Honestly, those who lost money did so because they were aiming for profits, not for The Network State, or for having non-seizable money etc. On the other hand, for those who got in early because they were online and curious at the time, with a small amount of money back then has made them billionaires today, an extremely low risk. If they arrived a bit later, millionaires, still with a really soft risk.
Then of course, there are MANY problems starting with BTC https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html but they generally aren't what most people talk about, and today, even if the complexity is insane, the documentation sparse, and the code quality questionable, Lightning is actually the only truly scalable solution we have for micropayments and payments of various amounts, generally not large ones. It has some absurd aspects, but that hardly matters. It works.
More generally, we don't have a crystal ball; where we can, we diversify, certainly limiting risk but also taking a bit of a gamble; where we can't, we choose to watch and see how it goes, knowing that we'll pay for it in terms of returns.
As things stand for me personally, given the level of IT obscenity in the traditional banking world, which in 2026 still doesn't have decent APIs open to retail customers, or at least decent export functions, shameful websites, a push towards completely unacceptable mobile apps, absurd limits etc etc etc, well, the worst CEx is less bad than the best bank. I don't trust either, but I distrust the CEx less than the bank, and given Wikileaks, Francesca Albanese, the protesters in Canada, the various private individuals illegally "sanctioned" by the EU Commission and so on, I'd say it's madness to rely on banks for anything more than the bare minimum.
Most people today know nothing of this and don't weigh it up, but they will, and they'll pay for this delay with their lack of attention.
(WFH since ~11 years), the issue with remote work lay in the many who do not really know how to work in the present time. We're full of people who don't know how to use email even though they use it every day, or a chat app even though they're on it day and night; they can't use a bloody generic website even though they spend most of their lives online, and so on.
These people are simply a problem when working remotely, and while they're certainly present at the bottom of the ladder, they are particularly numerous among management. There are really very few who understand IT well enough not to cause issues and actually be productive.
The handful of people who have a financial interest in keeping the masses enslaved in the city, namely those with financial interests in office spaces, ready made food, fast-tech, fast-fashion, ... prey on this.
This is the real problem. The way out is to teach IT, not CS, not CE, at school, starting from early childhood, and to really teach it: FLOSS desktops, not cloud+mobile is mandatory. And since we don't have enough teachers, the only way is through video lessons, but to do something like that at a national level requires a level of understanding and commitment that currently seems largely absent among most people.
My experience in corporate life has been that, as you go up the corporate ladder, you have to dumb down and goo-goo-ga-ga-ify information for managers.
Like, we have a log of all our work done, it's git. It tracks and timestamps each individual commit. But my manager can't use our git frontend. I guess it's too hard? Not sure. So, we then re-enter our time in Jira.
Of course, his manager can't open up Jira. So, we also create a word document every week documenting everything we have done. We actually also spell out and link the Jira issues (???). And then that gets sent to him.
Some of this I can understand. Reporting and distilling data is important. But nothing is being distilled, it's the same information just duplicated. This could all be automated but, of course, it's not.
I admit among my coworkers, for a few, I wonder how they manage to work remotely and be productive. These same people are the one who suck up all the oxygen out of meetings; and leave a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the day.
Another take to deny the need of a POLITICAL union. Anyway a large slice of the issue lay in the many different social security systems, the vastly different inheritance tax regimes (zero inheritance tax for some states, over 80% for others) and so on, having a company that exists as a state unto itself, but with employees from another state subject to its rules, doesn't simplify things; it only complicates them.
What is needed is the arrest of the Commission for a coup d'état and high treason, with its powers being transferred to the European Parliament.
Well, more than just a website, I'd call it a domain name to be used for various personal services, starting with email. A domain name is like your home address in the physical world; not having one is like not being a citizen of civil society.
As for the domain, well, one can also have a website to introduce yourself to the world, the usefulness is marginal for the average person, but yeah, you can have one. It can be used as a sort of business card, an interactive CV, or your own little corner to tell the world what you think; it has many uses and each has implications to consider. But the domain is the essential part. It's about having your own mail even if you use GMail (for domains), so that one day you can switch providers without changing anything for your contacts. It's perhaps hosting XMPP or Matrix for yourself to talk to friends, family, and sometimes even total strangers without depending much on other people's services. It's about serving your own web apps to yourself on the go. The website itself matters less in all of this.
I think GoCardless stopped accepting new accounts recently, which makes it a bit harder to rely on now.
Feels like the options for EU/SEPA are still pretty limited. I’ve been looking into alternatives as well, curious if you’ve found anything that works well also?
Otherwise, with the scraping approach Woob https://woob.tech/ (FLOSS) works well enough on some banks... It's damn absurd that banks and even supermarkets do not offer authenticated feeds for data export but that's is unfortunately...
Me personally I think banks do their best to push people toward cryptos only because of their crappy services... Even the worst CEx offer better data access the banks...
That's the limit of smart-contracts: they can't know the real world, so they depend on "Oracles"/external sources who can be corrupted or coerced, and so even if the foundation is guaranteed in the code, what the code uses as a reference is not...
RTO is also about forcing people in cities, the cities that have lost their factories to globalisation, because it was and still is cheaper to produce far away without the problems of density and then move things, rather than everyone staying close together. The cities that are losing their offices, their last economic engine, to remote working, and with them, the giant property owners who want everyone renting their buildings, not owning scattered homes and sheds.
Cities that serve the ruling classes as a means of ensuring conformity, because the closer you are to your neighbour, the more the herd effect is felt. Cities that themselves serve as a means of control: you consume food and water that doesn't come from the city itself; control these and the four main arteries, and the city is yours, no questions asked.
People seem to have trouble understanding that orbital space isn't infinite, nor is the manoeuvrability of satellites; or to put it another way, there isn't room for everyone with launch capabilities.
Then of course, there are MANY problems starting with BTC https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html but they generally aren't what most people talk about, and today, even if the complexity is insane, the documentation sparse, and the code quality questionable, Lightning is actually the only truly scalable solution we have for micropayments and payments of various amounts, generally not large ones. It has some absurd aspects, but that hardly matters. It works.
More generally, we don't have a crystal ball; where we can, we diversify, certainly limiting risk but also taking a bit of a gamble; where we can't, we choose to watch and see how it goes, knowing that we'll pay for it in terms of returns.
As things stand for me personally, given the level of IT obscenity in the traditional banking world, which in 2026 still doesn't have decent APIs open to retail customers, or at least decent export functions, shameful websites, a push towards completely unacceptable mobile apps, absurd limits etc etc etc, well, the worst CEx is less bad than the best bank. I don't trust either, but I distrust the CEx less than the bank, and given Wikileaks, Francesca Albanese, the protesters in Canada, the various private individuals illegally "sanctioned" by the EU Commission and so on, I'd say it's madness to rely on banks for anything more than the bare minimum.
Most people today know nothing of this and don't weigh it up, but they will, and they'll pay for this delay with their lack of attention.
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