Where were you in 2014, Ben? :-) It's fascinating to watch a repeat of the bitcoin-miners-boil-the-ocean madness, and the same counter arguments, just at a 100x bigger scale, and involving nation state actors. I wonder, if China had embraced Bitcoin back in the day rather than ban it, if they'd run the same campaigns to discourage mining in the US? Would Alex de Vries have his own TV station? Anyway, honeybadger didn't care, and I doubt AI will either.

Knaken (colloquial Dutch for former ƒ2.50 coins) was preemptively declared bankrupt by the court, at the request of the public prosecutor. The reasoning is interesting. Because: 1. They didn't inform customers that €7 million is missing (for unknown reasons) 2. They locked users out of their accounts 3. They discouraged customers to take action This makes it difficult for customers to assess their legal options and to request bankruptcy themselves. https://www.rechtspraak.nl/organisatie-en-contact/organisatie/rechtbanken/rechtbank-rotterdam/nieuws/2026/07/knaken-cryptohandel-b.v.-failliet-verklaard

Guess who's back? https://bitcoinexplainedpodcast.com/@nado/episodes/aaron-and-sjors-discuss-whats-new-in-bitcoin-core-v31

My impression from reading more about the EU Digital Wallet project is that it originally had nothing to do with age verification. It was supposed to be a handy tool for a digital drivers license, for opening a bank account online abroad, making a digital signature, etc.. For such applications the privacy trade-offs were probably fine. Sure, the Dutch government can see that you just opened a German bank account. But they'd be notified of that anyway. Where it gets more dubious is the requirement that large social networks support it for login. Then the government can see which accounts you have. And lock you out of them! But realistically nobody would use that, it'd be some obscure option on the signup screen. But then it got hijacked by the age-verification gang, headed by Von der Leyen herself - so coming straight from the top. Because these apps will (initially) be the only way to do age verification, they go from a niche option to the default and effectively mandatory. And so what a started as a handy way to open a bank account after moving abroad, turns into a mass surveillance and censorship machine. None of this is excusable, and the people voting for it knew (or were willfully ignorant, no moral difference) this would happen. But it's useful to understand the dynamics.

I had Codex whip up a list of EU (adjacent) countries and their Digital Identity wallets. Many have already launched! It seems multiple countries simply ignored the open source requirement, or certification for that matter. Safe to assume they also ignored the privacy requirements then. Anyway, I don't have time to fully verify this list, let alone maintain it. Feel free to fork and take over...

EU Digital Identity Wallets - Source and Privacy

Source code and documented privacy issues for European Digital Identity Wallets across the EU.

Just a reminder that it's quite easy for someone to wipe their website history from the internet archive, making it hard to prove someone said something after the fact.

Fable flagged my attempt to expose yet another privacy leak in the Dutch implementation of the EU Digital Identity wallet. Gave them /feedback to not do that. Anyway, I'm sure Opus 4.8 can handle it.

There should be age limits on who these EU propagandists are allowed to survey, manipulate and abuse. View quoted note →

One reason to not flee The Netherlands over the upcoming unrealized capital gains tax, is that I'm looking forward to sue the government once they claim such forks are gains that I should pay taxes over. Precisely because of the reasons here: claiming the forks is work, and dangerous work at that. So it should be taxed as income, if and only if I do such work. View quoted note →

Reading a (different) long form article about why it took 15 years to plan (not build) a 100km high voltage line. Basically a Bitcoin Core pull request, where you just keep improving it until everyone and their mom has their objections addressed.

Omroep Brabant: het laatste nieuws uit Brabant, sport en informatie uit jouw regio.

Hoogspanningslijn liet 15 jaar op zich wachten door juridisch gesteggel

De nieuwe hoogspanningslijn van het Zeeuwse Rilland naar Tilburg is eindelijk in aanbouw. Maar voordat de eerste mastfunderingen de grond in konden...

Oh this is actually mandatory (to be fair, the Dutch government embraced open source in similar projects in the past). So ask your clanker to follow my investigation and repeat the same analysis on your country's app.

Regulation - EU - 2024/1183 - EN - EUR-Lex

View quoted note →