Liberation Travel Hacks 10/2024

The Slovak strongest political party, SMER, approved a radical consolidation reform in Slovakia - they increased VAT to 23%, corporate profit tax to 22%, introduced the most expensive vignette in the EU for broken and unfinished motorways, introduced a 0.4% tax on corporate banking transactions and 0.8% on ATM withdrawals. Crazy ideas that will convince you to leave Slovakia. Slovak politicians do not understand that Slovakia is a hole that high taxes, levies, and bureaucracy will destroy.

Despite all this, I decided to write this article in a positive spirit for all those who are breaking or have already broken a stick over Slovakia. And this can be applied to virtually any EU country.

Oppression (in this case economic) and unfreedom have historically always led to the creation of underground communities.

And this is exactly what I observe today in Slovakia.

Resistance to the state as never before

We used to be contacted at Liberation Travel by ideological libertarians and anarchists who, on principle, did not want to support the state or pay taxes.

Now, we are being contacted by ordinary democratic voters who, until recently, believed in positive democratic change, voted, and paid their taxes exemplary.

They no longer believe in democratic change and want to do everything to avoid supporting the current mafia. A question for reflection: how much of a mafia or totalitarian practice does the state have to exhibit for the democratic voter to finally say: enough is enough - I do not want to support this anymore.

For me, this point came more than 11 years ago when we launched the Czech and Slovak community project Not Working for the State. I started decentralizing my personal and economic life to several countries to achieve greater freedom. It was one of the best decisions of my life. If I regret anything, I didn't do it sooner.

My democratically minded friends and acquaintances have the most anarchistic views, which I could not have imagined in them just a few years ago.

Indeed, I don't think there has ever been a better opportunity for a tax protest than now when hundreds of thousands of opposition voters (and not just a few hundred anarchists or libertarians) are willing to get involved. If the opposition parties get on board, I think there's a lot of scope for success (although there's a risk that if they're in government, the opposition might do the tax protest again). While I'm a prominent skeptic about the effectiveness of organized demonstrations, I'm convinced that the tax one is probably the only non-violent one that works.

Critical mass is crucial in a tax protest; otherwise, it can quickly happen that if the mass is small, it will end up in jail.

The emergence of out-of-state private communities

The total tax burden of 40% on crypto in Slovakia does not mean that Slovaks will enthusiastically start paying taxes on crypto (in 2023, 98% less was collected than the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic planned to collect - and that's no joke).

This means that on Signal, Threema, WhatsApp, and Telegram, many private crypto trading groups with hundreds of people have been created, where Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency for cash, is massively traded one way or the other outside the supervision of the state or the tax authorities that has completely lost control of it. And those who can't get into these private groups, at the very least, install the Vexl app and trade freely amongst their friends without regulation or paying taxes.

Private communities are not just for crypto users. But also music festivals, for example.

This festival year in Slovakia was for me in the light of pure underground - I visited three music festivals in Slovakia, and all three were non-public, i.e., private by invitation (so as not to have to pay ransoms to "performance rights" organizations or deal with pointless cash registers).

Many of my friends who live in Slovakia are involved in private communities of producers of quality meat, vegetables, or other domestic products. Instead of card payments, they use cash, Bitcoin Lightning, or stablecoins without taxes or cash registers. Again, it is outside the control or oversight of the state.

They trust each other because trust is where communities have the upper hand from the state.

Whether it's the crypto community, festival communities, or communities of people dedicated to making homemade grown food, the black market is (at least in my neighborhood) getting to the level of the underground of the Czechoslovak totalitarian era thanks to the current sinister state.

And I, an agorist at heart and soul, am enjoying it immensely :)

I remembered my friends' predictions:

If the state ever ceases to exist, it will be because people start to ignore it and arrange their own lives.

It is only when you stop paying compulsory social and health insurance and switch to global, international health insurance outside the control of the state or visit functional Brazilian favelas where the distinction between the mafia and the state disappears that you realize that the state and its services are an illusion.

These days, politicians want to convince you that you are the state that pays for its failures.

The official reason the Slovak SMER introduced the consolidation package and taxed all Slovaks across the board is because of the big spending/irresponsibility of the former government. What do I and a few million other Slovaks have in common with the former government, and why should we contribute to its flawed or any politician's decisions? Politicians who steal and waste should be locked up. Not let the electorate suffer for their flawed economic choices.

The most significant opportunity for Bitcoin

Companies will now have to pay 0.40% on bank transactions. This amount can be insanely large, considering how many routine transactions companies make. In our small Slovak company alone, it will be hundreds of euros a month.

I am convinced that there has never been a better opportunity for Bitcoin adoption in Slovakia than right now.

In Slovakia, great companies (such as Hydranode or Crypto Diggers) make paying with Bitcoin quick and easy for all your clients. There are countless Bitcoin Lightning wallets (Phoenix, Zeus, and others) and many POS terminal implementations. Similarly, you can participate in the local Bitcoin economy as an individual or business.

If your end clients are just companies, there is also no reason to use bank accounts to invoice them. You can ultimately invoice them in Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies.

Current legislation that taxes banking transactions explicitly calls for the acceptance of cryptocurrencies. For Slovak entrepreneurs, this means it is high time.

Paraguayan dudes

"The worse, the better" - we say at Liberation Travel. The Paraguayan dudes are just one of many communities of intelligent and productive people who have decided to vote with their feet, opting for an exit strategy from a system that makes no sense to them. Slovak politicians are directly responsible for their decisions to drive these people out with a 40% tax burden.

The Paraguayan dudes have become a global economically free community of Czechs, Slovaks, and other Europeans who live their lives all over the world, reacting to the rising temperature of European fiscal hell (and the Slovak one is hotter than ever).

The economic flight is affecting Slovakia and the entire EU, where even economically vital countries like Germany stagnate economically (over 100,000 German immigrants arrive in Paraguay). The demand for Caribbean citizenship and passports has reached such a level that the EU has declared that this citizenship is too affordable and has forced these countries, under threats of the abolition of visa-free travel in the EU, to double the necessary investment to obtain this citizenship. The special exit tax you must pay to leave a country freely has already been introduced in the EU by Portugal, Spain, Finland, and Germany and is planned by the Netherlands. And they wouldn't be introducing it if people didn't want to flee.

Back to the community underground

The best you can do with growing economic unfreedom is precisely what your parents or grandparents did in the days of totalitarian Czechoslovakia. Go to the communal underground, a parallel society. Go to bitcoin/crypto transactions, support your local bakers or food producers, and attend private events and concerts that don't have to pay ransoms to state mafia organizations. In short, prefer any non-state solution to your problems.

I am convinced that now is the best time to do it.

Pavol Lupták, 15.10.2024, Asunción

Slovakia

SIS (Slovak Information Service) and Pegasus

Count on the fact that SIS has Pegasus and can compromise your phone remotely without you knowing about it.

I recommend making it as difficult as possible for them:

1. Use the most secure phone on the market (Google Pixel 6 and above) with the most secure GrapheneOS, which should be the most immune. We don't know of any case yet where a user with GrapheneOS has fallen victim to Pegasus, but of course, nothing is 100%.

2. At a minimum, use Signal for end-to-end encrypted communication (avoid virtually all mainstream messengers, including Telegram). At a minimum, it means that even Signal doesn't protect your metadata well enough. If this is a problem for you, I recommend SimpleX or Session

3. Avoid using non-anonymous KYC SIMs on your phone.

You can forward your Slovak number to Skype and call from a Slovak number via Skype using your Caller ID. So you can make and receive calls to your Slovak mobile number without having a Slovak SIM card! This avoids your location being tracked by the state and mobile operators. For data, use a cheap anonymous eSIM, which you can buy here for Bitcoin Lightning (I use the Polish Sparks 40 GB for 365 days for 40 EUR). Of course, if you use GSM or Skype calls, you will be easily eavesdropped. In the case of Skype calls, at least you don't disclose your location.

4. If you suspect your phone is compromised by Pegasus, buying a new phone is the best and cheapest solution. Older versions have been identified by the MVT tool.

How much is paid for zero-day (non-public) exploits (zero click means no user interaction required):

High demand
SMS/MMS Full Chain Zero Click: from 7 to 9 M USD
Android Zero Click Full Chain: 5 M USD
iOS Zero Click Full Chain: from 5 to 7 M USD
iOS (RCE + SBX): 3.5 M USD
Chrome (RCE + LPE): from 2 to 3 M USD
Chrome (SBX): 500k USD
Chrome (RCE w/o SBX): 500k USD
Safari (RCE + LPE): from 2.5 to 3.5 M USD
Safari (SBX): from 300 to 400k USD
Safari (RCE w/o SBX): 200k USD

The "out of nothing" super-law and the State Information Service

One of the key (and, in my view, difficult to refute) anarchist arguments (which is addressed by anarchist philosopher Larken Rose, for example) is that the state, politicians, and civil servants have super-rights "out of nothing."

That is to say, if we have any community that decides to vote for its (political) representative democratically, then that vote cannot delegate to that representative rights that they, as members themselves, do not have (for example, the right to rob or kill a member of that community).

Voters logically cannot, by democratically voting their representatives, delegate to them, for example, the special super-right of "parliamentary immunity," which none of their constituents have. And they invent this super-right.

This means the super-law of "parliamentary immunity" was created out of nothing and is therefore illegitimate.

And we have heaps of such superhuman rights "from nothing" in society. You can argue that these rights are guaranteed to them by our legal system. But again, this legal system was passed by parliamentarians who could not give extra rights to anyone since they did not have them. They only represent their constituents, who also do not have these rights and cannot delegate them to anyone.

State Information Service employees are also superhuman compared to ordinary citizens - the law allows them to work in complete secrecy and to impersonate someone else's identity, for example, with false documents. For this reason, an ordinary citizen ends up in jail. They can also use superhuman intelligence assets like Pegasus to spy on anyone in society that an ordinary mortal cannot get to.

You can argue that we need "superhumans" in society with these "superhuman rights" to keep order in our beautiful democratic society and protect it from external and internal enemies. And that is why we need the State Information Service.

Apart from the strong argument that the State Information Service is a long-abused state institution for political purposes in many countries, where apart from corruption scandals and repeated abuse of their powers, you never hear exactly how they protect our beautiful democratic society (because it is after all subject to secrecy), also bear in mind that they have superhuman rights "out of thin air." You, as voters, had no way to delegate to them with your democratic vote. Thus, they have no (at least moral) legitimacy.

EU

The new strong push to enforce ChatControl (mandatory scanning of communication content, which means breaking end-to-end encryption) in the EU continues.

This is a crucial point for me when I close my IT companies in Slovakia and leave the EU. If I had to choose between several totalitarian countries (where the EU will be based), I would prefer the ones with lower taxes.

A Dutch human rights organization has called for an investigation into whether the "Anti-Money Laundering" AMLD5 legislation violates fundamental human rights.

If someone tells you that the EU has good AI legislation, explain that the corporate world doesn't think so - Meta refused to release open-source LLama 3.2 in the EU because of regulatory uncertainty.

State / State a killer of technological progress.

I used to think that the state represented a brake on technological progress.
I've now changed that opinion - the state (including the whole EU) is not a brake but an explicit killer of technological progress.
I wrote over 12 years ago that the "EU cookie law" is nonsense and enforced privacy cannot work. EU countries have spent over 3.2 billion euros on this dysfunctional legislation(!). It is dysfunctional because 99% of internet users ignore any "EU cookie" notification (including me); similarly, thousands of websites ignore it entirely without any penalty and thus have ditched it. Thousands of people use browser plugins that click automatically for them. Nearly 300,000 people use the I don't care about cookies plugin. Then there's GDPR, another multi-billion dollar privacy legislation, the actual effectiveness of which I'll gloss over - my critique of GDPR is still more than current. I can tell you from practical experience that being GDPR compliant doesn't mean you won't be hacked :-) Another MiCA crypto legislation that defacto wipes out anonymous crypto in the EU. I help our clients set up tech companies and bank accounts outside the EU where they can breathe freely (only masochists set up new tech companies in the EU, in my opinion).
On this topic, I recommend an excellent summary by a very successful IT entrepreneur, @levelsio, on why the EU is killing technological progress.
Some AI features of the latest iPhone that don't work in the EU because they are regulated are just the tip of the iceberg. Even the most casual users already understand that there is something wrong with EU regulations when their software is technologically outdated.
Especially with Apple, it's a bit incomprehensible to me - the whole use of iPhones has always been built on its users trusting Apple and whatever business decisions it makes as much as possible regarding their privacy. They had nothing else to do since it's all centralized, monopolized, proprietary software. And in a situation where they've trusted Apple absolutely for the last 15 years, I don't see why they shouldn't trust them with new AI features as well. And why some European officials are bullshitting and trying to intervene with taxpayers' money.

I am the most prominent advocate of digital privacy protection. Still, I also think that some legislation or laws cannot impose digital privacy protection, especially when the citizens do not want it (it is immoral!)
And I find it utterly incomprehensible to trust some European bureaucrats when it comes to protecting our privacy when it is they (the European Commission) who have voted (and will continue to vote) on drastic anti-privacy "Chat Control" legislation that would make any dictator proud. By the way, the majority of EU countries support this.
Asking a European bureaucrat to protect your digital privacy is like asking a parent who sexually abuses you for protection.
In both cases - the sooner you leave, the sooner you can spare yourself the trauma.

Paraguay

One bad news and two good news regarding Paraguayan legislation:

Bad news: Paraguay has been introducing biometric cedulas (national IDs) since 15.10.2024, meaning we can no longer represent clients in their application for a cedula. If their residency is approved after that date, they will have to visit Paraguay the next time to apply for a cedula. They should be able to do this within six months. Nothing happens if they don't make it - they need a new apostilled, Spanish-translated criminal record extract (we handle this for our clients).
Good news: Mandatory visits within one year for temporary residents are abolished. After obtaining a temporary residence, you only need to arrive in Paraguay in the 21st-24th month of your temporary residence and apply for permanent residence straight away. Once approved, it is again necessary to appear in Paraguay within six months and apply for the permanent residency cedula. For updated information on the immigration process in Paraguay and the required visits, click here.
Good news: We have successfully submitted applications for our clients for permanent residency based on their university degree and RUC (tax number). The upgrade to permanent residency is working.

Searching for Honey - a Paraguayan Indigenous documentary - two brothers travel through the wild Paraguayan jungle, documenting their journey through six Indigenous tribes before the modern world changes them forever.

Edificio Palmanova in Asunción is already sold out, but it is still possible to buy a beautiful apartment for crypto in Palmanova Pacheco. If you would like more information, please email us.

Georgia

The reasons for SOLO bank accounts in Georgia are only growing. Not only can you have many subscription services (like Spotify) linked to a Georgian credit card for half the price of the EU, but you can also enjoy the AI intelligence of the latest iPhones, which are blocked in the EU.

Ukraine

The price of a bribe to avoid mobilization as a Ukrainian male and leave Ukraine has increased from 10000 over 15000 to 20000 USD.
A black market has started up for Ukrainian birth certificates, which can no longer be obtained remotely outside Ukraine, as consular services for Ukrainians outside Ukraine are shut down. But it would help if you had them obtain residency in another country.
In Paraguay, we ask the immigration office for an exception for Ukrainians - to return their birth certificate to them after the immigration process is complete. It's worth its weight in gold at the moment. If you want to prepare for an unexpected situation in the future, I recommend you apply for:

a duplicate birth certificate for each member of your family (including children)
a current criminal record certificate (but this is usually valid for a maximum of 6 months)
apostille and judicially translating all the above documents into English and Spanish, also ensuring the apostille of judicial translations
for a second passport
if you have a marriage certificate, divorce certificate, or university diploma, include it in the list above

This will equip you for residency in most countries.
Otherwise, you'll be like a hunted animal - Ukrainians who haven't managed to arrange this (and haven't applied for particular asylum) can only be everywhere for a few months on a tourist visa. And when their passport expires, they automatically become illegal immigrants, as they can't process a passport remotely anymore.

Brazil

There have been major protests in Brazil for freedom of speech (against the x.com ban).

Brazil even forced Starlink to shut down x.com.

Finally, x.com in Brazil seems to be working - thanks to Cloudflare's service, it changes IP addresses dynamically, so it's hard to ban it, and thus should work without a VPN.

Bitcoin, Monero, and cryptocurrencies

History and status of Monero security analysis

The Ukrainian version of xapo.com Trustee Plus is significantly cheaper than XAPO and has no CRS reporting, Tron support, or virtual cards that add it to Google/Apple Pay.

Tax evasion with untraceable cryptocurrencies in OECD countries.

Boltz.Exchange - non-custodial bitcoin bridge.

Nineteen benefits of Bitcoin you may never have heard of.

Fork Samourai Wallet - Ashigaru.

An anonymous number to receive an SMS that can be paid with Bitcoin Lightning. An alternative is SMS4Sats.

Travel Hacks

If you want the best, genuinely secure, privacy-respecting phone, don't rely on European bureaucrats and a new iPhone with limited features in the EU. Buy a Google Pixel 9, 9 Pro, or 9 Pro Fold and flash it on Graphene, which already supports all these phones. The Pixel 9 Pro is even sold with 1 TB(!)

I bought the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and it's the absolute best phone I've had in my hands so far—a significant upgrade over the Pixel Fold - a more prominent display, narrower and lighter with excellent luminosity.

If you don't want to be tracked, not having a SIM card in your phone is probably the best idea. Hacking phones via the SS7 protocol, you may not have known about.

How to visit 44 countries with Bitcoin.

Interview with the author of nomadlist.com - Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life.