This book from Mattias Desmet was such an eye-opener for me during covid

If you're an EU citizen you can give the European Commission feedback, in your language of choice, on their Orwellian, albeit not very concrete #DemocracyShield

It's not a proposed law, more like a policy direction. My main concern is that they're going to use this to institutionalize and expand the ad hoc ban on RT. So I wrote in my feedback that I find such censorship unacceptable, but otherwise they can do whatever.

A baby girl is on her way and my heart overflows with joy 🌷

In four more moons we’ll see the little face of this baby we are already so deeply in love with.

Grateful for our loving community in the jungle, who gathered to celebrate this sacred moment with us.

pura vida 🪽

The concept of a “prerogative state” that operates in parallel to do the dirty work, is an interesting concept. Recent news of ICE trying to arrest someone in a court room and then arresting the judge from trying to prevent that, remind me of this.

That said, the El Salvador gulag still has a lower death rate than Nazi concentration camps - so let's not get too carried away?

Onderzoekje uit 2024 naar bezitters van virtual assets.

New UN report claiming mining is a “powerful tool” for money laundering makes zero sense and will be used an excuse to push KYC/AML/Sanctions at miner level – Full story at end of this post.

First, it claims that criminals use “illegal” mining operations to launder money, which literally defeats the entire purpose of money laundering.

Money laundering is done best via businesses that generate quick cashflow – at current hashprice, even if you *did* have free electricity and a all-in hosting cost of 0, one ASIC generates a mere return of ~$6000 over the course of 24 months.

This is particularly true in the fucking LIBYAN DESERT where heat and dust contribute significantly to wear and tear, but I’m sure that the geniuses who wrote this report also take their laptops to the beach.

The amount of nonsense the UN has cooked up here is truly astonishing.

It claims illegal mining operations are hard to detect, which is not just untrue for stealing electricity from the grid, but also for the heat signatures such operations omit.

If you do want to make such operations undetectable, facilities need to be impossibly insulated on the one hand – further diminishing returns on investment – but you also need to utilize off-grid energy.

If these operations use off-grid energy, which the UN names as a power source, then they do not, by definition, contribute to “chronic power outages in Lybia [..] depriving essential services and residential areas”, which the UN also claims, because *they are not connected to the grid*.

An exception to this would be if Bitcoin miners utilized stolen fuel, but then the issue is *people stealing fuel*, not people mining Bitcoin. This further erodes the UN’s claims that Lybia is an attractive destination for “illegal miners” due to low electricity cost, because stolen electricity is *not paid for by definition*.

As widely reported, Lybia’s fuel shortage arises from vibrant black markets. This does *not* happen due to a lack of “anti-money laundering authorities”, or because “bitcoin miners are stealing all the energy,” but because political tensions in the country have ground entire industries to a halt.

If you want to stop people from stealing electricity, maybe next time don’t bomb an entire country back to the Stone Age. You’re welcome.

Dag NostrNL, ik was bij De Nieuwe Wereld: