TBG called this in 2014. Iran, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Hamas, Hezbollah, Belarus, Myanmar, and Syria have all since used Bitcoin or stablecoins to route around US/EU sanctions. Here's the panel's running record — country by country, episode by episode.
The conventional financial press came around to "crypto and sanctions" as a serious story sometime around February 24, 2022 — the morning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Bitcoin Group and the broader World Crypto Network archive — running weekly since October 2013 — had been on the topic for years before that. Iran's dollar exposure showed up on the show as early as TBG #188 (September 7, 2018). North Korea was already a regular issue by TBG #146 (June 16, 2017). Venezuela's Petro was being handicapped on-air the same year it was being announced. The point of this report is the timeline: panelist call, then real-world event, country by country, with transcript link on one side and Treasury or court filing on the other.
Two things this report is not. It is not a victory lap — the panel got plenty wrong, and the panel that called Bitcoin's role in sanctions evasion correctly is also the panel that has consistently liked that property of the asset. It is not a cheerleading exercise either. The closing section flags the obvious counterweight: the volumes evading sanctions through crypto, even at 2025's eye-watering $104B, are still small compared to the trade-misinvoicing, hawala, and shell-company channels traditional finance has run for half a century. Document the calls. Document the events. Let the reader weigh the gap.
For each highlighted country: the earliest TBG/WCN episode that flagged it as a sanctions-evasion vector, paired with the earliest verified real-world event — Treasury OFAC action, court filing, primary news report. Click a country to scroll to its dossier.
Panelists ranked by who pointed at the sanctions-evasion mechanism earliest and most clearly. Sorted by date of first call. Verbatim quotes only — Whisper transcription artifacts preserved, with reconstructed phrasing flagged where applicable.
Verbatim from the TBG transcripts. Each card links to the canonical mirror at /tbg-mirrors.
Sanctions-evasion events by year, the $104B Chainalysis number in context, TBG's own attention cycles, and the country-by-country mention heatmap of who the panel watched first.
The story Western financial-press desks finally caught up to in 2022 was, on this archive, a story The Bitcoin Group had been working since the Obama-era second term. Episode #188 (September 7, 2018) named the dollar-denominated commodity-export channel as the load-bearing wall of the sanctions regime. Episode #213 (March 6, 2020) identified Iran as the canonical case two and a half years before Iranian state policy formally legalized crypto-funded imports. Episode #298 (March 4, 2022) framed the Russia question with a clarity the BIS would not match for another six months: Bitcoin can collect Ukrainian donations and route Russian sanctions evasion. Same network, opposite directions, neutral protocol. None of those calls were a prediction of the dollar's death — they were a reading of where the dollar's enforcement edge was thinnest.
The honest counter is that the volumes are still small. Chainalysis's headline $104B in 2025 sanctioned-address flow is real and it is a 694% surge — but it sits next to a traditional-finance sanctions-evasion machine that runs on trade misinvoicing, shell companies, and dollar-cash hawala routes that have moved hundreds of billions per year for decades. Crypto became a meaningful evasion rail; it has not become the rail. The panel's call is that the gap is closing, not closed. That, too, is on tape: TBG #476 (December 27, 2025) — Hunt describing stablecoins as "Western Union 2.0" for moving Tether back and forth to Russia. Document the arc. Let the reader decide whether the next ten years extend the trend or break it.