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Convenience Was the Bait. Control Was the Catch.

An iris scan at a Colombian airport, two AI models switched off on a Friday evening, and a French tax office that leaked who owned bitcoin. What I keep handing over without asking whether I can take it back.

By Dalia ·

Written in June 2026, after the events it describes.

I once traded my iris for thirty seconds at an airport in Colombia, and I have written about the regret that followed (The Day I Traded My Iris for 30 Seconds). The short version: I sold my privacy for speed and fed the very system I claimed to mistrust.

I keep coming back to that trade, because the pattern is everywhere, and most of us walk into it the way I did. Someone says you must enroll, so you enroll. Someone offers something free, so you open your arms. We skip the only two questions that matter: what is the catch, and what am I trading for this?

I used to be very good at not asking.

I grew up watching a currency lose its value and a state keep promising to protect the people it kept failing. My answer was still to trust it a little more, give it a little more, and feel virtuous about it. For a long time I thought a bit of socialism was what a kind person believed. I had confused trust with goodness.

The mistake was never wanting to be generous. It was outsourcing my judgment to institutions and calling it compassion. I never asked what I was handing over, or to whom, or whether I could get it back.

Two stories in June 2026 brought it all back.

On Friday, 12 June, the U.S. Commerce Department sent Anthropic an export-control directive barring foreign nationals from using two of its AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. To comply, Anthropic switched both models off for every customer that evening. Maybe the order was justified. Maybe it was not. What stayed with me is that it did not matter what the users thought, or whether they had done anything. Access they believed was theirs was gone by dinner. It came back about eighteen days later, when the controls were lifted, on a schedule none of them set.

In France, kidnappings and extortion attempts against people connected to crypto keep climbing. On 30 June the Interior Minister counted 77 cases so far in 2026, against 45 in all of 2025. The thread investigators keep pulling is data. In one case, a tax agent in Bobigny was placed under formal investigation in 2025, accused of using the tax database to sell information about targets, crypto investors among them, to organized crime.

A state collected detailed records of what its citizens owned. That information got out. People were taken for it.

So I keep coming back to a question about the state itself. Why was it allowed to hold so much of us in the first place? And when the data leaks, why is it so rarely the institution that answers for it? We are told to hand over more in the name of safety, and when that machinery fails, the cost lands on us, not on the people who built it.

When exactly did we sign this? I do not remember the form. I do not remember agreeing to trade my liberties one convenience at a time.

That is when I stopped trusting by default and started verifying, out of self-respect more than fear.

Bitcoin is the clearest example I have found of a system that does not ask me to hand myself over to use it. The exchange where I buy it may want my identity; the network where I hold it does not. No one grants me permission to hold it. No one switches it off because a directive arrived on a Friday evening. And its supply is not managed by people who treat a budget as a creative writing exercise.

But I am not going to pretend it is a magic exit, because France is partly a Bitcoin story. Those people held bitcoin, and what put them in danger was information about what they owned. Bitcoin removes the company that can freeze you. It does not remove your duty to guard what others know about you; if anything, it raises it. And notice where that leak came from: not the blockchain, but a tax office. The state was the honeypot, again.

So the lesson is older and simpler than any slogan. Before you hand something over, ask whether you can take it back. A password I can change. A key I can rotate. My iris, I cannot. A record of what I own, once it is loose in the world, I cannot un-leak. The trades worth fearing are the ones with no undo.

What have you handed over this year that you could not take back if you wanted to?

I still believe what I wrote after that airport line: privacy is not optional, it is survival. What I understand now is the harder half: how much of it we give away without noticing, and how little of it we can ever take back.

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Created by Dalia · More essays · bitcoinsovereign.academy