It only started being populated recently, since May 2, and so far it has been doing so on a daily basis (at one point, my own channel had a similarly auspicious picture). The materials can be roughly divided into two categories: reviews of specific markets and articles explaining the advantages of Merexp Analytics.
As far as can be understood, the advantages lie in the fact that the company uses its own proprietary metrics. I particularly liked the breakdown of how these metrics work based on historical Bitcoin data. Admittedly, based on the channel’s materials, it remains unclear how the raw data for all these metrics is collected, but perhaps the company shares this information with its clients.
The fund views Bitcoin as simply another asset in the stock market, which gives the reviews their own charm, since the Bitcoin market is usually written about either in the context of cryptocurrency world news or in the context of technical analysis; here, however, the focus is mainly on the influence of fiat liquidity fluctuations and similar matters.
Strictly speaking, this is already at least the second attempt to launch the fund’s channel; the first happened in December 2023, and by February 2024, publications had already ceased. Back then, the publications were much less regular and concerned Bitcoin exclusively.
It was somewhat surprising that there is no link anywhere in the channel’s materials to the investment fund’s website or its analytical division. This is inconvenient both in terms of presenting materials (for example, the website could contain a convenient archive of review publications broken down into categories by individual markets), as well as a lack of information about the fund that is awkward to present in a Telegram channel format (for example, information about the volume of attracted investments and the fund’s portfolio). Instead of a website, it is suggested to contact the support bot for all questions. This model of presenting material and interacting with potential clients is not very clear to me, although perhaps it is simply a trend. After all, people even manage to do business on Instagram.
The feedback bot was tested by me at the most unfavorable time — on a Friday evening. The response time was 40 minutes, which is very good.
Or perhaps the website and other interactive tools are currently being actively finalized and will soon see the light of day. If so, I even appreciate such an approach: first fully develop one’s key know-how that provides an advantage over competitors, and only then pay attention to how to present them to the public. This is much more honest than first making a beautiful presentation and website, then attracting venture investment, and only then, possibly, spending that investment on the development of metrics and algorithms.
In any case, I subscribed to the channel because the content provided there is quite original. Regarding Bitcoin, it will even be possible to track how the forecasts come true, and if they prove reliable, then perhaps I will start looking for entry points, rather than just buying coins blindly as soon as I receive income exceeding the subsistence minimum.
From the proposed positions, it is strange in general to ask questions about whether one can do something. Of course, one can; the only question is the extent of responsibility.
If we are talking about sanctions from the Russian state, then solving the problem comes down to finding sufficiently safe ways of transferring money, publishing propaganda, delivering equipment, and so on.
However, I believe the question is more about whether other right-libertarians and right-individualists, upon learning of such activity, would feel obligated to obstruct you.
The RDK is a semi-autonomous armed formation within the AFU: in some ways it obeys the central command, it depends on it significantly for supplies, and it seems to be quite autonomous in matters of recruiting and the informational coverage of its activities. But there are other units within the AFU that independently conduct recruiting and crowdfunding. How is the RDK so different that the German Stirner asks about the permissibility of helping specifically the RDK, and not some Azov?
Azov was mentioned for a reason. Both this brigade and the Russian Volunteer Corps face numerous accusations that Nazis serve there. Economic theory tells us that values are subjective. Any person has every right to prefer one nation over all others; this in itself does not provide grounds to condemn them. Do the guys from Azov and RDK exterminate representatives of all other nations for the sake of the greatness of the nation they prefer over all others? No, they exterminate people according to a different criterion, and this criterion is no different from the one guided by other military formations within the AFU.
The only remaining difference between the RDK (and a couple of other smaller units) and other parts is that they physically, on foot, crossed the internationally recognized Russian-Ukrainian border to fight the Russian army on Russian territory. And what, does this make them aggressors? No, they are still participants in a defensive war. Just like the drone operators striking refineries deep in the Russian rear.
Ah, yes, they also have Russian passports, or at least they did at the start of the war. And what, does this somehow change their legal status? No, not even under Russian laws. They still remain AFU servicemen, toward whom all sorts of rights and restrictions associated with the laws and customs of war apply—laws which the RF pledged to observe (but does not). But even if there were a law in the RF according to which any RF citizen who joined the ranks of foreign armed forces was subject to execution without trial, what significance would this have for a legal individualist?
However, I assume that the reader with the nickname Max Stirner is a Russian citizen. Therefore, his question can be reformulated more sharply: does libertarian morality justify war against one’s own state? Actually, libertarian morality justifies war against any state. Even against states led by libertarians, such as Javier Milei, Nayib Bukele, or Hans-Adam II. Fighting against one’s own is even more meaningful, because that is where your main grievances lie, it is that state that causes you direct harm, whereas all others are just some predators roaming nearby, who, of course, should also have no place on earth. However, a successful war requires allies. Most of us do not have them. The RDK does. Let us be happy for them.
To avoid bothering readers with news about every single sneeze, I present a large chunk of the translation of The Network State all at once.
Chapter 4.4. The Foreseeable Future: here the author simply had some fun with a couple of interesting technical predictions. They have a rather indirect relationship to the theme of the book.
Chapter 4.5. American Anarchy, Chinese Control, and International Centrism. A monstrously large text where the author mostly, of course, writes about the USA, analyzing step by step exactly how the degree of confrontation between supporters of the establishment and supporters of decentralization will increase in the States, and reports that this, generally speaking, is not funny or romantic at all (to be honest, while reading, it seemed to me that the author created a straw man out of Bitcoin maximalists, and they by no means propagate societies of total distrust, but who knows what kind of freaks actually hang out in these Americas of theirs). The alternative in the form of the Chinese recipe for a digital gulag obviously does not entice him either. As usual, he hopes that foreign countries will help him, and primarily bets on Israel and India. However, in his view, this is merely a base for building many startup communities, some of which will grow to the high status of network states.
Chapter 4.7. Toward a Recentralized Center. And here Balaji Srinivasan only has to emphasize once more that institutions are not scary, centralization is normal, you just shouldn’t obsess over the fact that the old things don’t work, and it would be more correct to actually launch a market process for building new institutions.
I will try not to take too long with the translation of the final, fifth part of the book, which presumably contains the recipes for what the author proposes to do.
The channel is still on vacation, but the largest investor of Montelibero stopped by for a visit, and I had an evening to chat with him, so it felt strange not to publish my reflections on this.
My previous overview of Montelibero concerned tokenomics. Now I want to examine such a mysterious entity as the Montelibero Association. I first mentioned it in the sixteenth (and apparently final) news issue — since then, I no longer write about Montelibero as a whole, only about specific aspects.
The reason for the Association’s appearance was that the Montelibero community had accumulated problems:
Goal setting. The stated goal of the Montelibero project was initially libertarian transformations in Montenegro. However, those coming to the country are somehow more concerned with issues of their legalization in this state, earning a living, increasing the quality of that very life by developing internal culture within the community, and so on. Ancaps do not want to build an ancap for others; they are perfectly satisfied building an ancap for themselves, plus some minimal costs to keep the state from getting in the way.
Lack of activists to create public goods. Who will build the roads is not a particularly acute problem, because it is easy to outline the circle of main future beneficiaries of road construction. But who (or rather, for what incentives) will write the wallet code for our tokenomics, who will organize a large annual festival and many smaller intermediate activities, who will pay for hosting, who will handle the filling and promotion of information resources — and so on? Administering the collection of small targeted contributions for any such trifle would be too expensive; it is more profitable to aggregate administrative expenses somehow.
Insufficient clarity of collective decision-making mechanisms. For example, who and how will decide whom to send to deliver a report at a conference if the conference organizers contact one of the Montelibero participants and invite some representative of Montelibero?
One could simply dismiss such problems, claiming that the “market” is meant to solve them. But the “market” is precisely a generalized name for the entire sum of voluntary private initiatives. And so, one such initiative sounded roughly like this:
Since a loose community without fixed membership responds poorly to such challenges, let’s create an organization with fixed membership from its participants, gather activists into it, implement liquid democracy there, and within the framework of the association, they can engage in creating various cool infrastructural things for the entire community, as well as make collective decisions that can then be communicated to the whole community.
Half of last summer, the Association was at the stage of preliminary discussion. It was officially created at the festival. Now it has slightly over a hundred people in its membership. I will try to briefly list its main achievements:
Creation of a mechanism for identity verification of its participants and a standardized blockchain record of this fact
Creation of a court, which has already managed to consider several cases
Creation of a competition commission to select the organizing committee for the Montelibero festival in 2024
Creation of internal factions united by a common direction of interests (creates associations with secular Civil Society)
Even at the stage of preliminary discussion, the Association faced serious difficulties, and some of them became even more apparent after its activities began.
Firstly, the very idea of officially joining something, obeying the decisions of a collegiate body, and so on, proved alien to many ancaps. A working group around a specific project — as many as you like! Membership in a club — by all means! But the Association, by design, looked like something too similar to a political party, and therefore was rejected regardless of the arguments in its support.
Secondly, the Association has internally contradictory goals. On one hand, to engage in constructive activity, it needs a high concentration of activists. On the other hand, to communicate legitimate decisions to the entire large community, it must be as numerous as possible. On a third hand, principled opponents of the association perceive any attempts by the Association to communicate its decisions externally as encroachments on their freedom and try to delegitimize them in every way.
Liquid democracy deserves a separate mention. The Association’s council, to simplify the model slightly, consists of twenty of its participants with the highest number of votes delegated to them by other members of the Association. This creates an incentive for those wishing to enter the Council to campaign for their own sympathizers to join the Association, preferably passive ones, so that all their activity in the organization boils down to joining, verification, and delegating their vote.
As a result, a contradictory situation has emerged.
On one hand, the Association carries out some useful activity. For example, the court it created resolved several conflicts that were previously in limbo. However, in one of these conflicts, the defendant (a member of the Association) did not recognize the jurisdiction of the court over them, thus questioning the claim that the Association is a contractual jurisdiction. A potentially even more useful project is the development of a standard for the blockchainization of relationships. Finally, it is the Association that plans to carry the festival on its shoulders.
On the other hand, all this looks like an attempt to create a monopoly out of nowhere, combining completely diverse activities under a single brand, even to the detriment of efficiency. For instance, the development of the blockchainization standard and its accompanying toolkit requires a compact working group, not a bureaucratic structure. To create a tradition of resolving conflicts in court, examples of successful conflict resolution are needed, not attempts at forced court appearances under threat of loss of Association membership. Cumbersome democratic coordination procedures repel enthusiasts rather than attract them. Attempts to inflate the prestige of membership through economic incentives for Association members and restrictions for non-members lead rather to the opposite effect: any anti-statist knows that if someone tries to impose a certain free service on you, threatening sanctions for not using it, you should run as far away from such gifts as possible.
Now my conclusions.
The creation of the Association was a response by a small active part of the community to quite real challenges facing the community.
This solution is unsuccessful by design and is quite naturally rejected by part of the community.
Attempts to infiltrate the Association from the outside for the purpose of correcting its design flaws are harmful: it is a sin to try to replace the market with politics.
Attempts to destroy the Association for the purpose of returning to the past are counterproductive, since even if the price seems acceptable, as a result, the community will still have to solve the same problems that the Association tried to solve.
The only strategy that seems reasonable to me: ignore its very existence as some unified entity, without rejecting the people who are part of it in any way. Membership in the Association is neither good nor bad; it has no more meaning than an earring in the ear.
As for the little problems, they will have to be solved by our own efforts; no kind uncle will come and help, and no evil uncle will come and hinder. He doesn’t exist, this collective uncle.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone, and at the same time, happy end of Maslenitsa; and to those who love filming queues in fast-forward mode—happy opportunity to indulge in your favorite pastime. So many holidays in one day—isn’t that great, isn’t that panarchy!
As for me, another chapter of The Network State has been quietly translated. Balaji Srinivasan continues to discuss the trends of the near future, and if in the previous chapter he discussed socio-political trends, now he touches upon the techno-economic consequences of the digitalization and internetization of everything.
For instance, he notes that the sharp lowering of the publishing threshold increases variance: alongside traditional, polished, and weighted but uninteresting positions, a multitude of the most unusual chthonic entities crawl into the light. And besides the shaking of discourse via social networks, there is also the shaking of financial stability through countless cryptocurrencies.
Another interesting aspect discussed by the author is that the total digitalization of everything leads to digital entities becoming primary, while physical ones, in essence, materialize on demand if there is a need.
He also briefly touches upon the mystery of why we do not observe as frantic a leap in productivity in the physical world as we do in the digital world. Then, providing a whole brood of hypotheses, he suggests choosing between them independently.
In short, the chapter is quite saturated with ideas and generalizations, so I don’t see much point in summarizing it; it’s easier to just read it.
While the channel is on vacation, I’m not bothering with original materials, but so you don’t get bored, I’ll be posting some external content from time to time.
Soz recorded and posted a very high-quality video on MTL-TV, where he explains why the use of multi-signature wallets is extremely useful for literally everyone who holds large sums in cryptocurrencies, and how easily and conveniently this is organized in the Stellar blockchain in general and in the Montelibero tokenomics in particular. I highly recommend it, and I also want to use the suggested recipes once I have a bit more free time.
And don’t forget about the Ankaposhnaya segment on the same channel; they’ve already reached the part explaining the market and seem to have no intention of stopping.
Another translation order has come in, and it’s also quite urgent. This means I may need to take a break from running the channel.
Therefore, for now, I can recommend listening to the podcasts on our Montelibero channel MTL-TV, especially, of course, the new “Ankaposhnaya” section; it’s not so much about Montelibero as it is about various libertarian theories—after all, that’s why you gathered here to read, isn’t it?
Montelibero is a decentralized community, which is why the channel has no single host; it is managed by whoever needs it most at the moment. First it was Soz, then Birkin, now it’s Ivan from the Ogurism channel, and later perhaps someone else will take over.
Also, to keep from getting too bored, you can boost the channel for now. Previously, this would only have given me the ability to post stories, but I find it barbaric to work on content that is destined to disappear quickly—such is my vain nature. But now, a well-boosted channel can also be styled more exquisitely, and it’s better to have that option than not to have it.
A substantial piece of text is ready for a book on the theory of war, covering various aspects of war preparation. It took a very long time to write; it is evident that excerpts from different periods differ in style, but I do not want to delay publication; I will still have time to proofread it.
Let us consider this as a substitute for the routine post on the anniversary of the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukrainian territory by Russian troops, and after all, I promised to speed up after Navalny’s death. So, I am speeding up.
The translation of the fourth part of The Network State has begun. As expected, after finishing with the “past present,” the author has moved on to discussing the future.
In Chapter 4.1, Possible Versions of the Future, Balaji Srinivasan begins by clarifying the factors that prevent him from making precise forecasts, then provides a brief description of the envisioned future scenario, and finally estimates where his idea of network states would fit into this scenario. In doing so, he uses the disgustingly clumsy term “re-centralized center.” My ability to adapt the text during translation is limited, so I can only state that the term is terrible and difficult to understand, but nothing comes to mind yet to replace it with. What does the author even mean? As far as I can judge based on an incomplete reading, the word “center” refers to the center of the triangle he drew in the third part of the book describing a tripolar world—suggesting that our salvation lies in not falling into the extremes that accumulate at the poles. And he has yet to explain “re-centralized.” Perhaps it means that every startup community must have its own leader, otherwise it won’t take off. I would be glad to be wrong.
In Chapter 4.2, Sociopolitical Axes, the author briefly notes that to assess the future, it is not enough to look at well-known and long-established trends; it is also worth looking at those that are only just forming. As examples of sociopolitical factors that could seriously affect the future, he provides three completely diverse examples: Indians (while everyone is looking at China, India is quietly closing the gap, and in the next decade should make its presence felt quite loudly, both as a state and as a diaspora, i.e., a Network, in the author’s terminology), the confrontation between the “un-prime” and the “trans-hum” (Klaus Schwab was listed as a transhumanist), and the identity stack (there are several interesting thoughts on where identities come from, as well as a non-obvious take that one identity will inevitably be the leading and defining one).
The chapters in the fourth part of the book are not very long, so I will try to post them in groups rather than one by one, to avoid cluttering the feed.
There is one negative aspect to Navalny’s death: a good man has died. But there could never have been a happy ending in his fairy tale.
Otherwise, alas, things have rather improved.
The Russian regime has lost the potential opportunity to use a well-known political prisoner as bargaining material or a tool for blackmail.
The Russian opposition has an additional reason to abandon the idea of peaceful protest. Some of its representatives, acting by inertia, will go out into the streets of Russian cities to publicly express their grief, face persecution, and leave the RF.
I have an additional reason to increase my efforts in writing a book on the theory of war.
Other political regimes may throw a bit more fuel onto the fire of war with the RF (it would be good if without new mindless sanctions against those Russians who are easier to reach, but here life rather forces one to be a pessimist).
