Liberation Travel Hacks 08/2026
Hi friends,
one of the biggest dystopian fears I have about what we will live to see in the EU and the US is a ban on open source. After what happened in July, I am willing to bet it may well happen.
Specifically, it will be a ban on powerful open-weight (Chinese) LLM models that anyone can download and trivially strip of their "guard rails" (via Obliteratus or Heretic).
Chinese models are a thorn in absolutely everyone's side.
There is no shortage of reasons for a ban — some of them will be said out loud, others never:
- Powerful Chinese models are not EU AI Act compliant, and they never will be. They have been showing the EU the middle finger from day one.
- Bypassing every "safety control" is trivial, which means the models can be "horribly misused". This is now the official rhetoric of Anthropic's CEO too, which genuinely disappoints me.
- With uncensored LLMs you can generate unlimited child porn, get advice on making explosives, organising terrorist attacks or planning your own death. That is terribly dangerous and European citizens "must" be protected from it.
- They destroy the business of Western AI corporations, which subsidise their own products relentlessly. Those companies would love to raise the price of every model they sell, but they can't, because Chinese competition keeps shipping ever more capable models for free.
The fact that we have cheap Claude and ChatGPT is largely down to the existence of powerful Chinese models available at no cost. That is why Anthropic and OpenAI cannot afford to triple their prices, even though Sam Altman would like to. He has admitted OpenAI loses money on the $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro subscription, talks about premium AI agents "well north of $200/month" and about $1.4 trillion committed to data centres over the next eight years. That money has to come from somewhere, and the only thing standing in his way is competition that costs nothing.
A ban on Chinese open source will therefore enjoy very broad support — among EU and US politicians who will "protect" their citizens from "dangerous AI", and among Western AI corporations who get rid of their competition.
The rest of us can look forward to significantly higher prices for the AI services we use today, and to police raids on our devices where "finding" an uncensored Chinese model will be treated the same as "finding" child pornography.
Why do I think this isn't paranoia? Because exactly the same thing happened to your communications in July.
On 9 July the European Parliament waved through Chat Control 1.0, meaning blanket scanning of private communications without any suspicion whatsoever. The European Commission itself admits there is no evidence that mass scanning leads to more convictions or to more children being saved. Its own implementation report puts the error rate for AI detection of unknown material at up to 20 %. In other words, every fifth flagged conversation had nothing to do with child abuse at all.
The pattern is always the same:
- An unimpeachable moral reason is found (children).
- Infrastructure for blanket control is built.
- It gets used for something else entirely.
With Chat Control it is your messages. With AI it will be your tools.
And that is a significant shift compared to everything we have dealt with so far. Until now the state wanted to know what you own (CRS, DAC-8, MiCA), where you are (tax residency) and who you talk to (Chat Control). Now it will start caring about what tools you have on your disk.
So to the usual opt-out checklist — good tax residency, second citizenship, anonymous crypto, a non-CRS account outside the EU — I am adding one more item: have models downloaded locally, and hardware you can actually run them on.
And here is the good news. While the EU debates how to restrict open-weight models, Chinese models have quietly taken the lead. As of August 2026 the strongest open-weight model in the world is Kimi K3 — a score of 57 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, ahead of GLM-5.2 at 51 and DeepSeek V4. Not a single Western open-weight model comes close.
You won't run Kimi K3 or DeepSeek V4 at home, they are beyond the reach of any ordinary hardware. GLM-5.2 is smaller and can be made to run on a normal machine, though at the cost of speed.
While writing this editorial I fired up Qwen3.6 (30.5B MoE, quantised to Q4, 18 GB on disk) on my laptop. An ordinary Intel Core Ultra 7, no dedicated graphics card, 54 GB of RAM. It answered me at 12 tokens per second. No internet, no account, nobody anywhere any the wiser.
That is the real reason pressure for a ban will grow. Not because those models are dangerous, but because they are good enough and they run beyond the state's reach.
And I would be very glad to be wrong.
Until then only one thing holds: download while you still can.
Pavol Lupták, Montevideo, Uruguay, 13 August 2026
Germans are packing their bags in large numbers. More than 288,000 German citizens moved abroad in a single year and around 97,000 more Germans emigrated than returned, according to the Federal Statistical Office. The trend is strongest exactly where a country can least afford it: among people with a household net income of at least €6,000, more than one in two say they applied for a job abroad or tested the international market in the past twelve months. Practically all of my German friends have already left and none of them plan to come back. What about yours? Paraguay is full of German towns and villages.
Why they are leaving is shown by this chart. A couple, two children, both working. At €4,000 gross they are left with roughly €2,700. At €5,000 gross they are left with roughly €2,650. You read that correctly: earn €1,000 more and your wallet is lighter.
At €2,000 gross the family has about €2,350 available, at €5,000 it is €2,650. Earn €3,000 more, end up €300 better off. It is called the transfer withdrawal rate, and it is not some discovery from social media. The German labour ministry commissioned a study on it from the ifo Institute and ZEW, and the effective marginal burden for families in the lower income brackets routinely sits between 80 and 100 %, in places even higher. Every extra euro earned drags housing benefit, child supplement and tax allowances down with it, while taxes and social contributions rise at the same time. Nothing happened.
And then politicians wonder why nobody is increasing their hours. People are not lazy. They can do arithmetic.
The chart itself circulates on social media and is not official statistics — it is an edge case, a specific combination of income, number of children and benefit entitlements, not the average German family. But even that is more than alarming: a system in which a band exists at all where higher effort is punished with lower net income is badly designed regardless of how many people it happens to catch.
And it is not only about taxes. Germany has already introduced a framework requiring men aged 17 to 45 to ask permission if they want to leave the country for more than three months. Leaving thereby stops being a matter of free choice and becomes a matter of state permission.
Chat Control 1.0 passed. On Thursday 9 July the European Parliament permitted blanket scanning of private communications without any suspicion and extended the ePrivacy derogation until 2028. The EU took a milestone step towards Russia and China and became another totalitarian black hole.
It is worth looking at how it passed, because that is the worst part of it:
- A majority of voting MEPs were actually against — 314 against, 276 in favour, 17 abstentions. It passed anyway.
- The proposal was in second reading. There it is considered adopted unless Parliament rejects it by an absolute majority of all its members, meaning at least 361 votes out of 720. Supporters only needed a simple majority of those present.
- Anyone who didn't show up on Thursday effectively voted in favour. The scanning of hundreds of millions of people's communications was decided by absent MEPs.
- According to Patrick Breyer, with the derogation extended to 2028 the Council loses its reason to accept the more privacy-friendly version of Chat Control 2.0. The time pressure created by the derogation's expiry is gone.
The full picture: Chat Control 1.0 passed the European Parliament — through the back door and Breyer's own account of the vote.
And now the best part. The adopted text includes an amendment that exempts end-to-end encrypted communication from the surveillance. Somebody explain this to me: the EU is going to fight "child abusers" by scanning exclusively those who don't use encryption. Which is to say, precisely the people it doesn't concern.
The economic price. The European Parliament's own impact assessment on the child sexual abuse regulation models it: a false positive rate of 0.1 % across a billion messages a day means a million false alarms a day. That is the cost of manual triage, legal defence, police capacity and oversight, in the billions of euros annually — plus compliance, legal uncertainty and reputational damage. The EU ICT sector accounts for 5.2 % of the Union's gross value added and employs 7.4 million people, so every single percent of lost value in the European digital sector means roughly €9 billion a year.
The academic case against the underlying technology has been made for years. Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning, written by fifteen of the world's leading cryptographers, argues that scanning on the user's own device does not deliver a clever compromise between protecting children and protecting encryption — it creates a new security vulnerability inside every phone.
And the biggest winners will be the American tech giants, who have armies of lawyers to absorb the regulation. Smaller European players do not.
If you want to do something about it in practice, a hands-on digital sovereignty manual has appeared: Exit Chat Control (repository on GitHub), step by step from beginner to whistleblower.
And it keeps going. Von der Leyen has announced a legislative proposal on restricting social media for minors after the summer break, with age verification still unresolved. At the same time a European Parliament committee is calling for Europol's mandate to be extended to "information manipulation" and for a permanent monitoring group for elections across all member states. In the United Kingdom the Prime Minister gave Apple and Google three months to build scanning directly into the operating system of every phone in the country. Not into an app you can delete, but into the layer underneath everything, the one that sees your camera before the camera does.
And the censorship we supposedly don't have. The Czech Republic banned Polymarket and gave internet providers 15 days to block it.
It is not alone. Slovakia blocks Polymarket too — it has been on the Gambling Regulation Office's list of prohibited offers since 22 June, and ISPs have been ordered to cut off access. That list now holds close to a thousand websites. In recent months access has also been restricted or blocked by Germany, Belgium, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal and Spain, with France getting there back in early 2025. As of July 2026 Polymarket is blocked or restricted in more than 40 countries.
The justification is identical everywhere: prediction markets are supposedly not finance but unlicensed gambling. Yet Polymarket is the best platform for predicting the future, where people put real skin in the game, and it is better than any polling agency — those get it wrong with admirable regularity. That is probably the actual problem: unlike agencies, its result cannot be ordered in advance.
Claiming over and over that there is no internet censorship in the EU is like claiming over and over that the war in Ukraine is a special military operation. Stop it.
The EU pushes the Caribbean towards the end of CBI. The European Commission has formally asked Antigua and Barbuda to wind down its citizenship-by-investment programme by 1 June 2028 or lose visa-free access. The letter was signed by Commissioner Magnus Brunner and all five Caribbean CBI states received the same one. Brussels leans on the revised visa suspension mechanism in force since 30 December 2025, under which the mere existence of a CBI programme, "regardless of how well it is managed", constitutes a self-standing ground for suspending visa-free travel. Prime Minister Browne refuses to end the programme unilaterally without replacement revenue. On 10 July the heads of government of the five Eastern Caribbean states met in Roseau and agreed to send a mission to Brussels.
If you were counting on Caribbean citizenship as an insurance policy, you have just under two years.
New permanent residency conditions apply from 6 July. DNM Resolution No. 407 (signed on 28 May 2026) unifies the criteria for documenting economic solvency at the transition from temporary to permanent residency. The essence of the change: filing zero monthly VAT returns is no longer enough. You have to demonstrate genuine economic activity that generates income, documented and consistent with the activity you declared on the way in.
Three ways to solve it:
- If you own real estate in Paraguay, the simplest route is a rental invoice. It is taxable income declared in Paraguay, and that is all you need.
- If you are a nomad, an apostilled employment contract from abroad is enough — a document proving income anywhere, stating which company you work for, how you get paid, how long you have worked there and your position. You pay no tax in Paraguay. Watch out though: the immigration office requires the contract to be concluded between a natural person with an address in Paraguay and the foreign company. And that Paraguayan address has to be evidenced by a lease agreement together with a utility bill, an electricity invoice for example.
- If you are self-employed with income in Paraguay, you will need at least your last 3 VAT returns showing non-zero activity — issue some invoices and pay tax on them.
The complete updated conditions are on our website. We run automated AI agents against those pages that analyse the legislative situation every day and keep the information current. That gives us the most up-to-date data of any agency — and in Paraguay the rules change often enough for that to be the difference between an approved and a rejected application.
Video summary: Paraguay just changed the rules — 407 Permanent Residency resolution. Independent analysis from IMI Daily: Paraguay Ties Long-Term Residency to Active Income, Unless You Invest.
The essence is the same across all three routes: the immigration office no longer wants to see merely a proof of income, it wants you to actually exist in Paraguay. If you have nowhere to live there and no business there either, the third route is the most workable — file local VAT returns for three months before applying.
A hypothesis surfaced in our groups that the stricter enforcement is connected to the EU–Mercosur agreements and an effort to curb tax optimisation. I cannot confirm it, but the trend is clear: "paper residency" is ending, real residency remains. And if you don't want to or cannot demonstrate real economic activity in Paraguay, one passive route is left.
Paraguay Investor Pass 2026. In April Paraguay opened a new lane to residency: invest and receive permanent residency directly, with no two-year wait. The Investor Pass (Resolution 0283/2026) runs on a separate track and bypasses temporary residency entirely, with the investment assessed under its own rules rather than against Resolution 407's categories. A complete comparison of every route to Paraguayan residency in 2026, what each one costs and how to choose: Paraguay Investor Pass 2026.
An AI agent now handles Marangatu. I think any automated scripts or Paraguayan accountants are redundant at this point. I told my Claude Fable to fill in the IVA General (a zero declaration) and the Reg. Mensual Comprobante on the Marangatu portal, and to remember how it did it. Result: Formulario 120 filed, Formulario 241 (Talón de Presentación) generated, both obligations for the 06/2026 period settled, the "Próximos Vencimientos" section gone from the dashboard. Then it logged out, closed the browser and deleted the temporary script containing the password. It saved the exact procedure, including every trap the portal set for it, into a file. Next time all it takes is a quick run.
Banks and accounts (from our groups, anonymised). Opening accounts for Paraguayan residents is a challenge:
- Mercury works for business accounts if you supply a lease agreement and a Constancia de RUC.
- Wise and Payoneer fail KYC for US LLCs.
- Paysera can be opened with a Paraguayan cédula and both SEPA and SWIFT transfers work, despite it not requiring proof of address, which made several people justifiably sceptical.
In short: try Mercury for a company account and Paysera for ordinary transfers, and if you run a US LLC, don't count on Wise or Payoneer. Opening a bank account directly in Paraguay, on the other hand, keeps getting easier for residents. With nothing but a cédula you can open an account entirely remotely at Sudameris Bank and Banco GNB. We also recommend Banco Familiar, Itaú, Banco Continental and UENO — all of them can be opened remotely as well.
And one more warning that concerns Paraguay more than we would like. France recorded 77 kidnappings and extortions over crypto in six months, a 71 % increase on 2025. The source of these attacks is almost always the same: a leaked database recording who holds how much.
And that is exactly why I consider declaring your crypto to the Paraguayan tax office a very bad idea. The Paraguayan civil registry has already leaked once and it affected everyone born, married, divorced or deceased in the country. Every additional database into which you voluntarily write down what you own is another target list waiting to leak.
A new article on what Georgian premium banking actually buys you in summer, when you are standing at an airport counter with a delayed connection: Airport Lounges, Concierge Calls, and Cashback.
What TBC Concept 360 includes, supplemented with experience from our groups:
- €13–26 a month depending on tier. A European bank won't even give you a personal banker for that.
- An English-speaking personal banker, cashback, Turkish Airlines miles.
- LoungeKey and Visa Fast Track for the holder and up to four guests. This is the item most people overlook, and with a family with children it pays for the entire annual fee in a single flight.
- 3 GB of Airalo roaming free, 50 % off Bolt in major cities, discounts on Agoda and Booking.com, travel insurance, SIXT discounts.
- Visa Platinum / Mastercard World Elite, multi-currency account, crypto-friendly policy.
- Remote opening, without ever setting foot in Georgia.
One important caveat, so we don't paint over reality. A Georgian account is practical and usable, but it does not provide the same non-CRS protection as Kyrgyzstan. It solves availability and comfort, while a Kyrgyz account solves privacy. In practice most people are best served by having both, since the accounts are complementary.
For anyone dealing with USDT in the EU: the combination of Paraguayan residency and Georgian banking through the Bitnet exchange is a route that works in our groups.
Want to test where you stand? Try the Banking Antifragility Score — a simple quiz that places you in one of three categories (Single Point of Failure, Partially Hedged, Antifragile) based on whether your accounts are spread across different legal frameworks and regulatory zones, or are just several accounts inside the same system. Real diversification is not five banks in the EU.
More about Georgian banking is on our page, and you can order the account directly here.
Bitcoin, Zcash and crypto |
Coldcard: a critical flaw in entropy generation. Coinkite issued a security advisory covering the Mk2, Mk3, Mk4, Mk5 and Q devices. Seeds generated on affected firmware versions may have reduced entropy and funds are at risk unless the seed was created with at least 50 independent dice rolls or is protected by a strong BIP-39 passphrase.
This is not a theoretical flaw. On 29 July a theft of 18.25 BTC, roughly 1.6 million Canadian dollars (about €1 million) from a Coldcard wallet was reported. The owner had followed every security procedure and kept the device offline in a safety deposit box. According to available information the attackers used AI to brute-force the seed phrase through a vulnerability dating back to 2021.
Our recommendation: do not use Coldcard devices and migrate to a more secure hardware wallet immediately. If you are staying, at the very least update the firmware and move to a new seed.
This is also a good reminder of why multisig makes sense. Liana removes the single point of failure through configurable multisig policies and time-based recovery.
How to buy crypto in the EU without KYC. Ever since MiCA came into force, someone asks me this almost every day. A summary of the options:
- Find a private crypto dealer you trust — my strongest recommendation.
- Vexl for P2P trading through your own network of contacts.
- Bisq, RoboSats and Peer.XYZ for decentralised P2P.
- If you live in Poland, Switzerland, Portugal or Slovakia, definitely try Bitblik — a P2P swap of Bitcoin Lightning for a BLIK payment, with no registration and no KYC. Use it to pay in a shop, withdraw cash from an ATM or pay online.
But let us look at the other side too. MiCA did not increase safety, it reduced it. By pushing people out of regulated exchanges and into cash trades, it raised the risk of physical robbery. And P2P trades often carry "dirty" money, after which your bank closes your account automatically. In our groups we had a detailed account of an elaborate scam on Binance P2P, where the attacker first froze the victim's bank account to force them to complete the transaction, then stole further funds over WhatsApp.
This is the direct consequence of regulation that was supposed to "protect the consumer".
KYC means it is only a matter of time before that data leaks — it happens constantly and the consequences are physical, not merely digital. In France it meant 77 kidnappings and extortions in six months.
Pull your KYC crypto out of EU services. Fortunately I don't hold much KYC crypto, but what I do hold I am withdrawing from every MiCA-compliant EU service. I consider it dangerous; I think that in future it may be a problem to access it without an EU regulator going through every last detail of it. A few years ago I had some spare cash on Revolut, bought local regulated Bitcoin with it, and today Revolut informed me I may withdraw a maximum of €300 per day to an external Bitcoin address. Some "safety limit" of theirs I never agreed to. And it will get worse.
And one thing that doesn't happen often. The crypto exchange Bull Bitcoin has sued the French finance ministry over the way it implemented CARF, the framework creating a global surveillance database of cryptocurrency transactions. Finally someone who doesn't complain but litigates.
Tools and projects from July:
- Am I Exposed — the on-chain privacy scanner you were afraid to run. Paste a Bitcoin address, transaction ID, xpub/descriptor or an unsigned PSBT and get a privacy score from 0 to 100. Find out what the blockchain reveals about you before someone else does.
- Radar — a private messenger with native Bitcoin Lightning payments. It is a fork of Signal-Android and keeps Signal's end-to-end encryption. Freedom money right inside the chat.
- Valar — there is no privacy system today that scales. Card networks scale, but every transaction is recorded. Valar is helping Zcash solve low throughput, pre-quantum cryptography and privacy models that leak.
- Liquity V2 is relaunching. The protocol has no frontend of its own and relies on independent, community-hosted frontends (Liquity.App, DeFi Saver, LQTY.IO, Trove Zero). Liquity AG does not vet them, so do your own due diligence.
- Bitget Wallet has extended QR stablecoin payments to Argentina, Colombia and Bolivia. Unlike traditional crypto cards, which require custodial accounts and charge high conversion fees through Visa/Mastercard, here you pay directly from a self-custodial wallet using native local payment rails. The merchant receives local currency and you keep control of your funds.
What I actually use from altcoins. There are very few shitcoins I genuinely use. VVV and DIEM tokens (Venice.AI) and AVA tokens (Travala) definitely make the list — I buy them and then spend them regularly. Through Travala you can pay with crypto for car rental among other things, plus hotels, flights and tours, over 3 million travel products in total.
And to close, something I disagree with but which is worth reading. Bitcoin Is Not Freedom: The Delusion of Digital Escape: "Cypherpunks did not lose to the state; they recruited it... Bitcoin did not redistribute power, it redistributed speculative upside to those already positioned to capture it, while offering the dispossessed an illusion of sovereignty sophisticated enough to be mistaken for the real thing." A good text against which to test your own arguments.
Google is officially installing malware on your phone. Play Protect, a service that will start checking what you install, is being embedded into Android. Some call it malware and they are right — see F-Droid's statement. Together with Android's push to restrict app installation exclusively to the official Play Store, it means one thing: alternative operating systems are becoming unsustainable. And that is precisely the goal.
GrapheneOS and the duress PIN — and the first person being prosecuted for using one. In July a discussion started about whether the Fifth Amendment protects a citizen from being forced to hand over a PIN. Except the theory has meanwhile turned into a very concrete case.
The US Department of Justice is prosecuting Samuel Tunick for entering a duress password during a border check that wiped his phone. He was returning from the Dominican Republic through Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta, CBP pulled him into secondary inspection and asked for the passcode to his Google Pixel. He entered a code and, according to the court filing, the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone restarted. They seized the device but let him into the country.
Prosecutors used 18 U.S.C. § 2232(a), a statute written for destroying physical evidence ahead of a raid. He faces five years in prison. It is the first known case in the US of anyone being prosecuted for using a duress password. Tunick has pleaded not guilty and his defence argues he was detained without a warrant, denied a lawyer and never advised of his rights.
What to take from this in practice? A duress PIN works exactly as intended — the data is gone. But it protects you from having your content read, not from being prosecuted for letting it be erased. At the border it is therefore wiser to have nothing to erase: travel with a clean device and pull your data down from a server after you cross. Set the duress PIN so that it also triggers on brute-force attempts, but never by accident.
Travelling with hardware through customs. A good debate developed in our groups about "decoy" devices. The dispute in summary: one side argues that in a physical attack it is safer to carry a nearly empty device, the other that a completely empty device is itself a red flag to a customs officer. The technical solutions most people agreed on: full disk backups and restores, home servers, and not physically carrying sensitive data at all.
Tools and links:
Most of the things on this list I either use daily or have at least tried. The rest I keep on hand for the moment I need them — and with some of them I hope that moment never comes.
Tools and links:
- Anonproxy — our colleague at Nethemba wrote a reversible anonymisation layer for sending pentest data to LLMs, more reliable than match/replace. It sits between your tools (Claude Code, the OpenAI SDK, Burp Suite) and the LLM API.
- Confidential Inference — a comparison of providers running AI inference inside trusted execution environments. Filter by models, pricing and API features.
- "Mythos" at home, and it's called AISLE. A European startup built a system that matches Mythos at zero-day discovery using widely available models, even air-gapped.
- colibri — run GLM-5.2 (744B MoE) on an ordinary machine with 25 GB of RAM. Pure C, zero dependencies, experts streamed from disk. That streaming is also the limit: fine for batch work, not for real-time conversation. Tiny engine, immense model.
- OpenWork — a free, open-source desktop app (macOS, Windows, Linux) for working with AI agents over your own files, the open source alternative to Claude Cowork and Codex. 50+ LLMs with your own provider keys, skills, plugins and MCP servers.
- Superpowers — a complete software development methodology for coding agents, built on composable skills and instructions that make sure your agent actually uses them.
- unsnooze — automatically resumes Claude Code, Codex CLI, Grok, Qwen Code, Kimi CLI, OpenCode and Antigravity when the 5-hour or weekly limit resets. Works in tmux, Zellij, VS Code and desktop apps.
- Hermes Claude Proxy v5.0 — turns a Claude Max subscription into an OpenAI-compatible
/v1/chat/completions endpoint with built-in tools (WebSearch, Bash, Read/Write). Primary target: Hermes Agent.
- Paperclip adapter for Hermes Agent — run Hermes as a managed employee in a Paperclip company.
- security-audit-skill from Cloudflare — a skill that turns your coding agent into a security auditor. It orchestrates multiple parallel agents through a six-phase pipeline (recon, hunting, validation, reporting, structured output, independent verification).
- Wallbreaker — an AI red-team harness.
- Anatomy of a Failed (Nation-State?) Attack — a fake-interview scam tried to backdoor the author's machine with PinpinRAT hidden in a malicious TypeScript patch. Analysis of the attack, the payload and the indicators of compromise. This is exactly what is happening to developers right now.
- The first browser-to-kernel full-chain RCE on Android 17.
What caught my attention in July beyond tools:
And one thing I built myself. I vibe-coded my first application into my Even Realities G2 AR glasses (you'll find a detailed review in last month's issue). Working from the Colours of Ostrava festival map and the programme, the glasses navigated me beautifully to the stage where my favourite band was playing. No paper map, no pulling out a phone in the crowd. The post-smartphone era really isn't marketing, it just needs to be filled with something.
Why the EU will not be an "AI continent". Ursula von der Leyen, like other European politicians, is hallucinating about things entirely detached from reality. For instance that an over-regulated, ultra-taxed EU will be the first AI continent:
- They postponed their own law before it even took effect. The Digital Omnibus pushed the AI Act's high-risk rules back by 16 months to December 2027. The "AI continent" couldn't even get its own bureaucracy ready for its own regulation.
- Regulation outran the product. The EU wrote a comprehensive AI law before building a single frontier model. The US builds, China builds, Brussels writes annexes.
- Mistral is a generation behind OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and DeepSeek. Not one European model sits in the top tier of any benchmark. Aleph Alpha gave up back in 2024.
- Chinese open-source models ignore the AI Act with impunity. Enforceability against China is zero and the compliance costs fall on European firms alone. Self-harm by statute.
- Capital is an order of magnitude elsewhere. €200bn "mobilised" (of which the EU itself provides only €50bn, the rest non-binding pledges) versus Stargate at roughly $500bn. Meta or Microsoft alone spend more per year than the entire European plan.
- Electricity is 2–3× more expensive than in the US, and Germany switched off its nuclear plants.
- Zero domestic hardware. The EU doesn't make GPUs. ASML makes the lithography machines; the chips are baked elsewhere.
- Talent is draining away. The best Europeans work at DeepMind and OpenAI — Mistral's founders trained there too.
- GDPR already makes the EU a periphery. Meta, OpenAI and Google ship features in the EU later or not at all. A European is a second-class AI citizen.
- The cherry on top: the European Parliament's own AI chatbot blocked a question about how to get rid of von der Leyen, citing "safety rules". The one thing European AI reliably does is protect politicians from criticism.
From Family Plan B to Full Opt-Out. Four scenarios for a family leaving the system, from a residency held in reserve to a new home on the other side of the world, with facts, numbers and legal references. I wrote it for the situation I see most often: one partner wants to leave and the other doesn't. There is also a presentation in English.
Your Money, Their Rules. Savings you can't withdraw, hard caps on your own money, cards that stop working the day you cross a border, currencies melting month by month, and bank accounts your tax authority reads without a warrant. A tour of the financial rules that simply don't add up, and the people for whom an account abroad is the rational answer.
6 Ways a Government Can Stop You From Leaving. Most people plan where they will move. Few ask what the country they currently live in can do to stop them. Six tools: exit bans, exit taxes, capital controls, conscription, tax clearance rules and passport revocation. The common denominator of all six: each attaches to something specific — a citizenship, a tax residency, assets inside a border. Concentration is the exposure, spreading out is the defence.
How to Travel Correctly When You Hold Two or More Passports. Holding two passports is the easy part. The skill is knowing which to show at which border, and leaving on the one you arrived on. The key rules: tell the airline which passport you are entering on (they transmit Advance Passenger Information and pay fines for boarding someone a border will turn away); in a country where you are a citizen, use its passport; everywhere else use whichever gets you in visa-free or fastest, and exit on the same one. Enter on one and leave on another and you read, in that country's system, as a person who arrived and never left.
The Ultimate Prepper MeshCore Watch, Not Just for the Zombie Apocalypse. Everything you need to know about the LilyGo T-Watch Ultra. A good debate followed in our groups: a wearable mesh device versus a dedicated high-power radio box. The summary: the watch is for convenience and everyday use, but if you are dealing with a genuine crisis in a remote area, a standalone box with a bigger battery and higher transmit power is irreplaceable.
Bridging Bitchat and MeshCore. The practical continuation of the previous item, from Juraj Bednár. He wrote it up back in January and returned to the subject in a July podcast, which so far exists only in Slovak. The internet can disappear for several reasons — the state can switch it off or restrict it, a natural disaster or a technical outage can destroy it — so it pays to have an alternative on hand. MeshCore is already reasonably widespread in Slovakia and Czechia and suits regional coverage; BitChat runs on phones only, has shorter range, but needs no additional hardware. Juraj bridges both networks with his own bridge, whose firmware and source code are on GitHub. The combination makes sense: one network covers distance, the other covers availability.
silent.link watchdog — self-hosted monitoring of balances on silent.link eSIMs with adaptive polling and alerts for low balance, spikes, outages and expiry over ntfy or webhooks. A small thing that saves you the moment when your data runs out at an airport in a country where you have no other SIM.
7 Latin American Residency Programs Compared (2026) — a good overview if you are choosing between Paraguay, Uruguay, Panama and the rest of the region.
Slow Travel vs. Fast Travel. A text by someone who has tried both — 3 days in 20 cities and 6 months in one place — writing about what actually leads to a sustainable nomadic life. After ten years on the road I agree with it more than I would like to admit.
Cospaia: Italy's Accidental Anarchy — a village that stayed stateless for 385 years because of an error in a treaty. And it worked.
Voluntary Markets in an Involuntary World — centralised choke points, free-market solutions for a surveillance-based economy, and the pressure towards decentralised infrastructure.
Rewarding Good Governance: How Foot-Voters Benefit Society — governance improves when people and businesses are free to leave high-tax, low-value jurisdictions. Competition improves public policy the same way it improves products. I allow myself to doubt whether this works everywhere, though: some governments genuinely do not care who leaves or in what numbers, because the people leaving were never going to vote for them anyway.
Is voting a Crime? — one of my main arguments for not voting is moral: by voting I increase the probability that a politician wins who will enforce bad things on everyone who didn't vote for him, and I delegate coercive power over people who never consented to it. This article explains it better than I do. Feel free to forward it to your democratic friends.
A Day in the Life of Alex in AnCapville — a thought experiment on what a single day under anarcho-capitalism would look like. Without the state you supposedly cannot imagine life without.
The Philosophy of Liberty, narrated by Dominic Frisby.
Three Types of People. Only One of Them Wants Freedom. From the "Psychology of Freedom" series: most of the population does not want freedom, and not because they were deceived or never heard the right arguments, but because freedom requires a psychological capacity most adults never develop. An uncomfortable text, but ten years of observation confirm it for me.
Gary Lineker and the rich who want to pay more tax. Lineker belongs to the Patriotic Millionaires movement and signed an open letter to the British Prime Minister asking for higher taxes on the wealthy. At the same time he fought a six-year battle with HMRC over £4.9 million, hired top lawyers and won. The court ruled that the anti-avoidance legislation (IR35) did not apply to him. People who rhetorically call for a fairer system use, in practice, every legal loophole the law offers them. Of course they do.
Eli Vieira warns from exile: don't let them take the rule of law like they did in Brazil — a 2026 Westminster Free Speech Courage Award laureate describes what happened in the country he had to flee.
Code for the People — a documentary about the past, present and contested future of the open web. About what the internet is actually for, who gets to own it, and what it will take to keep it open.
Nostrautica — record a short intro, Nostrautica reads it alongside your public Nostr activity and tells you who is worth talking to at an event, and why.
Palantir has a nemesis and the author found him by accident — a five-minute conversation at a privacy hackathon in London with Harry Halpin, a technologist and anarchist building tools against the surveillance industry. That chance meeting turned into eight months of research and produced a video about the Nym mixnet and what today's technology is doing to society.
The new System76 Lemur is out and it's a bit of a disappointment. The new model has only 32 GB of RAM; my old one has 56 GB. No upgrade for me.
The world's first full-body ultrasound CT scanner? Ultrasonic CT allows whole-body imaging that is in many ways better than MRI, and the scan takes 60 seconds.
The Journey That Changed Everything. A feature-length film about a family that sold almost everything and left for several years on the road. It always makes me happy to see more people who, like me, became full-time travellers.
Pavol Lupták – The Impact of AI on Cryptoanarchy | Bitcoin je RETRO 2026.
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
4–6 Oct 2026 Bitcoin Poland Conference in Poznań
23–24 Oct 2026 Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano
29 Oct – 1 Nov 2026 LaBitConf 2026 in Buenos Aires
11–12 Nov 2026 Bitcoin Histórico in San Salvador, El Salvador
27–30 Dec 2026 40C3 Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg
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