I'm upset about the #Odyssey because they left out the "Nobody poked my eye out" pun.

Ok, so I read the EU Court of Justice judgement (the original is in Dutch, but there's 23 translations) and I'm not as bullish. It seems to hinge on the details of EU copyright law. 1. A copyright holder in The Netherlands has absolutely zero authority to control who has access their work in countries where the work is public domain, i.e. the rest of the EU. So there's a high bar for demanding any restrictions that could hinder people in other countries. 2. There's the weird legalese concept of ‘communication to the public’; you're clearly not trying to communicate to the Dutch public if you geo-block the country, even if that measure is flawed. 3. The bar for a VPN service to be dragged into this is pretty high, i.e. an ‘indispensable role’ , e.g. like Youtube hosting a video that's otherwise not available I don't think this is going to be useful precedent when the EU starts its inventible crackdown of uncensored social media and payment systems. They would just include a requirement in the law that VPN services must block such things (when ordered). So the use of a VPN would still be perfectly legal, there just won't be any useful (legal) VPNs.

EUR-Lex - 62024CJ0788 - EN - EUR-Lex

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Apparently about 80% of regular bank payments from Russia to their Chinese suppliers fail, because Chinese banks are worried about secondary sanctions. They use "crypto" to get around that. The TV items zooms in on A7 which is a digital ruble, but then point out this is typically converted to dollar based stablecoins. The exchange to USD / EUR / RMB then happens in Kirgizstan. Or happened, past tense, because recent EU sanctions persuaded that country to shut down a bunch of exchanges. So it moves elsewhere. Ino the EU focus on exchanges illustrates how they really don't understand the essence of stablecoins: regulatory arbitrage. Their issuers are just banks that governments choose not to regulate. Their reserves are the chokepoint. Dollar and euro based stablecoins are trivial for western governments to shutdown, if they actually decided to do so. (Of course that might hurt Ukraine too. I assume they get both funding and Chinese supplies via the same or similar rails.) The reason this annoys me is that ultimately Bitcoin is going to be blamed for this stuff. Ironically that's hardly used because thanks to "crypto" there's no need for Bitcoin. This goes back to my pet theory that "cryptos" are like hoverflies to government, who mistake them to have the hardened properties of Bitcoin. (voice over in Dutch, but most interviews in English)

If you're one of the cool kids who use wkd to fetch PGP keys, I just bumped the expiration date for mine: gpg --auto-key-locate clear,wkd,nodefault --locate-keys sjors@sprovoost.nl

You can also ask your agent to fetch the branch for each open pull request, as a backup for work in progress. View quoted note →

The world's most populous dictatorship. View quoted note →

No, the US is not accusing Europe of forced labor. EU foreign minister Kallas is lying, as usual. What the White House is saying, is that the EU is not doing enough to prevent the import (and re-export) of products involving forced labor. That's hypocritical, but also true. The EU Directive to fix that won't take effect until next year. Ironically this will impact American companies, presumably triggering more tariffs.

The White House

Actions by the United States in the Investigations under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 of the Acts, Policies, and Practices of 60 Economies Related to the Failure of Each Economy to Impose and Effectively Enforce a Prohibition on the Importation of Goods Produced with Forced Labor

MEMORANDUM FOR THE UNITED STATES TRADE REPRESENTATIVE Subject:       Actions by the United States in the Investigations under Section 301 of ...

I'll be impressed if a single miner produces a block that's guaranteed to be orphaned by normal nodes, except by accident* while attempting to virtue signal. * = e.g. running Knots initially to just signal support, forgetting to switch back to Core once signaling is mandatory. Not everyone understands that the consequence of mandatory signaling is that your node won't see the most proof-of-work tip. View quoted note →

MAGA MEV

Engadget

There

The API is supposed to deliver posts from

I would not run software by people who prefer writing snarky tweets to rationalize their bugs, instead of tests that either prevent the bug or document the intended behavior. (e.g. if downgrading is unsafe, bump a version somewhere so old nodes refuse to start) View quoted note →

"It's estimated that a few hundred Dutch crypto investors became a 'digital resident' of Palau [...] for $288 [...]. Several large crypto exchanges accept this ID, the FD found" - a Dutch financial newspaper prints on their Saturday frontpage. Interesting, tell me more! :-)

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.