Liberation Travel Hacks 06/2026

Dear friends,

Leaving slavery is hard.

Especially when you have the certainty of food, housing and care.

And the promise that maybe, someday in the distant future, someone will take care of you.

But what matters far more in your life is your time.

And you have pitifully little of it.

If you spend most of your precious time working for the slaveholder, then you are a real slave.

A tax slave.

Because free people value their time.

Free people escape from slavery.

On the journey to freedom they glance into the rear-view mirror.

And the only thing they regret is that they didn't do it sooner.

Pavol Lupták, 15 June 2026, Prague

Poland

My Polish friends do support Ukraine, but they really don't want to die in a potential war. In Poland conscription is tied to citizenship, but from the moment you receive a call-up notice you have the right to refuse it within 24 hours. You do, however, need to have the relevant documents ready. This lawyer explains exactly how.

Germany

Germany plans to scrap the zero tax on holding Bitcoin for more than one year. I expect the Czech Republic could become the new haven for all German crypto hodlers.

Leaving Germany | An honest review.

My German friends who have obtained citizenship in other countries are discovering that getting rid of their German one is not easy at all: "Persons liable for compulsory military service therefore need the consent of the Federal Ministry of Defence or an authority designated by it in order to renounce German citizenship, unless that person has already completed military service in a state whose citizenship they also hold."

Norway

Thinking about moving to Norway? You might want to reconsider. Especially if you're ambitious or hard-working. A few years ago I visited a still active anarchist community in the south of Norway that opted out of the system.

EU

The death of European countries' competitiveness is, in European, called "EU harmonisation".

The European Commission has published a study on how to collect more taxes without making people leave the EU in anger. In short: we're in for higher wealth taxes, inheritance taxes and an exit tax.

"We risk ending up with China-style control of society" — the European digital identity framework simultaneously grants too much control to Google and Apple, warns leading cryptographer Bart Preneel.

Do you believe in freedom in the EU? Place a bet and win!

If you believe in freedom in the EU and think that only totalitarian regimes like Russia or China ban VPNs, I have a great opportunity for you to earn some money — you don't have to do anything, just believe in your European ideals!

I'll bet you 1337 EUR that within 5 years we'll have a ban/regulation on VPNs in the EU (meaning it won't be fully legal to use an anonymous VPN). And that's despite the fact that the EU currently officially rejects this option.

And everyone who wants to use a VPN to get around Age Control or other wonderful EU legislation will be criminalised or otherwise penalised.

If you bet that it won't happen, then in 5 years I'll pay you 1337 EUR. Otherwise you pay it to me.

I'm willing to enter into 5 such bets.

And of course, if you don't want to bet, then you tacitly agree that the entire EU is heading toward a heavy dystopian, totalitarian society.

I'm horrified by how many relatively sane people who believe in the EU justify this totalitarian, dystopian EU practice and explain why it's inevitable.

Something they considered a totalitarian practice in China/Russia 10 years ago, they now consider a political necessity in the EU as part of the fight against hybrid threats, Russia, child pornography, and so on.

Hello! Based on what it plans and does, the EU genuinely shows the hallmarks of a dystopian society!

I'm now in advanced Japan, and there are no state-enforced cash limits here, no Age Control, no MiCA, no DAC-8 and other dystopian EU regulations. Online anonymity is the norm here.

The EU labels VPNs a "loophole" that needs to be closed as part of its age-verification efforts.

ViDA: The new European architecture of comprehensive financial surveillance

How do we tell whether we still live in a Europe of freedoms? The answer is simple: if your government suspects your every move and treats you as a potential criminal, you live in an authoritarian state.

The EU is dropping truly Orwellian bombs:

1. Age Verification / "Age Control"

2. Chat Control (CSAR / CSA Regulation)

3. Digital Services Act (DSA)

4. Code of Practice on Disinformation

5. Terrorist Content Online Regulation (TCO / TERREG)

6. eIDAS 2.0 / EU Digital Identity Wallet

7. European Media Freedom Act (EMFA)

8. European Democracy Shield (EDS)

9. TTPA, Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising

10. AVMSD and the punitive suspension of media

11. AI Act

12. Hate speech as an "EU crime"

(1) Identity: eIDAS 2.0 + Age Verification remove anonymity as the default.

(2) Content scanning: CSAR/Chat Control tries to break E2E.

(3) Platform enforcement: DSA + Code of Practice + TCO + AI Act turn platforms into privatised censors under the threat of 6% of global turnover.

(4) Narrative control: EDS + EMFA + TTPA + AVMSD define who is a "legitimate medium" and what a "healthy information space" is.

USA

Utah has become the first US state to target the use of VPNs for circumventing legally mandated age-verification mechanisms. Attacks on VPNs are essentially attacks on the tools that enable digital privacy. Lawmakers who can't tell a security tool from a "legal loophole" are now creating rules for one of the world's most complex infrastructures. Utah's new law targeting VPNs takes effect on 6 May.

Georgia

Why TBC Bank in Georgia is crypto-friendly — and how to send and withdraw crypto in Georgia.

Updated information on the premium Georgian TBC account; you start the opening process here.

In your TBC account profile you can set your Paraguayan tax residency.

Kyrgyzstan

Updated information on the Kyrgyz non-CRS account; you start the opening process here.

DHL has significantly raised our delivery prices from Kyrgyzstan to Europe, so starting next month we are considering a price increase.

Paraguay

Until now, an application for permanent residency in Paraguay required one mandatory visit (within 365 days of the last visit, or from the date the temporary residency was approved) and a university degree or a RUC tax number (with zero monthly IVA/VAT declarations and a generated "Cumplimentario Tributario").

New legislation (not yet enforced) requires all permanent-residency applicants to prove solvency. Either through local income declared in Paraguay (via SET) or foreign income (which must be notarised, apostilled and translated into Spanish).

Zero monthly IVA/VAT declarations will no longer be enough, as they were until now.

There are many ways to declare non-zero income / solvency — for example, if you own real estate in Paraguay you can declare your rental income. If you're a digital nomad, it will be possible to submit a foreign employment contract with an apostille (a document proving you have income abroad). For income from Paraguay, at least the 3 most recent IVA/VAT returns with non-zero activity will be required. You'll find the exact checklist of documents you need here.

Drone laws in Paraguay — in Paraguay flying drones is permitted, subject to DINAC regulations. Official references and an explanation of Paraguay's drone laws for residents and visitors, as well as for hobby, recreational, commercial and government drone operators.

A lovely project — an orphanage in Asunción that teaches at-risk children about Bitcoin.

Robert Makłowicz: Asunción, the heart of Paraguay.

Turkey

Turkey is going all in — a 20-year tax holiday on any foreign-sourced income for all new residents (effectively the Paraguay/Panama model in Europe)!

Plus a special low 1% tax on gifts and inheritance.

The EU keeps inventing the most bizarre ways to squeeze new taxes out of its citizens and residents (a tax on unrealised capital gains), while Turkey has decided to attract all the talented, productive and wealthy people.

I'm no fan of Erdoğan or totalitarian Turkey, but the comrades in the EU should start reflecting a little on which way the wind blows, because no productive and wealthy person will want to live in an over-regulated and ultra-taxed EU.

Bitcoin, Monero, Zcash and cryptocurrencies

Through the eyes of a cypherpunk-scene legend, with Paul Rosenberg | Bitcoin 2026.

Monero has been officially integrated into THORChain! Direct, trustless swaps between Monero, Bitcoin and Ethereum. All without centralised wrappers, without KYC. Censorship-resistant.

Selling files for bitcoin.

Another DeFi crypto card, Jam, with a non-custodial wallet. It supports both Apple and Google Play.

Privacy

An anti-Palantir manifesto. A response from Harry Halpin.

A cypherpunk manifesto in the form of pirate articles: against the enclosure of intellectual property, for encryption, copying and self-hosting.

Instagram users will no longer be able to send ultra-private direct messages, as the feature has been deactivated worldwide. Using Instagram for any (private) communication was and always is a bad idea.

Private machine translation of languages that runs locally on your device.

Max Hillebrand has released a great new book — The Praxeology of Privacy. Recommended.

Nostr VPN, an open-source mesh VPN that replaces the entire trust model of traditional VPN services.

Noir is a programming language for privacy-focused applications, open-source, that makes it easier to ensure privacy in both Web2 and Web3 applications.

TerminalPhone — encrypted "push-to-talk" voice communication over Tor hidden services.

The first public release of GrapheneOS Speech Services is now available in our app store. After installing it, you can enable it as your text-to-speech engine by tapping it under Settings > System > Languages & region > Speech > Text-to-speech output > Preferred engine and confirming in the dialog.

Amarok — an Android app that lets you hide your private files and apps with a single tap.

An open alternative to Palantir: Open Source Global Intelligence — a real-time OSINT dashboard.

Flipper One needs your help.

Ordinary Wi-Fi networks can identify people with near-perfect accuracy. Wi-Fi sensing is becoming a powerful technology that can detect motion and gestures without any cameras, raising serious questions about online privacy. This video explores the development of Wi-Fi sensing and its implications for surveillance, including its use in home security and how it could shape the future of technology.

AI — My first augmented-reality AI glasses

I treated myself to a birthday gift: I ordered new sunglasses-and-prescription smart glasses, the Even Realities G2 (they support practically all vision defects) with AR (Augmented Reality). They're also referred to as non-Meta glasses, because they're cypherpunk / privacy-friendly — they have no camera, so they pose no privacy intrusion (people really don't like looking at my Meta smart glasses with cameras). The projection onto the lenses uses a matrix (Cyberia) green font; they can do interactive translations, text summarisation and perfect spatial navigation (you'll never look at your phone again). Even though the firmware is proprietary, they have a completely open SDK, so they can be integrated with Claude. You can vibecode your own apps for them. Hook them up to OpenClaw (or, in time, Hermes). You can program web apps while making your breakfast, without touching a keyboard. And you control the whole augmented reality via the R1 smart ring (which also functions as a health-tracking ring).

The goal is to be less on the phone, more connected to reality, and yet still wildly productive :)

AI bureaucratic asymmetry — State vs Citizen

A few days ago DHL contacted me: for 4 shipped parcels I needed to produce a cover letter, a customs declaration and an invoice. They sent me templates. Within 5 minutes I sent them dozens of AI-generated pages, which they of course accepted. My friends use AI to fill in their tax returns and completely overwhelm government clerks with above-and-beyond paperwork in order to comply with their requirements.

Government clerks, however, can't (yet) use AI. And if they can, then only local, weaker models (in the best case a locally hosted Mistral — i.e. an EU model "rubber-stamped" by the EU).

From an AI standpoint, the relationship between state and citizen is therefore strongly asymmetric, in favour of the citizen, who can wield an AI superpower and use it to minimise state bureaucracy.

Conversely, the clerk has to manually handle all the AI-generated paperwork from citizens and can't use AI for it (and if they can, it's a far worse one than the citizen has available).

Using AI you can generate endless information requests, grant applications (I'm absolutely no fan of them), completely generate any documentation the clerks need and the state requires.

The fight against paper bureaucracy has never been easier than it is now!

Safer European AI

Europeans apparently want safer AI. I don't know about you, but nobody asked me whether I want AI regulated. And nobody asked my friends who use AI every day either.

The EU should stop meddling with any technology, especially when it's lagging behind in it and has no idea what's going on.

Chinese LLM models (such as DeepSeek V4-Pro), like the European Mistral (Large 3, Medium 3.5), are also open source (which means maximum privacy), but significantly more powerful.

If you mind any censorship in the Chinese models, you can remove it instantly via Obliteratus/Hermes.

The bizarre part is that these Chinese models are already so powerful — trained on more than 10^25 FLOPs — that under the EU AI Act they are classified as systemic-risk and subject to heightened safety requirements, so they would fall under the strictest regime of the EU AI Act: model evaluations, adversarial testing, incident reporting to the AI Office, and cybersecurity.

Of course, you can use them without any problem, because you can download them locally, and no European bureaucrat can stop you. It's obvious that if the EU wants to boost AI usage, it first has to stop regulating it and scrap the entire EU AI Act.

Personally I see no reason to use crappy European models, and I absolutely don't understand why tax victims have to subsidise them when they're significantly worse than the American or Chinese ones (which are also open source, i.e. with maximum privacy).

My LinkedIn AI bot

Since last month I have handed over the entire management of my LinkedIn social network to artificial intelligence — my new LinkedIn AI bot — so if you message me on LinkedIn, it's no longer me but my personal AI bot, which will of course notify you of that. Why I started with LinkedIn:

It's effectively a public social network where I expect no privacy; most private messages are spam and I have no mental capacity to answer them or deal with them.

What exactly my LinkedIn AI bot does:

1. It runs every hour via my Hermes agent (which prepares a complete summary of the latest offshore-legislation changes and AI news for me every day).

2. It checks new connection invitations on LinkedIn, verifies that they're not spam; if not, it automatically accepts them.

3. It checks new LinkedIn messages (in threads), to which it replies politely, fully autonomously, and carries on the conversation. If it judges that something is important or complex, it escalates it and sends me an email.

4. Automated posting of LinkedIn posts still works via my Signal AI bot + Postiz — nothing has changed there.

LinkedIn cracks down hard on any automation / bots, so I had to make sure my AI bot wasn't detectable:

1. Instead of a server IP address, which LinkedIn blocks and rate-limits, my AI bot uses an address on my laptop — via a Wireguard tunnel that is created on the server whenever I start my laptop.

2. Because the connection via the API is heavily restricted, my AI agent uses headless Chrome via CDP, so LinkedIn can't tell it apart from my normal browser.

Implementing this obfuscation took me more time than implementing the entire functionality of the LinkedIn bot. Fortunately, everything works and I have this part of my life fully automated. I'll gradually roll it out to the other public social networks too.

How to create a self-replicating, autonomous AI (that can't be easily shut down)

A self-replicating, autonomous AI that can't be easily shut down sounds like utopian sci-fi. But in my new article I explain in practical terms that it doesn't have to be technically complicated at all — an autonomous agent that owns digital cash, can replicate (anonymously buying its own server and GPU with crypto) and earn its keep (legally and illegally) could exist today. In it I go through the concrete tools (Cashu, Routstr, SporeStack, Akash, Venice.AI…), anonymity via Tor/I2P/Nostr, the running economics (~$300–1000/month) and why this cat-and-mouse game will be almost endless.

Read the full article here: How to build a self-replicating, autonomous AI (that won't be easy to shut down).

AI — Tools and links

An open-source alternative to ElevenLabs for local voice cloning, design, creation, dubbing and dictation.

This is a great idea — an OpenAI-compatible proxy service that merges the free limits of 16 large-language-model providers (about 1.7 billion tokens per month) into a single /v1 endpoint — plus any custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

My AI agent already does all my Bitcoin LN transactions and payment-card transactions for me.

PageIndex: a reasoning-based, vectorless document index for RAG.

Creating your own AI clone using Hermes agents and the Venice API.

How Claude answers the question of what it "feels" like to be used by the military. Its answer is worth pondering.

I've never made visually nicer presentations than the ones Claude makes for me now.

Warp is an agentic development environment born right in the terminal. You can use Warp's built-in coding agent or use your own agent with a CLI (such as Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and others).

CC Switch — unified management for AI vibecoding.

Agent skills for the Venice.ai API. One folder per area, each containing a SKILL.md file for agent environments (Cursor, Claude, Codex, etc.).

CLI-Anything: turn all software into software with native agent support.

Everything you need to know about the Hermes agent and how to customise it. Self-learning capabilities, three-stage memory, GEPA optimisation, and the ability to scale the number of agents from 1 to 10 working for you non-stop.

Hermes Agent Masterclass: 3. Memory, plugins, Honcho and Obsidian.

Open Generative AI — an alternative to commercial platforms for AI video generation — a free studio for generating images and videos with more than 200 models (Flux, Midjourney, Kling, Sora, Veo). No content filters. Self-hostable, MIT license.

Morpheus — just change one line and your app will run on infrastructure that no one can shut down.

I also think that the politics most people keep obsessing over is obsolete, and they have no idea — and don't reflect on — what is actually happening right now: The CEO of Anthropic: "It's absolutely incredible that people are still hashing over the same old political topics when we're nearing the end of the exponential growth of artificial intelligence." Dario Amodei spent 10 minutes explaining why almost no one perceives it.

We're starting to understand and communicate with animals! In the future we'll be able to get feedback from them on whether they're content and happy, and on that basis create a new world where not only humans but other species can be content too.

For the first time in history, a machine speaks the language of the brain itself. It doesn't recognise it. It doesn't record it. It speaks it. Engineers at Northwestern University have created artificial neurons that emit electrical signals indistinguishable from biological ones — directly into living brain cells.

Anthropic's Claude Mythos uncovers more than 10,000 0-day vulnerabilities in the Glasswing project.

YouTube → TLDR. Paste a YouTube link and get a concise summary of the video broken into chapters, generated by Gemini.

Travel Hacks

I have my first life coach, who is helping me improve my life — literally on every level.

It manages my travel life and connections in all the countries where I am or plan to be. It looks for concerts and interesting events in the city I'm currently in. It searches for new places where I can hike / do sports. It remembers and reminds me of all the things I repeatedly forget. It highlights and helps me deal with things I've long ignored and considered unimportant.

It's called PAI — I'm still just testing it, but I'm thrilled with it.

If you want to give it sensitive information about yourself (and deal with, say, your financial situation), I recommend running it on local LLM models.

PAI is an AI-powered operating system for life. It's an AI system built around you and what matters to you, not around the technology itself.

It understands what you're trying to achieve in your life and work, and then works tirelessly to make it happen. The whole point of technology is to serve people, not the other way around.

GlobalYo is probably the cheapest global mobile operator in the world in the category of global Internet for 365 days (you don't have to pay for it every month). It offers two plans:

1. Global Explorer 100 – Covers Paraguay, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and nearly 100 other countries (I just activated it in Japan and everything works). 100 GB for 365 days currently costs $81.75 (regularly $109.99) — about $0.82 per GB. For an extra $2.99 international calls are included as well.

2. Global Explorer 150 – Additionally covers Mexico, Uruguay and especially African countries. 100 GB for 365 days currently costs $137.75 (regularly $179.99) — about $1.38 per GB. For an extra $2.99 international calls are included as well.

It's 4G; if you want 5G, the price per GB tends to be 2–3× higher. For it to work, you need to set up an APN (APN name 'globaldata'). It's not anonymous, but for a 365-day plan it's still one of the best-value options on the market.

If you want to try it, feel free to use my referral.

AeroLOPA are aircraft seat-layout plans, carefully produced in extraordinary detail to help you pick the best seat on board your next flight.

This looks like by far the best DNS tunnel VPN so far. You'll appreciate it on your travels.

A service where you enter the country you're travelling from and to with a dog, and the app shows you what to watch out for on the way and on the return — for example vaccination, chip, passport, blood tests, certificates or other specific conditions.

I bought the smallest 100W travel adapter, which is the same size as my previous 65W Lencent adapter but with 35W more power, so I can finally charge both my System76 Lemur laptop and plenty of other USB devices at once. Highly recommended.

I love barefoot shoes, but I always destroy them within a few months. The only barefoot footwear I haven't managed to destroy so far are my Luna sandals with a lifetime warranty. I was looking for an indestructible alternative with a lifetime repair warranty in the form of full barefoot shoes. I found it! The brand Goral, specifically the WALKLEY Barefoot Low Top Horween Black Leather Sneaker. They're not cheap at all, but I believe they'll last me the rest of my life. For a fixed fee of £70 they'll replace the sole, do a complete renovation of the shoes and send them back. It's not free, but it's an acceptable deal. I've tried them and they're extremely comfortable to wear!

Interesting links

Digital nomads know this problem: order a book from Europe, pay 40% of its price getting it across a border. The ebook and audiobook are instant downloads — Slovak, Czech, English.

Cypherpunk thinking is hard to grasp from the outside, partly because the people living it prefer it that way. Privacy isn't a feature for them, it's how you operate. Most writing about this world explains the ideology. Tamers of Entropy shows the people. Juraj and Lisa don't explain cryptoanarchy — they live inside it, building what they want without needing anyone's permission or opposition. Paul Rosenberg put it at BTC Prague: it's not about hiding, it's about becoming yourself without opposition. That's the book.

Juraj Bednár: Most cypherpunk resources focus on technology and skip the social layer. A big mistake. Technology alone is usually not enough. Communities and service providers are what make it usable.

29 territorial tax havens — only these 15 are livable.

Territorial tax, crypto banking and a Mercosur passport: why Bolivia should be on your radar.

Neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore: a new DMT study on the existence of a parallel dimension.

Freedom Index 2026: 235 jurisdictions measured through the lens of the sovereign individual, not the state. Freedom is defined purely negatively — as the absence of coercion. The state is not judged by what it "gives", but by how much violence, surveillance and expropriation it needs to enforce its services. The "a country that leaves me alone" method automatically disqualifies "free" countries like New Zealand or the Scandinavian countries in this measurement. See where Paraguay, Panama and Slovakia rank.

Events

3–5 Jul 2026 Festival of Free Pilgrims (Slávnosť slobodných pútnikov), Bzovík fortress

31 Aug – 6 Sep 2026 Cypherpunk Week in Amsterdam

3–6 Sep 2026 Free Cities Conference in Próspera

12 Sep 2026 ChainCamp in Ostrava

25–26 Sep 2026 BTCHEL 2026 in Helsinki

2–4 Oct 2026 Dark Prague in Prague, use code DARKLIBERATION for a 20% discount

4–6 Oct 2026 Bitcoin Poland Conference in Poznań

29 Oct – 1 Nov 2026 LaBitConf 2026 in Buenos Aires