"Money laundering" is what they call it when poor people try to achieve financial privacy.

Fiat, KYC, Google/Apple surveillance. Really easy to avoid one, doable to avoid two, almost impossible to avoid all three!

When you move a couch for your job, you're paid in fungible tokens (money). When you move a couch for your fiend, you're paid in purely mental non-fungible tokens (gratitude between friends). Love is an NFT. The more you know... 💡

Money is just a language we use to communicate value. It makes perfect sense to combine value communication with social communication. This is why X makes sense.

Something like this happens a few times per year

X (formerly Twitter)

Joel Valenzuela (@TheDesertLynx) on X

I don't think that's how my name is spelled...

People who want to be shut out of their bank account and have their entire life controlled and spied on are more than welcome to keep living the way they're living. https://twitter.com/TheDesertLynx/status/1683200675339968512

It was a pleasure having Sam on to make sense of our coming (already here?) CBDC dystopia. We were both surprisingly optimistic though!

No one is 100% free. Few people are 100% slaves. But almost all of us can become meaningfully freer. Move to New Hampshire, start living on crypto, and use privacy tech.

No, I don't spend ALL of my time shitposting about crypto

X (formerly Twitter)

Joel Valenzuela (@TheDesertLynx) on X

Lake day!

Liberty is the best. Libertarians are the worst. If you know, oh, you DEFINITELY know.

Live with Sam Kuritzén!

Live in two hours (3pm EDT/7pm UTC) Sam Kuritzén comes on the Digital Cash Rundown to talk about FedNow's launch and global CBDCs

In crypto, I have my eye on: -Zero-knowledge proofs (Zcash) -Truly cross-chain native DeFi (THORChain/Maya Protocol) -Social payments (Dash) Add in trust-minimized stablecoins as easy to use as native crypto and you have the new global economy!

The @Bitcoin Twitter account changed its bio to describe #Bitcoin as "trackable digital gold"! 😱 This came as a surprise to many, but it's absolutely true. Bitcoin is easily trackable. 🔎This can be very bad, but it can also be good. First, Bitcoin, and most cryptos, are public, though pseudonymous. This means transactions aren't linked to your identity, and anyone can create new wallets. But every single activity is public on-chain. Just check a block explorer like Blockchair. THE GOOD Crypto is the most radically transparent financial system in the world. Every last satoshi is accounted for. Where all the money is, who runs the network, how much is being sent, etc. is all publicly-available data. This builds enormous trust in the system. THE BAD Literally everything you do is public information! All your income, your purchases, how much you have, the whole world can see all of it. All you need is a single link to your identity, like sharing a tipping address, and you're exposed 😱 There's ways you can protect your privacy on public chains: coin mixing, avoiding address reuse, avoiding using "doxxic change", and being careful with address exposure. These protect you from thieves and scammers, but not governments. Privacy on public chains is hard! Some privacy-focused coins, such as Monero and Zcash (the gold standard) and more, hide much more, giving great privacy. But but there's always a trade-off: technically difficult, data-intensive, more time-consuming, and inability to 100% verify the entire coin's supply! Crypto is in this strange dance of privacy vs. transparency. It honestly needs both, though they're necessarily in conflict with each other.👁️🕵️ Network and institutional transparency plus personal privacy is a great goal. But especially choice: you choose what you reveal. To better understand the various privacy approaches employed by different cryptocurrencies, and their common attack vectors, check out the videos that I did for ZecHub, including the one on personal privacy. It's phrased from the Zcash perspective, but these tips apply regardless of which cryptocurrency you're using. Finally, follow Naomi Brockwell's work. She's one of the premier educators on personal privacy. Also follow @Seth For Privacy . He's an invaluable resource, especially on achieving privacy on transparent chains like Bitcoin. Privacy is a fundamental human right!✊

What new information have you received that caused you to change a long-held opinion on something?

I'm feeling like we increasingly communicate primarily through memes. What's your favorite meme of the past year?

Haha took me long enough https://twitter.com/TheDesertLynx/status/1681013964866564096

I'll be seeing everyone at Zcon4 very soon! Not a bad excuse to go to Barcelona. https://twitter.com/ZcashFoundation/status/1680969337903915009

Most people don't care about privacy because it's not real to them. It's a vague "Google knows everything" idea. But show them which private information everyone knows, and watch them freak out. 👁️👄👁️

Every true patriot hates their government.