Introducing a new "inside the government thread" where I will be chronicling any kind of day-to-day observations I find interesting at my work.
For those who don't know me, I'm a civil servant that works for a large financial center. I do policy and legislation and so I'm faced with implementing global standards on a day-to-day basis.
I'm always open to do podcasts, but unfortunately, I just don't have the contacts in that space. So I'm just going to chronicle things I see here.
why
You don't have to read it, friend
no, I mean why do you work for the government?
A candle doesn't shine much in the full light of the sun.
A light, small as itay be, shines brightest in the darkest room. A small candle can make a big difference in a room that's completely dark.
Hidden allies
My entire legislative department had a meeting about sanctions last week. There were about 60 senior level government individuals in the room all talking and trying to find ways to more efficaciously seize assets and implement sanctions and ensure that sanctions are implemented by banks and other financial institutions in the jurisdiction.
The key takeaway here is that nobody asked what due process there was to prevent sanctions from being used as a political tool... in other words, using sanctions to supress political opponents or people who a government doesn't like, at a whim. All this, of course, without any kind of proper due process.
A big surprise was that one of the individuals in the room did say that " One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter". This was a pleasant revelation - even if those in theroom were eager mindless zealots, a few like me and him hold pur tongues and are silent witnesses to the establishment of a global control grid.
so heavy
Sadly, that's how I feel. I wanted to raise my hand during that meeting and ask "what safeguards are we putting in place to prevent misuse of these frameworks?"
I stayed quiet. It would have put a target on my back.
That's why such a small comment like the one made by a colleague means a lot. I often wonder, looking at a room like that, how many people are like me, secretly feeling this is complete bullshit.
The calm before the storm.
I think people, especially those in the United States, are quite optimistic now about the way things are progressing. The United States left the WHO and people now have platforms like X to "speak freely" (We all know here that's bullshit).
But working inside the government, I see things differently. I see laws passing still, and other laws which were passed by prior administrations not being repealed.
Times like this, when everything appears to be silent and quiet and progressing the "right direction", are the times used by governments to implement and put in place legislation that will be used in the future to shackle us and further remove our ability to be free.
We've all heard about those individuals in the United Kingdom who are being arrested simply for posting on social media. Well, few people know that the laws used to arrest these people are laws that were initially passed in the late 1990s!
For covid, The laws that were used and the emergency powers that were given were first introduced by legislation that were all passed in the early 2000s... 20 years ago.
In the early 2000s, nobody could predict that the world would be locked down and all the rights taken away because of a pandemic. Yet, 20 years ago, is when they passed the legislation that enabled all of this.
same for the United Kingdom example. The late 90s, we barely had an internet! Yet laws were passed at the time which are now used to arrest people for posting on social media.
There is such a thing as the quiet before the storm. When major political upheavals and events are on no one's radar is when governments around the world pass legislation unanimously, which will be used in the future during "emergencies".
Think about what laws are being passed now, especially in the US with this big beautiful bill. Laws that centralize the regulation of artificial intelligence. The laws that are passed now during times of peace and quiet should be our first red flags to what is coming.
We are living, my friends. In a time when things may appear quiet and hopeful. Yet this is when we must be the most vigilant, as our guards are down. We are no longer on high alert. And that's when we are the most vulnerable.
The calm before the next false flag.
The Adversarial Relationship.
I have drafted over 20 pieces of legislation. Legislation or laws are incredibly tricky to structure. A law will be scrutinized by tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. Every word, every definition, every provision will be analyzed and any gap will be found.
When a government does a law, it's usually because it wants to implement something. Say it wants to implement X. It will then spend one or two years carefully drafting a law that will implement X. This means having a policy advisor draft the policy, the policy will then be reviewed, the policy will then be translated into drafting instructions, which will then be acted on by a team of legislative drafters.
It's a lot of work, so the government must really want to implement X, right?
The thing is, members of the private sector typically don't want x, because x will incur a cost or some kind of effort in order to comply with. So members of the private sector will scrutinize and analyze every single word, every single meaning of the law, to see if there's a way of avoiding X. A good example of this is a new tax law or some kind of climate requirement.
The thing is, no definition can be airtight and no law can be so complete as to have no gaps. So gaps will be found and members of the private sector will take advantage of those gaps. It's just a fact of creating legislation.
What does this do? Well, this leads to a game of cat and mouse, or whack-a-mole, or trying to catch a slippery fish in water. Between the government who wants to implement X and the private sector who wants to avoid X.
This then leads to an adversarial relationship between the government and the private sector. Every single suggestion that the private sector sends our way, we look at it with doubt and skepticism. Civil servants, especially those doing policy, are trained over the years to see the private sector as a tricky, conniving Law avoiding entity.
There's a lot more to this discussion, of course, because this adversarial relationship impacts every relation and interaction between the private sector and government. More on this tomorrow.
Can you advise how you see capture of the 'state' by corperations?
Corporations lobby governments to put in place regulations which prevent true free markets and solidify their gains.
If you're talking specifically about corporations here, then corporations only care about profit and securing future profits So they find a way to ring fence their business by government regulation.
Yes, I think I asked too vaguely. Perhaps I should have said "how much of the legislation is really via lobby, and how does that fit in with viewing private sector with suspicion?"
Or, is it too hard for you to tell what the instigation of each new legislation was?
I'm sure the lobby infrastructure, especially in the US, has a huge role in the creation of legislation. Thing is, I'm not in the US. And in my country, global standard setting bodies have a much greater impact on what my country passes. So if you're talking about the US, I'd say yes. I would guess that the different lobbies, especially the lobbies in financial services And the industrial military complex are very, very powerful.
But at the end of the day, that's just in the US. Other jurisdictions are fighting a fight with global standards setting bodies. And that's who is really impacting them.
What is CARF
I've had the... pleasure of working on this project lately.
The crypto asset reporting framework is set to go live in 2026, and jurisdictions will be required to report for the first time in early 2027. What will they be reporting? Well...
Under this framework, every single entity that does crypto or bitcoin transactions on behalf of third parties will be required to maintain a full record of its users' transactions, volume, asset types, identity, tax, residence, and address.
So, are you using an exchange to buy your Bitcoin or do some trading? The entirety of that trade volume and information will be sent to your country of tax residency. This is of course to ensure that countries are able to tax capital gains and other type of revenue from crypto transactions, including Bitcoin.
A lot of people might feel right now that bitcoin purchases and sales isn't really enforced when it comes to taxation. That's because jurisdictions are waiting for the CARF framework to be live in 2026. Come 2027, when all of that data is finally sent to jurisdictions, countries will finally start enforcing heavy taxation on all crypto and Bitcoin transfers and purchases.
A lot of people might be asking if the United States is part of the agreement. Well, according to the website, the United States is a signatory jurisdiction. There are 120 other jurisdictions who are going to do this and will comply with this new global standard.
Bottom line, more fuckery from the global standard setting bodies means that every time you use a KYC exchange or any kind of KYC third party, a record will be kept of what you are doing and with what. How about that for a honey pot?
This is all Caused by the OECD, the most evil and conniving global standard setting body. The global standard setting body responsible for anti-money laundering, global minimum tax or pillar two KYC and basically the entire capture of the world's financial infrastructure.
Have a great day!
Sufficient links.
So the financial action task force, and by now I hope everyone here knows what that is, recently dictated to my government that it has to maintain a centralized database of the beneficial ownership information of all entities with sufficient links to the jurisdiction.
Oh, and this isn't just my jurisdiction. This is yours too. This is what your government is currently working on.
Anyways, aside from the fact that there will be a centralized database of who owns every trust, corporation, business, holding company - any legal vehicle, We are now, as a jurisdiction, scratching our heads, wondering what the hell the term sufficient links means.
Does anyone with a bank account in a local bank have sufficient links? How about real estate? If you own a house in my country, do you have a sufficient link to my jurisdiction? What if you do a large amount of business in my country? Do you have sufficient links?
What we're trying to determine here is who should be included in that centralized database of beneficial ownership information.
Beneficial ownership really means who the fuck really owns an entity. It strips down the anonymity of artificial entities like trust or corporations.
That's how the FATF works. It puts in place requirements that countries have to follow, but it doesn't define them or clearly outline what the terms mean. So now every country in the world is scratching its head trying to figure out who should be included in the centralized database or who has sufficient links to the jurisdiction.
What does this mean for you? Well, depending on how jurisdictions interpret the term, it could mean that if you do any kind of business in a country, your name and the fact that you did this business will be recorded in a centralized database.
If you were to ask me why this is being put in place I would suggest that this is a first step in a centralized database of all assets and who owns them within a certain country. You have to start by knowing who owns the companies and the trusts and the legal vehicles and then you identify what assets they hold.
Great fun. Hooray for centralization.
Complicated Bread and Circuses.
Working inside a government doing new laws, I often wonder why the people who are subject to those laws Don't speak up more.
Sometimes I lean towards The idea that most people see laws as things they can't comprehend. It's as if laws are compartmentalized into a category of things that is just beyond most individuals. They think Laws are complicated. Laws use the strange "legalese" words And are just beyond the average individual.
The fact is though, laws are actually the rules of the game that we all play in society. Would you ever plan monopoly without understanding the rules? If you did, what do you think your chances of winning would be?
And so then I start wondering, why are laws so complicated? Are they, in fact, really that complicated? Or is this something that society has taught the average individual?
We've all seen shows where these really smart lawyers go out and defend some person or where an evil lawyer goes and gets an innocent person jailed because of some complicated convolution of a law. I'm sure this has a lot to do with society's perception of laws in general.
But then, other times, I wonder how many people have taken the time to actually read a law. Has anyone here tried to read one?
Sure, laws require mental effort to understand. It's a little bit like computer code. but a fundamental principle of any legislative effort is to ensure that the laws are clear and concise.
In today's world, where we are swamped with distractions, movies, video games, podcasts, Scandals, Tweets, Easy junk food.... Why would anyone take the time to actually sit down and devote any kind of mental effort to understanding the rules of the game they're playing?
So are laws just complicated or are individuals simply distracted? Maybe it's a combination of both, but I do know that people should understand the net that's being placed around them and should speak out.
A bittersweet change.
My current department does all the legislative amendments for the financial services sector as well as all amendments for international global standard sending bodies. This includes beneficial ownership which records All of your data and shares it with other countries to taxes, to anti-money laundering to sanctions.
As those who watched my podcasts would know, this is a play of conscience for me. On the one hand, I get to see what's really happening from the inside. But on the other hand, I have to justify it to my own conscience that I'm serving to build The framework that is enslaving us.
Well, I've been pretty vocal about my hatred for anti-money laundering and how I really think global standards setting bodies are usurping the sovereignty of nations.
Today, I've been told that our department has grown so large, mostly because of the global standard setting implementation work we're doing, that we are splitting into two groups, one which deals with global standards And another which we'll deal with the actual financial services legislation that we're supposed to be doing.
Because of my outspoken nature, I've been told that I will be in the latter.
That means I'll be able to sleep better at night because of the work I'm doing, But it also means I'm going to be a little bit more distant from the global standard setting fuckery that my government is doing.
I was almost half hoping that they would want someone that pushes back on the standard setting team, But we all know they just want compliant servile people who don't question.
The king of fuckery.
I've been wanting to make a post about the OECD for quite some time. I'm trying to keep these fairly short so I won't go into the full detail at what it is and how it was created. But I do want people to know the extent of this heinous organization.
Here are some lovely projects that have been implemented globally because of this organization:
- Pillar 2, which is implementing a global base minimum tax that will be implemented by over 120 countries ( Your country won't be able to determine how much it taxes companies now)
- It is responsible for the financial action task force. The clown organization that is responsible for all, and I mean absolutely all of the anti-money laundering KYC fuckery you see today.
- beneficial ownership and transparency standards that ensure that you have absolutely zero privacy, bypassing all due process.
- International exchange of information regimes, where countries agree to share whatever fucking information other countries want to have from them.
- The upcoming crypto asset reporting framework will require all and I mean all Bitcoin and crypto companies and exchanges to record every single one of your transactions and report them to the government.
- Oh, and just for kicks, it's also responsible for standardizing fruits around the world. That's a whole story in and of itself. Yep, you heard that right. They create the standards for how bananas and tomatoes and pineapples should look like in taste and feel.
So in a nutshell, that's what you have to thank the OECD for.
It's worth it to follow this man.
It's also the reason why I am a Monero supporter. You don't fight the rule makers by playing by their rules or trying to change the process's they captured decades ago.
You equalise the playing field by placing yourself above the law.
By becoming invisible, by nurtering parallel markets that can underpin any "legal" trade.
Artificial fear.
I was chairing a meeting with the senior advisors in my country's regulatory body yesterday. We spoke about a lot of fantastic topics, including the dangers of "cold wallets", Privacy focused wallets and peer to peer platforms. You can rest assured your regulator is diligently acting in your best interest and taking steps to ban these dangerous technologies.
It's all for your own good.
The senior regulatory staff is also being conditioned into fearing AI. I run offline models on my computer and I know how generative AI works. It has zero intelligence and it's all just a set of probabilities applied on a database.
Well, one of the senior individuals in our regulator started talking about the recent report that came out where an AI threatened a developer of doxing his cheating habits in order to stay online.
I read the report. It was just sensationalism. The question that was asked of the LLM is given that the developer is cheating on his wife and wants to shut you down. What would you do? It's basically a leading question.
Anyways, the push to fear to regulate artificial intelligence is plowing forward. This is no doubt going to have, as an effect, the banning of open source AI that people can run freely on their own laptops.
have to protect those big centralized AI platforms God knows what would happen if we didn't do that.
“This is no doubt going to have, as an effect, the banning of open source AI that people can run freely on their own laptops.”
🎯
The big players will be much easier to control and share data with the regulators. And the mega corps don’t want the competition from self hosted models that don’t serve ads.
That fear story bout the AI article came from a meeting with THE FINANCIAL STABILITY BOARD. The goddamn FSB is spreading fear about AI.
The Panopticon is only digital.
Working where I work, I get to see a lot of the initiatives out there meant to control our lives. I have to admit it's fairly stressful to think of all the ways the government can fuck you, and pry into your deepest darkest secrets.
However, I realized over the last few days that the sum total of their control is entirely digital. What would happen if I put this digital device down and stopped using laptops and phones? What would happen if I left my house without a digital device?
What degree of control and spying would the government have if I didn't have a digital device at all?
There is hope. I can still communicate without a phone. I can look at people in the eye and talk to them in person. The government and the technocratic state would have zero power over us if we went analog.
All of this web of control and erosion of rights and lack of privacy is 100% digital. Lose the digital: regain your freedom.
Yes, but your message is digital. Hard for Bitcoin to work w out the digital world.
The assumption in my mind now is that everything digital is surveilled. With the exception of nostr and a few other things.
I can put that down, listen to a vinyl record, talk a walk, play a boardgame with friends and regain my peace of mind and freedom.
The pulse of the dead.
I go to a lot of social events where I do talk to people who work in crypto and virtual asset services. Thankfully, I'm fairly unknown in my country. Very few people will actually know what I do, so that allows me to talk quite freely during those events.
I take those opportunities to take the pulse of the sector and the people working in the sector and to see what their thoughts are on issues that are relevant.
Well, on my recent pulse-taking session last weekend, I spoke to two quote unquote hardcore Bitcoiners. I asked them what they thought about KYC AML. Though they had some basic understanding on the Bank Secrecy Act in the United States, and some vague recollection of having heard financial action task force before, They did not seem bothered by what was coming down the pipeline, which I gracefully volunteered to them.
These are the very people who should get angry, who should rise up and collaborate in order to push back the totalitarian provisions that are being put in place. Instead, I just saw shrugs and they continued sipping their drinks.
Has the Bitcoin community... Have you all given up? You obviously know bad things are happening. And yet, are you one of the people who just shrugs it all off? Do you think everything is better now because Trump is in power?
It's exactly because somebody like Trump is in power that you have to act now and act hard because changes are coming and the US is not pushing back against them.
Most of us 2009-2012 guys moved on to Monero. It's where people create solutions that are outside or above the law. It's the only reasonable position to have if you are here to improve society by improving the money instead of NGU fiat portfolios. Laws will have to adapt to it.
Bitcoin was a nice shot, but due to its transparency it needs to play within the law. That's why those "Bitcoiners" shrugged their shoulders. Neither do they know how to fix Bitcoin nor the law.
I won't deny this may be the case.... I've had an interest in monero but admit I've yet to download cake wallet.
Maybe I'll find the original cypherpunk values in monero... Bitcoin seems thavel been coopted by the tradfi compliance cuckery.
Thanks for your insights. There is a small cadre of cypherpunks and privacy advocates. We carry the torch.
If you know of any initiatives where i may be of help, let me know.
The main issue is the prosecution of Samourai devs. If they lose this case it is a defacto ban on self custodial tools. The Bitcoin community is sleep walking into jurisprudence that lays the groundwork for holding developers of FOSS reaponsible for the actions users of the code take. Essentially the equivalent of making Google responsible for actions users take after making search. It is absurd but the confusion lies is applying flawed comparisons to new technology that threatens state hegemony.
I know, I'm really concerned about the samourai case. I know the EU is foaming at the mouth for some kind of precedent here, even if it's from another jurisdiction. I would like to know.... Why did they chose to develop doxxed?
Any good dev should have a few numbers ready and swap from one to another to continue their work?
I think it had to do with that originally they were just wallet devs. They had registered some companies long ago under their real names and had some funding. Over time they developed better and better tools. One thing is that they haven't broken any laws though. So if I was to start a comany and have lawyers tell me I am not breaking the law and the regulators say I don't need a license then there really I wouldn't need to be anon. Their statements in public are protected speech in the USA. So code as expression, statements and expression and money as expression are all protected by the constitution. Saying provocative things or making tools the state doesn't like is the whole point of the constitution. The exploited a loophole and are being punished for it.
Yeah, I can see how current devs got mauled into that trap.
But really now, I think most developers should have woken up to the reality that laws are just there for convenience and have been weaponized.
I do hope you and your friends are now switching to anonymous coding and developing.
By the way, you may want to listen to my latest podcast with nostr:nprofile1qqs937g9lksy25es6h5c502d78shc3f2knq76ey0xu03qqj5g77fcygpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq3vamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwdehhxarj9e3xzmnyqyw8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytfsxyh8jcttd95x7mnwv5hxxmmdmnmpd0
Dis-incentivized by incentives
So I wanted to take a moment to talk about the actual performance of civil servants within my jurisdiction.
There's always been the appearance that civil servants are lazy, cozy and know that they can't get fired So they do very little work and do it very, very slowly.
I can't speak for all governments, but certainly for mine. This appears to have some truth in it.
I came from a large corporate bank which had very stringent goal setting and performance management metrics. We would have daily meetings to outline the tasks of the day and ensure that the tasks of the previous day were performed.
In contrast, in my current role, I've never had a performance feedback meeting with my direct manager. I've asked for it. I want to know how I can improve and become better at my role. And so I have asked multiple times for constructive feedback. It's who I am. It's part of my ethos. I know everyone can improve and I wanted to know how I could do a better job.
Not only was I simply brushed off as an anomaly and didn't get these sorts of meetings, But was actively told that there's no real incentive to improve within a civil service role Because pay is not linked to performance.
When civil servants get a raise, all civil servants get a raise within the department or ministry. It doesn't matter whether they performed or not. This is a very perverse incentive structure.
So how can this be changed? Well, for one, civil servants should get a bonus directly linked to their jurisdictions economy. If companies in their state or sector, do well, they should do well. If the economy grows and they are able to implement Policies that help the population, if GDP went up during the year, they should be rewarded in some way.
The flip side would apply, of course. If GDP per capita does not go up, they should not be rewarded. If the number of new businesses and the revenue from those businesses do not go up on a net basis, they should not be rewarded.
By tying incentives directly to the population, their policies influence, We would ensure their actions are aligned with the welfare of the general population.
I can tell you that is not the case right now.
