I’m Only a Maximalist of Freedom Crypto maximalism loves to dress up as “conviction”, but it’s usually ego in ceremonial robes. When someone fuses their identity with a coin, they stop analyzing and start defending. Technology can stagnate, cracks can show, and incentives can shift—admitting it would feel like admitting defeat. So they bend reality to protect the original belief. What began as a pursuit of sovereignty and privacy mutates into a self-imposed dogma. I don’t play that game. I’m not a maximalist of any cryptocurrency. Today, #Monero looks like the best form of sovereign money; tomorrow it might not. On many occasions, I have published critiques or warnings about potential vulnerabilities in Monero. Freedom and privacy are the only principles that don’t move. Cryptocurrencies are replaceable.

**The Efficient Turn: From Human Surveillance to Data-Driven Technocracy** Traditional governments — monarchies, empires, 20th-century totalitarian regimes — depended on human surveillance. Informants, secret police, paper files. Even at their most aggressive, they monitored only 10–20% of the population. Reactive, narrow, and limited by biology. Today, the paradigm is proactive, global, and automated. Modern democracies surveil nearly everyone by default. Digital identity, increasingly biometric, anchors every action; Big Data records it; AI connects, interprets, and predicts. This technical base drives a political transformation: – Democracy is built on debate and representation. – Technocracy is built on experts, models, and “data-driven” inevitability. Signals of the shift: – Policies framed as technical conclusions, not political choices. – Power moving to unelected experts managing infrastructure, intelligence, and AI. – Efficiency over citizenship, treating people as data points to optimize. Fueling it all is growing public validation. The narrative glorifies transparency and efficiency while hiding expanding invasiveness, continuous monitoring, and large-scale manipulation. When the promise looks clean and the cost is invisible, technocracy doesn’t need force. It scales.

Apple introduces Digital ID, a new way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet

Apple Newsroom

Apple introduces Digital ID, a new way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet

Digital ID is a new way for users to create an ID in Apple Wallet using their U.S. passport, and present it with the privacy of iPhone or Apple Watch.

Do you see the signals, or are they still slipping past you? We’re moving into an algorithmic democracy—a Technocracy—and Digital Identity is its foundation. No power can govern people without an individual identification system. This time, the infrastructure isn’t built by states; Big Tech builds it. I’ve been writing about this for a while: articles, analysis, and my book 'Understanding The Information Age. The Sovereign Individual', published chapter by chapter.

Medium

Understanding The Information Age. The Sovereign Individual. ─Index

The Book

Apple introduces Digital ID, a new way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet

Zcash—the "opt-in" privacy that only kicks in if you remember... and if your exchange allows it! While Monero hides you 24/7, Zcash glows with 70% transparent txs and magic view keys so Uncle Sam can peek. VC sugar daddies like a16z scooped 20% of the premine—total decentralization, bro! It kisses the regulatory ring, gets cozy with the law, and pumps +1000% for being a good boy. Monero: delisted because won’t kneel. Zcash: boutique anonymity for folks who want privacy... but, you know, not too much.

The #Monero war is not technical. It is cultural. Imagine Monero reaching massive, accelerated, unstoppable adoption. Do you think regulators would feel comfortable? Of course not — that's exactly why they cannot allow the "system error" to grow. The signals of the era — increasingly sharp — push against total control. The regulators learned an uncomfortable lesson: if you can’t defeat the code, defeat the perception. They will install a public frame that makes Monero synonymous with “crime,” hiding a simpler truth: They cannot control it — and of course, they don’t want money they cannot control. My article: Monero Faces a Cultural War https://medium.com/@liberlion/monero-faces-a-cultural-war-1f8cb57c3b35

Zcash is “private sometimes", which makes it acceptable for regulated institutions. Monero is “always private”, which makes it persona non grata on CEXs such as Gemini, Coinbase, or Kraken (in many regions). That's why the Winklevoss twins (Gemini) are investing $58.88 million in #Zcash... but not a penny in #Monero. Furthermore, Gemini never listed Monero, which directly conflicts with the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements demanded by US regulators, especially in New York, where this CEX is based. It's not hypocrisy: it's regulatory strategy. View quoted note →

Do you think this isn't planned? Why hasn't Monero been delisted from all the major CEXs? To manipulate its price. Spoiler: I think we'll see attacks on the price of XMR in a few days. Zcash is part of the attack, as it will be used to demonstrate that the price continues to rise, manipulated by a significant amount of VC money from undercover bankers, who are leveraging the Cypherpunk privacy coin narrative, among other tactics. Zcash is the honeypot. Monero is the Enemy of The Central Banks. Monero Pump&Dump = bankers + regulators

Zcash: signals and patterns. Do you have any doubts that there will soon be an event that leaves no doubt that Zcash is a development co-opted by regulators with money from bankers? Regulators and bankers are always partners. Of course, I can't guess what the event will be or when it will happen, but all the signals are pointing in that direction, forming a clear pattern.

The Lightning Network Money Trail The banking network In this article, I will show you the investments and financing received by the Lightning Network to understand the incentives driving this development. Why is this important? Because the money trail shows the destination and the intention. https://medium.com/@liberlion/the-lightning-network-money-trail-b9594243ee74

I’m only a maximalist about one thing: freedom Everything else is just tools you pick based on what you need. Today, #Monero looks like one of the strongest forms of sovereign money, sure. And I’ll even say #BitcoinCash has its uses, despite the traceability in certain cases. Privacy means each individual decides what to show and when. That’s sovereignty — not the cult of “all or nothing.” The problem starts when someone tries to sell you “privacy” and “crypto-anarchism” as a Cypherpunk deluxe package… and what you really get is #Zcash, the establishment’s Trojan horse wrapped in a regulatory bow with auditors included. In the end, it feels less like a revolution and more like a loyalty program.

What's worse than a corrupt politician? People who vote for and finance corrupt politicians.

Wow! That's deep! View quoted note →

Mordinals: Turning Sovereign Money into Collectible Stickers Mordinals were a short-lived attempt to sneak NFTs into Monero via tx extra. In practice, it turned a sovereign, fungible currency into a stack of traceable stickers. The use of burned outputs created obvious patterns, weakening ring anonymity and opening room for heuristics that should never exist in Monero. Meanwhile, Bitcoin Ordinals fit perfectly in their natural habitat: a fully transparent chain where everyone already behaves like curators in a glass-walled museum, proudly tagging UTXOs with digital “art.” On Bitcoin, Ordinals make sense; on Monero, Mordinals are pure nonsense. No surprise the experiment died quickly (March–April 2023). Monero is sovereign money, not an NFT art gallery on training wheels.

MoneroPulse: The Emergency Checkpointing Mechanism MoneroPulse is an optional emergency checkpointing system to prevent chain-splits caused by consensus bugs. Operators publish which fork they consider valid via a block hash and height. Nodes only warn users unless `--enforce-dns-checkpointing` is enabled, which rolls back a few blocks and follows the “fixed” fork. It’s opt-in and recommended for unattended full nodes.

MoneroPulse - Monero Docs

Monero: which traceability heuristics were mitigated — and which weren’t I will always push for improvement and evolution. I don't go along with maximalist narratives, but rather with critical thinking. Don't say this post is FUD, because I document the information here. I found a paper from last year: "Monero Traceability Heuristics: Wallet Application Bugs and the Mordinal-P2Pool Perspective" by Nada Hammad and Friedhelm Victor. They classified heuristics aimed at identifying the true spend or filtering out decoys in Monero rings. Using mainnet data, testnet ground truth, and P2Pool payments, they evaluated accuracy, collisions between heuristics, and how their effectiveness evolved over time. Essentially, a full audit of what works, when, and with what limits. It is important to understand the concept: a heuristic is not a guaranteed attack or a mathematical break. It’s a rule-of-thumb pattern: a clue in the data that lets an analyst guess which ring member is the real spend—or which ones are just decoys. It exploits human behavior, wallet bugs, timing patterns, or predictable miner habits. It’s probabilistic: sometimes works, sometimes misfires. That’s why researchers measure precision instead of certainty. I found that some problems were solved, but others persist. Mitigated (wallet bugs): ─10-Block Decoy Bug: fixed in 2023. ─Differ-By-One: improved decoy-selection logic. ─Mordinal patterns: short-lived artifact, no longer reproducible. Partially mitigated (usage patterns): ─Coinbase outputs: still leak signals because miners spend in predictable ways. ─P2Pool merges: depends on miner behavior, not on the protocol itself. Practical outcome: Even after applying all known heuristics, the effective ring size remains above ~14/16. Monero didn’t lose structural privacy — it just had to prune bugs and predictable habits that left crumbs behind. Sources: 1.

Monero Traceability Heuristics: Wallet Application Bugs and the Mordinal-P2Pool Perspective

2.

getmonero.org, The Monero Project

Blog: Post-Mortem of 10-Block-Old Decoy Selection Bug

Emprical analysis of the high severity vulnerability within the reference wallet. Updating to the latest version is strongly advised.

3.

Monero Traceability Heuristics: Wallet Application Bugs and the Mordinal-P2Pool Perspective

Privacy-focused cryptoassets like Monero are intentionally difficult to trace. Over the years, several traceability heuristics have been proposed, ...

4.

Monero Observer - Monero Dev Activity Report - Week 50 2024: 11 PRs, 15 Issues

This weekly report aims to provide a big picture view of Monero development activity, increase community support for existing devs and, hopefully, ...

5.

GitHub

GUI Re-design improvements. · Issue #2024 · monero-project/monero-gui

I've done some re-designing of the GUI of the past few days of which I would greatly appreciate some feedback on. I have broken down each main aspe...

Central Banking: Because War Needed a Payment Plan The Bank of England, founded in 1694, is considered the oldest central bank in the world in continuous operation. The Crown was bankrupt and needed to finance wars, so the Bank of England started as a private company to lend money to the British government during the war against France and, in return, obtained a monopoly on issuing banknotes. That's it. No inflation targets, no macroprudential subtleties. Just a privileged lender with one real customer who always needed more credit.

Signals of #Technocracy #Agenda2030 I apply my L3 research protocol to this news: "Czech National Bank adds BTC to its balance sheet—marking a first for central banks. $1M test portfolio includes bitcoin, a USD stablecoin & tokenized deposit." Layer 1 — Surface: what anyone can see A central bank adds BTC, a USD stablecoin, and a tokenized deposit to a tiny test portfolio. From the outside it looks like harmless tech curiosity — a small, symbolic pilot. And the official framing is predictable: they sell it as “evolution,” modernization, financial innovation, keeping up with the future. The story is progress, efficiency, nothing alarming. Layer 2 — Depth: what isn’t visible at first glance Here it stops being curiosity and becomes institutional assimilation. A central bank never touches a new asset class unless it thinks it may shape its future mandate: payments, reserves, monetary plumbing. To learn custody, key management, tokenized deposits, and stablecoin mechanics, they must accept a silent premise: the architecture of finance is moving toward tokenization. If the central bank is preparing, it’s not a hobby — it’s to govern that terrain once it matures. And here the bias appears: Modern policy circles are drifting toward systems that rely on monitoring, real-time accounting, and programmable financial instruments to “manage risk.” Technical pilots are never neutral; they’re governance rehearsals. Layer 3 — Hidden Structure: why the surface exists A central bank testing tokens today is responding to a race it didn’t start: Private markets already tokenize deposits. Global banks experiment with real-time digital-asset accounting. Big tech pushes wallets, instant payments, and stablecoins. Regulators fear losing control if they don’t integrate this infrastructure. In that sense, your interpretation holds: The real signal isn’t “they bought $1M in crypto.” The real signal is the convergence of state, software, and tokenized finance. When technical architecture begins shaping political architecture, you move toward technocracy: granular control, algorithmic governance, real-time oversight, and monetary power mediated by digital infrastructure. A central bank adopting tokens isn’t buying an asset — it’s rehearsing a system.

Bitcoin (BTC) Comes to Central Bank Balance Sheet as CNB Buys

The bank said it created a $1 million "test portfolio" of digital assets, mostly made up of bitcoin.

Privacy Is Not A Technical Problem Many people stare at the surface and mistake the symptom for the cause. They say something like “the big privacy risks come from ISPs and hardware.” Comfortable, simple… and incomplete. The real risk doesn’t originate in a router or a provider. It comes from the ecosystem that decides which ISPs are allowed to exist, what hardware gets produced, and what model of society those choices serve. The surface shows cables and chips. The structure shows incentives, regulations, lobbying, patents, and a political-economic design that turns every layer of infrastructure into a control point. If you only look at the symptom, you end up arguing about antennas. If you look at the structure, you see why those antennas exist… and who benefits from keeping them that way. Privacy is not a technical problem; it shows up through the technical. Privacy is a field of power.

Quality among all the trash. Sometimes I receive high-quality responses to my posts, with technical or philosophical arguments. And I can see that they have few followers, because they don't have a lot of posts, although the few they do have are of high quality. You can find quality among all the trash, if you know what to look for. It takes effort to learn, but it's worth the time it takes.