One small thing: if it's not too much trouble, would you mind looking over a draft of my FATF paper when it gets close to the finish line? It's still a ways off, but I'd love to get your perspective on it

Thank you for flagging it! I'm looking forward to tuning in. I have it queued up and ready for my commute home later this evening.

The ease of sharing long-form work on Nostr is unreal.

Dictators regularly use the financial system to target opposition. says Bitcoin offers a lifeline: "It's money that dictators can't stop."

"If you try to force people to adopt something they’re uneasy with, because they’re anxious about the power it would give you over them, the whole thing risks confirming the very concerns about coercion and control that touched off their resistance in the first place." - https://hrf.org/latest/house-money/

If nothing else, it is entertaining

And to think, they also have a £800 million annual budget

Maybe it’s just me, but seeing that the Bank of England can’t build a functioning menu bar doesn’t exactly inspire confidence for the digital pound. Luckily, the @HRF CBDC Tracker has you covered if you want all the latest information. https://cbdctracker.hrf.org/home

It's amazing how some things are just timeless.

I'll actually have a long report on FATF soon. But you're on to it in the end. After the Bank Secrecy Act was passed in the United States in 1970, the US government started "exporting" these laws to other jurisdictions. It wasn't long before it spread like a plague

Admittedly, I have not noticed. However, it's going to be fascinating to see when the "Ozempic effect" shows up in country and regional level data sets on average weight.

Curious about the Bank Secrecy Act? Or maybe just curious about what Norbert Michel and I talk about all day at Cato? Today, we kicked off the Cato Institute's new podcast series by exploring the rise of financial surveillance and the illusion of financial privacy. https://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-podcast/illusion-financial-privacy

It's interesting seeing this video pop back up considering Lagarde just did an interview with Chinese state news and said that she started working on the Digital Euro just after her last visit to China. Check out the HRF CBDC Tracker below for more: https://cbdctracker.hrf.org/currency/eurozone

Agreed. I think the biggest challenge is breaking through the illusion of financial privacy. Too many people don't care because they think the system works. And making it even more of an uphill battle, it's hard to put an image to financial surveillance. It's not like police brutality where there are pictures that go viral. Sadly, screenshots of "your account has been frozen" letters do not grab the same attention.

In other words, "We find that if we show people propaganda, they like the state more."

Thank you!

Dang! I just reached 200 subscribers on my Substack! Thank you, everyone, for the support here. I was on the fence about starting this newsletter, but it's turned out to be a great way to get my work out there.