EU has always been leaning towards totalitarianism, but in the recent years things have really gone downhill. Frankly I don't care about China, Russia or any other other totalitarian states. Too bad EU takes example from them.
However I think that blocking Tor and VPN are not their main objectives. Most likely they will just remove physical cash (in fact they are already phasing it out), thus removing all crypto on/off ramps they don't control. Once the cash is gone the totalitarian state will be complete and we will be living in the Fourth Reich.
Worse than that. The project is to link digital identity to the use of CBDCs, so politicians will have all your information at the click of a button.
Some retards say that it's all the same, that nowadays when you use a cell phone you no longer have privacy. What they do not understand is that it is not the same that a company has my data and that to access them a judicial authorization is required, than a politician can access everything in an instant if he wants. Apart from the problem of hacks. Having medical data, employment, studies, economic behavior and behavior in general in the same centralized database is going to be a very juicy booty for hackers.
I have been since long registered on this forum as a reader. Now I have to say that with the new EU law that is acted now since 01.07.25, what we can expect is sometime the ban of self-custody wallets. By now, there is a question about the kind of wallet: self-custody or hoster and if so which one. I bet it is a transitional step in order to accustom users to a level of fencing, then 2d step will feel less repressive.
So it is exactly what you tell about encapsulating users digitally 100%. Basically if BTC is not centralized by state banks, the other way for EU regime is to centralize the users... At the same time, exchangers/traders get swallowed inside the financial state controlled grid. Money and people digitalized and tracked real time, where it comes from, where it goes to, what they do, what they write, what they think.
I live in Norway and sometime I use a local highly controlled trading platform, Firi, because it is a simple way to convert BTC to NOK and get wired to bank account.
Yesterday evening I connected in order to send some BTC to my account there. There was the warning about additional checks, it says we will have to tell what is the source of the BTC:
https://i.imgur.com/XIi4iC0.jpeg I sent some BTC from a wallet of mine friday evening, and the status by now early sunday is on "incoming":
https://i.imgur.com/lCdggeJ.jpegyou will laugh: it is stuck in "incoming" long after transaction was tens of times confirmed, because we are ... week-end. Here in Norway even bank computers don't work week-end. Ie. if you do a payment online in your bank, after friday 15:00 it doesn't arrive to recipient until monday from 05:00.
In the case of Firi, then, you can't wire ie. withdraw from your wallet to your bank week-ends. And now since 01.07, when you send BTC to your bitcoin address there, it is also stuck until monday, then operators will check, ask questions and what not. If exchange rates goes down significantly in the week-end ... Before 01.07, you could put BTC in your wallet and do a "sale" to NOK, so you had your money credited a bit after BTC incoming was confirmed. Now the BTC are also in week-end limbo until what will be the exchange rate of monday morning. Silly.
Anyway, back to the "Matrix" build by EU.
The way to escape it requires to travel,, so to have a bank profile outside EU, which means in fact outside the whole "West". Once you have this, you can use hops across digital systems. There are still countries where cash is required. Inside EU, cash is either almost banned or strongly limited (few ATMs, capping + questions, at bank's discretion), but outside EU, say some of Asia, Africa, some South America, you will need cash, so VISA cars can be used to get cash. EU politburo has still some level of digital repression, and these days the whole West is criminally hysterical, it is going to be very grim.
Last year there was a massive USA-EU combined attack that also criminalized developers, the case of Samourai for instance, and the ban of VISA/Mastercard/SWIFT/SEPA for buying Monero.
