Guillem

I help investors accumulate more #Bitcoin on autopilot by using cutting-edge software tools | @deltabadgerapp

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

KYC is criminal

Continual endangerment of innocent people who have done nothing wrong.

[Guillem @guillem_dev]

@pbbakkum @benjamincrozat Hi Peter any news on this? We’re looking forward to level up our app!

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

KYC is a bullshit scam that endangers millions of innocent people so that regulators can feel as if they're providing value to the world

[Guillem @guillem_dev]

@pbbakkum Congrats! And… any ETA for gpt-live API? 👀

[Paul Walsh @Paul__Walsh]

Ursula von der Leyen has confirmed that everyone in the EU will need to use the EU's app for identity authentication before being able to access or post on social media websites.

🇪🇺 As an expert in online child safety, I am here to expose the misinformation and misdirection in von der Leyen's statements.

Today von der Leyen said:

"This is not about whether children can access social media, it is about whether social media can access our children".

💡The first part is true. This isn't about children. It's about surveillance and combating political dissent. A state that can't control its own citizens is more dangerous than a state rife with criminals. The second part is a PR soundbite that politicians are using like a campaign slogan straight out of 1984.

🇪🇺"The question is no longer if children face risks online, but what can we do to give children a safer start online".

💡No. You can't give children a "safer start" online any more than you can offline. In the offline world, the government doesn't enforce curfews or ban children from entering liquor stores, bars or restaurants. That's a parent's responsibility. The digital world should be no different.

🇪🇺"The age verification app is one of the tools to get it done".

💡This is a contradiction because she also said "It won't be foolproof".

🇪🇺"It's easy to use, it is privacy preserving and it is open source".

💡The app was compromised as soon as it was released. "Privacy-preserving" age verification is an oxymoron. You can't verify a person's age without verifying their identity. Where or how that age is shared afterwards is irrelevant.

🇪🇺"This is basically about putting back the power into the hands of parents".

💡More from 1984. The EU is doing the opposite. Parents are having their authority stripped by politicians who think they know better. Many parents are capable and unaffected by peer pressure, and they know how to use parental controls to block any app classified as 13+. Some teens are safe, their parents trust them, and the state has no business overruling that trust.

🇪🇺"We don't give our children keys to the car before they have their licence"

💡Comparing an app to a car is a false equivalence used to justify mass surveillance. Governments don't decide when a young person is ready for car keys, guardians do.

💡Forcing every adult and child into a biometric checkpoint just to use an app or website is not licensing drivers. It's the state seizing everyone's keys, locking the garage, and forcing every driver to ask a private company for permission to take a drive.

💡 This is a gross, unethical overreach that strips authority from parents while imposing state sanctioned identity verification on every adult who doesn't even have a child.

💡Additionally, people who pass a test, obtain a licence and drive a car aren't forced to use an app to constantly authenticate their suitability to drive.

🇪🇺"We do not let them buy alcohol until they are legally allowed"

💡False equivalence. We don't force every person to show ID at a shopping mall entrance just because a few people might buy alcohol with a meal at a restaurant. Some parents are okay with their 12 year-old going to the mall with friends while others aren't. Either way, it's their choice. Whatever irresponsible decisions some parents might make, every adult in the country shouldn't be forced to pay the price.

🇪🇺"It won't be foolproof"

💡This is all the proof we need to show that the EU and every government know that banning social media for teens won't protect them. When pressed by journalists about VPNs being used to circumvent a ban, politicians always state the ban isn't a silver bullet and will take time. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan went as far as to say "we know it's not the solution".

💡Either age verification works, or it doesn't. As a technical expert in this space, I can tell you there are no additional steps to take and no progress to be made. Either the approach does what it is supposed to do, or it's not fit for purpose. If they claim a bulletproof solution is coming, it can only mean one thing. They intend to ban or restrict VPNs to people who verify their identity.

🇪🇺"It will take time to invite the cultural change that is already taking shape in our society, just as it took time to outlaw drink driving, just as it took time to use seatbelts in the cars. Great change never happens overnight, but when it comes to our safety it is always worth it".

💡Comparing a social media ban and age verification to seatbelts is a completely broken analogy. Seatbelts are a safety feature that protects children while allowing them to travel in a car. A ban doesn't give kids a seatbelt. It kicks them out of the car entirely.

💡Instead of supporting parents who want to guide their own children through the digital world, this heavy-handed law strips away parental authority by banning the apps and websites that many parents are perfectly fine with and actively monitor.

💡Furthermore, enforcing these bans requires biometric age verification, which means forcing millions of adult citizens to scan their IDs, faces or credit cards just to browse the internet. That isn't a common-sense traffic law.

💡It's a digital checkpoint on every street. True safety means teaching kids how to navigate the digital world safely with real guardrails and parental guidance, not burning down digital spaces for everyone under the guise of protection.

🇪🇺☠️ The EU wants to ban teens from social media so every person is forced to verify their identity before they can read, share or post anything online. In their words, this is to protect children from dangerous content.

🇪🇺☠️ The EU wants to enforce "Chat Control" so every app has to monitor everything people say privately inside it, including apps with end-to-end encryption. In their words, this is to protect children from dangerous criminals.

💡Where this ends

🇪🇺 "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever".

George Orwell, 1984.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

🇪🇺 Chat Control has passed 😔

They can and will now legally scan any person's messages, emails and photos you send without a warrant

The way they passed this law when the majority of the European Parliament was against it will shock you:

They waited until most EP members were on holiday so only a few were present and then created an "urgent" vote for it to pass it through

There's nothing democratic about any of it and big powerful forces are behind this that can manipulate the EU for whatever they want

Democracy in Europe died a bit today 😔

[Jason Fried @jasonfried]

Exceptionally good article on UI design, using Tahoe's regressions as examples of what not to do. Lots of side-by-side examples making the abstract obvious.

https://t.co/SQYsBiT40W

Via @daringfireball.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

This is what I worry Europe will get negatively polarized into: an ideology taking pride in a neat, sanitized online environment free of evil corporate and fascist pathogens.

I hope European govs do not go this way, and instead take a Pirate Party approach of user empowerment.

First, what's wrong with the tweet I'm quoting:

The idea that there should be "no space" for something you dislike is fundamentally a totalitarian and anti-pluralistic impulse. It's incompatible with being in an environment that you do not fully control.

This is especially true for categories that are subjective and controversial, because you end up trying to fully remove things you think are pathogens, when other people have good faith disagreements, and because you give yourself the maximalist goal of not even giving them breathing room, you create conflict and end up building the machinery of technocratic authoritarianism to impose your victory in the conflict.

So sorry, if you want to be a free society, you have to bite the bullet that some people, somewhere, will be selling things that you consider dangerous and saying things you consider disinformation and vicious lies.

What is the goal to shoot for?

You want to create an environment where those things don't dominate. This is the problem with twitter today: not that it's a safe space where 1000 people talk to each other in a corner about how heritage americans are the master race and putin is good or whatever, but that that crap gets shoved in our face on a mass scale, and the algorithms actively favor it.

The right metaphor is not castles and walls, but biological - think, why European forests don't have tropical lizards.

Having incentives for social media platforms to have less of those things instead of more is fundamentally reasonable, @audreyt has talked about how Taiwan has done something similar.

You also want to do this in a way where it's clear what the underlying principle is, so it's not a vehicle for imposing arbitrary and frequently changing expert-consensus agendas.

You also want to empower users, rather than working against them. People want to see and buy good things instead of bad things. Often the problem is that competition is too difficult in the current market. I actually supported the USB-C standardization mandate; it created more interoperability and thus improved competition and convenience. I would support incentivizing social platforms to be more open, and to be more transparent (eg. my proposal to require algorithms to be continuously published with a 1-2 year delay, with zk-proofs to ensure that the algorithm being used in real time exactly equals the one that gets published later)

Being able to better identify what messages are coming from what communities is also good, though I don't support the direction of banning anonymity of individual posters, rather I would want to see more macro-scale analytics, eg. seeing what communities are most strongly saying and amplifying content that semantically matches a particular idea; this can be done in privacy-preserving ways.

There is a real opportunity to reaffirm freedom of speech in a unique and different way, that emphasizes pluralism and pushes against unbalanced attempts to manipulate the discourse by individual powerful actors. We want to do this, not go down the dark path of having something that claims to support fundamental rights but actually is not trusted by anyone to be anything other than the fundamental right to follow the footsteps of a few technocratic experts.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

Realistically I think the only way is to convince the EU member states to either 1) pressure the EU to redesign itself structually, and if not 2) exit the EU

Once enough exit there will be restructuring of the EU or a whole new design or it disappears

And the individual EU nations will just make deals with each other like they used to

I'm a big believer in the concept of the EU but the current EU design especially with the unelected and authoritarian European Commission just doesn't work and it's not democratic

And now it's seriously going into a direction of totalitarianism with Chat Control

Very scary

[@levelsio @levelsio]

We've literally just lost power in Europe

The European Union is not of the people, by the people or for the people

Not even in the slightest anymore

[Peter McCormack 🏴‍☠️🇬🇧🇮🇪 @PeterMcCormack]

How to be a socialist:
1. Offer free stuff
2. Print money to pay for it
3. Wrap it in moral superiority
4. Blame the rich
5. Call sceptics “heartless”

When it fails, return to step 4.

[Eva Vlaardingerbroek @EvaVlaar]

My content is being restricted in the EU under the Digital Services Act - the very censorship act I’ve been warning about for years.

Under the guise of "online safety" they put a search ban on my account and flagged my posts as sensitive/age restricted content.

The EU hates free speech because it threatens their power.

[TFTC @TFTC21]

Jack Dorsey: "Everything you think you own is actually just a lease from the government when they have a monopoly on violence, because they can seize your property at any time."

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

CASH DIES IN 847 DAYS

Europe just legislated the end of financial freedom and nobody noticed.

January 2027: Every euro above €10,000 becomes illegal tender. Every Bitcoin needs government permission. Every transaction becomes a datapoint in Brussels’ surveillance grid.

This is not proposed. This is law.

340 million Europeans will wake up in a cage built from their own bank accounts.

THE KILL SHOT

The EU Anti-Money Laundering package doesn’t just track criminals. It treats every citizen as one. Starting 2027, buying a car in cash becomes a crime. Sending €1,001 in Bitcoin without state approval triggers prosecution. Anonymous wallets vanish overnight.

The Digital Euro arrives 2029. The European Central Bank spent €1.3 billion building what they call freedom. But leaked proposals cap holdings at €3,000 per person. Every purchase tracked. Every pattern analyzed. Every dissent potentially bankable.

THE LIE THEY’RE SELLING

“This stops money laundering.” Europe launders €500 billion yearly, they claim. So they’re building a panopticon for 340 million people to catch the fraction who commit crimes.

China’s digital yuan already programs money to expire, to restrict, to control. The ECB promises Europe will be different.

They promised deposit safety in Cyprus too. Then they seized accounts in 2013.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Privacy coins migrate to the shadows. Black markets replace grey ones. The state gains omniscience. You lose the right to buy bread without permission.

This isn’t about crime. It’s about power. €20 trillion flows through the eurozone. Every cent will soon require approval from Frankfurt.

The infrastructure of tyranny gets built in the name of safety. Always.

THE CLOCK IS RUNNING

847 days until your cash becomes contraband. 1,308 days until the Digital Euro launches. Zero days of mainstream coverage asking the only question that matters:

Who decides what you’re allowed to buy when money becomes permission?

The European Union just made Orwell an instruction manual.

And you heard it here first.

[The ₿itcoin Therapist @TheBTCTherapist]

Robert Breedlove explains how the US government printing $6 trillion in 2020 was the equivalent time theft of over 2 million human lives. 🤯

This is still one of best metaphors for inflation that I’ve ever heard in my life.

[Pavel Durov @durov]

I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating.

Our generation is running out of time to save the free Internet built for us by our fathers.

What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control.

Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU).

Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.

A dark, dystopian world is approaching fast — while we’re asleep. Our generation risks going down in history as the last one that had freedoms — and allowed them to be taken away.

We’ve been fed a lie.

We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech.

By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction — moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological.

So no, I’m not going to celebrate today. I’m running out of time. WE are running out of time.

[Eli Nagar @EliNagar]

“How many bitcoin do you own?”
That’s how it starts, a stupid question from the host.

From there, it goes downhill fast.
Christine Lagarde repeats every tired anti-bitcoin cliché the ECB has ever pushed.

Let's go...

1️⃣ “Bitcoin has no intrinsic value.”
Neither does fiat. Intrinsic value is an outdated economic myth, money derives value from scarcity, credibility, and demand for settlement.
Bitcoin’s scarcity is mathematically enforced; fiat’s is politically decided.

2️⃣ “It has no anchor of safety.”
Bitcoin’s anchor is energy. Every coin represents irreversible work, proof of energy expended to secure the network.
Fiat’s anchor is faith in central banks that inflate at will.

3️⃣ “It could collapse.”
So can any monetary system. But bitcoin has operated with 99.99% uptime for 15 years, through wars, recessions, bans, and collapses, that you and your friends created!
Now go and compare that to banking crises that occur every decade.

4️⃣ “It’s speculative.”
Yes! In the same way that every emerging monetary asset is.
Gold was speculative in 600 BC.
Bonds were speculative in 17th-century Europe.
Bitcoin is price discovery in real time. A Feature!

5️⃣ “A digital euro will be safer.”
Hmmmm... no! That’s not safety. That’s dependency.
A CBDC is not money you own; it’s credit you’re allowed to use, programmable and reversible at will.
While bitcoin is ownership; CBDCs are permission.

6️⃣ “Stablecoins are different.”
Exactly! They’re IOUs, not assets. They rely on trust in an issuer, exactly what bitcoin removes.

Bottom line: Every critique Lagarde makes of bitcoin describes fiat more accurately.

Trust math, not mandates.

[DHH @dhh]

Saved by the Germans. Shame on us Danes.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

“What is a central bank digital currency (CBDC) for? What problem is it going to solve?”

“Look….um….to keep track…um…er…”