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Are the fees also capped for foreign cards?

I spend significant amounts of time in Europe each year (multiple months) and some of my US credit cards don't charge foreign transaction fees and also earn cashback on transactions done in Europe. I'm wondering who is losing money here - the merchant or the card issuer?

The Alliant credit card is a great investment if you need to pay estimated taxes: The cheapest IRS payment processor charges 1.87% to pay taxes via credit card, which is much less than the cashback that you receive from Alliant.

Same thing happened to me with Simple (the banking startup). After they got acquired by BBVA they moved their customer's checking accounts from The Bancorp to BBVA. As part of that process they re-verified their customers and closed accounts of non-citizen customers (they also closed accounts of permanent residents physically residing in the United States).

That migration pretty much happened in the worst way possible: While customers had several months to migrate once the migration started you only had something like 30 days to verify your documents and open the new account. Also once the migration was started there was no way to cancel or pause it. I'd at least have expected them to notify non-citizen customers in advance so that they have plenty of time to open another account. Instead, I didn't get any information about this issue until after I started the migration, and once I started it they told me that it's not possible to prevent/delay the closure of my account anymore.

Fun fact: According to Reddit/Twitter non-citizens who used a driver's license for KYC weren't affected (because Simple newer checked for their citizenship status). But if you used a Greencard for KYC they noticed that you aren't a citizen and closed your account. (So there's probably a large number of customers left whose accounts will be randomly closed at some future point.)

As a consequence (for non-citizens) I suggest using a bank or credit union which has a known track record of handling non-citizen accounts (especially with the current BofA news). The United Nations Credit Union (https://www.unfcu.org/) looks like a good choice, as they target UN workers and it appears that a large number of customers aren't US citizens (and don't even live in the United States). And don't forget to keep one or two backup checking accounts in case your main account gets closed down.

> If you somehow managed to clone the security key, services would notice that your nonces are no longer monotonically increasing and you could at least detect that it's been cloned.

At least a year ago or so (last time when I checked) most services didn't appear to check the nonce and worked fine when the nonce was reset.

I'm surprised that he didn't try to relocate back to Germany years ago, as Germany doesn't extradite its own citizens. Did any of the court orders in New Zealand prevent him from (legally) leaving the country?

> The speeds are theoretical and plummet as spectrum utilization increases. If everybody replaced their xDSL/DOCSIS/FTTx connections with 4G/5G and utilized them the same, the speeds would be terrible.

The provider A1 in Austria (around 45% marketshare for broadband) uses ADSL for most of its broadband lines, which is significantly slower than cable. A few years ago they merged with the largest wireless provider and now use hybrid-ADSL-LTE modems that use ADSL by default, but which automatically switch to LTE when higher bandwidths are required.

In addition there are several wireless providers (and MVNOs) that sell data flatrates which are cheaper and faster than ADSL. E.g., I recently replaced my ADSL connection with a LTE flatrate for 20 EUR a month that allows 20mbit down and 6mbit up (and almost all of the time it also reaches that speed).

I often hear the argument that LTE would be too congested if everyone uses it. But I can't see any evidence of that in places where LTE is heavily used.

Same in Austria (but 20 EUR instead of 10). LTE is a competitor for ADSL and Cable here and LTE providers sell WiFi routers that use LTE instead of ADSL/Cable as uplink.

I recently replaced my home ADSL connection with LTE (for 20 EUR a month: https://www.yesss.at/tarifoptionen/unlimited) and get approx 2x the download bandwidth and 10x the upload bandwidth for the same price as my previous ADSL connection. Even when there's congestion (which doesn't happen a lot) it's still significantly faster than ADSL.

Yes.

> The decentralization narrative will go away. Only a few people will have enough storage for the blockchain and you will go back to having to trust someone.

With a pruning client you only need to store a small subset of the blockchain and there are no major changes in regards to trust. Your client still verifies every single transaction, but it removes data from the chain that it won't need anymore in the future (e.g., an old transaction that already has been spent).

With a SPV client your client only stores the chain headers and then only requests the required data from a server. SPV clients need a small amount of resources and can run on mobile phones. At the same time most of the important functionality (transaction signing, transaction verification, ...) happens still locally and the level of trust that you need to put into the servers is quite small.

> Same here in Austria. Per capita, the people employed in the banking sector is significantly higher than in other countries.

Yet it's usually a hassle to find an ATM in Austria (which is the most important thing related to banking that I can't do online), because ATMs are usually only located at banks.

Compare that to the US where every other shop as a private ATM that you can use. They usually charge $2 or something like that, but (better) banks usually refund those fees at the end of the month.

Also Bitcoin has been declared dead 299 times already: https://99bitcoins.com/obituary-stats/

Maybe the futures will have some impact, but I wouldn't be surprised if in hindsight it will turn out that futures didn't have any impact at all.

> I'd offer a much simpler explanation. The buzz around Bitcoin reached a critical mass where people at home with no knowledge of cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology suddenly got caught up in a bubble. As the interest increased so did the price so it became a feedback loop.

Yes. Those bubbles happen regularly in the Bitcoin world. Maybe the futures had some impact, but even without futures a bubble will eventually end in a crash.

December was crazy. I had several non-tech friends ask me how to buy Bitcoins. I strongly recommended against buying, but at least one of them still used a leveraged trade on some sketchy platform to buy. Needless to say that it didn't take long until the volatility wiped out 100% of his investment. I'm against regulation but seeing first hand how financially illiterate people behave I'm not opposed to a minimum level of regulation - e.g., why do retail investors need access to leveraged trading?

Somewhat related: Since a few weeks I'm regularly getting a Facebook ad with the title "I want to work at [company name]. Can you help?" from someone who seems to be interested in a job at the company at which I'm working.

Anyone else who noticed similar ads?

You can use ACH trial deposit verification with Robinhoodas alternative to Plaid.

IB is not European but based in the US. I would also recommend it but tax could be somewhat more complicated (W-8BEN form, etc.).

If you have larger sums to invest (or if you trade a lot) Interactive Brokers could be an option. Also there are a number of other European brokers - e.g., DeGiro and Lynx.

The one feature that I'm really missing from Robinhood is selling based on Spec-ID instead of just FIFO. FIFO means I won't be able to tax-loss harvest making Robinhood effectively much more expensive than the alternatives (as the additional taxes are much higher than what I would save in trading fees).

> What Google should do is just build a shared messaging API that can integrate multiple services into one app.

You mean something like XMPP? (On which Google's original chat service was based).

Same here. I've been using btrfs for years so far on my personal laptop and never had any problems.

That's only for US debit cards where a debit transaction requires a PIN code, but a credit transaction prefers signatures. For credit cards with PIN preference it shouldn't make a difference, as it's up to the card to decide which mode to use (based on the options that are supported by the terminal).

Depends on the restaurant. Most of the times the terminal doesn't support PINs and so it falls back to signatures. But some restaurants use PIN-capable terminals in which case that issue occurs.

I travel a lot between the US and Europe and the cultures are very different:

In the US I have my real signature at the back of the card but I just draw a straight line when signing the receipt. No one ever complained about that.

In Europe I sign with my real signature (because I know that cashiers there are more strict) and even then sometimes hear complaints that the signature on the receipt doesn't exactly match the one on the card.

Most European cards use Chip & PIN with pin preference: If the terminal supports it the card will ask for a chip instead of a signature. Chip-based signature transactions are only used as fallback if the terminal doesn't support pins (which is very uncommon).

Unfortunately most US cards don't use a pin code at all. There are a few issuers that provide you with a pin code, but even in those cases there's typically a signature preference and the pin code is only used as fallback if the terminal doesn't support signatures. So if you're using a US card in Europe pretty much the only places where you can use the pin code are automated terminals (e.g., at train stations). At most other places you're going to have to use a signature.

There are a few US issuers that issue Chip & PIN cards with PIN preference - for example UNFCU and First Tech Credit Union. Those cards work great in Europe, but are sometimes a pain to use in the US. E.g., if you're paying at a restaurant and you have to go with the waiter to the terminal in some backroom, because the terminal asks for the pin. That's not an issue in Europe, as waiters usually carry mobile terminals with them.

Palm detection on the new MBPs is extremely good. You can rest your palm on the touchpad without any accidental clicks. It's far ahead of any other touchpad I used so far.

1) Tax laws are completely different for each European country.

2) At least for some of the countries (the once where I'm aware how taxes work) this is not the case: Even if you exchange one cryptocurrency for another cryptocurrency it's taxable. However, long-term capital gains of cryptocurrencies aren't taxable in some European countries.

No. But I trust that the Signal binaries for Android match the source code that is published on Github: https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/

Azul's builds are also TCK certified. They currently look like the best choice if you use Java and if you don't want to depend on Oracle's builds.

It looks like Oracle will only provide binary releases for the LTS versions (after the regular 6 month release window) to paying customers: https://medium.com/codefx-weekly/no-free-java-lts-version-b8....

Vanguard allows me to exchange one mutual fund for another mutual fund (without having to explicitly sell and re-buy). Do you think that's something that shouldn't be taxable? Where's the difference to the cryptocurrency example above?

> That said, the consensus I've heard from my audit colleagues (I work in public accounting) is that no one has the slightest freaking clue how to audit crypto.

Shouldn't the crypto part be trivial for Tether? You'd just need to check how many Tethers were issued on the blockchain. The hard part ensuring that those Tethers are backed by real Dollars - and that should be a regular accounting task that doesn't have anything to do with crypto.