It is really make or break for the EU "regime".
This is because the EU never had a clear goal and so the project cannot be finished if it was to survive.
First it was about harmonizing law and standards, then the Euro and stabilizing and rebuilding the eastern Europe. All those things were good ideas and great successes, but now what?
This is why they really wanted to absorb Turkey 20 years ago, and now Ukraine, Brussels needs a new project so it can justify it's existence and expansion.
So it becomes a devouring mother who keep their 40 years old kids at home and try to find new one to adopt.
The EU is also unfortunately a very pre-Internet and pre-globalization project.
Just put yourself in the shoes of the previous generations who had to imagine a system to have Germany, Portugal and Greece adopt standards to be able to work efficiently together? This is a very hard problem in 1970 or 1980.
Today if Greta from Hamburg want to get in business with Portugal she search on Google, send an email, go on a Zoom meeting with real time translation and can pay with a stablecoin. If she need to figure out some laws in Portugal she can ask ChatGPT. This was science fiction 50 years ago.
That is not even necessary, she can go on aliexpress and do business in China instantly. China is not part of the EU but it seems we are very interconnected and do a lot of business with China anyway. And your shipment from China is protected by the Seventh fleet, not the EU.
Protecting the borders or raising an army? those are not things a bureaucracy know how to do or can do... it was not designed for this.
So yes the EU is trying to find a new frontiers: physical, ideological or digital. This is why in recent year it has been a lot about regulating the Internet, social media, porn, crypto, chat, AI, etc. But regulating a technology when the cat is already out of the bag is really hard so they will have to get China level authoritarian to show some results.
I remember clearly that 20 years ago when they were trying to pass their constitution they were saying: "do not worry we can transfer all power to the EU because any country could always veto it so it is safe"
I personally feel like the race to support a vast array of hardware is very costly for such a small team and might be a waste of their precious resources.
Of course I love FreeBSD and want it to be supported on my desktop or laptop but at what cost?
Here is the question I have always wanted to ask:
Why not make the ultimate compromise and say: you will be able to run FreeBSD on almost all laptops but it is gonna be through let say an Alpine Linux hypervisor and we are gonna ship it with all the glue you need to have a great experience.
About every CPU has great visualization capabilities nowadays and the perf are amazing.
Now some might start screaming at the idea but you already run your favorite operating system through a stack of software you do not trust or control: UEFI, CPU microcode, etc.
I believe we need OS diversity and if so much of the energy of project is spent on working on an infinite hardware support, how much is left for the real innovation?
I agree. Linux has a wealth of hardware drivers and the time would be better spent on a translation layer or do it via running a VM or even using LLMs to port the drivers over to FreeBSD en masse. That way BSD team can focus on their unique strengths.
I believe the only stablecoin that is "uncensorable" is the old MakerDAO DAI (pegged to USD with vaults overcollaterised with other tokens).
Not sure if there is a lot of liquidity left.
Its successor USDS has implemented all the mechanisms to censor some addresses but if I remember correctly this hasn't been activated yet.
All the other ones: USDC, USDT, EURC and the ruble one can be whipped out easily. So more risky for them than good old dollars.
Now I am still wondering, does the taproot asset protocol make it really uncensorable? because on Ethereum an address can be blacklisted by Tether and the USDT frozen (through the ERC20 contract I believe).
And I would be a bit surprise that Tether, which is more and more integrated and compliant with regulations, would start minting USDT on a system that doesn't have an asset freezing mechanism...
The whole thing is very recent, and the ecosystem is not very mature or developed (i.e. hardly any lightning wallet supports transfering taproot assets). But taproot was enabled in 2021, and Tether announced a taproot stablecoin as early as January 2025: https://tether.io/news/tether-brings-usdt-to-bitcoins-lightn...
I am not deep enough into the tech complexity, but AFAIK the token on TAP is traceable by the owner, just as bitcoin is. While not on-chain, the proof file that the new owner gets during transfer includes the full history and lineage of that token.
I.e. the moment you want to exchange the stablecoin token for the underlying asset (being it fiat USD, gold or whatnot) the stablecoin issuer can refuse to do that exchange for whatever grounds they have - probably based on regulation. So if a sanctioned entity (russia, iran) owned that token before, it is in the history and the stablecoin issuer can refuse to swap.
BUT: Good luck tying the public keys to real-world entities like russian goverment. Other than on-chain with bitcoin, you would only revel the public key if you traded with that entity, and are part of the lineage. The keys are not revealed to the entire world.
Plus, this also does not prevent fungibility of the token, you can still transfer the token to whatever other wallet you like, selling it to someone who does not care/check if it is tainted.
The whole stablecoint-over-taproot-over-lightning is IMHO way underreported and underestimated in media. This stuff has the potencial to obsolete any payments indermediaries, while combining the truly decentralized bitcoin blockchain, with anonymous and instant lightning transfers using non-volatile stablecoins. No shitcoins, no other blockchains with questionable control patterns, no discussions whether bitcoin has a value or not etc.
As for the technology, issuing a fungible token on bitcoin can be done in minutes using tapd. Download and a couple of commands + one single anchor bitcoin transactions, and the token is minted. Just government regulation around stablecoins hasn't caught up (and probably won't, because banks will lobby against abolishing themselves).
I really believe most "open source" big projects have been compromised long ago. We have saw all those "Foundations" taking them over with all their governance, bureaucracy and goal which do not make any sense at the first look.
One example is Fedora, which is part of "The Digital Public Goods Alliance" [0], "a multi-stakeholder initiative that accelerates the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods."
The Digital Public Goods Alliance has about every governments as member plus all the usual suspects: Gate Foundation and co.
All the leaderships have usually no background or experience in open source or even computers but are just magically placed there. But you can't say anything because they are mostly women.
You read the goals and roadmaps of those foundations and find out it has nothing to do with software or open source. It is basically there to control those projects and then have them implement all the age verification, digital id, etc.
So yes this is not a surprise all those projects are now all in absurd features such as age verification.
Yes, all the code of conducts pushed onto open source projects, often by outside actors or novice contributors backed by a mob, has been mostly about replacing people who care about the projects with people who care more about following rules and will do what they will be told.
Adding new signature schemes to bitcoin is relatively trivial and has been done previously (today Bitcoin supports both schnorr and ecdsa signatures).
Existing PQ standards have signatures with the wrong efficiency tradeoffs for usage in Bitcoin-- large signatures that are durable against a lot of use and supports fast signing, while for Bitcoin signature+key size is critical, keys should be close to single use, and signing time is irrelevant.
To the extent that I've seen any opposition related to this isn't only been in related to schemes that were to inefficient or related to proposals to confiscate the assets of people not adopting the proponent's scheme (which immediately raises concerns about backdoors and consent).
Claims that there is no development are as far as I can tell are just backscatter from a massive fraud scheme that is ongoing (actually, at least two distinct cons with an almost identical script). There are criminal fraudsters out seeking investments in a scheme to raise money to build a quantum computer and steal Bitcoins. One of them reportedly has raised funds approaching a substantial fraction of a billion dollars from victims. For every one sucker they convince to give them money, they probably create 99 others people panicked about it (since believing it'll work is a pre-req to handing over your money).
> proposals to confiscate the assets of people not adopting the proponent's scheme (which immediately raises concerns about backdoors and consent)
They're going to lose those assets regardless, either to the first hacker with a QC or via a protocol-level burn. The latter is arguably better for the network's long-term health, as it reduces circulating supply rather than subsidizing an attacker.
I can understand disagreeing about timelines but is there a flaw in the logic that once the underlying crypto is broken, "consent" is a moot point?
> A scam creates the credulous, not the skeptical. To portray skeptics as byproducts of a scam is an insult to logic — and a classic straw man fallacy.
No. When the scam is successful against a target the target is in on it and all for it and hands over their money. When the scam fails there are a number of different outcomes and one of them is thinking "this is real, going to happen, very scary, and also absolutely illegal, immoral, and/or self defeating, so I want no part of it".
Inherently scams tend to only convert a small percentage of their prospects,-- ones that don't aren't ambitious enough (e.g. aren't asking for enough money) and risk running their path too quickly by signing on too many people and getting too much exposure too fast.
Ethereum is way more complex than let's say Bitcoin and all parts are affected. This is not just the "signature scheme".
The fact that the signature size is multiplied by ~10 will greatly affect things like blockspace (what I guess is even more a problem with Bitcoin !)
Also they are the only blockchain I believe that put an emphasis on allowing large number of validators to run on very modest hardware (in the ballpark of a RPI, N100 or phone).
My understanding is they will need to pack it with a larger upgrade to solve all those problems, the so called zkVM/leanVM roadmap.
And then there are the L2 that are an integral part of the ecosystem.
So this is the greatest upgrade ever made on Ethereum, pretty much full rewrite, larger than the transition to proof of stake.
I remember before the Proof of Stake migration they were planning to redo the EVM too (with something WASM based at the time) but they had to abandon their plan. Now it seems there is no choice but to do it.
> I don't think it's been possible to feed the UK domestically since before WW2.
Of course you can, I know people being almost self sustainable right now on very little land. It is hard, frugal but highly rewarding and we have evolved to do it since very recently.
Energy and heating is a bit more complicated. We obviously cannot burn wood or coal like we use to because this is actually very damaging to the planet.
So this is where technology has to play a bigger role.
Farming might feel rewarding while watching someone else do the hard work. I watched and had to help my grandparents do it and went through my own decade of "farming" and it never gets easier and you only get older.
> ... "it never gets easier and you only get older."
Hence why traditionally farmers either had large families, hired outside workers, or most often did both.
(Source: I grew up in rancher/farmer territory and earned some of my earliest "spending money" working for local farmers or ranchers during harvest season.)
The population of the UK or Europe did not explode in the last hundred years. It did not even double.
The population used to be more rural and relatively self sufficient in terms of food. There is actually enough land in Europe to feed everybody, especially considering the great progress we made scientifically.
You can actually sustain yourself on a few hundred square meters of land and you won't get fat and be healthier (in your body and mind).
The great migration of the local population to the city to get a good factory or a bank job is over I believe. But the country side is still empty.
The reason is it is hard to make the jump first and ending up in the middle of nowhere living with a few old people.
Also your politicians hate independent people so they are not gonna encourage it. They would rather keep you in a constant guilty state about their vision of "climate change" while letting you board a 10 GBP Ryanair flight for a week-end city trip or order useless things on Temu.
For Europe and many other places, the solution to a more sustainable future is actually quite straightforward.
Europe’s big problem is the hindered of millions of climate refugees on the doorstep. Even the most open heart liberal will baulk at the population doubling or more in 20 years. The only ones promising a solution will be the neofeudalists
But Europe also have to stop believing they can solve the world problems and act on a global scale. This time is long gone, about at least a hundred year.
Every region, culture will need to find a path to sustainability in their own way. If the path they take is invading another region, it leads to war. Like it has been for thousands of years.
Presumably they mean that acceptance of migration is a continuum and the numbers of climate refugees would push a large fraction of people self identifying as liberal to oppose it.
What makes it a different question? What numbers change that change things?
Leaving aside what you hear on the internet, I personally know a few people who say they have no concern welcoming any number of refugees, a couple of them actually to the point of getting quite enraged at people who do have different opinions. So there definitely are some such people in existence.
Spaniard there, from rural background. Self-suficient... you wish. Post civil war even oranges were a luxury, something to be give as a present in Christmas. Any autharchic attemp, be left or right, just produced famines and misery.
> The great migration of the local population to the city to get a good factory or a bank job is over I believe. But the country side is still empty.
My major belief/bet is that young professionals that work in front of the computer all day will figure out that living in a very expensive city doesn’t make much sense and there are a ton of cheap rural houses in the beautiful countryside and we’ll have a reverse migration for young, educated white collars. Right now it’s just a trending topic for youtubers, but most people, especially Gen-Z existing in an economic limbo, have not caught on.
At least that’s my plan because it makes so much economic sense, I have had enough of city life and I am too old to care about urban amenities vs quality of life.
I think the fundamental problem is the conflict between climate, family and live-style vs corporate interest and economic growth.
Ideally, we should want populations that are either not growing or slowly shrinking, but we can't have this because multi-national corporations don't want to invest in countries with a declining consumer base. We must therefore sustain population growth indefinitely.
Similar humans would presumably prefer more space – perhaps a home with a few bedrooms and a decent sized garden where they can grow a little food and the kids and play in the summer. But we can't have this because it's more economically productive if we increase population density such that people increasingly live in small flats within high-rise buildings with no gardens and little natural light.
And I get it, money is nice... People will trade a lot of things for more money, but the government ideally should not encourage this.
Ideally the government should be encouraging people to have a home with a garden. To have a couple of kids. To grow some of their own food. To work in their local community, and therefore obtain an education which will help them to be productive members of their community – rather than say taking a punt at studying journalism at university and hoping they'll get a job in some city 200 miles from home and their family.
Just speaking personally, the city I grew up in in the UK has become hell to live in over the last couple of decades. It's almost impossible to drive around today because of densification which has taken place. All of the local fields that I played on as a kid have been turned into cheap flats which has transformed the semi-rural area I used to live into an ugly anti-human concrete jungle. And because of the number of people now living around here no one seems to know anyone anymore – I walk outside my house and it feels like there's random people everywhere, and I've noticed many people around me don't even seem to speak English anymore.
It's such a strange thing we are doing... It really makes no sense for us to want to live like this.
Makes sense if you want to make money, and have money enough to not have to suffer the worst of it yourself. Of course, nobody voted for it, but those that promised not to do it and did it anyway were democratically elected, so only a fascist would take issue with it surely.
> your politicians hate independent people so they are not gonna encourage it
Your politicians are actually subsidising the rural lifestyle with direct and indirect transfers. Eg in Europe, you can buy land, leave it more or less abandoned and cash in agricultural subsidies.
Subsistence farming would be farming to only feed the farmers with little excess left for trade, it's a little too keyhole in this context.
They're talking more in the direction of EU scale closed loop / closed cycle agriculture, in which a network of farms across countries interop to exchange resources (pig and chicken waste, for fertilizer, for example) in order to reduce or eliminate outside inputs (synthetic fertilizers from the Gulf, for example), but still work to maximise production for EU consumption.
Moving from the current situation to the situation you describe is impossible, because the UK has far too much debt and far too small an annual government income to pay for even the popular kinds of infrastructure spending, let alone the degrowth proposition you articulate. The millionaires really do take their assets and leave if taxes are raised and a Mossad-style international program to repatriate them in duffel bags would see the government that initiated it both out of power permanently and in cells themselves.
I happened to install Fedora Silverblue on a computer a few days ago and looked quickly at the memory usage after boot: it was about 6gb ! I usually run Alpine or FreeBSD, so I thought: great that thing consumes 10x the RAM.
I believe Fedora and Ubuntu use about the same set of technologies: systemd, wayland, Gnome, etc. so it is about the same.
Apart from working out of the box I do not really know what those distros have and I don't.
I just have to admit managing network interfaces is really easy in Gnome.
With the skyrocketing price of RAM this might finally be the year of the Linux desktop. But it is not gonna be Gnome I guess.
First it was about harmonizing law and standards, then the Euro and stabilizing and rebuilding the eastern Europe. All those things were good ideas and great successes, but now what?
This is why they really wanted to absorb Turkey 20 years ago, and now Ukraine, Brussels needs a new project so it can justify it's existence and expansion. So it becomes a devouring mother who keep their 40 years old kids at home and try to find new one to adopt.
The EU is also unfortunately a very pre-Internet and pre-globalization project.
Just put yourself in the shoes of the previous generations who had to imagine a system to have Germany, Portugal and Greece adopt standards to be able to work efficiently together? This is a very hard problem in 1970 or 1980.
Today if Greta from Hamburg want to get in business with Portugal she search on Google, send an email, go on a Zoom meeting with real time translation and can pay with a stablecoin. If she need to figure out some laws in Portugal she can ask ChatGPT. This was science fiction 50 years ago.
That is not even necessary, she can go on aliexpress and do business in China instantly. China is not part of the EU but it seems we are very interconnected and do a lot of business with China anyway. And your shipment from China is protected by the Seventh fleet, not the EU.
Protecting the borders or raising an army? those are not things a bureaucracy know how to do or can do... it was not designed for this.
So yes the EU is trying to find a new frontiers: physical, ideological or digital. This is why in recent year it has been a lot about regulating the Internet, social media, porn, crypto, chat, AI, etc. But regulating a technology when the cat is already out of the bag is really hard so they will have to get China level authoritarian to show some results.
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