The biggest fraud is taxation itself.
The state has made you a free range slave and convinced you it's neccesary. The services they provide do not justify what they steal from you.
It's a con job designed to extract wealth from you and give it to the ruling class.
#politics
Government contracts and welfare programs will always be rife with massive amounts of fraud. So much stolen money is coming in via taxation and money printing that the Government as a whole could care less if a % of the money they have stolen from us is then stolen from them.
On a more granular level, government employees don't have the same incentive to care about catching fraud that a private organization's employees have. It's not like the Government will go out of business if they aren't vigilant about catching fraud.
It's not their money, and they will get a paycheck regardless. Also, a lot of the time the employees are in on some fraud themselves.
#politics #news
I just linked my X account to an XMR address using xmr.bio
If you like any of my posts feel free to tip me privately with #Monero!
Go to https://xmr.bio/bitcoinrenegade to tip me or replace my X handle in the URL with someone else who has linked their account to tip them.
The people who keep saying the Samourai devs were "asking for it" because of some tweets they made in the past are using the same logic as someone who claims a rape victim deserved what they got because they wore revealing clothes.
No one deserves to get kidnapped, bankrupted, and put in a cage for writing code to help protect privacy. It really doesn't matter what they did or didn't say in the past.
The only people that deserve to be in a cage are the criminals who refer to themselves as the state who love to destroy people's lives for imaginary crimes with no victims.
if there was no victim, there is no crime.
#FreeSamourai
I'm so sick of seeing people LARP as freedom minded individuals acting like immigrants are the problem and not the state.
Idk about Canada but in erica watching people cheer on masked thugs kidnapping people off the street, scanning their face, and checking their papers based solely on the color of the skin is surreal.
Then the same people turn around and talk about limiting government.
The majority of deportees here have no criminal record whatsoever, and even if they do have one it's usually victimless crimes.
If you come here and aren't hurting anyone, you. should be left the fuck alone. There is plenty of room, and immigration generates new jobs and grows the economy.
Those demonizing immigrants are a bunch of fucking sheep who believe every thing they read on X about immigrants and are willing to let the state destroy our rights to "protect" them from the scary brown people.
Ending welfare, I can get down with that. Deport violent people and thieves, that's fine too. But this letting ICE run around like drunken cowboys snatching everyone up, that's insane.
A brand new dystopian surveillance state 10x worse than what we had before in America is being implemented using illegal immigration as the fake "emergency" to justify it.
And if someone is so scared of immigrants they are willing to trade their liberty for some fake safety, they need to grow some balls.
Being a "law abiding citizen" isn't a good thing.
It means you care more about words on a piece of paper written by corrupt politicians than morality.
It means you are not to be trusted.
It means you can't think for yourself.
All I wanted for Christmas is no government. Governments won't ever make themselves smaller in any meaningful sense as we just saw with the failure of DOGE. Even if you start from scratch with a very small government, it will inevitably grow like the cancer it is.
That's sad, every kid needs a base kit.
Pray for the many souls who are spending Christmas in prison instead of with their families because a state says they committed a victimless crime. I say if there was no victim, there is no crime. That should be obvious to society.
#FreeSamourai
Break out of multiple choice mentality, stop voting for Democrats or Republicans, and learn to think for yourself.
Having a choice between two slave masters doesn't mean you are free.
#politics
#anarchism
#voluntaryism
They trained the algos to recognize faces wearing masks via eyes, eyebrows, foreheads. So just a covid mask is close to worthless on newer models.
I'm assuming a hat plus IR reflective sunglasses, plus covid mask would work though.
Ski masks may work too I suppose, but walking by a cop with a ski mask on doesn't seem like a great idea, unless everyone starts wearing them.
Axon is now building police body cameras with built in automatic facial recognition. Walk by a cop, get scanned. They built these despite their own ethics board advising against it.
If your profit is dependant on creating a Orwellian dystopia, maybe you should consider other ways to make money.
There are a few local jurisdictions in the United States that ban facial recognition, but outside of those cities, we will probably see this spreading soon.
It needs to be stopped.
Or just have no government
Do you have a good source for this? I hear this sometimes but I would like to know how the "quantum attack is impossible" crowd came to this conclusion? I do agree that burning is not the way though.
If we burn these coins, once people know that their btc can be seized in an emergency, bitcoin loses one it's most valuable properties. This will be even worse than an attacker owning all the lost coins.
A sell off from a theft is temporary, destroying the value prop of Bitcoin by burning coins is permanent. IMHO
Are hashtags cringe on Nostr like they are elsewhere, or are they considered acceptable to aid in discoverability?
#asknostr
Yeah I believe the founders probably had good intentions but failed at what they wanted to do. So far it seems their constitution hasn't been able to protect the rights of citizens in many instances.
Good point, what do you think "representation" meant to a revolutionary war era colonist?
Exponential growth is our secret weapon: not just for markets, but because states won’t spot the threat until it’s way too late. As Albert A. Bartlett said:
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
We humans are notoriously bad at wrapping our heads around exponential growth, and luckily, politicians aren’t even our sharpest minds ;) Here are three classic riddles to prove it (sharing in case you haven’t seen them yet), because grasping exponentials might be the most underlearned lesson in history.
- Bacteria Doubling Riddle: A Petri dish starts with a smattering of bacteria. Every second, their numbers double. The dish fills completely after one minute. When was it half full?
- Paper Folding Riddle: Grab a sheet of paper and fold it in half. Then fold it again. If you could keep at it 50 times, how thick do you think it’d end up? ;)
- Chessboard Wheat Riddle: Perhaps the oldest tale of exponential growth hails from ancient India. Legend has it a king offered the chess inventor any reward for such a marvelous game. The inventor asked for one grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard (64 squares total), two on the second, four on the third, and so on — doubling each time. How many grains at the end?
https://themeritocrat.substack.com/p/monero-circular-economy-from-cypherpunk
Nonviolent resistance to state oppression through creating and using circular economies outside of their systems is our best hope. Monero is ideal for countereconomics in every way.
I want to see more merchants who not only accept Monero but don't convert it into fiat or stablecoins. If the price continues to rise, it could encourage development of DeFi mechanisms built on top of Monero that enable merchants to hold XMR while hedging the risk of doing so in a permissionless way.
Wtf is this bullshit I just want to send someone ten cents.
When they raised only 10%, they and everyone else still thought they were going to trial. Maybe the fact they didn't raise enough would of had an impact on that decision. Why would you go to trial if you failed to raise enough money to do so?
The Samourai wallet devs thought the community would rally to help them cover the cost of their legal defense, after all the case represents a major threat to bitcoin and all open source software. Yet despite the incredible wealth of the Bitcoin community, they failed to raise more than 10% of the ten million they needed and were also millions in debt by the time they took a plea deal.
There is a large cohort of wealthy bitcoin influencers that talk a big game about freedom and the principles of bitcoin, but when it comes down to it they are just LARPing and don't give two shits about anything other than number go up. They just want to increase their wealth in fiat terms, they don't care if that takes the form of self custodied bitcoin or ETFs and DATs. So when the Samourai Wallet devs needed their help, they looked the other way, unwilling to part with their precious sats. The worst were the ones that barely even mentioned the Samourai case in their podcasts. I guess the latest DAT purchase was just more important.
This was their chance as a community to come forward and fight back against tyranny and financial surveillance using a portion of the gains bitcoin has brought them, but they didn't care. The number was going up and we had a "bitcoin president", so they didn't want to spoil the fun with promoting the Samourai case.
Meanwhile the shitcoiners that these same bitcoin influencers spend so much energy hating on, raised more than 4 million dollars for Roman Storm of Tornado Cash (which is another case that these influencers should of been fighting hard for)
We need a shame list of any bitcoin influencers that haven't been consistently advocating for the Samourai devs since the arrest. Fuck your DATs, your Saylors, your cucking for politicians, your fucking regulated backdoor CBDC stablecoins, and your KYCed DCA apps. Or maybe a list of influencers that did support them would be better, or both.
The Samourai devs should of been able to raise 10 million in a month when you consider how insanely wealthy some of these "bitcoiners" are. Anything less was a travesty. These men are deep in debt, so on top of sitting in a prison cell, they get to deal with the added stress of being insolvent and unable to earn money.
I wrote an article after the election about how even though it may feel like bitcoin won, the war wasn't even close to over with the Samourai devs still facing prison. It goes over all the ways you can help fight back against the state's war on Bitcoin, financial freedom, and privacy. Check it out, it's still very relevant.
https://hackernoon.com/fight-for-your-right-to-use-bitcoin-as-it-was-intended-to-be-used
I live my life almost entirely outside of the system with the goal of interacting with the state and it's thugs as little as possible.
-No drivers license/car (most encounters with the state occur during traffic stops)
-No plane travel or border crossings (this sucks)
-No bank account
-Self employed
-No Facebook or any social media under my real name
-No property in my name
-Cash and crypto for most transactions, prepaid debit cards for a few
-No insurance in my name
-No bills of any kind in my name
There are some disadvantages to this kind of lifestyle, it's not for everyone (although the more of us that opt out the easier it gets for others to do so) but it is incredibly liberating.
Opting out is the closest you can get to true freedom within our enslaved society. We need to build alternative systems and communities outside of the system to make opting out easier for people. No one should have to live as a slave if they don't want to.
On Saturday morning, someone posing as a delivery worker broke into a San Francisco home, tied up the homeowner, and stole 11 million in crypto.
I don't think American crypto holders are ready for what's coming in terms of targeted theft/kidnapping/extortion using personal data leaked by both users themselves and companies with poor data handling (*cough coinbase *cough).
You got people STILL posting shit like what city you live in, what car you drive, stuff about your kids, when you are on vacation, etc.
Even little details can get you fucked.
That's fine if you have say, less than 10k in crypto on transparent chains, you might be ok.
Anything more than 10k is quite attractive for gangs of semi computer savvy youngins with no moral compass and no money to speak of. Especially with the economy going down the toilet and AI fixin' to drain all the job openings.
Just don't be surprised if you ever find yourself getting your ass beat until you give up your keys.
It has already started to happen in America and it's only going to get worse.
It's never too late to start protecting yourself. Storing your wealth on privacy chains such as Monero or shielded Zcash where a rando with a block explorer can't track down your balances is a good start.
Tax loss harvesting might be a good opportunity to rearrange your funds to be more private. Say you are underwater on an asset in a wallet linked to your name in some way. Sell the asset, write the loss off of your taxes, then redeploy the cash in a non kyced wallet by purchasing crypto p2p.
Criminals will just see that you once had crypto, and you sold it. They aren't interested in your bank account $$$, they want crypto that can be sent out of your wallet and can't be clawed back.
Something to think about. NFA
#privacy #bitcoin #security
CTV is a good start. Any changes that help enable Bitcoin to replace the dollar which it is incapable of doing in it's present form. We need privacy plus scaling improvements and custodial solutions don't count. IMHO
You're exactly right, you made me realize my mass civil disobedience of obscuring license plates wouldn't do anything except increase everyone's anon set slightly to include only cars that look exactly like your car.
Plan B, break the cameras.
The Supreme Court has ruled that tracking you via cellphone location requires a warrant. No such restriction exists for tracking via automated license plate readers. Law enforcement can get this data from Flock Safety's massive surveillance network, and if you audit these LE requests, the reasons given for needing to track a particular license plate include such important things as "lalala" or "asdf". They don't need an actual legitimate reason, they can put whatever they want on the data request form. The places you drive to can reveal a detailed picture of your life. There have already been instances of cops misusing this data for non law enforcement reasons, and it is incredibly dangerous to allow them to access this kind of information on any citizen at any time for any reason.
This new surveillance network should not be tolerated by the American people. It is nobody's business where you go throughout the day, and I would love to see some kind of anti license plate movement go viral. Imagine if even a third of people just ripped their license plates off or covered them with mud. There isn't enough cops to pull over that many people for driving without a visible license plate number. The people could instantly destroy the power of this Flock Safety surveillance network, but it would only work if enough people were willing to do it.
Would you be willing to obscure your license plate if you knew others would do the same? Do you have the guts to stand up to this mass surveillance? Or should we just roll over and continue to let America grow more dystopian with every passing day? Now is the time to resist, not when it gets even worse and any dissent is immediately crushed by armed drones reading your brain waves (that's not even a joke any more, mind reading tech is gaining more accuracy every day).
You have a right to keep your personal life private, but it's a right you are probably going to have to fight for. We can bitch about this government overreach all day, but unless we are actually willing to do something about it, nothing will get better and it will only get worse.
We all need to opt the fuck out and throw our license plates in the garbage. Make it a Tik Tok challenge or something, make it viral. How do we make people care enough about this to commit a small act of civil disobedience?
#privacy
Five years in a cage for helping people protect their privacy. The prosecutors and the judge are the ones who should get locked up, they were the real criminals in the courtroom today.
#freesamourai
Never forget what Saylor did
Anytime you move to a new house, apartment, or van down by the river, it is a golden opportunity for a privacy reset.
Tell no one other than trusted friends and family your new address. Don't get anything shipped to your new address under your real name. Don't update your address with any services or businesses unless absolutely necessary, if you do need to share your new address with a service, consider making an entirely new account under an alias.
If you want to go all out, don't put the utilities/internet under your name. If you are considering a move, think about using a trust to rent or buy the property.
Route all internet access at new address through a VPN, proxy, or TOR. Be wary of what devices you bring to the new address.
The goal here is to have as few links between your real identity and your new home as possible, this can protect you from things like five dollar wrench attacks.
It's much easier to keep an address private if you start from day one at your new residence than it is to try to work backwards and protect information that has already been leaked.
#privacy
If we freeze the code now, won't there be a massive supply shock when Satoshi's wallets get compromised by quantum computers?
What about updates that improve fungibility/privacy? Does immutability and scarcity matter if any sats that have even interacted with a nonkyced wallet are blacklisted? The state wants to assign a risk score to every satoshi.
Federal prosecutors are seeking the maximum sentence for the Samourai devs this week.
Pro-crypto administration my asshole. This case should of been dropped on Trump's first week.
The only part of crypto the Trump administration cares about is the part that makes his family and companies money. He can still make money off of a highly regulated, centralized, and surveilled crypto industry in which anyone actually developing real freedom tech is thrown into a prison cell. That's why CZ got a pardon while the Samourai devs might be getting 5 years in a cage.
Fuck that. Yes it could of been much worse, but ANY amount of prison time for the fabricated "crimes" that they are accusing the Samourai devs of is not acceptable.
This is not what happens in a "free" country. Freedom to transact privately is a fundamental right and if the state is infringing upon that right, they are the criminals, not the software developers who are trying to enable private transactions.
https://x.com/theragetech/status/1985373961190805882
#privacy #freesamourai #bitcoin
I think Bitcoin has a serious risk of being destroyed from within by hubris. Bitcoin represents the majority of portfolio, and every single time over multiple cycles that I began to doubt it, it slaps me upside the head and reminds me who is the boss. After so many times of that happening, you began to assume that Bitcoin will always go up no matter what, that it is unstoppable. The cult of maximalism reenforces this bias wholeheartedly. Why would you ever sell?
That's exactly why I am so worried. Everyone in Bitcoin assumes it will always be number 1 simply because it has always been number 1.
That is dangerous thinking. Keeping Bitcoin as number 1 will take work, not ossification. You can't have a community that is scared of changing a single line of code and expect to stay on top. Don't forget that Bitcoin, at the end of the day, is software. Software adapts and changes or it becomes obsolete.
Bitcoin has the best change of replacing the extractive and flawed fiat monetary system, but only if the community doesn't fuck it up....
I will continue to stack sats, but the Bitcoin community needs to do some serious soul searching and remember why we are here in the first place.
#bitcoin
Currently trying my best to get rid of years of conditioning that makes me think of everything in terms of fiat.
1 XMR = 1 XMR
No shame. I probably wouldn't have much bitcoin if it wasn't for my shitcoinery over the years..farming airdrops, trading, gig work for projects, etc. The end goal is always more sats honestly and it's also a great way to get nonkyc BTC.
You are way more likely to be killed by agents of the state than a mass shooter or terrorist.
Monero is my favorite high yield checking account. Actually, it's my only checking account.
Today I discovered the very useful website Wallet Scrutiny that tests and reviews Bitcoin wallets to make sure they are truly open source and that they are safe and secure. They have thousands of entries in their searchable database.
