Fully agree, Anja, and thank you for doing the reading most people won’t (and @francispouliot_ for cc). In EU DAC8, our version of the OECD’s CARF, has applied since 1 January 2026. First reports go to tax authorities in 2027. Same pattern you describe: the power is set in the law, and the detail is filled in later by officials. We didn’t think “comment and hope” was enough, so we went to court. @BULLBITCOIN_ (together with #Paymium), has challenged France’s DAC8 decree before the Conseil d’État, asking for a referral to the EU Court of Justice. Our argument: general, indiscriminate collection of financial data on everyone, with no link to any suspicion, is disproportionate under the right to privacy and data protection. This isn’t a fringe argument. The EU Court has struck down mass data regimes before. “It’s for tax” has never been a blank cheque. After reading your tweet, I'd like to offer a few thoughts. The most intrusive parts of this bill aren’t CARF at all. Per-transaction reporting with transaction IDs, quarterly, with no threshold, seems to come from a separate domestic regime Australia is adding on top. That’s a domestic choice and it should be justified on its own terms. Australia is party to the ICCPR (Art. 17, privacy), and any bill introduced to Parliament needs a statement of compatibility with human rights. Ask Treasury to publish its assessment now, while the design can still change. Make the safety argument concrete. Every database built is a database that can leak, and here the leak comes with an address attached. Less intrusive tools already exist. The ATO can compel information when there’s a real reason to, and CARF itself works on aggregates, with details available on request. Targeted access beats mass collection. Your six asks are reasonable and modest. Good luck! 🧡

Why I think this crypto bill deserves real scrutiny I’m not against paying tax. I want to say that upfront, because whenever someone raises privacy, the first response is “what have you got to hide?” Nothing. And that’s the point. Wanting privacy is not evidence of wrongdoing. It’s a right. I’ve read the Treasury Laws Amendment Bill 2026: Tax Information Reporting, and the explanatory notes that come with it. Here’s why it worries me. 1. Parliament is being asked to approve a power, not a policy. The bill doesn’t list what data will be collected about you. Treasury’s notes give an “expected” list: your name, address and bank details, plus the date, time, value and ID of every transaction. But the final list is set by the ATO later, and it can change. It goes further. The bill lets the government sign Australia up to any future international data sharing framework by regulation. No new law. No vote to approve it. Treasury’s notes say these frameworks concern foreign residents. The bill itself doesn’t say that anywhere. A reassurance in the notes is not a protection in law. 2. It collects more than tax needs. Moving crypto to your own wallet isn’t a taxable event. You haven’t sold anything or made a gain. Yet that transfer must be reported. If it isn’t taxable, why does a tax law need to know about it? The only thing it reveals is where you keep your money, and that you hold it yourself. 3. The transaction ID could follow you forever. Every report includes a “transaction ID”. The bill doesn’t define it. If it means the blockchain ID, your name could be linked to your wallet and its entire history. The Bitcoin ledger is public and permanent. You can change a password. You can’t change a blockchain. The ATO doesn’t need this to calculate tax. The date, value and asset are enough. 4. It goes further than banks. Banks report your annual interest to the ATO, not every transaction. Transfers between your own accounts aren’t reported at all. Where cash is reported, there’s a $10,000 threshold. This bill reports every crypto transaction of any value, every quarter. The notes never explain why crypto should be treated more intrusively. 5. The safeguards aren’t there. No limit on how long data is kept. No security standard. No breach rules. No notice that you’ve been reported. No published human rights assessment or privacy impact assessment. Just one sentence pointing to existing privacy law. 6. This is a safety issue, not just a privacy one. A bank transfer can be frozen or reversed. A Bitcoin transfer can’t. If someone forces you to send it, it’s gone. Criminals know this. Physical attacks on crypto holders are rising worldwide, and gangs now pick victims using leaked databases and exchange records. In France, a tax official allegedly sold crypto investors’ details to criminals. Optus. Medibank. Latitude. Databases leak. In trying to stop one crime, tax evasion, we risk making another far easier. 7. It’s been rushed. We’ve had 13 days to comment. Treasury’s average is 27. That’s not enough time for a bill that hands this much power to officials. What I’m asking for Not to scrap it. To do it properly: A minimum threshold No blockchain IDs or wallet addresses No reporting of transfers to your own wallet Retention, security and breach rules written into the law Any new international data sharing approved by Parliament More time to consult Submissions close at midnight on 28 October. Anyone can make one, and it doesn’t need to be formal. consult.treasury.gov.au/c202…

Those who are opposed to corporations and favor government do not realize that government is simply the largest, most monopolistic corporation of all and it has a monopoly on violence.

In October 2008, Switzerland had to rescue UBS, its biggest bank. The government put in 6 billion francs, and the Swiss National Bank agreed to take up to $60 billion of the bank’s toxic assets off its hands. In a country famous for sound banking, the public was left holding the risk. A group of citizens started asking a question nobody else seemed to be asking. Why do private banks get to create money at all? In 2011 they formed an association called Monetary Modernisation (MoMo), and in 2014 they launched a national campaign. In Switzerland, collect 100,000 signatures in 18 months and the whole country votes on changing the constitution. On 1 December 2015 they handed in 110,955. Their proposal was called Vollgeld, or Sovereign Money. Only the Swiss National Bank would be allowed to create money. Commercial banks could only lend money they actually had, from savers, investors or the central bank. The power you saw on Day 24, typing new money into existence, would end. The establishment lined up against it. The government, parliament, business groups, unions, the Swiss National Bank and every major party except the Greens, who left it to their members, all opposed it. The central bank’s chairman, Thomas Jordan, warned it would be a leap into the unknown. Opponents ran about 90 per cent of the advertising. The few politicians who backed it came from both ends of the spectrum, from the left wing Social Democrats and Greens to the right wing People’s Party. On 10 June 2018, 75.7 per cent of voters said no. Not a single canton voted yes. Turnout was just 34.6 per cent. Two in three Swiss didn’t vote at all on who should create their money. Here is the twist. The Swiss were asked who should control the money printer, private banks or the central bank. Both answers kept the printer. Nobody asked the bigger question. What if money didn’t need an issuer at all? Tomorrow, where Australia’s pandemic money went, and who paid for it. Follow and ring the 🔔 on our profile so you don’t miss a day.

On Friday 13 March 2009, the insurance giant AIG paid $165 million in bonuses to its staff. Seventy three of them received more than $1 million each. Just months earlier, AIG had been rescued by American taxpayers, and by then its bailout had passed $170 billion. President Obama called the bonuses an outrage. They were paid anyway, because the contracts said so. AIG was not alone. In October 2008, the US Congress approved a $700 billion package to rescue the banking system. The argument was that some institutions were so big and so tangled into everything else that letting them fail would drag down the whole economy. They were too big to fail. Economists have a name for what that teaches. Moral hazard. If someone else will cover your losses, taking bigger risks becomes the rational thing to do. Profits stay private. Losses become public. Australia acted too. On 12 October 2008, the Rudd government guaranteed deposits in Australian banks, building societies and credit unions, covering around 15 million accounts worth $800 billion. It also let banks borrow with a government guarantee, for a fee. No Australian bank failed. But some of the stress was absorbed quietly. In October 2007, struggling mortgage lender RAMS sold its brand and franchise network to Westpac for $140 million. On 8 October 2008, as its British owner HBOS was being swallowed by Lloyds, Bankwest was sold to the Commonwealth Bank for $2.1 billion. Add Westpac’s merger with St George, agreed earlier that year, and Australia came out of the crisis with fewer, bigger banks, each one a little more too big to fail. And the protections kept growing. As we saw on Day 7, since 2018 the banking regulator APRA has had powers to step into a struggling bank, partly so a rescue can be arranged confidentially, before the public knows. Then in 2024, the government’s misinformation bill, the so called MAD Bill, listed harm to “public confidence in the banking system or financial markets” among the serious harms that online content could cause. It was dropped in November 2024 after failing to win Senate support. But it showed where the thinking was heading. Do you see the pattern? First a guarantee. Then a quiet takeover. Then secrecy. Then rules about what you can say. Each crisis adds another layer of protection around a system whose foundations were never strong enough to stand on their own. Someone saw that pattern back in 2009. On 3 January that year, an anonymous programmer launched a brand new kind of money, and in its very first record, they embedded that day’s headline from The Times. “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” We will come back to who wrote it, and why, on Day 31. Tomorrow, the printing press that doesn’t print anything. Follow and ring the 🔔 on our profile so you don’t miss a day.

In the mid 2000s, Wingecarribee Shire Council, in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, was looking for a safe home for its ratepayers’ money. A Sydney firm called Grange Securities offered products that looked secure and paid more than a term deposit. The council bought them. So did Parkes Shire Council and the City of Swan in Western Australia. The products had a complicated name, synthetic collateralised debt obligations. In plain English, they were bundles of bets linked to the health of loans and companies on the other side of the world, many tied to the American housing market. In 2007, Grange was bought by the US investment bank Lehman Brothers and renamed Lehman Brothers Australia. To understand what was in the box, rewind to 2003. The US Federal Reserve had cut its key interest rate to 1 per cent, the lowest in 45 years. Money was cheap, and American lenders handed out mortgages to almost anyone, including people with little hope of repaying. Wall Street bundled those loans together, ratings agencies stamped many of them AAA, and banks sold them around the world. Including, eventually, to councils in country Australia. When American house prices turned, the whole structure gave way. On Monday 15 September 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy with more than $600 billion in assets, the largest bankruptcy in US history. The Dow fell more than 500 points that day. In the Southern Highlands, Parkes and Swan, millions in ratepayer money went with it. In 2012, the Federal Court ruled that Grange had misled the councils and breached its duty to them. Mainstream accounts blame greed, weak regulation and products nobody understood, and they have a point. Austrian economists add a cause that sits upstream of all of it. Years of artificially cheap money made reckless lending look profitable, and inflated a boom that could only end in a bust. The money was created in Washington. The losses landed in Bowral. Tomorrow, who got rescued, and who didn’t. Follow and ring the 🔔 on our profile so you don’t miss a day.