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Liberation Travel Hacks 08/2024
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This newsletter will again be full of concern but packed with information.
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The critics sound the alarm - "Why are you panicking? It's all in its infancy" - at the level of a proposal by a non-profit organization, the EU Tax Observatory.
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So this "independent" research lab has been set up to analyze tax evasion and avoidance in the EU in 2021. The organization is completely subsidized by EU money, so if you pay taxes in the EU, you are supporting this organization and its dystopian spying projects with your taxes.
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They reassured me, "But it won't pass, just like the EU's ban on end-to-end encrypted communications didn't pass".
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Astonishingly, critical matters such as spying on the communications of hundreds of millions of Europeans should even be decided by a state institution such as the European Commission. And nobody finds it strange (and tragically, I noticed that no mainstream media in Slovakia or the Czech Republic reported on it).
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And, shockingly, anyone in the EU is even considering the need to monitor the assets of all EU citizens and create a central dystopian register so that officials finally know who owns what and what they have. And yet someone actually got a fat wad of EU money for this study.
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To even contemplate and subsidize these dystopian ideas (let alone vote on them) is on the level of supporting and funding any racist or otherwise discriminatory legislation that has no place in the EU. In my opinion, it is even worse because it does not just affect one discriminated group but absolutely all citizens.
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As if the aforementioned ban on "end-to-end" encrypted communications would not help (terrorists and criminals would continue to use secure "end-to-end" encrypted applications outside of official EU-regulated repositories), and the most ordinary citizens would be the ones to pay the price, falling victim to the EU's indiscriminate snooping. So even introducing a European central asset for EU citizens will not help. Russian oligarchs and rich people already use complex offshore structures and various trusts, for which the EU asset register is really short, so again, it will be the most ordinary citizens who will pay the price, whose assets will be completely spied on and monitored by officials. I can think of several scenarios of how this register could be abused if its contents are leaked or some state official sells its content.
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Note the irony that the European Commission was considering introducing blanket spying on hundreds of millions of Europeans - the biggest imaginable invasion of everyone's privacy, but we are still convinced that it is the EU that we owe the GDPR for protecting our digital privacy :-)
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My cryptoanarchist prediction is coming true - the state will lose control over the anonymous virtual world in the future, but it will consolidate it even more in the physical one. The EU is becoming a totalitarian spying organization with communist practices.
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For other crypto people and me, this means doing a complete opt-out, entering full crypto mode, acquiring assets outside the EU, and being outside any EU registries.
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Fortunately, walking away from dystopia and not using the government's money is still possible.
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Pavol Lupták, 5.8.2024, festival All Together Now, Ireland
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Slovakia
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Slovak politicians are overdoing it in introducing the most bizarre tax possible. The Ministry of Finance does not rule out a tax on transactions (sending money through the bank or withdrawals from ATMs). Something that Viktor Orbán has already successfully introduced in Hungary. I believe that after the approval of this legislation, the demand for the use of cryptocurrencies (especially Bitcoin Lightning and Monero) with low fees, where no transaction taxes can be enforced, will grow. Similarly, demand for foreign bank accounts will grow (if you don't already have a premium SOLO bank account in Georgia, we will be happy to help you open one).
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It is a manifestation of political totalitarianism that when politicians impose any absurd tax and start enforcing it, everyone accepts it without a murmur and starts paying it. History is full of the most bizarre taxes. To me, it's just another signal to consider the government/state as illegitimate nonsense and continue to follow its laws only to the extent that I don't end up in jail. I find it astonishing that most people don't have it that way - they accept nonsensical laws and utterly bizarre taxes - they complain and pay it in a patterned fashion. They don't take any action to get around it, to avoid it, just to avoid being the victim of more political nonsense. You don't really need to live outside the EU or have a residence outside the EU to have a fully functioning bank account outside the EU without nonsensical transaction taxes. I haven't used personal bank accounts in the EU for years, and I don't understand why I would, to begin with (there's also Gibraltar/UK or Switzerland in the SEPA system where they will happily, even remotely, open an account for you).
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And you may not even need a bank account - many services are already paid for with Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies. Try negotiating Bitcoin with your service provider, and you might be pleasantly surprised when they accept it without any problems.
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Do not be a victim of the totalitarian political arbitrariness that the state is trying to impose on you.
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EU
How US politicians understand the Bitcoin standard. Conversely, European ones have understood absolutely nothing and are missing the train.
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Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr wants to get the US Treasury to buy 550 Bitcoins every day and reach a reserve of up to 4 million BTC (which I personally can't imagine, but so be it). At the same time, he wants to make any transfers between BTC and USD tax-free.
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Presidential candidate Donald Trump wants to get the US to buy a million Bitcoins as part of the country's strategic plan. Trump wants the US to become a Bitcoin superpower and a major crypto state, and most Bitcoins should be mined in the US. He wants to abolish discrimination against all crypto services (stop Operation ChokePoint) and promote any bitcoin/crypto jobs. Trump wants to abolish blanket financial surveillance of Americans (CBDC). They spread Bitcoin maxi catchphrases, "never sell your Bitcoin," and cryptoanarchist catchphrases, "Bitcoin is protection against state oppression, inflation, etc".
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Senator Cynthia Lummis has stated that the US wants to buy 5% of the total Bitcoin stock (one million BTC) and hold it for at least 20 years to eliminate its huge national debt.
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It is irrelevant that all these are just political promises:
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The key point is that top US politicians UNDERSTAND the Bitcoin standard.
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They understand that the way forward is not through inflationary money that makes the world poorer but through Bitcoin, which will sooner or later become the world's reserve currency.
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Those European politicians, on the other hand, have understood absolutely nothing. They have no idea what is happening:
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The German ones just sold €3 billion worth of Bitcoins (they are already losing many millions of Euros, and the loss will only increase - you can track how much money Germany is losing every day with this decision).
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The European ones, with regulations like MiCA, have driven and are still driving crypto startups and companies out of the EU (I used to have a problem using crypto services residing outside the EU, now it's a problem to use some crypto services residing in the EU).
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Instead of the Bitcoin standard, the EU is addressing the digital euro, which has already been promoted by every central bank, so spy CBDC or digital wallets.
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Unless European politicians embrace the Bitcoin standard, as American ones do, the entire EU will remain stuck in the financial middle ages.
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And over time, our standard of living will adapt to it.
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Personally, I've noticed that the Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram are extra sensitive to my posts and either automatically remove them without my permission or do shadow banning. If you want to follow me uncensored, I recommend X.com (yes, I'll be more active on Nostr soon, I'm a fan).
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Paraguay
Releases of Paraguayan national IDs (cedulas) slowed down for a few weeks. There was a police crackdown on two cases of fake cedulas at the identification department. They double-check all the files; they have to be verified by two other departments and the police; they don't have the human or technological resources to do it. In August, it should all move. More information.
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Does it still make sense to mine cryptocurrencies in Paraguay?
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Questions abound about whether it still makes sense to mine cryptocurrencies in Paraguay. Miners are considering mining in Ethiopia, Argentina, or Brazil.
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In the media, you have probably caught the nonsensical, stupid crypto bills in Paraguay - thankfully, they have all been swept off the table. A distinction needs to be made between draft laws and real laws that have gone through the approval process.
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There is no legislation in Paraguay regulating the use or taxation of cryptocurrencies (income from cryptocurrencies is not local income within Paraguay and thus is not taxed or declared).
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The legislation only regulates mining in Paraguay, which is 100% legal, but miners must register and obtain a license (or face heavy fines).
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Mining in Paraguay is concentrated near the Itaipú hydroelectric plant, but also everywhere in the country where there are energy surpluses. Paraguay cannot consume more than two-thirds of its electricity, so it has lower prices than most countries. Even though registered miners have a slightly higher electricity price (at US$44-59 + VAT per MW), it is still 2-3 times lower than companies anywhere in Europe.
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I am not a believer in regulation, but clearly defined conditions for mining make Paraguay a stable, deterministic environment with a high degree of certainty. Paraguay has long been known for its stable, conservative legislation. In the surrounding countries (Brazil and Argentina), there is no established legislative environment regarding cryptocurrency mining. Mind you, there are just more socialists and higher taxes all around Paraguay that they will gladly extract from you in the future. Mining in Ethiopia, where the biggest genocide of the population in the Tigray region is currently taking place, strikes me as a bad joke.
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For more details on Paraguayan mining legislation or Bitcoin mining, please contact our Paraguayan dudes at Acuariohosting. There's still a promotion going on that will give you a $100 discount on the code "LIBERATIONTRAVEL".
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Bitcoin, Monero, and cryptocurrencies
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ProtonMail has launched its own Bitcoin wallet. This has sparked excitement and potential concern over whether ProtonMail can match users' identities with their payments. It is worth asking why Proton Wallet did not implement any "privacy" features of the Bitcoin wallet and why ProtonMail developers refused to implement Monero support.
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Dear European bureaucrats stuck in the last millennium: I want to remind you that in 2024 we have a borderless global internet and equally borderless cryptocurrencies. Asking for permission to see if a given (stable) cryptocurrency can operate in your country borders on financial censorship.
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Haveno-reto is the flagship instance of Haveno, a decentralized crypto and fiat exchange platform built on Tor and Monero.
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The global outage of hundreds of thousands of servers worldwide due to a bug in the Crowdstrike app amounted to $5.4 billion in damage. The outages also affected payment transactions or payment terminals. I think it's high time for corporations to think about whether it's a good idea to switch to decentralized cryptocurrencies where something like this can't happen so easily. And let us ordinary people think about whether we want to live in a cashless society that can easily be paralyzed.
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"Cash is the king" is still true, and cash by mail markets are also booming, with non-KYC cash in an envelope arriving in exchange for Monero straight to your home in the mail.
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Travel Hacks
Comma.ai is nothing new. If your car supports adaptive cruise control and lane assist and is officially supported simultaneously, then Comma.ai is literally a MUST. For the price of $1250, it's definitely worth it and will make driving your car significantly easier, especially over longer distances. Instead of the official OpenPilot, I recommend the geek-friendly SunnyPilot.
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German "privacy smartphone" Volla. I have seen it with my own eyes, and it booted into Ubuntu as well.
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Interesting links
If you're using a Google Pixel phone with the latest version of GrapheneOS, then you should be immune to Cellebrite analysis, which is software that is used massively by government agencies and police for forensic analysis. If you have an iPhone with an iOS version less than 17.4 or another Android, you may have a problem (Cellebrite can unlock even devices with the latest Android 14).
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Events
I would especially like to promote the Slovak crypto event of the year - Lunarpunk Festival, which will take place in a few days at YUZU House in Bratislava, namely on Friday, August 9, 2024. Tickets are available here.
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27-30.12 38C3, the biggest hacker congress in Hamburg
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8-12.8.2025 WHY2025, the biggest hacker camp in the Netherlands
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