All I wanted for Christmas is no government. Governments won't ever make themselves smaller in any meaningful sense as we just saw with the failure of DOGE. Even if you start from scratch with a very small government, it will inevitably grow like the cancer it is.

Axon is now building police body cameras with built in automatic facial recognition. Walk by a cop, get scanned. They built these despite their own ethics board advising against it. If your profit is dependant on creating a Orwellian dystopia, maybe you should consider other ways to make money. There are a few local jurisdictions in the United States that ban facial recognition, but outside of those cities, we will probably see this spreading soon. It needs to be stopped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0G9FjldwfY

Do you have a good source for this? I hear this sometimes but I would like to know how the "quantum attack is impossible" crowd came to this conclusion? I do agree that burning is not the way though.

Nonviolent resistance to state oppression through creating and using circular economies outside of their systems is our best hope. Monero is ideal for countereconomics in every way. I want to see more merchants who not only accept Monero but don't convert it into fiat or stablecoins. If the price continues to rise, it could encourage development of DeFi mechanisms built on top of Monero that enable merchants to hold XMR while hedging the risk of doing so in a permissionless way.

Wtf is this bullshit I just want to send someone ten cents.

When they raised only 10%, they and everyone else still thought they were going to trial. Maybe the fact they didn't raise enough would of had an impact on that decision. Why would you go to trial if you failed to raise enough money to do so?

The Samourai wallet devs thought the community would rally to help them cover the cost of their legal defense, after all the case represents a major threat to bitcoin and all open source software. Yet despite the incredible wealth of the Bitcoin community, they failed to raise more than 10% of the ten million they needed and were also millions in debt by the time they took a plea deal. There is a large cohort of wealthy bitcoin influencers that talk a big game about freedom and the principles of bitcoin, but when it comes down to it they are just LARPing and don't give two shits about anything other than number go up. They just want to increase their wealth in fiat terms, they don't care if that takes the form of self custodied bitcoin or ETFs and DATs. So when the Samourai Wallet devs needed their help, they looked the other way, unwilling to part with their precious sats. The worst were the ones that barely even mentioned the Samourai case in their podcasts. I guess the latest DAT purchase was just more important. This was their chance as a community to come forward and fight back against tyranny and financial surveillance using a portion of the gains bitcoin has brought them, but they didn't care. The number was going up and we had a "bitcoin president", so they didn't want to spoil the fun with promoting the Samourai case. Meanwhile the shitcoiners that these same bitcoin influencers spend so much energy hating on, raised more than 4 million dollars for Roman Storm of Tornado Cash (which is another case that these influencers should of been fighting hard for) We need a shame list of any bitcoin influencers that haven't been consistently advocating for the Samourai devs since the arrest. Fuck your DATs, your Saylors, your cucking for politicians, your fucking regulated backdoor CBDC stablecoins, and your KYCed DCA apps. Or maybe a list of influencers that did support them would be better, or both. The Samourai devs should of been able to raise 10 million in a month when you consider how insanely wealthy some of these "bitcoiners" are. Anything less was a travesty.  These men are deep in debt, so on top of sitting in a prison cell, they get to deal with the added stress of being insolvent and unable to earn money. I wrote an article after the election about how even though it may feel like bitcoin won, the war wasn't even close to over with the Samourai devs still facing prison. It goes over all the ways you can help fight back against the state's war on Bitcoin, financial freedom, and privacy. Check it out, it's still very relevant. https://hackernoon.com/fight-for-your-right-to-use-bitcoin-as-it-was-intended-to-be-used

The people who keep saying the Samourai devs were "asking for it" because of some tweets they made in the past are using the same logic as someone who claims a rape victim deserved what they got because they wore revealing clothes. No one deserves to get kidnapped, bankrupted, and put in a cage for writing code to help protect privacy. It really doesn't matter what they did or didn't say in the past. The only people that deserve to be in a cage are the criminals who refer to themselves as the state who love to destroy people's lives for imaginary crimes with no victims. if there was no victim, there is no crime. #FreeSamourai

I'm so sick of seeing people LARP as freedom minded individuals acting like immigrants are the problem and not the state. Idk about Canada but in erica watching people cheer on masked thugs kidnapping people off the street, scanning their face, and checking their papers based solely on the color of the skin is surreal. Then the same people turn around and talk about limiting government. The majority of deportees here have no criminal record whatsoever, and even if they do have one it's usually victimless crimes. If you come here and aren't hurting anyone, you. should be left the fuck alone. There is plenty of room, and immigration generates new jobs and grows the economy. Those demonizing immigrants are a bunch of fucking sheep who believe every thing they read on X about immigrants and are willing to let the state destroy our rights to "protect" them from the scary brown people. Ending welfare, I can get down with that. Deport violent people and thieves, that's fine too. But this letting ICE run around like drunken cowboys snatching everyone up, that's insane. A brand new dystopian surveillance state 10x worse than what we had before in America is being implemented using illegal immigration as the fake "emergency" to justify it. And if someone is so scared of immigrants they are willing to trade their liberty for some fake safety, they need to grow some balls.

😂 exactly

Being a "law abiding citizen" isn't a good thing. It means you care more about words on a piece of paper written by corrupt politicians than morality. It means you are not to be trusted. It means you can't think for yourself.

That's sad, every kid needs a base kit.

Pray for the many souls who are spending Christmas in prison instead of with their families because a state says they committed a victimless crime. I say if there was no victim, there is no crime. That should be obvious to society. #FreeSamourai

Break out of multiple choice mentality, stop voting for Democrats or Republicans, and learn to think for yourself. Having a choice between two slave masters doesn't mean you are free. #politics #anarchism #voluntaryism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiuVlZJVqpw

Thanks for the detailed response

They trained the algos to recognize faces wearing masks via eyes, eyebrows, foreheads. So just a covid mask is close to worthless on newer models. I'm assuming a hat plus IR reflective sunglasses, plus covid mask would work though. Ski masks may work too I suppose, but walking by a cop with a ski mask on doesn't seem like a great idea, unless everyone starts wearing them.

The state's main mechanism of control is money. They can close or freeze your bank account at any time if they don't like you or your speech. As more people realize this and exit their financial system, the power they have over us decreases greatly. Opt out. Use cash, Monero, Bitcoin, bartering, and gold. Develop or join circular economies within your local community. Buy your food directly from farmers not corporations. Countereconomics has more power to resist tyranny than trying to resist within the system with elections, ballot initiatives, petitions, and protests. There is no more time, the exits are closing, you need to get any wealth you do have outside of the system now and not later. Follow me and subscribe to my newsletter to learn all about opting out and protecting yourself and your loved ones from the technocratic surveillance state. #privacy #optout #monero #bitcoin

Or just have no government

If we burn these coins, once people know that their btc can be seized in an emergency, bitcoin loses one it's most valuable properties. This will be even worse than an attacker owning all the lost coins. A sell off from a theft is temporary, destroying the value prop of Bitcoin by burning coins is permanent. IMHO

Yeah I believe the founders probably had good intentions but failed at what they wanted to do. So far it seems their constitution hasn't been able to protect the rights of citizens in many instances.