Police – Do Not Cross

>> May 6, 2020

>> Blog Post #68

Another week, another company that folds due to restrictive legislation. This time it’s the Dutch company BitKassa.

last time was end of April only… 🙁

Imagine you run a business and from one day to another you see the need to place this big red banner on your front page.

It must hurt so bad.

Here’s their post about why. 1st paragraph includes this:

« Main reason is we no longer want to commit to the excessive demands of the Dutch Central Bank, and the Dutch Ministry of Finance who does a great job serving the Dutch Central Bank in enforcing unreasonable regulation upon Dutch Bitcoin companies. »

Country legislation that protects government sponsored associations of non-elected officials to the detriment of hardworking, honest people who are trying to build for the future.

Makes me sad.

Building is important. Staying in the shade probably is too. It’s still early in the game. I learned early enough that you did not want to sit at the frontier of bitcoin to FIAT if you did not want to face issues. This is just another example of this. License fees, legal delays or costs and fines are designed to run you out of business and protect the establishment.

Traffic Restrictions

>> March 19, 2020

>> Blog Post #43


There’s a local police officer in the town my kids go to school that really rubs be the wrong way. The police force in France is set up in an unusual way that people outside of France are not aware of. You actually have two “police” forces. One is called the police and is similar to what you probably have wherever you live. The other is the gendarmerie and actually consists of a police force of trained military. They actually fall under the army’s authority.

Anyways, this particular guy that really annoys me is from the police, but the kind of police that has very little authority because they report to the mayor and deal with very limited local affairs. His morning responsibility is to help me cross the street in front of the kids’ school while making a point of showing all the cars in the town that he’s in charge of the crossing. Just thinking about it pisses me off, the guy is so overzealous it is embarrassing. I’ve also seen him turn on the siren and the lights – only when people are there to witness the scene – when someone is double parked so that he can do his best chuck Norris impersonation and threaten to hand the driver a parking ticket. That’s pretty much the extent of his power. But boy does he take his job seriously.

Anyways, he stopped me in the street on Monday, the day the restrictions on being out of home came into effect in France. It was 12:05 and the restrictions were supposed to take effect at 12:00. He asked me if I had my self-signed attestation authorizing me to be out of my home. I knew it was the first day and I was not running much of a risk by not having it, so I responded I did not. He lectured me for a sec and I drove home.

Today I went to town again, to try to find some toilet paper. What else?

He was there.

He stopped me.

I opened the window and handed him my self-signed attestation without even looking at him. I cannot suppress the feeling of anger at having the state restrict my liberty by confiscating public spaces. The form was filled out thoroughly as I just don’t want to be fined. I didn’t add comments to it, although I really really really want to. Nothing was missing from it. Name, address, birth date, purpose of me cruising around on such a fine day and my signature.

There was nothing he could say about it.

And yet he did….

“you should add the time of the day you are leaving your house”.

This is not something that is requested on the form, just another overzealous ask of his. I guess he’ll be asking for my DNA and fingerprints tomorrow.

These are the first people that jump ships when shit hits the fan and become oppressors. Fucking fascist.


The DAO Rant

>> January 28, 2020

>> Blog Post #19

Here’s a quick one.

I felt like punching someone the other day. I was hanging out at a conference, just outside of an open stage, trying to put some order in all the notes I take or voice recordings I have.

I was in a very large industrial type of exposition hall, where the entire space was open except for a few areas where talks were being held and that were separated from the rest of the hall by drapes.

The seat I had chosen when I sat down was on the side, far away from all the chairs and tables that were closer to the food courts and the kids’ play area. I thought it would be calmer and more comfortable to get some work done. I was wrong.

A few minutes after I had sat down, turned on the computer, taken the notepad out, the draped area next to me started filling up. The talk started and I wasn’t really paying attention, concentrating on whatever I was doing while also listening to some music with my noise cancelling headphones. But the talk was loud. Just enough for me to pick up some words here and there, which after a few minutes were enough to break my concentration and grab my attention. Eventually, I pieced together enough of these to understand what the guy was saying, even though I really felt like I was trying to fight it.

It was one of those dumbasses that will revolutionize the world because they understand it better than us and they have figured out just how to organize everything and put it in a freaking DAO.

A DAO, if you have never heard of one before, stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. If I were to describe it in a few words, I’d say it’s an organization, a protocol or a governance that is based on people interacting with a software where all the rules of the organization are already programmed. When events trigger some kind of reaction by the software, the execution of the response is automatic.

While I believe studying how organizations function and how they could work better is an interesting topic, I have a real problem with most of the people I meet who are working on DAOs. The guy that was talking so loud in that mic the other day was one of them.

For some reason, that I just cannot wrap my head around, supporters of those DAOs seem to believe that they know how to fix stuff and organize it better. They found their target organization and they will prove to us it is better and once we all hop on the bandwagon, we’ll see for ourselves just how great it is. And yet, no one has jumped ships. Guess why? Because they know squat.

I don’t know why they always feel like they can create something out of thin air, perfect it when no one cares and then just expect people to flock over. The myth of the creator. Playing god. That’s what it is.

The guy kept babbling about the craziest stuff, like how he hadn’t used the verb “to be” in his entire talk (the damn thing was over an hour long) because that could represent his view and he wanted to remain neutral. He’s probably the type of person that believes he could be a perfectly objective journalist if he wanted to. Fool.

You cannot, nor should you impose your will on others. Should you want to setup some kind of organization with your friends, family, company, fine. That’s your business and none of mine, and I have no problem with that at all. It’s actually interesting. But do not for one second believe you can do anything more. It would be morally flawed by essence.

Man, I really felt like punching the guy in the face.

End rant.