⚡️🇫🇷 ALERT - It's official. In France, mixers and privacy coins are now considered by default as an indicator of suspicious activity. The law has been adopted.

The Rubicon has been crossed.

If you don't want to reveal your wallet holdings with every payment, you're guilty of money laundering by default.

396 votes against 68, with main opposition from the Parti de la France Insoumise ...

In other words, there are 396 people whose existence relies on the taxes of the French who have decided overnight that you're criminals by default if you use Lightning, ZKPs, and loads of other technologies that "enable the anonymization or opacification of crypto-asset transactions", even if that's not the intended use of their users.

Zooming Out: How Winemaking Prepared Me for Bitcoin

Starting Peony Lane meant leaning into something most people see as a downside.

Waiting.

Making red wine is slow.

You invest into grapes, barrels, and labor, then wait two years before selling a single bottle.

Most people hate that part.

For me, it was the opportunity.

The waiting gave me time to focus on what actually matters: making good wine.

Since I didn’t have a product to sell yet, all I could do was learn.

People act like it’s wild I learned so quickly while working full-time, but nothing motivates you like dumping your life savings into something and having to figure it out.

One year in, I had a big test.

You only get to make wine once a year.

When that second fall came, I'd never sold a single bottle, but I had to decide how much wine to make.

So I guessed.

I figured I’d make a little more than the year before.

Worst case, the wine would sit and get better with time. No harm in that.

That became the rhythm.

Not scaling up felt like more of a risk than scaling up too much.

I never wanted to run out of wine to sell.

And if I ever made too much, I’d just make less the next year. Simple.

What I couldn’t do was go back and make more if I ran out.

Eventually, that thinking becomes second nature.

You stop looking at each vintage in isolation.

Your baseline shifts to thinking two or three years ahead.

When I found Bitcoin, the low time preference mindset clicked immediately.

You can’t chase every short-term move.

You have to zoom out.

You trust that time and patience will reward conviction because you know the underlying product is sound.

(Which, to be honest, is more than I could say about my wine back then.)

So I went all in on Bitcoin at both tops of the 2021 cycle.

It felt more risky to not buy bitcoin in the moment than the downside potential of being able to buy cheaper bitcoin in the future.

If you can wait long enough, time heals all.

The problem is that man has been diminished in status from man to citizen, therefore, he is below the government he created.

Yes. The real “sin” in the eyes of religious authority is disobedience, not evil.

The free man is inconvenient to the state; he does not ask for permission, nor does he expect entitlements.

However, the 'democratic state' cannot tolerate such independence. It must convince the self-reliant man that he needs it. Better yet- that he rules it. Thus, the state does not conquer its subjects with force alone - it converts them, one by one, from sovereigns to subjects (dependents).