Martin (mx) @POWbug

BREAKING: The EU just banned cash payments over €10,000. And will require ID for all Bitcoin transactions starting 2027. The same EU whose German Chancellor called it a world champion of over-regulation. Cash banned above €10,000. Bitcoin requires ID. Gold can still be bought anonymously. While America proposes zero capital gains on Bitcoin. While UAE builds crypto banks with zero restrictions. Europe is building a financial surveillance state. And calling it consumer protection. 2027 is closer than it sounds.

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Is the UK on the verge of banning VPNs?   On May 26, the consultation intended to help the British government make decisions on age verification for websites, digital services, and social media platforms came to an end. Some form of restrictions regarding at least age limits for social media already appear inevitable; government officials have confirmed as much. The only question is what kind of restrictions will be imposed.   For example, the age verification restrictions could end up including VPN services. National restrictions for websites and social media can be bypassed using tools such as VPNs, virtual phone numbers, eSIM cards, Tor and dedicated services. It is therefore unsurprising that politicians have begun looking toward VPN services, which are the most common and accessible method of changing one’s geographic location.   In early 2026, the House of Lords sent an amendment(regarding the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill) to the House of Commons, proposing an 18-year age limit for using VPN services. The House of Commons rejected the House of Lords amendment four separate times. However, the House of Commons instead introduced its own proposal, which was passed and has now become law. This agreement grants the government the power to introduce restrictions through secondary legislation, with only limited parliamentary scrutiny.   Unfortunately, the risk that the UK government will crack down on VPN services is real – effectively joining countries such as China and Russia in opposing VPN services. Officials have already hinted that they may consider introducing age restrictions for VPN usage under the slogan “No platform gets a free pass”.   If VPN services were to implement identity verification, this would mean collecting data that could be abused through either malice or incompetence. It would, for example, make such services risky for whistleblowers and activists, make it harder for journalists to work with sensitive information, and create a chilling effect on online debate (VPNs can help people post anonymously on social media). In a society like the UK, where 30 people are arrested every day for writing something online that authorities classify as “grossly offensive”, VPN services are an important tool for free speech.   If VPN providers were to impose an age limit on their service, this would also mean that underage users would effectively lose their right to online privacy. Ironically, one consequence would be that social media companies mapping people’s lives through third-party trackers on websites could continue monitoring young people’s online behavior via their IP addresses without any interference. In other words, politicians would remove one of the protections children have against the very companies they claim to want to protect children from.

Our internal data shows Claude is accelerating AI development—a possible path to recursive self-improvement, or AI autonomously building a more capable successor. It’s happening faster than we thought, and the implications deserve greater attention. anthropic.com/institute/recu…

JUST IN: JPMorgan, Citi and major US banks to launch new tokenized deposit system to compete with crypto.

BREAKING 🚨: Central banks now hold 36,000 tonnes of gold. 🥇 Nearly matching the pre-1971 Bretton Woods peak of 38,000 tonnes. That was when gold backed the entire global monetary system. We're almost back there. And Goldman Sachs thinks the unofficial total is even higher. The world is rebuilding a gold standard. Just without announcing it. #Gold #CentralBanks #PreciousMetals

AI-powered computer worm, a self-replicating agent that reasons its way through a network instead of carrying a fixed exploit list. It steals compute from compromised GPU machines to run its own open-weight LLM, then uses weaker machines as relays for reach. In trials on a corporate testbed, it identified vulnerabilities, exploited systems, and launched replicas across Linux, Windows, and IoT targets. Every new infection can add more infrastructure while costing the attacker almost nothing. Patching one flaw no longer ends the threat, because the worm can operationalise fresh advisories, generate new attack logic, and keep adapting without a human operator. It is not a WannaCry-style worm with one baked exploit and one baked ransomware payload. It can adapt across many vulnerability classes it can discover and operationalise arxiv.org/pdf/2606.03811

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The internet wasn't built to spy on us. We let it happen. Now every click is tracked, profiled, and stored, forever. The creator of JavaScript, and co-founder of Mozilla and Brave, explains how we got here, and where we go next.

Cyberattack on humanitarian organization World Food Program exposes sensitive data of vulnerable population. Affected 600,000 households in Gaza, names, ID numbers, phone numbers, location data, all exfiltrated. The timing is specific. Israel's Supreme Court had just upheld a requirement forcing aid organizations to hand over workers' personal data as a condition of operating in Gaza. In 2022 it was the Red Cross (515,000 people). In 2023, the Norwegian Refugee Council. This time it's WFP. The sector has had a poor track record. thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2026/06/0…

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Just for the record - ZODL, a for-profit entity funded by VC firms, secretly coordinated an entire soft and hard fork of a network, and now are using it for marketing purposes tell you NOT to use open source wallets who aren’t VC funded. The full story: 1. As one of the largest ecosystem participants in Zcash (both as a wallet and a merchant via Cake Pay), we had to find out about the bug from an X post and were never contacted to start patching our nodes or wallets ahead of time. 2. Every question we sent on X and DMs to ZODL folks was ignored until after they had the opportunity to patch in secret before releasing code. 3. The fix was (understandably) obfuscated and commits were held back until the release was out, so we had no way to see what was necessary to resolve client-side until long after ZODL and who knows who else. 4. We were only able to get a response and talk to those in the know on the bug/fix as of 3h ago, despite repeated efforts on all platforms for two days, but they have been helpful since then. I understand the need for doing things quietly when critical bugs are found in consensus code, but refusing to notify or communicate at all with your FOSS ecosystem partner (likely because they feel threatened by our competition) is absolutely insane and an abuse of the insider access that ZODL has, EVEN MORE SO now that they’re a for-profit company that has to serve its VC interests. This is not the way decentralized networks should be run, is not the way FOSS communities should coordinate responses to responsibly disclosed bugs, and is yet another frustrating saga in Zcash having good tech but an immensely frustrating social layer.

peacemonger 🛡 @peacemongerZ

a week ago

I suggest storing ZEC in wallets built by experienced teams committed to Zcash beyond collecting swap fees, with the engineering expertise to maintain and secure their own codebase.

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Privacy is expanding. We're excited to announce that @SilentSwap is now live on @TopazDex, bringing non-custodial privacy directly into the trading experience. Swap with confidence. Trade with privacy. Privacy Without Borders.

zcash just had to emergency fork because of a critical bug in their most advanced privacy feature (orchard). network stopped producing blocks for 6+ hours while they pushed a fix. meanwhile monero has been running the same battle-tested privacy tech for years with no trusted setup and no team that can unilaterally change the rules. different design. different risk profile. #Monero #Zcash #Privacy

CyberSatoshi 𓆙 @XBToshi

a week ago

“coordinated protocol update" is just corporate speak for an admin key. zama paused their contracts. thorchain is halted. now zcash freezes its orchard shielded pool. the entire industry is addicted to centralized kill switches. they literally called up the node cartel over the

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Criminals prefer stablecoins over bitcoin.

Good morning to everyone who knows privacy is a right, not a crime.

🚨MAJOR WARNING from France: Crypto Companies Without EU License Will Be BLACKLISTED & Prosecuted By July 1 🫣🔥

Nothing is more ironic than a decentralized currency depending on a centralized exchange for legitimacy.

Fiat currencies are in an eternal bear market against gold: Since 1971, the US Dollar has lost -99.24% of its value against gold, the 2nd-largest decline among major currencies. Over the same period, the British Pound has declined -99.57%. The Euro would have lost -99.08% against gold if it had existed since 1971. Furthermore, the Japanese Yen and Swiss Franc have dropped -98.27% and -96.07%, respectively. Meanwhile, gold prices in US Dollar terms are up +11,119% over the same timeframe. Own assets or be left behind.

Throughout history, whenever money was anchored to gold, the system imposed discipline on nations. Governments could not create unlimited currency without consequences. Gold acted as a restraint on excess. Today? Global debt has surged beyond $350 trillion.

Another one bites the dust. Cantor, Lutnick, & the financial-industrial complex are wrapping as many Bitcoiners as possible into collateralized debt obligations for the financial-industrial complex. ✅ Jack Mallers ✅ Adam Back ✅ David Bailey ☑️ Next…?

Just the beginning. Wait until they roll out AI powered digital IDs based on your social credit score.

Cenk Uygur @cenkuygur

2 weeks ago

I’ve been banned from the UK. I tried to get on a flight to London to attend SXSW London and give a speech at Oxford. I’ve been banned for criticizing Israel. Are we free anymore? This is oppression of Western citizens by our own governments on behalf of a different country!

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🚨Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers. Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake. He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing. Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor. Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale. Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models. But here is what Burry is flagging. Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory. They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies. Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle. Now here is where American retirees enter the picture. Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit. Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene. Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans. When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center. The numbers inside Athene are most alarming. Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight. Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets. Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth. The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times. Burry's says: Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing. - Nvidia books the revenue. - Apollo collects the fees. - xAI gets the computing power. - And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.

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