How I was scammed

A post by Bitarch and Voluntarist about how taxes are unfair robbery, which seemed a bit boring to me, nonetheless sparked a lively discussion, since the comment section of the Telegram channel includes Alex Rozov, a lively and sane leftist. The main point of the post was that taxes are advertised as a means of taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, but the rich have a multitude of tools for tax evasion, and therefore the middle class suffers the most from taxes. To this, Alex inquired whether the authors of the post would support the introduction of a tax specifically on the rich (2% per year of the market value of assets worth over $10M) as fair? Bitarch chose not to answer this because he was caught in an obvious logical trap; in reality, libertarians condemn taxes not for the unfairness of the distribution of the tax burden, and therefore they cannot approve a legislative patch that increases the burden on a category that had previously successfully avoided taxation without contradicting their own ideology.

One could have ended the discussion there, but the conversation steered into a slightly different direction. In response to Alex’s question about whether it is moral that a significant percentage of people live in poverty, and an even larger percentage balance on the brink of poverty, I—balancing on the brink of poverty because I spend a disproportionate amount of effort on activities that bring only modest donations—replied that any distribution of wealth obtained through purely voluntary transactions is moral. However, in conditions of total systemic robbery, it is practically impossible to determine what the distribution of wealth would be through purely voluntary transactions.

To this, Alex rightly replied that it is impossible to fix a real situation if you treat it as if it were ideal. The reality is that the disproportion in the distribution of wealth and power is a self-sustaining and exacerbating cycle.

I agreed with this thesis, but noted that since we consider robbery immoral, then complaining that we receive too little from the robbery is simply irrelevant, and the task of restoring justice consists precisely in the abolition of the mechanisms of robbery. And in the case of success, one can completely ignore what this unfair machine of forced redistribution managed to grind out; the main thing is that we broke it, and now all that remains is to slap the hands of anyone who attempts to repair it.

After this, Alex reasonably wondered who would be doing the slapping and what would stop him from repairing the machine himself. I replied that such vigilantism must be strictly decentralized—specifically to prevent the obvious danger of a monopoly on the restoration of justice. Systemic decentralized efforts, however, require moral pressure from society.

And here Alex played his trump card, asking how I plan to ensure moral pressure in this direction if it is currently operating in the opposite direction: the broad masses enthusiastically welcome fiscal measures against the super-rich. However, since we had already moved to discussing moral positions, I could afford an ethical rather than a logical thrust, suggesting that he at least refrain from increasing moral pressure in the current vein himself, thereby shifting the general equilibrium slightly toward justice.

And, of course, after that, Alex had only one way to finish me off: by suggesting that since I expect to change the moral vector in society by persuading influencers from the left and adjacent areas of the political spectrum, why not try to persuade him as a test. Well, it means I will get to it; it is a worthy and interesting task.

So, I am announcing a new book with the working title “Charting a Libertarian Course in Leftist Discourse,” and considering how much time I spend on such large-scale works, I fear that the results will now have to be awaited for a year or two.

Let’s forgive the neural network its inattention to card design: if it drew flawlessly, we would feel even more inferior

Taxes are robbery. But you know what’s even worse? It’s unfair robbery!

What is the most popular fairy tale among adults? No, not the one about “I’ll start exercising next Monday,” and not even the one about “we’ll call you back.” The most resilient and beloved fairy tale is the myth of the “fair tax system.”
 
Every time another politician in an expensive suit (bought with your money, by the way) takes the podium and begins to proclaim: “We will make the rich pay more to help the poor!”, the etatists are selling us the image of a noble Robin Hood. But in reality, we get the Sheriff of Nottingham, who simply shakes the change out of the pockets of the working class.
 
Let’s look at how this “celebration of justice” works in real life. It is important to understand that you are the one paying for this entire banquet—the very same shrinking and vanishing “middle class.” People who just want to live normally, pay off their mortgage, go on vacation, and provide an education for their children.
 
How does the state sell us taxes? “Look, that guy in the Maybach! We’ll introduce a progressive scale, a luxury tax, strip him of his wealth, and we’ll all live well!”. Sounds like a great plan, right? But this is where harsh reality kicks in.
 
The thing is, truly wealthy people don’t receive a salary. They don’t have a pay stub that accountant Marya Ivanovna looks at with a sad sigh while slicing off a third for the state. The fortunes of the rich lie in stocks, trusts, funds, real estate, and clever financial instruments. They don’t need to withdraw millions in cash to buy a yacht. They simply take a bank loan secured by their shares at a ridiculous interest rate. And loans, as we know, are not taxable!
 
The ultra-wealthy also have something we don’t—entire armies of high-paid lawyers and tax consultants. For them, the tax code is not a noose around the neck, but simply a restaurant menu where one can always find a loophole, a discount, or an offshore zone. They don’t evade taxes, but they optimize them. And they do it brilliantly.
 
Now let’s return to our middle class. To you, to me, to the guy working as an IT specialist, a doctor, or running a small coffee shop. To the state, we are all ideal dairy cows. We stand in the pen, we can’t run away, and all our incomes are as transparent as a baby’s tear. The state is too lazy and it’s too expensive to chase wild mustangs (billionaires and their lawyers) across the prairies. Why strain yourself if you can just come into the cowshed and take what you want?
 
Of course, it’s useless for the middle class to complain about why, after all the deductions, VAT in stores, excise taxes on gasoline, and hidden levies from their salary, they are left with nothing. The oligarchs have already transferred their assets to the Cayman Islands. So, you will be the one chipping in for the new curb and the golden toilet brush for the mayor’s office. Nothing personal, just social justice!
 
That is precisely why the middle class is currently being destroyed worldwide. The state is constantly tightening the screws, inventing new levies, fines, and fees, presenting it under the sauce of “caring for society.” We are sheared so often that we don’t have time to grow our wool back. You strive, you grow as a professional, you take on side jobs, you open a small business, after which you suddenly move into a new tax category. You are now “rich” (in the eyes of the tax office, if you can afford meat every day, you are almost a Rockefeller), and they start milking you with double the intensity.
 
In the end, what do we have? Taxes are not just robbery (although the phrase “Taxation is theft” will never lose its relevance), but banal injustice. It is a system where the poor depend on handouts, the rich play by their own rules in the VIP room, and the middle class pays for it all, becoming poorer every year while trying to stay afloat. So next time you hear a fairy tale from another etatist about how taxes make society “equal and fair,” just laugh in their face!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

A few bits of channel news

Since 2018, a huge amount of text has accumulated on my website, and I suddenly felt the urge to translate this entire corpus of materials into English. You see, sometimes when chatting with an English speaker, I’d mention that I have a site with materials on ancap, they’d get curious and go to the address, only to find Cyrillic. And there wasn’t even a button to switch to English. It felt kind of silly. Well, now there is a button.

For this task, I mastered vibe-coding, built a WordPress plugin plus a set of Python utilities that connect to this plugin, and of course, API calls to an LLM—how could I do without them. It was terribly fascinating, and I even managed to limit myself exclusively to free tools. I’ll need a few more days to finish translating the very earliest posts and run a script to replace internal links in the translations from Russian to English. But, of course, this will be a purely neural-network translation, and native speakers might cringe at certain phrasings. On the other hand, if the English version of the site is presented not to Americans, but to say, Germans, there’s a chance they won’t notice anything at all. However, if any readers are willing and able to proofread not all posts in a row, but at least the most valuable ones, that would be wonderful. Once the English version of the site is finished, I will create a Serbian one in the same manner, and we’ll see where it goes from there.

Actually, I didn’t just dive into this activity for no reason; it’s because this autumn I am finally moving to Serbia. Montenegro is introducing visas for Russians, and all the ways to live in the country legally are becoming too expensive for me. Moreover, the government’s rhetoric leaves no doubt that they don’t plan to stop, and squeezing out foreigners before joining the EU is their conscious policy. So I see no reason to cling to this country until the end; I’d rather try to start from scratch in the neighboring one. And if Montenegro is Montelibero, then Serbia is Liberland. This means there will be a lot of communication with an English-speaking audience, which means a site translation is needed—that was roughly my train of thought.

That was the second piece of news, and the third is even more exciting. I’m planning to give birth around mid-April. And the fact that I won’t have to rely on the famous Montenegrin medicine already fills me with great joy, so everything is working out perfectly.

Due to the pregnancy, I am becoming less fit for physical work, so I’ve started looking for remote work. So far, I’ve laid out my “Libertarian Theory of War” for the Svoboda Publishing House; the client liked it and gave me a new book, which I’m currently working through, and we’ll see how long their queue of orders is. It’s unlikely this one side job will be enough to live on, but it’s a start. If you have any other interesting remote work options, please suggest them. But even if you don’t, you can simply donate to the development of the project, as you can see, it is indeed developing.

The state broke the demographics, and now even migrants will not save it

Every modern statist has a rather interesting “cheat code” at their disposal. States around the world, through their suffocating regulation, insane taxes, and inflation, have driven their native populations into such a demographic pit that there is no easy way out. Having children when half of your income is taken away by the tax office with an invisible (and very visible) hand, and a mortgage feels like lifelong slavery due to central bank games, is an unaffordable luxury for many young families.

And so, the average authoritarian bureaucrat scratches his head. He essentially has two paths:

The first path is total deregulation. Radically lowering taxes, easing regulations, removing bureaucratic barriers, letting people breathe, build homes, start businesses, grow wealthy, and look confidently into tomorrow. Making it so that people actually want to have children because they are confident in their future.

The second path is, with a heavy heart, to let millions of migrants into the country to somehow plug the gaping holes in the budget and the labor market, while not loosening the noose around the necks of their own citizens by a single millimeter.

Which do you think the official chooses? The second option, of course! Authoritarian statists usually don’t like migrants, but they are terrified to the point of shaking in their boots of losing power over the economy and society. It is better to import new blood than to give freedom to their own.

But then a system failure occurred; the “cheat code” stopped working. Let’s look at Spain (this was recently written about excellently here in El Confidencial). Local socialists have for years prayed to immigrants as the saviors of the solidarity pension system (i.e., a legalized financial pyramid). But suddenly, an inconvenient truth emerged—migrants age! A mass flow of people over 45 began entering Spain.

And here, the mathematics hits the official right in the face. Even if the statist gentlemen dream of importing ideal “passive hamsters” aged 55+, who will quietly sweep the streets, drive a steering wheel, and not say a crooked word against the government—it no longer works economically. Such a “hamster” will sluggishly work for 5–10 years, pay their few pennies in taxes (if they even leave the gray economy), and then retirement age arrives. And what next? Next, this person will spend 20+ years draining money from a budget bursting at the seams for a minimum social pension and free healthcare, which becomes insanely expensive in old age. Instead of solving the demographic problem, the state gets a giant financial black hole. The presence of such migrants creates a colossal burden on the budget, effectively bringing no net plus to the economy.

And you know what the most ironic part is? Statism is contagious; it has spread across the entire planet. The bureaucratic noose is not exclusive to developed countries. After all, the governments of the countries from which migrants traditionally come play the same games with no less enthusiasm: introducing new bans, multiplying bureaucrats, and terrorizing businesses. The result is predictable: birth rates there are also plummeting into the abyss! The myth that there is an “infinite reservoir of young labor” somewhere in the Global South has shattered against reality. In the countries of Latin America, North Africa, or Central Asia, there are fewer and fewer young people because having children under the conditions of their own native, local government regulation is just as much of a financial suicide. That is why it is no longer healthy twenty-year-old guys moving to rich countries, but those same exhausted people in their fifties. States around the world, with their insane rules, have created a global demographic winter.

An alternative to the “do not interfere in people’s lives” option simply does not exist. Do you want the nation to grow and the demographic crisis to be a thing of the past? Abolish taxes and the total regulation of life! When a person has freedom, property, and the confidence that the state will not come to take it away tomorrow—they will build a large family themselves. But as long as statists continue to tighten the noose, no amount of importing obedient “hamsters” will save their budgets from inevitable bankruptcy.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Notes on decentralization, part 4. Reputation.

A recent post by Bitarch on trust networks reminded me of my decentralization cycle, and that it would be a good idea to supplement it with a new note.

People inevitably interact with one another and would like to derive maximum benefit from this with minimum costs. Of course, in a praxeological sense—meaning it doesn’t necessarily have to be about monetary profit or loss, but rather about satisfaction or, conversely, dissatisfaction. In repeated interactions, one can attempt to predict the counterpart’s actions and, based on this, decide in advance how to act. And if the counterpart knows that the interaction will continue to repeat, this knowledge will also influence their actions. Constantly interacting counterparts can agree on cooperation, distance themselves if they find each other unpleasant, send signals suggesting the boundaries of what is acceptable, and so on. Each person inevitably builds up a certain reputation in the eyes of the other.

Additionally, in human communities, the transmission of information about one person’s reputation to another person is of great importance. The other is not obliged to take this information on faith and may, on the contrary, believe that they are being misinformed for some reason. And even if the information received turns out to be completely reliable, they may still believe that someone is trying to gain their trust only to deceive them later. There can be as many layers of reflection as one likes; that is why we grew such a complex brain—to gossip with pleasure.

To gossip and especially to collect gossip about people outside their constant circle of communication, people devise various systems for recording and representing reputation. What should such a system be like from the perspective of someone studying another’s reputation? They would want to be able to receive information about a person’s behavior in the area of interest, and for that information to be easily accessible, difficult to forge, and difficult to hide. And if it is not a matter of studying one specific individual, but of searching for a suitable option, then there should be many options—ideally all possible ones—with convenient data filtering tools.

And what should the system be like from the perspective of the person whose behavioral data is being studied? Naturally, they would prefer that only the information they want to keep public is made public, while information that doesn’t need to be known by everyone could ideally be formatted as reliable proofs and presented only to those who need it. It would also be useful to have the ability to provide ill-wishers with convincing fake information about oneself.

From this set of contradictory requests, it is clear that an ideal reputation system that satisfies everyone is impossible. Again, we have so far neglected the costs of collecting, storing, and presenting reputational information, but those costs also exist.

Thus, it is quite easy to imagine the economically justified construction of a reputation system in some specific narrow field, but it is difficult to understand who would be interested, and why, in maintaining comprehensive open dossiers on every action of every person. Even government agencies prefer to collect voluminous dossiers only for official access, and their employees are certainly not interested in ending up in them themselves, perfectly understanding that the wider the circle of those who have voluminous information about them, the more vectors there are for sudden attacks.

Who, besides the consumers of reputation information, is interested in this information appearing in the corresponding systems? Of course, those who believe that their reputation in this system will present them in the light they wish to be presented. Those aspiring to the title of faithful spouses are unlikely to want to see themselves in an open registry of top lovers, although in another context, a high rating in that capacity would flatter them. A talented craftsman will have nothing against appearing in a rating of masters in the relevant field, while a less talented one would prefer to appear simply on a bulletin board, without a built-in reputation system, or at least have the ability to boost their rating a bit.

What general conclusion can I draw from all these considerations regarding the processes of centralization and decentralization in reputation systems? In a free market, it seems more likely to me that there will be many local reputation systems, rather than comprehensive, monstrous social rating systems. Even if some open system stores data on a large number of people, this will be fairly narrow information. Services for aggregating comprehensive open information on a specific person of interest are also quite monetizable; however, the objects of such research are unlikely to be interested in having information about them from diverse sources be easily aggregated. Nevertheless, working with big data today is a relatively inexpensive pastime, so few will be able to seriously confuse researchers of someone else’s digital footprint.

But these numerous local reputation systems will, I believe, be mostly centralized. As for systems of distributed storage of reputational information in electronic form, they are unlikely to gain serious popularity, remaining a niche solution for small communities. There are no serious prerequisites for scaling here.

Written contracts are a crutch for the weak that destroys civilization

We now live in an amazing time when buying a streaming subscription requires agreeing to a legal tome that exceeds “War and Peace” in volume. We have grown accustomed to thinking that this is normal, a sign of “civilization” and a “state governed by the rule of law.” But in reality, a paper contract as thick as a brick is not a sign of progress, but rather a medical report on the sickness of society. A diagnosis that screams: “We no longer trust each other!”
 
For this reason, let’s consider a bold idea: in a truly healthy, free society, the vast majority of transactions should be concluded with a simple handshake. And we are not talking about Western-style romance, but about a dry, pragmatic, and extremely efficient thing—the institution of reputation.
 
As soon as we stop believing in a person’s word, we start proliferating paperwork. And where there is paperwork, there are lawyers, notaries, regulators, and, of course, our favorite stationary bandit, who happily takes on the role of supreme arbiter using your own taxes. But let’s look back at history. Do you think that without state control and tons of waste paper, people would have simply torn each other’s throats out? Not at all.
 
How did the diamond exchanges of Antwerp and New York work? For centuries, Orthodox Jews conducted deals worth millions of dollars there. Do you know what the contract for a batch of diamonds looked like? It didn’t exist. Two people looked at the stones, shook hands, and said: “Mazal u’Bracha” (“Luck and blessings”). And that was it; the deal was closed. If someone broke their word or tried to pass off junk, they weren’t dragged into court. They were simply expelled from the community forever. Their reputation was multiplied by zero, and they could no longer buy even bread from their own. The risk of losing face and business was a thousand times more terrifying than any state fine.
 
Another example is the medieval Lex Mercatoria (Merchant Law). Imagine: the 11th century, merchants trading from England to the Levant. There is no single state, just a bunch of different feudal lords. How do they conclude contracts? They created private law, without kings and officials. If a merchant from Genoa cheated a clothier from Flanders, the clothier didn’t write a complaint to the Pope. News of the deception spread through all the Champagne fairs, and simply no one did business with the Genoese anymore. Reputation was harder than gold.
 
And then there is the Wild West. From the movies, it seems people only shot each other there. In reality, until the federal government arrived with its laws, people (miners, farmers, cattlemen) created claims clubs. Land was bought and sold on a word of honor and an entry in the club’s ledger. Conflicts were resolved by neighbors over a glass of whiskey, not by judges in wigs. And it worked!
 
But today, we have forgotten how to reach agreements. We have outsourced the most important human function—the ability to take responsibility and resolve conflicts—to the Leviathan. The moment something goes wrong: “I’ll sue you!” or “I’ll call the police!”. Modern man has turned into a weak and infantile teenager who runs to complain to “Daddy State” because someone broke his sandcastle. And “Daddy” is deliriously happy about it. Because while we are litigating, he collects fees, swells the ranks of bureaucrats, and writes new laws on how we should properly breathe.
 
Total reliance on written contracts is a crutch for a society whose legs have atrophied. It is a path to nowhere! The decline of social trust and total legal infantilism are literally eating modern Western civilization from the inside. The Roman Empire collapsed not only because of barbarians; it suffocated in its own bureaucracy and taxes when citizens ceased to be citizens and became merely a “taxable base.” And we are currently stepping on the same rake. A society in which people cannot trust each other’s word, where everyone views their neighbor as a potential fraudster, and where buying a used car requires a 100-page contract—this is a fragile society. It will collapse as soon as the bureaucratic apparatus fails, and this will inevitably happen with 100% probability in the long run.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

The crap that in the RF is delicately called an “internet accelerator”

Someone contacted me claiming to be developing their own VPN service and offered collaboration in the format of “here’s a referral link, maybe someone will buy a subscription, and you’ll get half of what they spend.” I don’t live in Russia and have no idea which services are considered decent or rubbish by local standards, so I cannot consciously recommend this product. I had thoughts about setting up some kind of VPN on my own VPS and offering it to the few remaining relatives and acquaintances in the RF, but it seems that today they are all universally far more competent in such matters than a sweet summer child like me, who has never known real censorship. So, I decided not to embarrass myself.

I asked if there was a way to verify whether the offered service actually doesn’t keep logs. I was told that a buyer of the service can see from the configs that the open-source xray core is being used. As the wise neural networks explained to me, this core is indeed open-source and indeed knows how not to write logs, but it also knows how to write them, and you certainly won’t see that from the client configs. The second question I was interested in was whether payment via more or less anonymous crypto was available. In response, I received a screenshot with a ton of payment methods; Monero, for example, was present. So, even if Comrade Major gains access to the non-existent logs, he won’t be able to link your traffic to personal data, but you’ll still have to mask your IP additionally.

I think there are currently more VPN service offers in the RF than there are cocaine offers in Montenegro, and anyone who wants can choose something from a very impressive list. I don’t think the service I was asked to promote stands out in any particular way—cocaine is cocaine, nothing extraordinary. If your current VPN subscription is expiring anyway, or if this one seems more convenient, or if you feel that sending me donations directly is too much of an honor but doing it via a referral link is fine—then welcome. Here is the link to the service website, and here is the link to the Telegram bot, if the privacy of the purchase doesn’t concern you particularly.

The Billionaires’ Final Plan — a review

An anonymous user asked me to comment on a video from the Netstalkers channel about how “famous super-rich libertines arrange libertarianism for themselves and the state boot for everyone else.”

I am completely unfamiliar with the channel, however, it is clearly better known to the public than my own, as it had 859 thousand subscribers at the time of this post. The video in question fits well within the channel’s theme, which mainly discusses various behind-the-scenes global mechanics. Well, the topic is in demand, and I want to understand how this demand is exploited in relation to libertarianism.

I don’t want to analyze the style of presentation. Since people watch it, who am I to dispute someone else’s business approach. The video provides quite correct facts: about the book “The Sovereign Individual,” which set many current trends; about how the development of autonomous libertarian territories proceeded, from seasteading in the Andaman Sea to Prospera and Network School; about the fact that this movement is largely driven by representatives of the American tech and financial industries; and finally, that these same people often provide business services to the state, despite all their libertarian rhetoric. Oh, yes, the theme of cosplaying the Roman Republic was also touched upon, but that’s been going on in the US since the Founding Fathers, so there’s nothing particularly surprising about that.

The final punchline is quite funny: basically, that capitalism is already established in the world and works reasonably well, but no, there are troublemakers who are bored and want some action. Thus, enthusiasts of private charter cities are equated to Putin. And rightly so; enough of chewing over the now-tedious Hitler, it was long overdue to find a new bogeyman. Now everyone will be equated to Putin for every possible reason, until the understanding of what exactly is wrong with him is completely blurred, but with a firm fixation that he is definitely terrible, and no one doubts this—unless they want to be seen as literally Putin themselves.

The video prompted me to reflect on the evolution of the criticism of the libertarian movement.

Historically, the first platform for criticism boils down to the idea that libertarian settlers will be communally helpless, that in an-cap there will be no one to build roads, and that these folks will eventually have to go begging to the state if they want normal infrastructure. There are texts about this regarding New Hampshire, and Sperry incriminates Coopersmith with roughly the same position while he was establishing order in Hong Kong. In the video being discussed, this position is no longer used because it is outdated.

The second position is that if an-caps were given their way, they would build a grim corporate cyberpunk world with ruthless exploitation of workers and charging a fee for every sneeze. High tech low life, all that. This is again illustrated by Sperry’s article on Hong Kong, the game BioShock, and is very widely represented in general mass discourse. The video about the billionaires’ final plan hints at this, but, of course, does not illustrate it with real examples.

What happens when an-caps actually found a settlement and start establishing their own rules? Everything turns out fine for them. It becomes a normal peaceful life where people are busy with their own affairs. But then the state inevitably comes along and tears everything to shreds, because where is the cyberpunk, what are you showing us, where is the oppression, are you libertarians or did you just come out for a walk? Now we will show you oppression.

Thus, the third complaint about charter cities is: why do these suckers even bother, the big uncle will come anyway, break this sandcastle, and send everyone to toil in a sand quarry. Some “autonomous settlement” that can’t even withstand a navy. The author of the video slightly indicates this position but does not delve deep, because his task is not to criticize the state, but those who wish to avoid its embrace.

Instead, he goes all out criticizing libertarians from a fourth angle: look, the libertarians have learned from their early attempts, and now they more and more often speak to states from a position of strength. To do this, they simply bring another state over to their side. And to attract that state, they provide services in the proper organization of oppression. Why specifically in this field? Because these are exactly the services the state needs; it buys them.

In other words, the criticism of libertarian autonomous structures now follows the line of hypocrisy. That they establish one set of rules for themselves, but help states establish completely different ones. Well, here we are.

What should the next step be? I think it’s quite obvious. Another libertarian settlement will actually be able to stand up for itself without appealing to state courts and without turning to other states—but simply by its own strength. What will libertarians be incriminated with then? Well, this sort of criticism was quite accurately described by Rozov in the Meganesian cycle. The founders of private autonomous settlements will be accused of war crimes, immorality, poaching talent, financing extremist organizations, and so on. These accusations have one thing in common—they are small dick energy. Anger born of helplessness. I dream of living to see this stage, of course)

Web of Trust: How Mathematics and Cryptography Will Replace Courts and Police

Imagine you are looking for a good auto mechanic. You don’t look at advertisements; instead, you call your best friend Petya. Petya says, “I don’t know anything about cars, but my brother Kolya fixes rides, and he swears that Uncle Ashot’s garage does honest work.” You go to Ashot because you trust Petya, and Petya trusts Kolya.
 
In IT, the “Web of Trust” is the digital version of this principle. Instead of a passport with an eagle or a ministry seal, your identity is a digital key. It is signed by friends, colleagues, and counterparties. A vast cryptographic web is formed. The more respected people who have vouched for you, the higher your weight in society. Now let’s look at the practical applications of this principle.  

  1. Cadastre and property registry. Why do we need bureaucrats shuffling papers using our own taxes? In a WoT system, your property is linked to a digital key. Buying a house? The transaction is recorded in a distributed database (like a blockchain) and signed by you, the seller, and, say, five witness-notaries with impeccable ratings in the Web of Trust. After that, no one will be able to take away your property rights, as any “fake” signature will be rejected.
  2. Transaction guarantees. Suppose you are buying a batch of goods from a stranger in another city. You transfer the money to a special account that will only open with two out of three keys (2-of-3 multisig). One key is yours, the second belongs to the seller, and the third belongs to a pre-selected Arbitrator. Did the goods arrive? You and the seller provide two signatures—the deal is complete. Did the seller send a brick instead of a laptop? You call the Arbitrator, he reviews the evidence, and uses his key to return the money to you.
  3. Arbitration (“private courts”). One might ask: “What stops the Arbitrator from colluding with the seller and scamming me?” This problem is solved by reputation in the Web of Trust. A private arbitration agency survives only on the trust of the parties. If it is revealed that a judge took a bribe, independent auditors will lower their rating in the WoT column. The judge’s social capital will crash to zero, and no sane person will ever include them in a smart contract again.
  4. The “free rider” problem. Suppose not everyone chipped in for the pavement in a village, but everyone uses it. How do you make free riders pay without a tax police? Using the Web of Trust! Didn’t pay your donation to the road fund? No one fines you; live as you did. However, the algorithm automatically resets your trust level with your neighbors. Upon approaching the village barrier, a smart sensor will simply say: “Your key is not serviced; make a voluntary contribution or stick to the dirt road.” Life without coercion, but with natural consequences!
  5. Ostracism instead of prisons. Prisons are very expensive (we pay for them), and they don’t rehabilitate people; they turn them into professional criminals. Contractual ostracism would be much better. Someone scammed their partners for money and refused to pay compensation per a court decision? Authoritative arbitrators attach a crypto-tag to their public key: “Fraudster.” Their rating in the global web of trust hits rock bottom. Automatic protocols trigger: smart locks in car-sharing don’t open, supermarket checkouts reject their transactions, and private security companies deny them access to private territories. This is scarier than prison. Anyone in such a situation would go to work off what they owe.
  6. Lending without banks. Imagine a microcredit system based not on whether a person officially works in an office, but on their history in the Web of Trust. Need funds to launch a business? Your guarantors are the nodes in the network you’ve interacted with over the last 5 years. People will lend to you or invest in your startup directly via P2P, seeing your crystal-clear profile in the Web of Trust.

 
For centuries, the state has convinced us that without the stick, we would slide back into the Stone Age and kill each other. But the truth is that technology already allows us today to build structures based on voluntarism, reputation, and mathematics. No sticks and no taxes—only mutual respect and responsibility for every digital handshake!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

“Ancap” on “Svoboda”

My book “Ancap” has been published in print by Svoboda Publishing House and is available for purchase on Ozon. The first copies are sold at a discount; as of today, the price is less than 300 rubles (varying slightly depending on the payment method), and the sale will last for another 19 days, or until a Ukrainian drone hits the Ozon warehouse in the Moscow region, which serves as an additional incentive not to delay the purchase.

While you’re at it, stock up on other books from the same publisher