Bitcoin is being regulated in Europe and the UK before policymakers have really understood what Bitcoin is. At @BTCHEL 25.-26. SEPTEMBER, the first panel set out three approaches: - Protect sovereignty and self custody - Work within MiCA and regulated rails - Push back when state power goes too far The second panel asked who is writing Bitcoin policy across Europe. Brussels, national regulators, courts, governments and parliaments each write a piece, but banks still decide whether you get an account or can send a payment. You can have a law that looks open but you can still be shut out in practice. Lawful Bitcoin payments are already being blocked, accounts restricted, and customers made to jump through hoops that have nothing to do with the statute. In the UK the FCA, Treasury and Bank of England are already writing the rulebook, while Parliament is still debating what an overarching digital asset strategy should look like. By 2030, Europe will have written more law around Bitcoin. If it is still being treated as just another cryptoasset, the rules may never properly account for what makes Bitcoin different. We still have a long way to go, but thank you to my fellow panellists for all their work.

The US government said you already have enough privacy and then 153 million driving licences went up for sale on the dark web. In the Tornado Cash trial, prosecutors told the jury a bank account or a Coinbase login was 'privacy enough'. Their expert said the responsible version of the software was a login screen and a database linking every user to every transaction. That is the same architecture used by the company that scans licences at hotels, rental desks and dispensaries. Scans of ordinary people and senior officials appeared for sale on the dark web, along with data that could expose people hiding from abusers. Storm built software with no middleman holding the data: - no company - no server - no identity file That was treated as the crime. Data collection is not the same thing as safety. You cannot leak what was never collected.

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Lebanon showed what happens when banks and currency policy fail the public. Although the worst of the hyperinflation may have eased, banking distrust, poverty and reconstruction needs remain. So too does the need for self-custody, low friction remittances and money that cannot be arbitrarily devalued. Published in early 2024, the lessons have not aged. Read the full article here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/02/02/lebanons-economic-rebirth-through-bitcoin/

If you’re unhappy with the Bitcoin price, stop looking at the chart and start reading the congressional trading disclosures. Nancy Pelosi’s household portfolio has been beating the S&P 500 and the average hedge fund for years. A $174,000 congressional salary and a fortune estimated at $250 million. * Maybe the real alpha was public service all along. The numbers: https://vertdata.com/blog/nancy-pelosi-stock-portfolio Track the disclosed trades:

Nancy Pelosi Net Worth | Quiver Quantitative

View Nancy Pelosi's current net worth. Track their disclosed holdings and estimated net worth over time.

* Estimates vary, with some placing the Pelosi fortune at more than $400 million.

Quantum mechanics keeps forcing me to question what 'reality' even is … and where consciousness fits into it. I’ve tried to articulate some of my recent thoughts in this article. What's your take on this? View article →

What is the best way to post an article on Nostr?

Yikes ... we should all be worried! The Trump team privately warned Andy Burnham against giving Ed Miliband a top economic or foreign policy role. Steve Bannon said they called him a "red diaper baby and self-described socialist" who would damage the special relationship. Ouch!! A senior Trump official also described Miliband as a major point of friction in the transatlantic alliance. Steve Bannon then went on to say: “Burnham could not care less – he appointed this twit anyway.” Full article: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/07/21/white-house-deeply-concerned-miliband-foreign-secretary/

Andy Burnham is scrapping the Labour government’s digital ID scheme as one of his first acts as prime minister. The policy was never included in Labour’s 2024 manifesto. Despite this, Keir Starmer announced it last September as a tool to combat illegal migration, following strong encouragement from Tony Blair and former Conservative leader William Hague. Blair has been the persistent driving force behind this undemocratic push for two decades. As prime minister he tried to introduce national ID cards through the Identity Cards Act 2006. Billions were spent before the scheme was abandoned in 2010. His Tony Blair Institute then continued lobbying heavily for digital ID, publishing reports and recommendations that helped shape the Starmer government’s plans. The public response was overwhelming. Nearly three million people signed a petition opposing the scheme, while a four hour parliamentary debate saw MPs from across the political spectrum warn that it threatened privacy, civil liberties and the principle of public consent. The government was eventually forced to drop the compulsory element for workers, but it continued trying to advance the broader digital ID infrastructure under a softer, rebranded model. That disregard for manifesto commitments, parliamentary concern and enormous public resistance was deeply troubling. Burnham is now ending the programme, with hundreds of millions of pounds in projected annual costs redirected towards cost-of-living support rather than another expensive, centralised state project. That money will not solve the cost-of-living crisis, and whether families feel any meaningful benefit remains to be seen. Even so, choosing immediate help for ordinary people over a controversial national identity system is a major and very welcome decision. Tony Blair has pushed this idea relentlessly for years, despite repeated rejection from the public. This is a victory, but I would not assume the battle is over. Why do I suspect digital ID will return under another name?

El Salvador’s government has the power to tap phones and read private messages without a warrant, while branding itself as the ultimate Bitcoin freedom project. The reality is that self-censorship has become normal for anyone who dares question the government. Chivo collected biometric data from millions of Salvadorans, creating a national honeypot. More than 80% of the population’s private information was later reportedly leaked onto the dark web, including facial images, addresses and dates of birth. Chivo denies that the leak came from its systems. Top-down narratives sold as sovereign and decentralised can erode the very principles they claim to champion. When a government wraps mass surveillance in the Bitcoin flag, it becomes more dangerous by borrowing the language of freedom to disguise control. Joe’s latest video asks the questions much of the space refuses to confront. Awesome work @Joe Nakamoto. Full video here:

A GoFundMe campaign raised more than £55,000 for a Gazan family trying to escape the war. Most of the money raised never reached them. Banking rules and sanctions prevent direct payouts in Gaza, so the funds had to go through an intermediary. When that arrangement collapsed, the family was left without the support raised for them. Bitcoin platforms like Agora and Geyser send funds directly to recipients’ own wallets, using community verification instead of giving control to a single intermediary. Read how these tools are helping people in crisis. My latest piece in Forbes featuring @Team Soapbox @Geyser @Lyudmyla Kozlovska @npub1zhqc...h0dw @npub18yr2...8czq. https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2026/07/16/when-the-financial-system-cant-reach-people-in-crisis-bitcoin-can/

When governments shut down your communications or a platform debanks you, what’s your backup plan? Listening to activists at the Oslo Freedom Forum describing surveillance, censorship and financial exclusion, one thing stood out. For nearly every problem they raised, builders were already working on solutions. It became the opening to my talk at @BTC Prague. In this clip, I explain why CBDCs may not arrive in the form people expect and why stablecoins can carry many of the same risks. Full video, article and practical tools linked below. Freedom depends on having money that no government, bank or platform can switch off. Bitcoin gives us that option.

What you can build in a week now is actually insane. I’ve prompt built a website and I’m blown away by what was possible. Everything I’ve done across Bitcoin, policy and journalism is now in one place. If you have time I would appreciate some feedback. What works? What doesn’t? What did I miss? Constructive criticism very welcome! Full website:

Susie Violet Ward, Journalist

Susie Violet Ward | UK Bitcoin & Digital Assets Journalist

Independent UK journalist covering Bitcoin, regulation, energy, privacy and surveillance, including Bitcoin within UK cryptoasset and digital asset...

Link also in bio! #ProofOfWork #Bitcoin

If it’s not “for the children,” it’s “national security.” FATF’s new roadmap calls for greater use of large datasets, real-time information sharing and closer cooperation between tech, telecoms and finance to tackle fraud. Traditional finance already collects vast amounts of identity and transaction data and serious financial crime continues at scale. The same approach is now being extended further, linking identity and financial activity across more systems. This turns law-abiding citizens into targets for both increased surveillance and physical attacks. My latest in Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2026/07/02/fatfs-fraud-roadmap-expands-data-risks-and-global-surveillance/

Global regulators built the FATF Travel Rule for a banking system still full of illicit finance. Now they are imposing the same surveillance architecture on Bitcoin. The rule was created by G7 countries through an unelected body in France. It was sold as a way to stop money laundering by forcing information to travel with every transaction. Decades later, the UN still estimates money laundering at 2 - 5% of global GDP. The model has failed in TradFi.

United Nations : Office on Drugs and Crime

Overview

Overview

Regulators now want to apply that same framework to Bitcoin, which is an open, auditable ledger with a completely different risk profile. Chainalysis’ 2026 Crypto Crime Report shows stablecoins accounted for 84% of illicit transaction volume in 2025, while Bitcoin is still being pulled into a surveillance regime designed for banks and centralised intermediaries and a financial system struggling to stop illicit finance at scale. https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2026-crypto-crime-report-introduction/ The Travel Rule forces firms to collect, hold and transmit personal information about the people behind transactions. This creates databases that link identity, transaction history and asset ownership in ways that expose ordinary users to hacks, targeting and physical security risks. FATF has updated it’s recommendations as part of a global push for payment transparency. As a result it is being expanded, embedded and normalised. This solves nothing but creates unprecedented harm by forcing more personal financial data to be collected, stored and shared. This clip is from the @You’re The Voice podcast with @Efrat Fenigson and Ben Samocha at Bitcoin Vegas last year. The warning has only grown more urgent. Bitcoin does not need TradFi’s failed surveillance architecture wrapped around it.

Jeremy Grantham’s latest CNBC comments are a perfect example of what happens when traditional finance tries to judge Bitcoin using an old framework. Had these comments been about crypto, I would have nodded along. Much of that market has proved to be speculative and altcoin season is not coming back. This was not a discussion about the crypto casino. He was speaking in front of a Bitcoin chart, while the segment drifted between 'crypto' and Bitcoin as though they were the same thing, which tells you how little precision sat behind the critique. Bitcoin deserves a more serious discussion than recycled talking points about crooks, dividends and supermarket payments. He called it a 'useless speculative mechanism' and said it would 'dwindle away' over decades, 'not with a bang but a whimper.' He asked why people do not use it to buy dinner or pay at the supermarket. Then came the line: “What it does is allows crooks to move money around without leaving a trace.” That is not dismissive… it’s wrong. It is not a stock, a company, or a bond. It does not have earnings, dividends, cash flow, a management team, or a board of directors, because it was not designed to be valued like those things. It is a decentralised monetary network with: - no CEO - no central bank - no political control - no bailouts - no off switch - a fixed 21 million supply that cannot be inflated on demand. The 'without leaving a trace' claim really misunderstands the system. Bitcoin is a public ledger and every base layer transaction is recorded. It is far more traceable than cash, which is why law enforcement, analytics firms and exchanges have spent years building tools around that transparency. The 'people don’t buy dinner with it' argument is also wrong and lazy. Gold is not judged by how often it is used at the supermarket. Bitcoin allows people to store and transfer value across borders, outside a system suffering from inflation, surveillance, debanking, capital controls and political discretion. Then there is proof of work, which Grantham dismissed as 'proof of unnecessary work.' That 'work' is what secures the network. It is what makes Bitcoin expensive to attack, impossible to rewrite and different from the thousands of tokens that can be changed, paused, printed or controlled by insiders. That is a stock market framework being applied to an open monetary protocol. Bitcoin has already survived bans, crashes, exchange failures, media attacks, regulatory assaults, energy panic, criminality narratives and repeated predictions of its death. That is not dwindling away. Grantham is not watching Bitcoin disappear, he is watching the old framework fail to explain it. So if the price worries you, remember what this actually is... A 17 year old monetary network separating money from state and challenging some of the oldest assumptions in finance. We are still early! Full article:

CNBC

Billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham says bitcoin will 'dwindle away with a whimper'

Jeremy Grantham renewed his long-running criticism of bitcoin, predicting it will gradually fade into irrelevance over decades.

Hollywood loves a whistleblower story once the danger has passed. Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man arrives while the danger is still attached. Major platforms privately praised it … then said no. Now it’s bypassing them with Bitcoin and Nostr on June 27. My latest in Forbes featuring @Eugene Jarecki @jack Julian Assange @BTC Prague. Full article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2026/06/24/the-julian-assange-film-streamers-wouldnt-touch-turns-to-bitcoin/

This is another great advert for bitcoin, Nostr and separating money and state. Nobody serious thinks social media is creating a happy, healthy environment for children. The harms from addictive apps, algorithmic feeds, cyberbullying, adult content, predators, body image pressure, endless scrolling and destroyed attention spans are obvious. The problem is that banning things rarely works, especially when technology is moving faster than the digitally illiterate policy class trying to control it. This will push children onto VPNs, fake accounts, encrypted groups, offshore platforms, unregulated apps and darker corners of the internet where parents have even less visibility. It risks turning a difficult parenting problem into a surveillance and identity checking regime for everyone, while giving families the false comfort that the state has 'solved' something it barely understands. We have already seen this pattern with online age checks. The rules come in, VPN use surges, people route around the system, privacy gets weaker, and the children most at risk are driven further underground. Australia’s under 16 ban has already shown enforcement problems, with children learning how to evade the controls rather than becoming meaningfully safer. The really depressing part is how familiar this all feels. We have seen it in bitcoin policy for years. The people with the worst incentives, the least technical understanding and the biggest lobbying budgets somehow end up with the ear of government, while people who actually understand the technology are ignored. It is a total shit show. The answer is not more state control over speech, money, identity and childhood. The answer is better parenting, better tools, better communities, better education, and less blind faith in governments with a proven track record of making problems worse. Handing more power to the state every time society gets scared is how we sleepwalk into something far more dangerous. Critics have already warned about enforcement, privacy and children moving to less regulated spaces.  Research on age verification and the UK Online Safety Act also points to VPN spikes and privacy concerns after age checks. At the same time, early analysis of Australia's ban suggests children often learn to evade controls rather than comply. When governments use 'protecting children' as the justification for sweeping digital control, the question is no longer whether they mean well. It’s whether they are building the infrastructure for something far more dangerous. #ForTheKids 🤔

Hal Finney understood early that Bitcoin could serve two worlds. It could become ‘a reserve currency for banks’ while still remaining permissionless money anyone can hold and use without intermediaries. As Eric Balchunas said, Bitcoin has two major advantages. It is censorship resistant and a debasement hedge because of its scarcity. The important thing is preserving access to both uses, so it can integrate without surrender and scale without ceasing to be freedom money. This is the most elegant monetary achievement in history.

Digital control is expanding through surveillance, debanking, KYC databases, internet shutdowns and financial repression. Builders and activists are creating an emerging freedom tech stack of private payments, resilient communication, spyware research, peer to peer funding and practical education. My latest article in Forbes featuring @Cashu @The Citizen Lab @Hodl Hodl @HRF Bitchat, Agora, Nostr and Bitcoin. With insights from @Farida Nabourema @calle @Leo and @Anna Chekhovich. Read the full article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2026/06/04/how-freedom-tech-is-pushing-back-against-digital-authoritarianism/