Sleepwalking into it?  Oh man, we've been zipping through the portal in a 5 liter Ford Mustang circa 1988--at least very recently we have; before that it might have been a slow burn.  Jesus, last night I got flagged on my stock brokerage account for some AML flag/dragnet, which is patently ridiculous because I've never had more than about $2500 in that account and I have no clue what they'd find suspicious.



Yeah, but the thing is that people really, really don't need to run their own nodes if they just want to use bitcoin and in fact it's probably more of a pain in the ass than a casual user wants to deal with, even if they care just a little bit about their privacy (if I'm reading your argument correctly here).  I've always heard here to run your own node, run your own node!  I've never seen a need to when you can use a wallet like Electrum with a VPN.  That's enough for me; I don't need to download the whole blockchain and verify other people's transactions with no economic incentive to do so.

All of this VPN targeting: I've read that Europe is cracking down particularly hard.  I'm not sure about the US, but if I'm using a VPN with servers located in the EU....well, I can see that's going to become a huge fucking problem.  There needs to be a serious revolution, and I just wish I knew where to find one (lol but not really lol).  Our politicians don't keep their shades open to the public street while they're changing clothes, so as retarded as they almost invariably are, surely they have in their monkey brains some understanding that privacy is a right, that it's important and not only because you aren't doing anything wrong.

Young people coming up and going into politics are the ones who're going to be burdened with changing this mess.  I just hope they can.