The final edited translation of another chapter from Stephan Molinari’s book Practical Anarchy has been posted—about how a stateless society solves the problem of issuing reliable money. The text was written shortly before the appearance of Bitcoin, and therefore it does not concern how a stateless society can ensure reliable money despite the will of governments, but merely how it all could work in the absence of state opposition.

Nevertheless, the text is by no means useless. In essence, it describes the prospects of what the tokenomics of Montelibero could turn into if it were to achieve significant scale. We already have a fairly developed system of private monetary obligations of varying liquidity, but overall our monetary market is still too small for there to be economic sense in the emergence of complex clearing systems. Our private money largely takes the form of obligations backed by goods and services offered by the issuer, and the issuance represents a form of obtaining a loan to launch or maintain the production of these very goods and services. Accordingly, the more widely a service is demanded, the more liquid the monetary obligations issued for it become.

Molinari will soon be finished, and it is not a given that I will take on new large projects for translation. Firstly, people do not read long texts very often. For example, during the entire time a volunteer-translated draft of the chapter on money was on my site, no one complained that a page of text was simply missing from the middle. Secondly, if a person needs to tackle a text in a foreign language, they search for a translation less and less often, and more and more often trust the on-the-fly translation tools built into the browser. Yes, neural networks produce a mediocre semi-finished product, but for simple texts this is enough, and in the case of complex ones, the reader usually has a good understanding of the subject and understands what the author wanted to say, even based on a poor translation of individual difficult parts.