HN user
It may sound strange, but I found it very funny. I've had the same thoughts myself. As someone who sometimes worries a bit too much about making the best life choices, it's darkly funny to think that for all my planning, I'll probably find a way to regret and hate my attempts at thoughtful and wise decisionmaking in the future no matter what path I choose.
I wonder what he means by that. To me it's the exact opposite. I don't want anything extravagant - none of the things one might picture when one thinks "millionaire's lifestyle"; no big house, no luxury car, no exotic vacations, etc. The only (or at least primary) thing I'd like is the security to pay my modest expenses and cover any potential emergencies in perpetuity, without relying on a job and without moving to a cheap country to reduce living expenses (I would like to stay close to my family in the US). For that, I do need a million dollars, and even that is barely enough.
and then cash will become criminalized
It won't happen if enough people fight it. You should value privacy and have a healthy distrust of both banks and governments.
Here are the heartening results of an EU survey conducted earlier this year about restricting payments in cash[0]. In short, 94.9% of respondents oppose restrictions on cash payments. 86.9% believe that paying anonymously is an essential personal freedom. That's the spirit.
Yeah, I use SOCKS5 over SSH all the time, although I didn't follow that particular guide. I am also not an expert but after making sure DNS requests were tunneled, I wasn't able to see any cleartext at all using Wireshark.
It is not a Tor replacement or anything. I think it should be effective at simple things like: masking personal browsing at work[0], masking browsing habits from your ISP.
[0] Obviously if you use a company computer, you could be keylogged/monitored in other ways. Use your judgement.