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The UK’s Latest “Debanking” Scandal Should Give Everyone Pause

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First they came for Muslim activists. Then they came for Nigel Farage. Now, they’re coming for independent media outlets.

UK-based readers may recall the moment almost exactly three years ago when the word “debanking” entered the mainstream British English lexicon. The prestigious London-based private bank Coutts had just decided to close Nigel Farage’s bank account due to his unsavoury political views and alleged Russian connections. That decision turned out to be very costly.

Almost immediately, Farage did what Farage does best: he whipped up a massive media frenzy. In next to no time two senior banking scalps had been claimed: those of Dame Alison Rose, the CEO of Coutts’ parent bank and “Big Four” lender, Natwest (formerly known as the Royal Bank of Scotland) and Coutts’ chief executive Peter Flavel.

Within a month, Natwest’s share price had slumped 8%, wiping £1 billion off its market cap, much of which was being propped up with public funds, and generating juicy returns for short-selling hedge funds. As we reported at the time, the resulting scandal drew much-needed public attention to a long-standing but accelerating trend — the “de-banking” of people and organisations with politically inconvenient views:

[T]his is hardly a one-off event: as I reported a couple of weeks ago, banks on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly debanking their customers, often without explanation. I gave the example of California-based writer, activist, and social and political commentator Elad Nehorai, whose political views and ideals could not diverge more from those of Nigel Farage. Yet he, too, had his account at Bank of America, his bank of many years, summarily closed with no apparent warning or explanation…

Without a bank account, it is almost impossible to participate in the economy. And it is getting more difficult as cash becomes harder and harder to access and use. As Alex Lo writes for South China Morning Post, “Banking is a fundamental utility like water and electricity, and that’s precisely why democratic societies are increasingly turning to its use as a method of censorship and repression.”

However, the resulting government inquiry concluded that customers were not being “debanked” for political reasons. As a result, not only has debanking continued but debanked customers now face the prospect of being blocked from setting up new accounts at other banks, as the Telegraph reported on Monday:

Banks are planning to block “debanked” customers from setting up accounts with other lenders, potentially leading to innocent people being effectively locked out of the financial system, The Telegraph can reveal.

Lobby group UK Finance is developing a platform that will allow banks to share data on their customers where they detect “markers of economic crime”.

Lloyds, Barclays and Revolut have already started sharing data about customers, leading to accounts being frozen or closed, The Telegraph understands, following a pilot in 2024.

The data-sharing platform will build on that pilot to make a UK-wide system, which could automatically bar people from opening another account.

But concerns have been raised that thousands of innocent customers and businesses who have been debanked unfairly could be barred from opening up an account with another bank, effectively leaving them locked out of the financial system.

The latest victim of the debanking trend is the left-wing news website The Canary, which has accused the Lloyds Banking Group of “withholding a substantial amount of our money”  after nearly a decade of use. The news outlet — which brands itself as “radical working-class media” — says “Lloyds has not explained why it has taken this action… despite multiple communications from us”.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Canary speculated about the possible reasons behind Lloyds’ decision, including its anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine stance:

Whilst we do not currently know the reasons behind our debanking, we cannot afford to be naive about this.

We do know that multiple other politically engaged people have suffered similar actions by other banks in recent times. It is not lost on us that powerful banks are able to restrict the financial activity of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine organisations and individuals.

It is an outrage that the Canary has been unceremoniously dropped into financial instability with no notice or explanation from Lloyds.

Starmer’s Last Attack

It would hardly come as a surprise the attack was in response to The Canary’s pro-Palestine sympathies. The UK government has done everything within its not inconsiderable powers to criminalise pro-Palestine, anti-genocide activism, including by scrapping the ancient right to trial by jury. Through its new National Security Law, the outgoing Keir Starmer government seeks to bulldoze literal thought crime legislation into law — in Orwell’s native United Kingdom.

An article in The Canary explains just how dire a threat the new National Security Law poses to journalism and political dissent, describing it as “one last power grab” by Keir Starmer’s outgoing government:

As I am sat here writing this, there’s a sense of terror kicking in. I’m a journalist. It’s my job to be in the know about foreign affairs. At the Canary we pride ourselves on bringing people the news that the mainstream doesn’t dare. But this terror is absolutely nothing compared to what other people must be feeling.

This radicalised weaponisation of new legislation will hit marginalised communities so first and hardest. Journalists and community workers with direct, lived and painful connections to global conflict zones are facing a massive legal trap. If a reporter so much as quotes an entity that the home secretary has designated as a threat, they face immediate prosecution.

Civil liberties groups warn that the law will grant the Home Office absolute power to decide who is allowed to speak. And by leaving the definition of ‘assisting a designated body’ vague, the state has created a total monopoly on the narrative. It’s very much going to be, follow their way and toe the line, or go to jail, it seems.

Indie media outlet Zeteo warned of the severe danger of this new power-grab. The outlet warned that journalists face immediate arrest simply for conducting public interest interviews with banned groups. People will only get one side of the story. There will only be one narrative fed to us… and it will be the government’s.

The timing of Lloyds Bank’s debanking of The Canary is also curious, coming just two months after it announced the launch of a daily left-wing print tabloid — and what’s more, one that defends Palestinian rights. Following an injection of cash last year from used car and property website founder Cecil Hetherington, Canary director Steve Topple hailed the new tabloid as an alternative to the corporate press.

After its debanking, the Canary says it is now in a “financially precarious situation” and does not know when “money that Lloyds is holding will be returned” or how it will affect “our ability to get another bank account in the future”.

“The immediate effect has been that we have been unable to pay any staff or contractors,” Topple told Novara Media. “We have a large team, and all of them are now extremely distressed and in limbo. Many of them are marginalised people and it has hit them very hard. We are trying our best to mitigate the situation and have so far received much-appreciated support from members of the public.”

Lloyds’ actions have already triggered a storm of protests from across the political spectrum.

A Growing Phenomenon

The first major target of debanking in the UK, well over a decade ago, were members of the British Muslim community, particularly those involved in Pro-Palestinian activism. But unlike with Farage, their plight was met with total radio silence in the mainstream media, as the veteran journalist Peter Oborne recounts in the video below.

By the time Farage had lost access to Coutts’ banking services, in the summer of 2023, banks in the UK were closing nearly one thousand accounts daily, with just over 343,000 closed in 2022, compared to about 45,000 in 2017.

Following the Farage affair, the Financial Conduct Authority conducted an investigation into banks’ debanking practices, the conclusion of which was that banks had not been closing customers’ accounts for political reasons. Farage described the outcome as “farcical”.

In the US, recent victims of debanking include Scott Ritter, the former United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspector who is a prominent critic of US and Western imperialism. In January, his bank of 26 years, Citizens’ Bank, closed all of his accounts, including his and his wife’s joint accounts with their daughters, without offering an explanation, as he recounts in the first minutes of the following interview with Judge Napolitano:

In a letter to Ritter Citizens Bank apparently that not only was it under no obligation to divulge the reasons for closing his accounts but that Citizens’ policy actively prevents any disclosure of any information concerning the decision to close the account. As Cato Institute notes, this silent treatment often has to do with confidentiality laws:

However, these are not laws meant to protect the financial privacy of customers. Rather, this confidentiality is to prevent citizens from finding out they are under criminal investigation. For example, reports filed under the Bank Secrecy Act are restricted so heavily that banks cannot share the details of the reports or even admit that a report exists.

While Ritter does not know the exact reasons for his debanking, he suspects that someone in the FBI, fully armed with the “totality of [his] banking transactions”, had “tipped off” Citizens Bank about “suspicious activity” that resulted in Citizens Bank issuing an SAR [Suspicious Activity Report].”

Ritter believes that donations he had received and subsequent cash withdrawals before his three trips to Russia in 2025, which thanks to US and EU sanctions is disconnected from the Western economy, may have triggered the move. According to Ritter, the “purpose of “de-banking” is to harass a targeted individual,” even in the absence of evidence pointing to any criminal activity.”

The reasons for an account closure, while often a mystery to the customers affected, often include operational reasons. Put simply, a financial institution chooses to close the account of a customer because the reputational risks of being associated with that client are simply too high. However, political or ideological motivations appear to play a part in some prominent cases.

The most clear-cut example of this was the Canadian government’s decision, in February 2022, to invoke the emergencies act to compel banks to seize the accounts of the freedom convoy protesters who had blocked several key border crossings. According to the minutes of a meeting between Canada’s Economy Minister, Vice President and WEF board member Chrystia Freeland and senior bank executives the day before the act was invoked, one CEO flagged concerns that if banks were forced to close accounts, it could be seen as the sector “being used as an arm of the government” or even “a political weapon.”

In 2022, Paypal banned the accounts of the UK-based Free Speech Union, its founder Toby Young and his online publication, the Daily Sceptic, for purportedly breaching its policies against hate speech. Worse still, the fintech giant surreptitiously slipped a line into its terms of service granting itself the right to fine customers $2,500 for spreading misinformation. When the news got out, provoking a huge public backlash, PayPal claimed it had all been a big mistake.

Of course, as NC readers EssCetera and Rev Kev pointed out in comments to a previous post, Paypal has a long, storied history of doing this sort of thing, going all the way back to its freezing of Wikileaks’ account in 2010. And banks in the US have been closing down the accounts of workers in the porn industry since at least 2014 as part of “Operation Chokepoint”, which targeted certain undesirable but legal business sectors (h/t Michaelmas).

From “Debanking” to “Civil Death”

If there’s one fate worse than being debanked, it is suffering through the ordeal of “civil death”. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian occupied territories, became subject to US sanctions roughly a year ago that cut her and her family off not only from US banking but also travel and tech.

In Albanese’s case, it was clear to her why she was being put under constraints normally reserved for narco-barons and terrorists: she had just published a UN report denouncing the more than 60 (largely Western) multinational corporations that are allegedly complicit in, and profiting from, Israel’s military occupation of Gaza.

“This fury [came] because I poked the bear,” she said. “Not in one eye, in both eyes.”

In the clip below, Albanese explains (in French), as she fights back tears, the extent to which she has been barred from participating in basic civil life since the imposition of US sanctions against her:

“I can’t make payments with my working credit card nor can I do transfers; my health insurance has been cancelled, I can’t make hotel reservations… I’m being treated as if I were Pablo Escobar. “

Other victims of civil death, this time at the hands of EU authorities, include the German journalist Hüseyin Doğru and Jacques Baud, a retired Swiss colonel and former senior strategic analyst for NATO. In both cases, the justifications were openly ideological. Baud was accused of of acting as a “mouthpiece” for pro-Russian propaganda and disseminating “conspiracy theories” about the war in Ukraine while Doğru was targeted due to his reporting on Gaza.

In the case of Doğru, both his wife and mother were also targeted with sanctions (h/t vao). In neither case were criminal charges imposed, and because the sanctions are defined as an administrative measure within the EU’s bureaucracy, neither Baud nor Doğru can appeal to a court of law in their respective countries of residence (Belgium and Germany). This is the very definition of Kafkaesque.

Worse still, these sorts of processes could soon be automated almost across the board, as I warned in my 2022 book Scanned:

Combining [central bank] digital currencies with digital IDs while phasing out, or even banning, the use of cash would grant governments and central banks the ability not only to track every purchase we make (and made in the past) but also to determine what we can and cannot spend our money on. They could also prevent certain “undesirable” people from buying anything. Anyone with a blocking notice attached to their digital identity would “thus be unable to do many of the most basic things independently,” says [German financial journalist Norbert] Häring.

Incidentally, the digital euro has already become a de facto legal reality, after the European Parliament (EP)’s economic and monetary affairs committee gave a green light to the eurozone central bank digital currency (CBDC) last week. Presumably, even many members of our highly informed readership will have been unaware of this fact since it all occurred against a backdrop of near-total media silence.

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46 comments

  1. vao

    “neither Baud nor Dogru can appeal to a court of law in their respective countries of residence (Switzerland and Belgium).”

    Actually, Baud is a Swiss citizen residing in Belgium, while Doğru is a German citizen residing in Germany.

    There have been other cases of that kind of “social death” imposed by the EU, the most well-known being Nathalie Yamb (Swiss citizen living in Switzerland), Thomas Röper, and Alina Lipp (both German citizens, had to flee to Russia).

    All this is made even worse because, as in the case of Scott Ritter, relatives are likewise being struck by the same sanctions. This also occurred to Alina Lipp’s mother and Hüseyin Doğru’s wife — with the justification that those persons’ assets were serving to support a sanctioned individual. Doğru could at least have a court of law overturn that decision in an emergency ruling — basically on the grounds that since German constitution and law prescribe that spouses are obligated to support each other, sanctioning his wife because she was helping him financially was illegal. Following that setback, the EU and German authorities went on to sanction his mother…

    When the naughties were ruling, this kind of practice — sanctioning relatives of a sanctioned person — was called Sippenhaft. It fits with the current Zeitgeist.

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  2. Es s Ce Tera

    I can see how this might shift the world to blockchain, crypto and definance. A silver lining?

    And by the way, during Occupy it was PayPal and such which blocked access to funds for various Occupies, to this day keeping the donated funds as far as I know.

    I hope NC has considered the financial situation with regard to these sorts of things.

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    1. jefemt

      One of my alternative economic metrics recurs in the mid-western US.
      It is very very common to see middle aged to older American men using cash.
      Big wads of cash. Fiat is worthless, crypto simply needs a loss of power or an electronic block.

      Not sure what the answer is here— just an interesting thing to see guys with wads of cash.
      I’m not a fan— shake- down, or simple loss / misplacement.

      I assume they have the devil’s right hand in the other pocket.

      About the time that Daddy left to fight the big war
      I saw my first pistol in the general store
      In the general store, when I was thirteen
      I thought it was the finest thing I ever had seen

      So l asked if I could have one someday when I grew up
      Mama dropped a dozen eggs, she really blew up
      She really blew up, and she didn’t understand
      Mama said the pistol is the devil’s right hand

      The devil’s right hand, the devil’s right hand
      Mama says the pistol is the devil’s right hand

      Me very first pistol was a cap and ball Colt
      Shoots as fast as lightnin’ but it loads a mite slow
      It loads a mite slow, and soon I found out
      It’ll get you into trouble but it can’t get you out

      So about a year later I bought a Colt 45
      Called a peacemaker but I never knew why
      I never knew why, I didn’t understand
      Mama says the pistol is the devil’s right hand

      The devil’s right hand, the devil’s right hand
      Mama says the pistol is the devil’s right hand

      Got into a card game in a company town
      I caught a miner cheating, I shot the dog down
      I shot the dog down, I watched the man fall
      He never touched his holster, never had a chance to draw

      The trial was in the morning and they drug me out of bed
      Asked me how I pleaded, not guilty I said
      Not guilty I said, you’ve got the wrong man
      Nothing touched the trigger but the devil’s right hand

      The devil’s right hand, the devil’s right hand
      Mama says the pistol is the devil’s right hand

      The devil’s right hand, the devil’s right hand
      Mama says the pistol is the devil’s right hand

      Reply ↓
      1. Retired Carpenter

        In my line of business some self-employed carpenters and carpenters-helpers we ask to help for a big job request their wages in cash, every day, when we down tools. Makes bookkeeping somewhat complicated. Thankfully, security is not an issue.

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      2. Other JL

        Could you please clarify what you mean by “fiat is worthless” in a post that otherwise is extolling the virtues of cash transactions? Cash is fiat, so I’m having difficulty understanding here.

        Reply ↓
    1. Ignacio

      I feel sorry for limiting my participation here to an “I very much agree” on both the importance of the post and thanking Nick. Leaves me speechless. IMO, this is very revealing about the institutional leaders pushing for this kind of aggression once and again. IMO, they are nothing but vengeful punishers resembling the Holy Inquisition in a modernized neoliberal fashion.

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      2. Henry Moon Pie

        The circumstances are somewhat flipped from the Inquisition. In the case of the Inquisition, authorities targeted small minorities with the purpose of expunging what the majority regarded as impure elements. With debanking, a tiny minority consisting of a managerial elite, seek to use the state’s authority against a majority with the purpose of maintaining their power in the face of an ever-rising tide of majoritarian anger.

        Their hope must be that the anger will go away if they can just keep reality from the people. The danger is that they are refusing to let a boiling pan let off steam, and things will soon boil over.

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  4. ambrit

    In a related note; as I commented over on another blog, I was reading the fine print on an ad letter from AT&T touting their fibre service the other day and came across this.
    “Internet Backup. The smartphone for the authorized wireless line must be at home for the duration of the Fiber outage. Location tracking must be enabled on all devices.”
    There it is in black and white. The Panopticon is being mandated by Private Capital.
    Add this to the financial scheming described above and we begin to see the outlines of the New and Improved Neoliberal Dispensation.
    One thing to remember about the Neoliberal Dispensation and its schemes, they do not live rent free anywhere, especially in our heads.
    Next up, a real Coventry as described by Heinlein in one of his early stories?
    Stay safe.

    Reply ↓
  5. The Rev Kev

    The only thing surprising about this is that the police have not been given powers to enter the home of one of these ‘unpersons’ and seize and cash or valuables from them and their partners on the grounds that they might be possibly a result of the activities that got them debanked in the first place. It would be a logical extension. This is really evil stuff this. Thanks for the recap, Nick.

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    1. Dingleberry

      Raiding homes might be a bridge too far for the current Powers, but with CBDC (rolled out for the Children’s safety of course!) they wouldn’t have to. 😶‍🌫️

      Reply ↓
  6. Michael Fiorillo

    Though not a solution to this repressive form of government fear, it’s an argument for having a stash of precious metals. You know things are bad when gold and silver bugs are being validated.

    Reply ↓
    1. ambrit

      As many of us in the prepper adjacent community say: “Stack the precious metals: Gold, Silver, Lead.”

      Reply ↓
      1. Retired Carpenter

        Retired Plumber,
        As someone once said, “if you have the lead, you can get gold and silver no problem” . The magic of philosopher’s stone…
        Be safe

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  7. KidDoc

    This is no joke. Once, a few years ago, when I was cashing a check, the young clerk threatened debanking when I resisted answering his questions about my job. He had already checked my US Drivers License, and his bank had my SSN and home address on file.

    Reply ↓
    2. albrt

      Bank tellers are not being friendly when you make a cash withdrawal and they ask if you have plans for the weekend or something like that. Which they do nearly every time. The U.S. has something called “know your customer” rules. They are legally required to spy on you.

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  8. Alex Cox

    Nick, thank you again. This is a very important issue, and you have put all the pieces together in one place. The attack on The Canary, perhaps the only leftist print medium left in Britain, is despicable.

    Reply ↓
    1. paul

      If they reintroduced prior laws,problem solved;

      A supplementary decree issued on 14 November 1935 defined who was legally considered Jewish and brought the Reich Citizenship Law into effect. On 26 November, further regulations extended the measures to “Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastards”, classifying them with Jews as “enemies of the race-based state”.

      I would not put it below merz to decree it

      Reply ↓
  10. Maxwell Johnston

    Thank you, Nick, for paying attention to this ongoing nonsense. Please keep it up.

    NC covered Scott Ritter’s debanking episode on 15 January 2026, at which time I commented on my own relevant experiences. Ironically enough, I was debanked yet again when I returned to Italy after my winter in Moscow…..from a top-tier Italian bank (well, in all honesty, Italy has no top-tier banks, they’re all in the Mickey Mouse league). No explanation as usual, but I assume it was because I was occasionally sending money to my Raiffeisen account in Moscow. Nothing disastrous (they gave me two months notice, and I had a backup local account anyway), but quite a pain in the neck nonetheless to re-route my automatic debits and credits.

    Always maintain multiple bank accounts, preferably in different countries. Always strive to keep as much of your assets as feasible outside of the formal banking system: cash, real estate, precious metals, diamonds, art, baseball cards, whatever. Do not give the bankers anything to feed on, aside from what you absolutely must keep on your accounts in order to function in our modern world.

    This compliance and debanking BS will only get worse going forward, I guarantee it. “Bank” is a four-letter word.

    Reply ↓
      1. Maxwell Johnston

        Exactly (apologies to Ernest H.)

        “A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.” — Mark Twain or Robert Frost, spot on either way

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        1. ambrit

          I went looking in Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary” and found nothing under bank or its derivatives.
          My idea is: Banker; a person of many interests.
          Stay safe, and liquid.

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    2. Rip Van Winkle

      When Fuentes talks about being de-banked / accounts confiscated the shocking part to me was that he was doing business with the likes of Chase and BOA in the first place.

      Reply ↓
  11. David in Friday Harbor

    The cult of personality that has come to substitute for ideological debate in the western political parties has resulted in the dependency of political elites on defamation of their opponents rather than sound policy debate. Starmer’s phony “anti-Semitism” smear campaign against Corbyn and the Labour left and Elizabeth Warren’s confabulated “anti-woman” smear of Bernie Sanders in 2020 are simply the tip of the iceberg.

    For at least the past decade the cynical neoliberal operatives who have captured the political party apparatus in every “western” country have had no real platform differences other than defaming their opponents, often falsely. As they are mostly self-serving careerists necessarily in cahoots with finance it should come as little surprise that finance is becoming their extra-judicial Stasi, utilizing starvation as a weapon.

    Fortunately in America we still have recourse to the courts — for now.

    Reply ↓
  12. Tom Stone

    These actions are all about “Protecting the Children” from being exposed to bad thoughts.
    We MUST protect the CHILDREN!
    Thankfully, we are ruled by people whose Wisdom and good intentions are beyond compare.

    Reply ↓
    1. jefemt

      The Cynic’s Guide to the World: Follow the Money.
      A Cynical Oil-trash Guide to the World: Follow the Oil, Nat Gas, and Money.

      Reply ↓
      1. ambrit

        An Ultra Cynical Oil-trash Guide to the World: Follow the hundred dollar bill (to the edge of the trailer park.)

        Reply ↓
          1. The Rev Kev

            I read that his Foundation is going to Venezuela and help out with relief. Maybe help all those orphans as well.

            Reply ↓
            1. flora

              His Foundation was so helpful in Haiti after their earthquake.

              The Irs are going there to “help”.
              Jimmy Dore with reporter Anya Parample.

              srael Child Trafficking in Venezuela after Earthquake?
              https://youtu.be/THUbXrixht8?t=654

              She detects something that looks like a pattern. Could be a coincidence.

              Reply ↓
              1. The Rev Kev

                After all those millions of dollars pumped in, how many houses did the Clinton Foundation end up building in Haiti? I think that it might have been nine in total.

                Reply ↓
    2. vao

      “Behind Israel’s ‘end game’ for Gaza: Theft of offshore gas reserves”

      I have been convinced ever since seeing Israelis razing those parts of Gaza they had conquered that this is definitely what drives them.

      After the treatment inflicted upon Gaza, there will no reconstruction (too many debris, too polluted, too laced with unexploded ordnance, too expensive), no agriculture (Israelis bulldozed fields and trees, and defoliated them), no large human communities (no drinking water left, everything polluted beyond remediation, no infrastructure left). People buying parcels or slots for a future urbanistic development there are fools who deserve to be relieved from their money.

      But a place razed to the ground, ready for installing a gas terminal, a harbour, and accommodations just for technical personnel. The jackpot. What remains to be done is to eliminate the surviving 1.5m or so Palestinians corralled there.

      Reply ↓
  14. flora

    well now, this is odd:

    “While Ritter does not know the exact reasons for his debanking, he suspects that someone in the FBI, fully armed with the “totality of [his] banking transactions”, had “tipped off” Citizens Bank about “suspicious activity” that resulted in Citizens Bank issuing an SAR [Suspicious Activity Report].” ”

    I recall Hunter Biden’s bank(s) issuing SARs to the FBI on Hunter’s account and……. nothing whatever happened to Hunter Biden or his bank account(s). In fact, the FBI agents who wanted to pursue the matter were silenced.

    Reply ↓
  15. none

    “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”

    KJV, Revelation 13:16-18.

    Reply ↓
  16. WillD

    I’d like to BAN the word ‘democracy’ and the phrase ‘the free world’. I never want to hear either of them again.

    Neither exists at all anymore.

    Reply ↓
  17. Dingleberry

    This is simply accelerating the move towards crypto and eventually privacy coins. 🪙
    Big Government derives its Power from its ability to interpose itself between each and every transaction, thereby leeching off of honest people’s work. Cut it off and the Leviathan can be brought down, or at least cut down to size. ✂️⬇️

    Reply ↓
    1. vao

      There have been a few recent cases (notably against Iran) where the government of the USA managed to deprive crypto-coin holders of their supposedly anonymous and safe belongings.

      Besides, all that crypto-stuff relying on such techniques as blockchains and proofs of work requires disproportionate amounts of energy to operate. Get a hold on electricity generation and distribution, and one can choke those crypto-currencies. Control of the physical world beats control of the digital space — see Hormuz, rare earths, Nord Stream, etc.

      Reply ↓
      1. Dingleberry

        government of the USA managed to deprive crypto-coin holders of their supposedly anonymous and safe belongings

        This happens when using non-custodial wallets. If you don’t control your keys, you don’t control your coins. Rookie mistake. 💸

        Bitcoin is pseudonymous but not anonymous like our humble blogger. A nation-state adversary can without too much trouble link your coins and activity if you’re not careful.

        Privacy coins like Monero are anonymous so they’ve been banned from centralized trading exchanges (CEX) but you can trade them on decentralized exchanges (DEX). ♾️

        disproportionate amounts of energy to operate

        There are alternatives like proof of stake that are much more efficient, some even combine the two. Monero famously was designed to be mined on personal CPUs (unlike massive GPU clusters) but it’s still a work in progress to keep out any one party from acquiring too much control over mining.

        Reply ↓

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