They lost their card provider on Black Friday, same day as Jan3 and at least one other provider lost theirs – so it's likely that one provider cut several (probably all) of these types of services.

All existing cards have been canceled, and you cannot buy new cards. Unfortunately they have not been communicative about the situation, but I'd say they're unlikely to reestablish service any time soon, and any existing money you might have had with them should be considered lost.

I think relying on tools blindly for protection is being lazy.

Is that what using a password manager is, though? Just a dumb reliance on tools?

Personally I have carefully picked KeePassXC because it suits my situation. I know it in and out, and I have a sound backup regime for it. I'm not some confused cargo cultist who does strange things I don't understand because experts on the internet told me to – and I doubt many such people exist.

You're recommending against using a password manager, and then you go on to reinvent one poorly with an encrypted spreadsheet. This gives you no browser integration and no paste buffer management.

it is usually 1) Internet-based, 2) run by a third party you really don't know, and 3) they control your tool by license or portal access.

If those are your concerns (and I'd agree with them), they are all addressed by KeePassXC. It's a solid, mature tool. Just use a password manager.

Impressed with Switzerland.

One clarification: What they rejected was the proposal for an inheritance tax. They already have a small wealth tax. The difference is that while the inheritance tax is paid when you die, the wealth tax is paid every year.

Greetings from Norway, which unlike Switzerland does not have a small wealth tax. We have a significant one.

I hear you! Browsing gemini reminds me of the very early internet. It's just that it's never going to be anything more or bigger than that, so we're always going to have to put up with the security trainwreck that the web is.

the less hampered our experience becomes

Here I meant "the more hampered".

This is a rather impossible battle to win as long as we insist on having such a feature-packed web. The more we try to protect ourselves against fingerprinting, the less hampered our experience becomes.

I use LibreWolf (a privacy-centric Firefox fork) which normalizes my timezone to UTC, makes my window size less unique, disables certain HTML5 features and a ton of other small tweaks – but it only helps to a small extent, and it's not easy to reason about. I'm just hoping what I do is measurably better than nothing.

There are alternatives to the web, especially Gemini, which have essentially zero fingerprintable surface. But these are mere geek novelties and will never have broad appeal.

Looks like existing Moon cards did stop working. Someone got an update from Pay With Moon's customer support:

The tech team is aware of intermittent card issues experienced by Moon users. They're working on a fix.

Please note that new card creation is temporarily paused.

So they're not going to say it outright, but it's pretty obvious they lost their card provider. On the same day as Jan3 lost theirs. It would be interesting to know if this happened because they had the same provider, which got enough and canceled them both on the same day, of if there's a wider crackdown going on. I'm guessing the former, since I haven't heard of more cases.

Pay With Moon just removed their prepaid Visa cards from their site too, possibly yesterday just shortly after tweeting about Black Friday (https://x.com/Mrcode100/status/1994459257987637676), so new cards can't be created. Anyone have existing cards and can confirm whether they still work?

Good, we need geopolitically diverse mining.

Although they probably just contribute hashpower to "Antpool & Friends" :-(

Yeah, it's not in the article, but in the judgment, which is worth a read: https://www.canlii.org/en/bc/bcpc/doc/2025/2025bcpc192/2025bcpc192.html

In this case it also didn't help that the husband had been bragging about his bitcoin trading success, even lying about having 200 bitcoin.

Here's the article on MSN: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/b-c-family-tortured-for-13-hours-by-thieves-impersonating-mailmen-in-2m-crypto-heist/ar-AA1QU0ko

Threatened with having his genitals cut off, the father gave the men access to his and his wife’s cryptocurrency accounts. Over the course of the evening, they made multiple withdrawals from both accounts totalling US$1.6 million (roughly $2.2 million Canadian), effectively draining the accounts.

Security is all about friction and inconvenience. If you have convenient access to USD 1.6M, there are scenarios like this that you're not secure against.

But if they had been secure against it, wouldn't the attackers have cut his genitals off? Of course there's a chance, but the calculus doesn't really check out. It's a significant and unusual escalation for no realistic gain.

The link stopped working. Here's a working link: https://winnipegsun.com/news/b-c-family-tortured-for-13-hours-by-thieves-impersonating-mailmen-in-2m-crypto-heist

It's a sarcastic remark about stale narratives. In the bcash runup a lot of people concerned themselves with "who would get the bitcoin name" and "who would get the subreddit" like it's some sort of divorce proceeding.

Let's be careful with terminology; there wouldn't be more than one "fork". Your question is better stated as "which side of the fork".

Nobody would "inherit" the name "bitcoin". The name would stay where it is. There aren't any kingmakers who declare who "gets the name". Perhaps in the 2017 era it was reasonable to speculate whether exchanges would swing their scepters and declare such things, but we learned that's just not how things work.

It's been almost ten years of this. I'm tired. Let's just get this fork over with, get our little airdrops and move on.

I still wonder how they have push access to the bitcoin repo in the UASF project on GitHub. That repo was last used for the BIP-148 UASF in 2017, and now it's suddenly sprung to life again. There are no publicly listed owners of the project, but perhaps Luke was one of them?

Doesn't really matter, just a point of curiosity and a perhaps unfair suspicion that they're using that project to establish legitimacy.

I think it's quite likely they break the law in many jurisdictions. And if not, I think it's very likely that mint operation will be outlawed in the near future. It's not like financial legislation tend towards permissiveness.

Cashu might be wise to adopt the assumption, right or wrong, that mint operation will be cracked down on. If it chooses to exist at the mercy of lawmakers, it is doomed. That's why I think the future of Cashu, should it survive, is pseudonymous mints, possibly running as Tor onion services. This path will be riddled with rug pulls, but over time, trustworthy mints will emerge, not merely by the Lindy effect, but also through relentless user vigilance and by the application of proof-of-liabilities schemes.

Thinking mints break the law doesn't mean you think they should shut down or that you agree with the law.