What's unrealistic is the widespread state of IT ignorance among the masses and the kleptocracy that profits from it.
Without this widespread ignorance, and with IPv6, a global per host, and without the disappearance and massive price hikes of RAM and storage, we could all have a home server running, for example, a family's personal services:
- contacts (Radicale/Baïkal/Davis/*)
- photos (Immich, PhotoPrism, ...)
- video (Jellyfin and the like, even Stash for those who fancy it)
- files in general (e.g. SyncThing)
- email (fetched via OfflineIMAP and similar, served via Dovecot+webmail for those who want it, etc.)
- federated XMPP/Matrix for family and friends
- ...
And even for the State, a national blockchain for digital identity (NFTs), contracts (e.g. property sales, etc.), and money, with a node for every family and consensus to regulate it, for maximum resilience and reliability, thus also enabling electronic voting.
But well, given the widespread IT ignorance, it's just a pipe dream.
In this model, we would have de facto teleworking, and therefore de-urbanisation, with houses and sheds with solar panels on the roof, batteries, and activities shifted to maximise self-consumption—thereby electrifying without loading the national grid, in a true and substantial transition that would otherwise be unrealistic.
Personally, that's how my house is, national blockchain aside (but with a personal lightning node anyway), and it works beautifully; it would work brilliantly up to ~45° latitude across the EU and slightly less (I think, I haven't checked the PV maps) for North America. Simply doing this would kill off the aforementioned kleptocrats. No cities means:
- no end to private property for the majority
- no dependence on private collective transport in the hands of a tiny few
- no fast tech/fast fashion with very low costs for the vendor but high costs for the customer and nature due to the piles of waste
- no ready-meal deliveries with tons of packaging
A resilient, renewable society (including the built environment) that can evolve but doesn't have the majority enslaved to a tiny few. This is why it isn't happening.
Read also https://shaun.nz/why-were-never-using-wise-again-a-cautionar... than understand why crypto (not stablecoin) shift is a need not because their are good (they are not much) but because they can't block us. Banks and fintech have dug their own grave with such behaviors, and they'll resist until common people will understand.
Heat pumps move heat, the small extra amount from the compressor does not change the game. On the other hand, things change significantly with the huge thermal mass of reinforced concrete buildings exposed to the sun, large glass facades exposed to the sun, and bare earth exposed to the sun.
Heat rises and dissipates from the atmosphere, so the point isn't the heat moved from a closed bit of atmosphere to an open one heading towards space, but rather the massive thermal mass of buildings constructed without ventilated facades, and fields and deserts without photovoltaic panels to stop the heat from massively warming the ground.
However, people don't like saying this; they don't like saying that it's the dense city that increases global warming and isn't ecological at all. They don't like it because the city serves to extract wealth from the many for the few.
FLOSS is a tool for efficiency, for sharing automation and knowledge; just like knowledge itself, it cannot be commercial, it cannot have paywalls. Simply put, everyone must develop what they need, publishing the code from day zero, from the very first commit, this is what creates the community on a larger scale.
The problem isn't Open Source, it's the commercial organisation of knowledge which is simply unsustainable. It is society that needs to change.
Honestly, those who lost money did so because they were aiming for profits, not for The Network State, or for having non-seizable money etc. On the other hand, for those who got in early because they were online and curious at the time, with a small amount of money back then has made them billionaires today, an extremely low risk. If they arrived a bit later, millionaires, still with a really soft risk.
Then of course, there are MANY problems starting with BTC https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html but they generally aren't what most people talk about, and today, even if the complexity is insane, the documentation sparse, and the code quality questionable, Lightning is actually the only truly scalable solution we have for micropayments and payments of various amounts, generally not large ones. It has some absurd aspects, but that hardly matters. It works.
More generally, we don't have a crystal ball; where we can, we diversify, certainly limiting risk but also taking a bit of a gamble; where we can't, we choose to watch and see how it goes, knowing that we'll pay for it in terms of returns.
As things stand for me personally, given the level of IT obscenity in the traditional banking world, which in 2026 still doesn't have decent APIs open to retail customers, or at least decent export functions, shameful websites, a push towards completely unacceptable mobile apps, absurd limits etc etc etc, well, the worst CEx is less bad than the best bank. I don't trust either, but I distrust the CEx less than the bank, and given Wikileaks, Francesca Albanese, the protesters in Canada, the various private individuals illegally "sanctioned" by the EU Commission and so on, I'd say it's madness to rely on banks for anything more than the bare minimum.
Most people today know nothing of this and don't weigh it up, but they will, and they'll pay for this delay with their lack of attention.
(WFH since ~11 years), the issue with remote work lay in the many who do not really know how to work in the present time. We're full of people who don't know how to use email even though they use it every day, or a chat app even though they're on it day and night; they can't use a bloody generic website even though they spend most of their lives online, and so on.
These people are simply a problem when working remotely, and while they're certainly present at the bottom of the ladder, they are particularly numerous among management. There are really very few who understand IT well enough not to cause issues and actually be productive.
The handful of people who have a financial interest in keeping the masses enslaved in the city, namely those with financial interests in office spaces, ready made food, fast-tech, fast-fashion, ... prey on this.
This is the real problem. The way out is to teach IT, not CS, not CE, at school, starting from early childhood, and to really teach it: FLOSS desktops, not cloud+mobile is mandatory. And since we don't have enough teachers, the only way is through video lessons, but to do something like that at a national level requires a level of understanding and commitment that currently seems largely absent among most people.
My experience in corporate life has been that, as you go up the corporate ladder, you have to dumb down and goo-goo-ga-ga-ify information for managers.
Like, we have a log of all our work done, it's git. It tracks and timestamps each individual commit. But my manager can't use our git frontend. I guess it's too hard? Not sure. So, we then re-enter our time in Jira.
Of course, his manager can't open up Jira. So, we also create a word document every week documenting everything we have done. We actually also spell out and link the Jira issues (???). And then that gets sent to him.
Some of this I can understand. Reporting and distilling data is important. But nothing is being distilled, it's the same information just duplicated. This could all be automated but, of course, it's not.
I admit among my coworkers, for a few, I wonder how they manage to work remotely and be productive. These same people are the one who suck up all the oxygen out of meetings; and leave a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the day.
Another take to deny the need of a POLITICAL union. Anyway a large slice of the issue lay in the many different social security systems, the vastly different inheritance tax regimes (zero inheritance tax for some states, over 80% for others) and so on, having a company that exists as a state unto itself, but with employees from another state subject to its rules, doesn't simplify things; it only complicates them.
What is needed is the arrest of the Commission for a coup d'état and high treason, with its powers being transferred to the European Parliament.
Well, more than just a website, I'd call it a domain name to be used for various personal services, starting with email. A domain name is like your home address in the physical world; not having one is like not being a citizen of civil society.
As for the domain, well, one can also have a website to introduce yourself to the world, the usefulness is marginal for the average person, but yeah, you can have one. It can be used as a sort of business card, an interactive CV, or your own little corner to tell the world what you think; it has many uses and each has implications to consider. But the domain is the essential part. It's about having your own mail even if you use GMail (for domains), so that one day you can switch providers without changing anything for your contacts. It's perhaps hosting XMPP or Matrix for yourself to talk to friends, family, and sometimes even total strangers without depending much on other people's services. It's about serving your own web apps to yourself on the go. The website itself matters less in all of this.
I think GoCardless stopped accepting new accounts recently, which makes it a bit harder to rely on now.
Feels like the options for EU/SEPA are still pretty limited. I’ve been looking into alternatives as well, curious if you’ve found anything that works well also?
Otherwise, with the scraping approach Woob https://woob.tech/ (FLOSS) works well enough on some banks... It's damn absurd that banks and even supermarkets do not offer authenticated feeds for data export but that's is unfortunately...
Me personally I think banks do their best to push people toward cryptos only because of their crappy services... Even the worst CEx offer better data access the banks...
Without this widespread ignorance, and with IPv6, a global per host, and without the disappearance and massive price hikes of RAM and storage, we could all have a home server running, for example, a family's personal services:
- contacts (Radicale/Baïkal/Davis/*)
- photos (Immich, PhotoPrism, ...)
- video (Jellyfin and the like, even Stash for those who fancy it)
- files in general (e.g. SyncThing)
- email (fetched via OfflineIMAP and similar, served via Dovecot+webmail for those who want it, etc.)
- federated XMPP/Matrix for family and friends
- ...
And even for the State, a national blockchain for digital identity (NFTs), contracts (e.g. property sales, etc.), and money, with a node for every family and consensus to regulate it, for maximum resilience and reliability, thus also enabling electronic voting.
But well, given the widespread IT ignorance, it's just a pipe dream.
In this model, we would have de facto teleworking, and therefore de-urbanisation, with houses and sheds with solar panels on the roof, batteries, and activities shifted to maximise self-consumption—thereby electrifying without loading the national grid, in a true and substantial transition that would otherwise be unrealistic.
Personally, that's how my house is, national blockchain aside (but with a personal lightning node anyway), and it works beautifully; it would work brilliantly up to ~45° latitude across the EU and slightly less (I think, I haven't checked the PV maps) for North America. Simply doing this would kill off the aforementioned kleptocrats. No cities means:
- no end to private property for the majority
- no dependence on private collective transport in the hands of a tiny few
- no fast tech/fast fashion with very low costs for the vendor but high costs for the customer and nature due to the piles of waste
- no ready-meal deliveries with tons of packaging
A resilient, renewable society (including the built environment) that can evolve but doesn't have the majority enslaved to a tiny few. This is why it isn't happening.
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