If it’s not “for the children,” it’s “national security.”

FATF’s new roadmap calls for greater use of large datasets, real-time information sharing and closer cooperation between tech, telecoms and finance to tackle fraud.

Traditional finance already collects vast amounts of identity and transaction data and serious financial crime continues at scale.

The same approach is now being extended further, linking identity and financial activity across more systems.

This turns law-abiding citizens into targets for both increased surveillance and physical attacks.

My latest in Forbes.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2026/07/02/fatfs-fraud-roadmap-expands-data-risks-and-global-surveillance/

Surveillance architecture becomes reality in Australia today.

AUSTRAC’s Travel Rule is now live with *zero threshold*.

Even a $5 transfer through a centralised exchange can trigger Travel Rule checks, requiring firms to collect and share identifying information.

These honeypots turn law abiding citizens into targets for hackers, they do not stop financial crime.

Then there's the 'Cold Wallet Squeeze'. Exchanges are forcing users to declare or verify ownership of self custody wallet addresses before allowing withdrawals.

This links real world identity to self custody wallets, turning Bitcoin’s open ledger into a map of ownership tied to named individuals.

Best move? Avoid centralised exchanges where possible. Use non-custodial P2P options like @vexl 😎 @Hodl Hodl @peachbitcoin.

Full article:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/australias-crypto-travel-rule-takes-effect-on-july-1-whats-changing

Global regulators built the FATF Travel Rule for a banking system still full of illicit finance.

Now they are imposing the same surveillance architecture on Bitcoin.

The rule was created by G7 countries through an unelected body in France. It was sold as a way to stop money laundering by forcing information to travel with every transaction.

Decades later, the UN still estimates money laundering at 2 - 5% of global GDP. The model has failed in TradFi.

https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/overview.html

Regulators now want to apply that same framework to Bitcoin, which is an open, auditable ledger with a completely different risk profile.

Chainalysis’ 2026 Crypto Crime Report shows stablecoins accounted for 84% of illicit transaction volume in 2025, while Bitcoin is still being pulled into a surveillance regime designed for banks and centralised intermediaries and a financial system struggling to stop illicit finance at scale.

https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2026-crypto-crime-report-introduction/

The Travel Rule forces firms to collect, hold and transmit personal information about the people behind transactions.

This creates databases that link identity, transaction history and asset ownership in ways that expose ordinary users to hacks, targeting and physical security risks.

FATF has updated it’s recommendations as part of a global push for payment transparency. As a result it is being expanded, embedded and normalised.

This solves nothing but creates unprecedented harm by forcing more personal financial data to be collected, stored and shared.

This clip is from the @You’re The Voice podcast with @Efrat Fenigson and Ben Samocha at Bitcoin Vegas last year.

The warning has only grown more urgent.

Bitcoin does not need TradFi’s failed surveillance architecture wrapped around it.

Jeremy Grantham’s latest CNBC comments are a perfect example of what happens when traditional finance tries to judge Bitcoin using an old framework.

Had these comments been about crypto, I would have nodded along. Much of that market has proved to be speculative and altcoin season is not coming back.

This was not a discussion about the crypto casino. He was speaking in front of a Bitcoin chart, while the segment drifted between 'crypto' and Bitcoin as though they were the same thing, which tells you how little precision sat behind the critique.

Bitcoin deserves a more serious discussion than recycled talking points about crooks, dividends and supermarket payments.

He called it a 'useless speculative mechanism' and said it would 'dwindle away' over decades, 'not with a bang but a whimper.'

He asked why people do not use it to buy dinner or pay at the supermarket.

Then came the line:

“What it does is allows crooks to move money around without leaving a trace.”

That is not dismissive… it’s wrong.

It is not a stock, a company, or a bond. It does not have earnings, dividends, cash flow, a management team, or a board of directors, because it was not designed to be valued like those things.

It is a decentralised monetary network with:

- no CEO
- no central bank
- no political control
- no bailouts
- no off switch
- a fixed 21 million supply that cannot be inflated on demand.

The 'without leaving a trace' claim really misunderstands the system.

Bitcoin is a public ledger and every base layer transaction is recorded. It is far more traceable than cash, which is why law enforcement, analytics firms and exchanges have spent years building tools around that transparency.

The 'people don’t buy dinner with it' argument is also wrong and lazy. Gold is not judged by how often it is used at the supermarket.

Bitcoin allows people to store and transfer value across borders, outside a system suffering from inflation, surveillance, debanking, capital controls and political discretion.

Then there is proof of work, which Grantham dismissed as 'proof of unnecessary work.'

That 'work' is what secures the network. It is what makes Bitcoin expensive to attack, impossible to rewrite and different from the thousands of tokens that can be changed, paused, printed or controlled by insiders.

That is a stock market framework being applied to an open monetary protocol.

Bitcoin has already survived bans, crashes, exchange failures, media attacks, regulatory assaults, energy panic, criminality narratives and repeated predictions of its death. That is not dwindling away.

Grantham is not watching Bitcoin disappear, he is watching the old framework fail to explain it.

So if the price worries you, remember what this actually is...

A 17 year old monetary network separating money from state and challenging some of the oldest assumptions in finance.

We are still early!

Full article:

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/06/26/billionaire-investor-jeremy-grantham-says-bitcoin-will-dwindle-away-with-a-whimper.html

Money detached from energy corrupts society.

That is exactly what we are living through right now as endless money printing eats away at wages, destroys savings, funds government waste and moves wealth upwards.

When money is broken the entire system built around it breaks too. 

I love fairy lights and I think they are a beautiful use of energy because they bring joy, warmth and a little bit of magic. 

Using energy to secure a global peer-to-peer money that anyone on Earth can use without needing government permission is one of the best uses of energy on the planet.

Bitcoin achieves this through Proof of Work by tying money back to energy with a real cost which is exactly what makes it sound, permissionless and decentralised. 

When money has a cost it cannot be printed endlessly by governments or banks so it forces discipline back into the system, reduces waste and malinvestment and helps people plan for the long term instead of being pushed into debt, speculation, and short term consumption. 

Securing sound money through energy is not waste.

It is one of the highest and most important uses of energy humanity can choose right now.