Letters by Burk #163: Two Kinds of Wallet

Hi friends,

Two of this week's pieces are about wallets. That was not planned.

One is the kind you open after almost three years to find two dollars in it. The other is the one the EU wants on your phone by Christmas, with your ID inside.

So: money week. Where it comes from… or doesn't, and who gets to confirm that you are you.

Here's my week.

The EU Digital Identity Wallet Arrives in December

From December 24, every one of us in the EU can walk up to our own state and ask for a digital identity wallet, free of charge. Germany opens on January 2, which is the first working day after the deadline runs out.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

Is Benable Worth It In 2026 (And What They Paid Me)

I opened my Benable dashboard after 33 months and found $2.00, both dollars from Benable itself. The platform is free and takes no cut, so this one is mostly about who the catalog is built for.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

Charge AI Rent For My Content

The crawlers read my site, answer somebody else's question with it, and I see nothing. A payment model that doesn't exist and probably never will, written down anyway.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

Gumroad vs Payhip vs Lemon Squeezy (2026)

Gumroad is the most expensive of the three and still the one I sell on. For sellers in Europe the fee is not the part that decides it.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

⚡ AI Bytes

Mistral raised €3 billion at a valuation above €21 billion, led by Samsung, with the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg among the new investors. The company calls it the largest equity round a European tech company has ever closed.

Also, OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra at the start of the month, and Claude arrived in CarPlay, which makes it the fifth chatbot you can talk to in the car.

📎 From the Archive

From January 2022: "Earnings On Medium, YouTube, Spotify, Google Adsense, and More Compared". The numbers have moved since, the ranking of the platforms mostly hasn't.

Read it on Substack.

🔧 One tip

If you sell digital files, find out today whether your platform is the merchant of record. That one term decides whether EU and UK VAT is their job or yours.

Gumroad has been the merchant of record on every sale since January 2025, worldwide. Lemon Squeezy has always worked that way. Payhip collects and remits EU and UK VAT. If your setup is a payment link and a spreadsheet, it's on you, and it's on you whether you knew it or not.

That's #163. Back next Tuesday. ✌️

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