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2024/04/26 #

Great Citadel Dispatch episode covering Bitcoin privacy with some really interesting examples of normal people getting caught up in the regulatory weeds. There's this big distinction between clean and dirty coins. Dirty being those that have questionable history, like having been through a mixer or perhaps were previously stolen. Many exchanges will block and confiscate your coins if they are deemed to be dirty, even if you have legitimate reasons for having the dirty coins.

Surely eventually all coins will be dirty though right? We are talking about a circular economy. Isn't this just going to eventually remove all coins from circulation? Exacerbated by the fact that it would benefit some people because the price would go up since less useable coins. #

Countries in EU with no limit on cash you can carry

I was listening to the latest Crypto Voices podcast where they were discussing the recent bitcoin halving. A topic that came up towards the end of the show was how many governments have introduced regulation restricting how much cash you are allowed to carry on your person.

It's really draconian in some places, for example France apparently has a 1000 euro limit. Seems like there would be many legitimate reasons for having more than this limit. Tourists for example could easily hit this limit, or proprietors of businesses that manage a cash float like a pub or restaurant.

Anyway they list on the show the countries that don't impose such limits. Reproducing here as I can see this might be useful information.

  • Estonia
  • Finland
  • Ireland
  • Cyprus
  • Luxembourg
  • Malta
  • Germany
  • Austria
  • Sweden

Hopefully at some point I'll be able to use this list, I just need to find some money. #

Very cool segment in the latest Linux unplugged podcast where they talk about the tech on the International Space Station (ISS).

  • Hardware inside and outside, sometimes spacewalks are necessary to replace hardware
  • Lots of linux on ISS
  • Activating windows from space can be a bit tricky
  • Lots of very old computers, pentiums, 386s, rad hardened to protect from X-rays
  • They use wireshark a lot

It's a pretty neat segment especially if you are interested in space related stuff. #

Today’s links:

  • Edward Snowden Slams Justice Department For Action Against Samourai Wallet Co-Founders: 'The Way To Fix This Is To Make Money Private By Default' - It's great there are still prominent people standing up publicly for developers, but it is slightly odd that it's from a bloke who is famous for breaking privacy, and living in allegedly repressive Russia. The world is so twisted and perverted. The truth is that forcing non-privacy on all money transactions affects regular law abiding people more than the criminals, who have the means to purchase fake identities anyway. Really cracking down like this just makes things easier for the criminals, because they don't want regular folks to have the same advantages they have. It's somewhat counter intuitive, but that's the truth, the criminals want nothing more than to control regular folks through the money. www.benzinga.com #

  • I'm giving up -- on open source - The more of these im-giving-up-on-open-source articles, the more I worry that in the long arc of time, somehow open source maintainers and developers will become slaves. Same for most content creators. There are way way too many leeches that are making out like bandits. Some of them even proport to be massive generous givers, even though they give nothing back, financial or otherwise, only to their friends. The people they steel from are left to die. We need to figure this out before it's too late. nutjs.dev #

  • FTC Bans Noncompete Agreements That Restrict Job Switching - I think I'm broadly in favour of this. Non-competes create a huge barier for workers to leave and find new work, which creates a lot of friction in society, with people becoming ever more unhappy and trapped. Labour needs to be able to move between jobs, otherwise their employers have much less incentive to treat them well. I can appreciate their are difficulties with trade secrets etc, but trapping your employees is for sure not the answer to that problem. www.wsj.com #

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