Accounting cash is extremely complicated and whether you like it or not, you will be forced to do an online transaction at some point.

Are you going to be wiring money across the country to buy stuff?

Instead of going back we should stop centralizing everything.

We are centralizing the internet with Cloudfare. We are centralizing mobile compute with Android/Apple

I don't want to be dependent on any of those platforms to access my bank

I'm not sure that isolating Iran in particular has much of an effect because countries don't want to be in Russia's orbit, China's orbit is Only Good for China, and so aside from a European-only/led system the best option would still be the current state/system.

The best solution to all of these problems is for Iran to just behave like pretty much all other countries, but in lieu of that and in lieu of us having a desire to really go to war in Iran, we're just going to have to take actions like this because we can't have this regime opposed to us and western values and pursuing nuclear weapons (prior to, during, and after JCPOA) but then enjoying the benefits of the American-led financial system.

If Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia want to get together and create their own crappy Intranet that nobody uses, well, more power to them. Hope they have fun.

> If push your opponent into a corner, then don't get upset when they jump over the wall into the wild where you can't catch them anymore. See also Chinese chips and AI.

I think this is a gross mischaracterization of the evolution of these arrangements. There's a lot of nuance here, but the United States helped get China into the WTO based on the premise that they'd liberalize and then what happened? State-directed investment, banning of competitor products, subsidized over-capacity to deindustrialize other countries, artificially cheap currency to boost exports. Russia? They were part of the The NATO-Russia Founding Act and then decided they'd rather do war and stuff. Iran? Won't stop pursuing nuclear weapons for no reason (among other things), so now their economy is going to tank. So it's really the opposite. Even when you think about the JCPOA, let's say it wasn't torn up. Why was/is Iran still funding militant groups that are destabilizing other countries in the region? The west, not just the US mind you, did its damned best to include these specific countries into the western rules-based order, allowed gross injustices and breaches of good conduct, and still tried only to now itself be backed into a corner (Iran, Russia invading Ukraine, Chinese economic destruction) and has to finally respond.

As a civilization, and yes that includes folks in the EU even if you are mad at the current president, we need to stop assuming we're the problem or we're the bad guys by default and start holding other countries to account.

Depending on who you are, Western CAs can come with some availability problems, but thanks to certificate transparency, you don't even have to trust the CA if you mostly care about security. Take a wild guess as to whether an Iranian CA will support that...

The main problem with sanctions is that it's the wrong people on the receiving end. Russian oligarchs and military businessmen have exactly zero problems managing their money, while ordinary people who flew russia into the EU - they face unsurmountable piles of unsolvable problems due to sanctions.