what are the chances you are on a three-letter-agency list?

turns out bitcoiners are super sensitive and reactive

Mortgage rates in Italy are back below 2% for a 20y fixed. 🤯

Think about that for a second. I don't know what the real inflation rate is but it's certain that the banks are losing at least 5-7% now, and swallowing the uncertainty of the next 20 years.

Makes you wonder what their real incentives are...

Hi Nostr

Any advice on buying a water filter?

My lady wants one but I’ve got no clue. Is there even a point to it?

It’s for use in Portugal

The entire developed world tax apparatus that was built in the 20th century and extends into the 21st century depends on ubiquitous financial surveillance.

They are not going to give that up without a fight. I have been saying at a number of conferences and podcasts that privacy is the main battleground for the next decade.

Back in the 19th century and before, money was mostly private. There were plenty of dictators but there was no major method of surveilling all transactions. Therefore things like broad income taxes were untenable to enforce.

But in the 20th century as money increasingly moved around at the speed of light, people needed bank accounts to keep up. It wasn’t all forced on them; they chose it. And those bank accounts were centralized, surveillable, and ruggable.

This allowed authorities to switch to income taxes, which require ubiquitous financial surveillance to work. And ultimately it allowed them to switch to fiat currency altogether.

Now in the 21st century, Bitcoin and its various layers allow people to hold and move around money globally without permissioned banks. They can do so peer to peer, or they can do so with custodians and open layers, etc. Unlike the base layer of fiat, the base layer of bitcoin is permissionless.

But this represents a threat to the entire current system of taxation and financial control. If bitcoin and particularly various private methods on top of it were to be adopted at massive scale, the entire tax structure and other things would need to reshape themselves around that reality. And so they won’t make it easy; they will try to criminalize financial privacy as much as possible while the network is still pretty small.

The only solutions are to 1) make privacy tech so ubiquitous that it can’t be isolated and can spread organically in a distributed way and 2) to apply legal pressure when possible so that governments sort of have to operate within the bounds of their own law, like the 1st and 4th amendments.

Minimum bid 16 bitcoin

In case anyone is confused with what’s going on:

Western elites fell in love with the China model. They are in the process of implementing it in the west.

Privacy is normal and good.

There has been an effort among authorities to make “money laundering” and “financial privacy” the same thing. That is, the mere act of moving money privately itself becomes a crime. That’s not okay.

Money laundering is when money that is obtained through crime is concealed by obfuscating it with clean money. The actual crime is the initial non-financial crime (say, mob stuff), and historically money laundering involves manual activity to work with the criminals.

Now that open source tech can make certain transactions private, authorities increasingly equate all private money transfer with money laundering, even if the developer of the open source tech had no direct involvement with criminals. Authorities target them regardless, and sanction the technology itself. Financial privacy becomes synonymous with crime in their minds, and in the minds of the public.

#Bitcoin is Refreshing.

There’s a special place in hell for people who have loud voices ALL THE TIME.

(If you’re [a bit] deaf no worries you get a free pass to heaven obvies)

Feeling so lucky to be alive on this planet 🌎 😌