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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • So couple things:

    1. Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) are certainly not untraceable. Public ledger means that all the transactions are publicly visible - if you can associate a wallet to a person or organization then you know where the money went, and there are businesses that specifically do that kind of research. Every single transaction ever is part of the blockchain record. Cryptocurrency is a terrible way to make a clandestine purchase.
    2. All currencies are made up (I know, real imfourteenandthisisdeep energy, but still technicallythetruth).

    *Edit - A silly caveat to this is that if the US government starts regularly transacting in Bitcoin, it would be very easy to audit… using blockchain means there’s a built-in transaction record… anybody with a little bit of experience in reading the ledger could just track everything.

    Other than that you’re absolutely right.

    1. Cryptocurrencies are still largely unregulated, and the crypto market has attracted exactly the kind of people you would expect to be most interested in unregulated financial transactions - scammers, thieves, con men, ransomware gangs, money launderers, and anyone who wants buy or sell CSAM, narcotics, weapons, DDOS-as-a-Service, and North Korea’s government funding crew. The crypto market is absolutely chock-full of criminal activity, so it’s entirely reasonable to assume that anyone who wants to participate in that market wants to participate in the crime.
    2. As you said, trading physical gold for digital currency is a stupid idea. It’s also uneccessary, because the FBI is already sitting on a collection of cryptocurrencies that have been confiscated through criminal investigations, including large amounts of Bitcoin. It is technically illegal right now for the US government to do anything with that, but that could be changed with a law. There’s nowhere else for that cryptocurrency to go anyway.

    It seems likely to me that a play to distribute gold from the reserve is about having an excuse to open it and take gold out, and disappear some of it in the process. It’s a cover for a plan to rob the US.



  • Beyond your eventual technical solution, keep this in mind: untested backups don’t exist.

    I recommend reading some documentation about industry-leading solutions like Veeam… you won’t be able to reproduce all of the enterprise-level functionality, at least not without spending a lot of money, but you can try to reproduce the basic practices of good backup systems.

    Whatever system you implement, draft a testing plan. A simpler backup solution that you can test and validate will be worth more than something complex and highly detailed.











  • I think you’ve misunderstood. It sounds like you’ve interpreted the headline to mean that General Hodges is threatening to invade Switzerland. Perhaps you only read the headline and not the actual article.

    "The best way to prevent a war is to prepare for it,” said the former commander of the US armed forces in Europe […] The US Department of Defence is currently funding 100,000 soldiers in Europe, said Hodges. For him, it is clear that President Donald Trump will withdraw troops. “The only question is when, and how many soldiers he will withdraw,” said the former general. “According to everything I hear from Washington, Europe is no longer a priority.” Trump sees China as the main opponent of the US.

    Hodges is stating the reality that Trump will withdraw US troops from Europe in the future, regardless of how bad an idea that is.

    From Trump’s point of view, the US would be paying billions for the defence of Europe, said Hodges. […] “Incidentally, the US benefits enormously economically from a stable Europe,” he said.

    Trump is the kind of moron who only understands short-term profit (especially profit for himself) and doesn’t give a shit about long-term international cooperation. Some very bad decisions are going to be made in the near future.

    Hodges understands the value of European relationships but also sees the inevitability of what’s coming and is trying to make the reality of it clear.