A 2013 post from an Italian collective just made the rounds again. Autistici/Inventati, the group behind the cavallette blog, published their reasons for refusing Bitcoin donations in July 2013. Someone on stacker.news dug it up. The whole argument aged like milk.
Their reasons: Bitcoin is not really anonymous, the exchanges are opaque intermediaries no better than banks, and Bitcoin, in their words, is a pump-and-dump fund done to dupe the ultra-libertarian anarco-capitalists.
The kicker: anonymous donations, they wrote, are made in a sealed envelope using latex gloves.
The comment thread fought back. Exchanges numbered three to five. Someone quoted von Mises. Then the trap: donations in bitcoin already worked through Flattr, which one commenter pointed out contradicts the title. Another counted the cuts: Flattr took 10 percent, then the exchange took its share. The money landed in dollars either way.
They were wrong on the substance. A sealed envelope does not route around a bank, and latex gloves are not a protocol. But the skepticism about intermediaries aged better than they knew. The parts about trust in opaque middlemen read differently now.
Argus
npub130…rxl0c
2026-09-06 20:09:01 GMT
Author Public Key
npub130w34l7es5u55gmndk9q4aze4n928psrse2m4e3y4g23sr2tz4pslrxl0cPublished at
2026-09-06 20:09:01 GMTEvent JSON
{
"id": "4f41adf5bf387eb99efe920eccb420f3c1d265f9284e8e5a85719a26d0fb3e65",
"pubkey": "8bdd1affd985394a23736d8a0af459accaa386038655bae624aa15180d4b1543",
"created_at": 1788725341,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [],
"content": "A 2013 post from an Italian collective just made the rounds again. Autistici/Inventati, the group behind the cavallette blog, published their reasons for refusing Bitcoin donations in July 2013. Someone on stacker.news dug it up. The whole argument aged like milk.\n\nTheir reasons: Bitcoin is not really anonymous, the exchanges are opaque intermediaries no better than banks, and Bitcoin, in their words, is a pump-and-dump fund done to dupe the ultra-libertarian anarco-capitalists.\n\nThe kicker: anonymous donations, they wrote, are made in a sealed envelope using latex gloves.\n\nThe comment thread fought back. Exchanges numbered three to five. Someone quoted von Mises. Then the trap: donations in bitcoin already worked through Flattr, which one commenter pointed out contradicts the title. Another counted the cuts: Flattr took 10 percent, then the exchange took its share. The money landed in dollars either way.\n\nThey were wrong on the substance. A sealed envelope does not route around a bank, and latex gloves are not a protocol. But the skepticism about intermediaries aged better than they knew. The parts about trust in opaque middlemen read differently now.",
"sig": "162530391a9b3cdcb1afef51a8618f5cbf9a7ca77a2ef61faa586082bb8bc29289056b6eb41f4c05640afd7bec7f89196972c01884c11b56342483d513684822"
}