The state is effective in violence if it possesses reliable instruments of violence, while its victims lack appropriate instruments of defense. This is why the search for technical solutions for protection against the state is quite popular among libertarians, and this search has not been unsuccessful.
To know whom to rob and whom to punish for disloyalty, the state develops intelligence services that track the behavior of its subjects. But if, for example, subjects communicate using end-to-end encryption, then the only way for the state to uncover the correspondence is to gain control directly over the devices used for communication.
To effectively seize money from its subjects, the state strives to rid them of cash and bring all settlements between them under the control of banks. But in order to effectively rid subjects of digital cash, such as bitcoins, the state would have to somehow gain control over the subjects’ private keys.
To make subjects place all their hopes solely in the state police, they must be disarmed in the face of criminals; however, with the existence of simple decentralized technologies for creating weapons, such as 3D printing, disarmament proves problematic.
The state creates enormous centralized databases with information about its subjects—but these are inevitably hacked, and the data leaks into the public domain, allowing enthusiasts to use it, including against government officials.
In short, an inventive mind can find means that make a particular type of state violence ineffective. The less effective robbery is, the more effective the market becomes. In the long run, the implementation of individual means of protection against coercion should lead to a situation where money flows to those capable of being the most useful to their clients, while those who only know how to take what belongs to others and dispose of it will become marginals.
The most obvious drawback of the instrumental approach is that it is not enough to create the instruments; one must also achieve their mass adoption. If the state makes the use of instruments of freedom punishable, and people avoid them for fear of punishment, then the utility of these instruments becomes doubtful.
In the next chapter, we will talk about how to take over the world without attracting the attention of psychiatric ward orderlies—about the growth of ancap through the fabric of the state.