Liberation Travel Hacks 07/2026

Hey friends,

I think that we humans (most of us) have biological limits on our ability to grasp the entire exponential onslaught of technology. Personally, I love technology. Unfortunately, I see that not only do many people around me refuse to use it — they actually have regressive tendencies, even IT people who refuse to actively use AI that could help them enormously.

How will we make a living in the future:

1. Until we have humanoid robots, we can still make a good living with physical work in the physical world. But this could change fast.

2. For a few years we can make a living as prompt engineers. But in the future there probably won't be any humans in the loop.

3. We can also work as intermediaries in the physical world for AI agents. I expect this market of people working for AI agents in the physical world to grow dramatically.

In any case, a huge number of people won't be able to adapt and will demand rescue in the form of universal basic income (UBI). I absolutely do not ethically endorse UBI, but I think states will move in this direction. And CBDC is how they'll push it through – you want a state universal income? We'll deliver it to you in the form of a digital (blanket-surveilled) euro. Even though AI should radically cut the costs of the state sector (state employees), the exact opposite is happening – states' costs are rising, and with UBI they'll be orders of magnitude higher.

States will be even more aggressive than before (and in the EU we can already see it) to cover UBI for the mass of unemployable people:

1. Introducing a ransom for "exiting the system" (exit tax), so leaving the system becomes highly costly – already standard in Western Europe.

2. Introducing taxation of unrealized gains (the Netherlands is the first case; other countries will follow).

3. Introducing a tax on crypto transactions (the EU proposal is 0.1%; the state of Illinois has already introduced 0.2% on every crypto transaction from 1 Jan 2027).

4. Sharp increases in property taxes.

5. Heavy taxation of anything in the physical world that "moves".

From this perspective, the best strategy to minimize state oppression is to be an "invisible nomad living on crypto":

1. Since in a few years it will be hard to make a living from any intellectual work, you need to own assets (real estate, gold, stocks, Bitcoin/crypto) that are limited in quantity and can be rented, lent, etc. From this angle, Bitcoin/crypto as a digital, unregulated asset comes out better than real estate, which falls victim to the state's arbitrary property taxes and costly regulations.

2. Tax residency in a tax hell (which includes all EU states) makes you a tax slave who – even more than before – will spend the larger part of their productive life working for the state and "rescuing" the large part of the population living on UBI. Leaving, because of the exit ransom (exit tax), will be difficult, even impossible.

3. Owning anonymous cryptocurrency will be desirable. If the state discovers you own a large amount of bitcoin, you'll face a wealth tax, an unrealized-gains tax, etc.

4. There's a risk you'll be taxed worldwide based on citizenship (citizenship taxation, as in the USA). Similarly, states will tie military conscription to your citizenship (not your residency), which many states have already done. It will be desirable to have a second citizenship from a country that hasn't introduced these obligations (the Caribbean).

States will claim everything in the physical world, everything transparent in the virtual world, and enforce blanket taxation on their tax residents – perhaps eventually on their citizens too.

You need to:

1. Be invisible in the physical world.

2. Be non-transparent in the virtual world.

3. Have good tax residency (with zero or territorial taxation).

4. And have good citizenship (with no obligations).

A dystopian future is something you can prepare for.

Pavol Lupták, Ružomberok, Slovakia, 2 July 2026

Slovakia

The state in Slovakia is collapsing on both a moral and an economic level. Here's the positive that comes out of it:

The mainstream — at least all entrepreneurs — have understood that the state is an ordinary thief that occasionally "gifts" something to someone. They've understood that populism isn't the "cancer of democracy" (as many people see it), but the optimal strategy of the most successful politicians in any democratic system, who use your money to bribe, and will keep bribing, their voters. It happens all over the world, where the most successful politicians are almost always populists.

Not paying taxes is not only normal but desirable, if you don't want to support the organized crime of a corrupt, pro-Russian government. Just three years ago I'd have been considered a total extremist (especially after writing this article). Now it's the mainstream narrative and I no longer have to explain anything to anyone.

None of my friends and acquaintances want to pay taxes in Slovakia, and it doesn't matter how socialist/left-wing or right-wing their convictions are. Many are starting to realize this works from the other side too. SMER voters likewise don't want to fund the EU's progressive ideas, the LGBT narrative, etc.

I fully understand that they don't want to contribute financially through their taxes (in a situation where the system flips). Understanding this is the first step to realizing that society is simply too complex for us to have a homogeneous state that enforces the values of the current democratic majority on everyone (my older article The Crisis of Homogeneous Authoritative Systems and the Future of Modern Tribes).

A democratic state will always enforce the majority's rules/values against a minority that will feel discriminated against. Many people are finally starting to realize that the key problem isn't that the current state is controlled by a corrupt mafia, but that a dangerous monopoly tool for regulations and laws exists at all, which enables it. The state as a monopoly on violence dramatically accelerates the influence of any organized crime that seizes it — because it forces all citizens to fund it involuntarily.

The fact that the mafia state does the evil you see is, unfortunately, partly caused by you involuntarily funding it with your taxes. If you don't want to pay taxes now because "the wrong ones" are in government, but you'd willingly pay them once the government changes to one that happens to suit you (even though you have legal ways not to), then unfortunately you've missed the whole point. The state is a dangerous territorial monopoly on regulations and laws, abused long-term by one side or the other.

Voting always means that you grant legitimacy to your political candidate to violently enforce laws and regulations against all the voters who didn't vote for him. That's why I consider voting immoral, and the argument above, in hindsight, very strong. And I don't think a political alternative exists.

As someone who has long worked in security and privacy while also running a business, I see the whole EU fundamentally degrading into a dystopian society, radically restricting economic and personal freedom — with totalitarian practices like Age Control, blanket surveillance of financial transactions, a tax on unrealized gains, and currently a proposal to tax crypto transactions... Over time it only gets worse.

But I believe there is an apolitical alternative — opting out of the system, decentralizing your economic and personal interests across many countries, flag theory — which I did for myself 10 years ago and now actively help our clients with. It's the only way to keep at least some economic and personal freedom in today's world. It's not for everyone, but more and more people can afford it.

That's why I see it as very positive that many people in Slovakia have already understood all this.

They're returning to individual cooperation outside the state, in the parallel economy — no invoices, no receipts, for cash, for crypto. Many of them have cancelled their permanent residence and stopped paying the ransom in the form of social and health insurance, switching to alternatives (global health insurance, investing in BTC).

In my bubble it's already the majority of people. And I'm very glad about it.

And this process is irreversible — people don't go back into the system. They don't re-register their permanent residence or health-insurance ransom, and they don't start paying taxes again. They've simply erased the state from their minds.

The libertarian Samuel Edward Konkin III would be pleased with Slovakia's current trajectory, which according to his New Libertarian Manifesto is approaching phase 2.

In the New Libertarian Manifesto (1980), Konkin divides the transition to an agorist society into four phases according to how widespread the counter-economy is:

Phase 0 – Zero-Density Agorism

The starting state. Almost no one practices conscious agorism, though black and grey markets exist everywhere as an ordinary part of human action. Counter-economic activity is unconscious, non-ideological – people bypass the state for practical reasons, not out of principle.

Phase 1 – Low-Density Agorism

The emergence of a conscious libertarian-agorist movement. Individuals and small groups appear who understand the counter-economy as a moral and strategic choice. Awareness and theory spread, the libertarian movement is built (Konkin stresses the role of the "movement" here). Emphasis on linking radical theory with real counter-economic practice.

Phase 2 – Mid-Density, Small-Condensation Agorism

The counter-economy reaches a size where its own supporting institutions arise – above all agorist arbitration and protection structures that replace state courts and police. "Condensations" begin to form – denser clusters of agorists able to provide services so far monopolized by the state. The counter-economy stops being just individuals and becomes a network.

Phase 3 – High-Density, the Agora

The counter-economy encompasses most of society. The state is reduced to isolated enclaves and becomes unsustainable – it can neither collect taxes nor enforce its monopoly on violence against the prevailing agora. In this phase the possibility of open defense of the agora against the remnants of the state also arises (Konkin here admits a role for protection and defense agencies). The result is a fully functioning classless, stateless market society.

The key idea of the whole transition: the transformation is incremental and counter-economic, not revolutionary-political. Society doesn't change by conquering the state, but by gradually "starving" it – shifting an ever-larger part of human action beyond its reach, until the state becomes irrelevant.

Slovakia's economic decline and, conversely, Paraguay's economic growth over the past years are enormous. Slovak politicians should be required to study Paraguay's economic reforms. My Slovak Facebook/Instagram bombards me with news about which company left Slovakia and how many people it laid off. Paraguayan Facebook/Instagram is exactly the opposite – which global corporation came to Paraguay and opened new jobs. I asked my Claude agent (through my AR glasses) to analyze this situation and create an illustrative infographic.

The state in Slovakia is ceasing to be relevant.

It took a long time, but most people now realize it's an unpleasant parasite we don't need. And it does far more harm than good. Fico does his populist dances, claiming that if he cuts taxes for entrepreneurs, then Slovak nurses, firefighters and pensioners will suffer. He conveniently omits that once entrepreneurs leave (either physically from the country, or from the system – which is happening every day), there will be no one left to support Slovak nurses, firefighters and pensioners. The state won't – it creates no value, it only consumes.

Whoever put out that not taxing annual income in Slovakia up to €3,000 (that's €250/month) is a "business success" must be completely detached from reality. I thought they'd forgotten a zero (and even then it would be too little).

A quick comparison:

1. Poland

Greetings from Poland, where annual income up to 30,000 PLN (over €7,000) is untaxed, and they now plan to raise this limit to 60,000 PLN a year (over €14,000). And it's not at the expense of Polish nurses, firefighters or pensioners. Everything here simply works better than in Slovakia.

2. Paraguay

In Paraguay, annual income up to 80M PYG (~$12,000 USD) is likewise not taxed at all (and health insurance is fully voluntary). The average monthly income of an employed person according to EPH (Q3 2025) is 3.2M PYG per month → 38.4M PYG per year. So Paraguay's tax-free threshold is roughly 2.1× the average annual income.

If we applied that to Slovakia: the average monthly wage in 2025 was €1,620 → €19,440 a year. If Slovakia had the same ratio as Paraguay, you'd pay no income tax up to ~€40,500 a year.

And that's comparing income tax alone. The real gap is even bigger: in Slovakia the largest part of the burden on labour is contributions (health + social), which you pay even on minimum income. In Paraguay, insurance for self-employed individuals is voluntary. So a Slovak doesn't get the "tax-free €3,000" — they get an illusion, while the state takes its cut through contributions before they even see their paycheck.

In short, Slovaks are ultra tax slaves and I genuinely feel sorry for them. If you want to legally break free from tax slavery, we at Liberation Travel will gladly help you.

In short: Paraguay is going up, Slovakia down — and the rating agencies confirm it in black and white.

Paraguay and Slovakia are moving in opposite directions in the ratings space, and the contrast is textbook. Over the last two years Paraguay earned two investment-grade ratings — Moody's upgraded it in July 2024 (Baa3), and S&P followed in December 2025 with a lift from BB+ to BBB−. The third agency, Fitch, keeps the country at BB+ for now, but with a positive outlook, i.e. ready to complete the set. In the same period Slovakia went exactly the opposite way: Fitch cut its rating back in 2023, Moody's followed at the end of 2024 with a downgrade to A3, and S&P today holds a negative outlook on Slovakia — in rating language, a harbinger of a further cut. Slovakia still has a higher absolute grade (the A band vs. BBB/BB), but that's a photo of the past, not a film about the future. What matters is the derivative, not the value: which way each country is moving.

Behind the numbers is a clear cause. Paraguay grew on average 3.9% per year in 2022–2025, with inflation around 3.5% and a fiscal deficit squeezed to 1.5% of GDP — S&P explicitly praises the government's credibility in meeting its fiscal targets. Slovakia, meanwhile, grows at barely a third of that pace (1.5–1.9% per year), with a deficit that jumped close to 6% of GDP and debt heading above 62% of GDP, i.e. above the median of comparable countries. A classic story of a country living off credit accumulated in the past, while Paraguay is only just building it.

Poland

Anonymous cash for Bitcoin Lightning at all Polish ATMs.

And not only that – with Bitcoin Lightning you can pay literally everywhere in Poland!

No KYC, no registration, via a Nostr provider.

I love it when I come across a new technology that gives (European) bureaucrats the finger, especially when they want to blanket-surveil and regulate you. The last time I was this happy was over peer.xyz, a non-KYC exchange of stablecoins for fiat that bypasses the dystopian centralized exchanges forced to do massive reporting because of the EU's DAC-8 and MiCA regulations. With BITBLIK, just like with peer.xyz, you're doing decentralized P2P trading, so I assume no regulation applies to you.

Today I came across a great Polish app, BITBLIK, which connects Poland's ubiquitous BLIK system with Bitcoin Lightning. With Bitcoin Lightning you can pay anonymously anywhere in Poland, withdraw cash anonymously from an ATM (which I just did!), or make online payments on the Polish internet. BLIK is massively accepted — it has over 20 million users and is taken by the vast majority of Polish shops and ATMs.

Install the app https://bitblik.app/, launch it, register nowhere, do no KYC, enter an offer for how much you want to pay in PLN or how much you want to withdraw from an ATM. You make a Bitcoin Lightning payment, which gets locked. You wait a minute or two until someone accepts your offer (the other side, who has BLIK and wants Bitcoin Lightning). As soon as they do, a BLIK code appears. It's valid for only about two minutes, so you punch it into the ATM or enter it in a shop or restaurant terminal. After a successful payment you confirm that you used the BLIK code, and the Lightning payment is settled to the counterparty.

Limits for BLIK payments differ across Polish ATMs. ING Bank Śląski has the highest limit: 10,000 PLN per day (€2,356), or mBank at 5,000 PLN per day (€1,178). PKO BP allows BLIK transactions up to 1,500 PLN, but you can make up to 20,000 PLN worth per day (€4,722). And of course those limits are per merchant. When various merchants accept these Lightning payments from you, you effectively have no limits – you're constrained only by the counterparty's liquidity.

The BITBLIK app is 100% open source, so it can't be banned! You can fork it and use it within your own closed community.

EU

A few days ago someone asked me which dystopian regulations the EU has introduced.

Let me start right with MiCA:

1. Thanks to this regulation, all European crypto exchanges delisted anonymous cryptocurrencies (like Monero or Zcash), which as a company we can no longer legally buy anywhere in the EU from a regulated exchange. It's not just anonymous coins — it also affects, e.g., USDT, which refused to deal with this compliance (note: it's the most widely accepted stablecoin in the world).

2. All crypto ATMs in the EU (except Poland) started requiring KYC from zero thanks to MiCA + AMLR + DAC8. The costs of the KYC process are so high that many companies gave up on it and left the EU.

3. Bitcoin payments became unusable. Almost all non-P2P services require KYC.

4. The costs of MiCA compliance are so enormous that a number of small, excellent services (like archway.finance) are shutting down in the EU because of MiCA. I just got an email about it and I'm honestly very angry at the EU bureaucrats. Of the 3,000+ crypto firms from 2024, only ~194–210 have a license; ~75% are being pushed out by 1 July 2026.

5. The world's largest crypto exchange, Binance, didn't get a MiCA license in Greece (it's trying its luck in France, which may take a few months with an unclear outcome).

This means that from 1 July it shut down its services for EU residents. Binance tells EU users it will no longer provide services after failing to secure a MiCA license

Which is questionable, because EU bureaucrats explicitly don't want Binance in the EU. They want to roll out a surveilling, centralized digital euro to have full control over the transactions of all European citizens (never mind that no citizen wants a digital euro).

If you're a Binance crypto user, you now finally have a completely clear signal that you need a working residency outside the EU. With a Paraguayan, Uruguayan, Panamanian or other cédula you can easily open and verify a Binance account. We'll gladly help you obtain Paraguayan residency and a cédula.

Note that Paraguay hasn't signed CRS or any other crypto reporting treaty, so reporting from Binance to Paraguay doesn't work. You need a Paraguayan cédula not only for crypto services that didn't pass MiCA and left the European market, but also just to have a normally functioning internet.

With a Paraguayan SIM card (whose roaming works great in the EU) you have no censorship – you can reach, no problem:

1. Non-GDPR (mainly American) sites that are switched off for EU citizens because of GDPR.

2. All online gambling portals that are censored in the EU.

3. SaaS/AI tools that are switched off for the EU (because of the EU AI Act).

4. And of course non-MiCA services that left the EU (like Binance right now).

And unfortunately, many people in the EU are still convinced that it's not about any restriction of freedom, but about protecting EU citizens. The mantra used by every totalitarian regime.

It's evident that the EU is hard against financial anonymity (a real hallmark of a dystopian society) and against crypto services that aren't MiCA/DAC-8 compliant, so EU bureaucrats approve only regulated crypto services that blanket-surveil and endanger users' privacy.

The proposed tax on every crypto transaction in the EU is equivalent to a carbon tax on every fart – you only pay for the one you hear or smell :) And you'll avoid it just as easily as the crypto-transaction tax.

EU tax on crypto transactions: a 0.1% levy could raise €3–4 billion a year.

A tax on every crypto transaction looks like a complete absurdity, but in Illinois they're already introducing it.

Even though AI can replace 95% of European bureaucrats, the EU still underestimates its pace and scale. AI already writes most of the software in the leading labs, does its own research and redefines cybersecurity; soon it will disrupt the labour market, the conduct of war and the global balance of power. Now is not the time for business-as-usual politics — that's exactly what the Europe 2031 project addresses.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov compares the absence of panic during the sinking of the Titanic to the current lack of awareness in Europe, where citizens' freedoms are being taken away: "I came here today to tell you that we are in a similarly desperate situation. Our ship has already hit the iceberg. We've already started to sink. And we don't even realize it. And I'm talking about the ship of our personal freedoms." He then gave examples from his personal experience with fraud and corruption in Russia, the EU and France. He then moved to Keir Starmer's harsh measures against social media in the UK: "In the UK, thousands of people are arrested every year over social-media posts. If you say something politically incorrect online, in Germany you could face a fine or even jail time."

That's exactly why it makes sense to opt out before the ship fully sinks – to decentralize your life and assets across multiple countries and not rely on a single state that keeps taking your freedoms away.

Paraguay

If you're a temporary Paraguayan resident applying for permanent residency, definitely read the new conditions for obtaining permanent residency in Paraguay, which start being enforced from 6 July 2026. We keep this information updated on our official website.

Already have your Paraguayan driver's license and want to use it abroad too? Here's how to get a Paraguayan international driver's permit.

Bitcoin, Monero, Zcash and cryptocurrencies

How to live long-term off a crypto loan and legally pay no taxes + contributions in 2026: everything you need to know about using the value of Bitcoin long-term without selling it — via Firefish.io or via Aave + tBTC — and why it makes more sense than selling and paying taxes and contributions.

My AI agents use Albyhub skills to pay with Bitcoin/Lightning.

Zcash developers used Claude Opus 4.8 to discover a critical bug that could have allowed attackers to create an unlimited amount of coins. They fixed it practically immediately, but the ZEC price temporarily dropped by half (and whoever bought the dip is happy :-). A Q&A summary of this vulnerability. So is it a good idea to move from the Orchard pool to the Sapling pool?

Frank Braun – Bitcoin is retro, Zcash is the future (video).

The new Cake Wallet supports hardware wallets and it works great (I tried it with my Trezor Safe 7).

Privacy

An interesting privacy project in the physical world – a special container with a tamper-evident closure.

ShopinBit introduces anonymous booking without email or phone number, paid in crypto.

Crypto exchanges, casinos, hosting services and VPNs with no identity verification (KYC), designed with privacy in mind.

The Proton problem – since 2017, Proton has handed over user data in response to more than 40,000 government orders. Their own transparency report shows a compliance rate of 94%. Here's everything they don't want you to know, straight from their own documents.

The FCC wants to kill anonymous "burner" phones – forcing telecom operators to collect ID from all customers.

AI - My first augmented-reality AI glasses

The post-smartphone era is here!

My new Even Realities AR glasses moved me into the year 2030 – a few observations from the last few days:

1. They navigated me to my favorite cinema without touching my phone – projecting the route directly onto the lenses (on foot or by bike). The maps are proprietary, but it's a clone of Google Maps/OpenStreetMap since they contain every place in Bratislava.

2. In the cinema I turned on Live Translation from French to Slovak and the whole drama was subtitled for me – including the French songs that the official subtitles didn't cover, and some passages were even better than the official translation. It also subtitles conversations of people around you (you have to set the language in advance, autodetection isn't there yet) – at a Tricky concert it even subtitled the sung lyrics into Slovak, which I couldn't make out myself in that loud music.

3. It translated a discussion in Slovak with my Kyrgyz (in Russian) and Turkish friends practically flawlessly.

4. Teleprompt – the glasses project your talk's text and scroll it as you read; ideal for public presentations. I had Claude do deep research over the entire Liberation.Travel website and generate a punchy 20-minute presentation about our services, which I loaded into the glasses.

5. Conversate – recording and AI-summarizing any of your communication (e.g. a boring business meeting you can now afford to sleep through :). Even AI doesn't know Slovak, but I connected it with Claude, which does.

6. The connection with Claude is via "Terminal Mode" (you scan a QR code from a running Claude Code, in my case over Tailscale VPN): you have an active Claude session controlled entirely by voice – you can vibecode or solve anything, switching options with the R1 ring.

7. When I lift my head to the sky, a dashboard appears – time, Live News and weather.

8. Fun apps – it projects the track + lyrics of the song currently playing from Spotify onto the lenses, PDF documents and voice notes (Notes), and I switch slides with the ring. Overview of Even apps; the mega-cool SenseMaker that activates your "second brain".

9. The factcheck app interactively flags easily verifiable fake news for me. The first thing I tried on my Chinese glasses was a question about Tiananmen 1989 – I was pleasantly surprised that they fact-checked it as a real event.

10. Mentra OS isn't alternative firmware but an open-source repository of apps running alongside the official Even one (Captions, Link Lingo, Dash, X and more – full list); switching is just a matter of which app you're running.

11. Battery life is an incredible 2–3 days – and since the glasses have no cameras or speakers, they're a super gadget for privacy activists.

12. The projected text isn't visible from the outside, people only notice your eyes are focused up close; the lenses have a reflective layer that at night faintly mirrors what's behind you.

13. The Even Realities G2 and the R1 ring are devices of the post-smartphone era – you can be productive without ever reaching for your phone.

AI - Concerns

In my view, concerns about AI are similar to concerns about electricity. I can come up with a hundred reasons why the invention of electricity was extremely dangerous for humanity (not to mention the huge number of people electricity has killed). All these reasons are completely irrelevant:

The benefits of electricity, like the benefits of AI, significantly outweigh their downsides. And that's true in practically any field, planet-wide.

AI does 95% of my work. On my laptop I only run Claude sessions, with which I "control" my entire world. I can't imagine any comeback to a world without AI, let alone a world without electricity.

Whenever you're about to speak out against AI, remember this analogy with electricity. Over a hundred years ago, a large number of people also spoke out against electrification, and today their views seem completely bizarre to us.

Just as, a hundred years from now, it will seem completely bizarre that there were people who spoke out against AI. Like, for example, Pope Leo, who issued the following warnings.

I understand all his AI concerns and find them relevant, but slowing down or stopping AI development is, in my view, impossible:

1. AI can weaken human judgment by offering instant answers that erode creativity, discernment and the patience needed to seek truth.

2. AI can simulate care without a genuine relationship, which may cause vulnerable users to mistake artificial empathy for real human connection.

3. AI can deepen inequality, because data, computing power and regulatory influence are concentrated in the hands of a small number of actors.

4. AI can destabilize democracy by amplifying disinformation and blurring the line between reality and fiction.

5. AI can make war easier by accelerating lethal decisions and distancing people from responsibility. Leo's toughest line: "No algorithm can make war morally acceptable."

"With this document Pope Leo has established himself as one of the leading figures in the field of AI ethics," Meghan Sullivan, director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame, told Axios.

AI - The shutdown of Mythos, and the freedom of Chinese models

The NSA director claims Mythos broke into almost all of its classified systems within a few hours. Within hours, Trump ordered Anthropic to block foreign access to the Mythos and Fable systems. Instead, Anthropic shut both systems down entirely. There are now two contradictory versions of why this actually happened. One says the shutdown was a reaction to the NSA's own classified systems being penetrated within hours. The other says Anthropic is privately pushing back, calling this security hole less serious and the shutdown an overreaction to something that can fool other AI models too.

Shutting down Claude Fable 5 may have the exact opposite effect to what the US government imagines. It will reduce the competitiveness of the Western world and give the Chinese another head start to catch up in AI. The powerful new Chinese model Kimi K2.7 is 3× cheaper than GPT-5.5 at coding. And GLM 5.2 absolutely excels.

We're currently seeing a repeat of the cryptography export situation from the 1990s — the US government banned the export of the most powerful Fable 5/Mythos 5 models. Anthropic's statement on the US government order suspending access to the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models.

Fortunately, all of this was temporary, and Anthropic is redeploying Fable 5.

In an AI discussion we tackled an interesting oxymoron: if you want a truly free, uncensored LLM, you have to reach for Chinese open-weight models, where with tools like Obliteratus or Heretic you strip away any restrictions/censorship and turn it into an uncensored model. Western commercial LLMs are heavily restricted and censored, and since you don't have local access to them, you can't do anything about it.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that the freest, uncensored AI models we'd use would be the Chinese ones.

The fact that Anthropic's CEO speaks out sharply against Chinese open-source models (because of the risk of their "brutal abuse") I perceive as fear of incredibly strong competition (the Chinese GLM 5.2 is starting to be at OPUS's level) that is free — and a wish to use a government regulator to get rid of it. It's a disappointment to me.

AI - Abuse by totalitarian regimes

This is probably what I see as the biggest problem with AI:

AI can dramatically cut the cost of running any totalitarian regime.

If the Stasi or the KGB had used AI, they could have blanket-surveilled the population, classified enemies of the regime and dissidents, and then enforced their discrimination or criminalization far more easily and cheaply.

And this risk is real in today's Western world too. Thanks to AI it will be possible to enforce and evaluate the EU's surveillance legislation (Age Control, Chat Control, MiCA, DAC-8, …) far more easily and cheaply – and it's already happening.

AI - Tools and links

My futuristic talk "The Impact of AI on Cryptoanarchy", which you'll love or hate (in English).

The most comprehensive collection of APIs on GitHub – 10,498 ready-to-use APIs for building everything from simple automations to complex applications.

Thanks to this tool, your AI agent will think like the laziest experienced programmer in the room. The best code is the code you never wrote.

The Hermes AI agent can now make phone calls (via integration with ElevenLabs).

The Hermes Agent can now learn from anything: just give it directories with any source material (code, API documentation, manuals, PDF files, config files) and it generates a verifiable, reusable skill from them.

Hermes Curator – a new system integrated into the Hermes Agent app that helps you keep the skills emerging from the self-improvement loop under control, by automatically merging and removing them.

Set up collaboration between the Hermes and Paperclip apps in under a minute.

The self-replicating, autonomous AI I wrote an article about last month has already been built by someone.

The strongest open-source model (for coding), GLM 5.2, already runs on an M5 Max with 128 GB RAM.

Argentina wants to legalize non-human, AI corporations.

A few days ago I was asked whether AI can kill people. If it gets the ability to control killer drones (which is only a matter of time), then definitely yes. This is exactly the kind of thing AI corporations should be dealing with — and not the other way around, cozying up to governments and their militant agenda (like Sam Altman did). Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time.

Anthropic calls for a global pause on AI development – to me this seems technically completely unfeasible. Whoever stops "loses" (geopolitically).

Independent automated benchmarking of the most advanced AI models. Tracking performance drops so the community knows when models are degrading; data updated every day.

You can already buy humanoid robots for $4,900; they're becoming broadly available.

No surprise – AI can identify medical diagnoses that almost no human doctor can. Another story from a cardiologist.

BugTraceAI Model 27B Uncensored, developed specifically for offensive-security tooling.

Travel Hacks

My new article The laptop-free era is here! How to pack in 2026 without a laptop while keeping all the advantages a laptop offers. And an updated How to pack like a high-tech minimalist and travel the world with a small backpack.

How to book "anti-woke" accommodation :)

Check out one of the best AI tools for analyzing your body and biological material – getbased.health.

Sherpa – a handy app to check visa and entry requirements based on your citizenship and destination country.

Interesting links

Juraj Bednár: How to be primary. Being primary means creating of your own will, inspired by your own ideas. It's rarer than it looks — and most modern environments actively select it out.

They reverse-engineered the Oura Ring. And the OpenOura project was born.

Brazil (unlike Paraguay or Uruguay) really isn't a good country for homeschooling kids.

Five countries where tax residency takes 90 days or fewer. In Paraguay, moreover, you don't need to stay in the country at all to obtain tax residency (RUC) – you just register with the tax office (which we're glad to help clients with).

Non-CRS Countries for Banking Privacy in 2026 (video). It explains why you need a non-CRS account, which we'll gladly open for you in Kyrgyzstan.

Events

31 Aug–6 Sep 2026 Cypherpunk Week in Amsterdam

3–6 Sep 2026 Free Cities Conference in Próspera

25–26 Sep 2026 BTCHEL 2026 in Helsinki

2–4 Oct 2026 Dark Prague in Prague

4–6 Oct 2026 Bitcoin Poland Conference in Poznań

29 Oct–1 Nov 2026 LaBitConf 2026 in Buenos Aires