Автор: Анкап-тян

Montellibero’s criticism from bitcoiners

A podcast was released on the Hype Coin News channel, for which two bitcoiners wanted to invite our Soz from Montelibero to tell them about Montelibero. However, the guys failed to account for the Montenegrin polako — Soz was late, and the entire podcast took place without him. As a result, it became a conversation between a person who knows something about Montelibero and a person who knows nothing but is trying to understand.

The main question that concerned the interlocutors for most of the podcast was “why are they using some shitcoin, what’s it called, Stellar, when there is a normal, orthodox Bitcoin?”

I have two answers to this question.

The first is usability. For instance, I cannot provide a link to a post from the Hype Coin News channel, nor to the channel itself, because it is private. As for how to subscribe to it — God knows; I subscribed somehow a long time ago and no longer remember how (which is why I am simply posting the podcast right here). It is roughly the same situation with attempts to operate tokens on the Liquid Bitcoin sidechain. Yes, the MTL fund has a Bitcoin sub-fund there, but all I managed to do there was buy L-MTL tokens with Bitcoin and occasionally nudge the head Bitcoin guru manually so that he would manually transfer the dividends to my Lightning wallet. This is not a full-fledged tokenomics, but rather a reservation for Bitcoin maximalists.

But if one sets a goal, it is possible to write a custom wallet (such an attempt is discussed in the podcast) with decent usability, and the first answer would become irrelevant. So, I have prepared a second, more fundamental answer.

What do our bitcoiners see as the main advantage of Bitcoin as a platform for tokenomics? That by issuing tokens, you provably freeze Bitcoins as collateral. But if an investment fund freezes all receipts, it turns out that it is investing in Bitcoin, and only in Bitcoin. However, the MTL fund needs to invest money into one business or another. Thus, its tokens will ultimately be backed not by the original carrier of value transferred to the fund, but by obligations. It doesn’t matter what entered the system. Some bought MTL tokens with Bitcoin, some with rubles, some even with the god-forsaken Lumens. Most of these funds were then converted into euros, and those euros were used for purchases on the external market. And entries appeared on the fund’s balance sheet regarding which assets it acquired. More precisely — tokens of the assets acquired by the fund. The fund does not have a single euro — neither in bank accounts nor in cash — because such entities cannot be put into a blockchain. Instead, it has tokenized euros (which the fund’s treasurers are obliged to exchange for cash upon first request, and these are specific people, and as many as needed can be brought in). Plus tokenized businesses that bring dividends. Plus tokenized investments that one hopes will increase in price — for example, land or Bitcoin itself.

If we used tokenomics based on a Bitcoin sidechain, it would be absurd. I freeze my Bitcoin in the sidechain and receive an MTL token. Then, for the fund to invest the funds, it would need to find someone who will accept this Bitcoin frozen in the sidechain and give euros for it. And where can you find such a person?

It is clear that bitcoiners would like to see something like the Bitcoin Beach project, where there is a large local economy, and everyone within this economy keeps records and makes settlements in Bitcoin. Need land — buy it with Bitcoin. Need a tractor — buy it with Bitcoin. Need to pay taxes to the damn state — pay with Bitcoin.

Yes, in such a world, tokenomics could be based on Bitcoin. What stopped us from doing something similar? Nothing, it is simply a completely parallel task. When the Bitcoin Beach franchise comes to Montenegro, we will be able to fit into it. But for now, it is more convenient for us to use another solution, one that is cheaper and simpler.

Tokenomics is perpendicular to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is about the ability to store and transfer value without trust. Tokenomics is about the ability to monetize trust. One does not hinder the other.

As a dessert, I suggest refreshing your memory with a couple of my texts on tokenomics: part 1, part 2.

Montelibero Project News, Issue 15

Exactly two months have passed since the previous issue, let’s go through the news.

On May 24, a libertarian flag was raised over MTL-city. I hope this is not just a morale-boosting action, but also a declaration of intent to protect the territory from state encroachments; otherwise, the Montelibero flag should have been raised instead of the Gadsden flag with the snake.

I wrote that in MTL-city they promised to deliver the first apartments by summer. Well, we can conditionally consider the promise fulfilled: on May 28, the first apartment owner in MTL-city moved into their home. He worked on the construction site himself, including finishing his own apartment, which is why he moved in first, even before the full formal completion of the work.

In the last issue, I lamented that with current construction prices, I wouldn’t have enough money, and now I am forced to put my small plot of land up for sale.

The plot of 202 sq.m is conveniently located right in the geometric center of MTL-city. Communications are brought in from below, which means greater convenience for connection to the sewage system. The main road runs along the plot, which facilitates access—no need to maneuver through narrow internal paths. There are two oak trees on the plot that create extensive shade (very relevant in summer), and if there is a desire to build on a large scale, they can be cut down and sold for firewood. The plot is also burdened with a debt of 2,055 euros for the payment of general infrastructure construction. Price: 8,000 euros (including the encumbrance, it will be 10,055). Installments are possible. Contact via DM.

Montelibero was presented at two major conferences: Zuzalu (a posh gathering in Luštica Bay, with honorary citizen of Montenegro Vitalik Buterin, Dritan Abazović, who is spending his final days as the Prime Minister of Montenegro, and other famous guys like Titus Gebel) and Edcon (a two-day cryptocurrency conference, also with Buterin and various Ethereum startups). As a result, we have a number of business contacts plus an increased probability that MTL-city will have fewer problems with the legalization of buildings.

The Montelibero Wallet, which is a Telegram bot, has made significant progress in its functionality. It already supports multi-accounting, trading is possible through it (though Lobstr still has a more convenient interface for this), it is equipped with special tools for MTL fund shareholders, but most conveniently—it is now possible to deposit/withdraw funds in USDT (TRC20) or Bitcoin (Lightning) through it. That is, if before I deposited bitcoins on-chain to the fund’s wallet, and then the fund officially issued BTCMTL tokens against them, processing the decision via multi-sig, and this took a day—now the entire procedure of depositing Lightning in exchange for SATMTL tokens takes about five minutes, without involving live people in the exchange, and without commissions.

In anticipation of the yachting season, a yacht club was launched by Montelibero participants. Participants meet on Saturdays either in the first Montelibero club or in the Bar marina, and have the opportunity to order a yacht trip at discounted prices or undergo skipper training. EURMTL is accepted as payment.

The Montelibero podcast channel has become active; it currently features conversations about individual interesting employment cases in Montenegro (there are episodes about a chef and an electronics technician so far) and weekly reviews of the project’s news.

Nostr, first impressions

After the release of the post about regular automatic payments via Lightning using the Nostr protocol, it was quite logical to try and understand what this protocol is, what it can be used for, and what its prospects are.

To start, I familiarized myself with a selection of materials from Tony and the official description on GitHub from the protocol’s author. In short: Nostr is a protocol for the decentralized exchange of small texts (more precisely, scripts in JSON format).

  • Any server owner can run their own relay, which will receive such messages, store them, and forward them.
  • Any developer can write their own client that connects to one or more such relays, receives messages from them, filters and beautifies them if desired before showing them to the user (for example, loading media where there were links to it in the message), and sends the user’s messages to the relay.
  • Any user can download a client, configure which relays it connects to (if the client allows), and enjoy life.

On GitHub, it is easy to find Nostr libraries for several languages, clients (one could make a fork adapted for Montelibero), and relays (again, one can run their own relay for Montelibero’s needs).

To set up a Nostr account, it is sufficient to generate a pair of private and public keys; after that, the private key is stored, and the public one can be shared far and wide (here is mine: npub1jj4xxj47j9yjthhrd2kwklx5vl9j45ruvhl0ftdfamf7v6nx799ssf45q3), just as the creators of asymmetric encryption intended. Keys can be generated directly within a particular Nostr client (I generated mine in the Alby browser extension), via a special service, or for security, one can use a completely custom script if they have the expertise (I do not). However, I managed to link my Nostr public key to the name ancapchan@getalby.com (so-called NIP5 verification), create my own Lightning address ⚡ancapchan2018@gmail.com (which masks the address ⚡ancapchan@getalby.com), as well as link this browser extension to my website, so now, if you have it installed, its icon on the ancapchan.info website changes from yellow to blue, and when you click it, you will see an invitation to send a donation:

In general, Lightning is natively integrated into the Nostr protocol as a means of transferring value. For instance, social network clients based on Nostr offer “zaps” instead of likes, which are accompanied by the sending of a small amount of satoshis. In addition, money in the system can be used for paid relays that offer additional functionality, such as spam filters.

Overall, the protocol seems promising to me. I hope it will soon acquire a sufficiently convenient infrastructure, more people will join, and it will gradually be able to draw the attention away from current centralized solutions. I also hope that the collective intelligence of the developers participating in the Montelibero project will be enough to create their own Nostr-based solutions: their own relay, a bridge to Telegram, and much more that hasn’t even occurred to me yet.

What is the libertarian response to a claim along the lines of: “In a free market, you will be sold into slavery?”

Mr. Coupon

That’s correct, they can indeed be sold. For this to happen, slaves must be perceived as a commodity:

  • by the seller
  • by the buyer
  • by those around them.

If you are enslaved, but all potential buyers do not perceive slaves as a commodity, then congratulations, you will not be sold; you will remain a slave to whoever enslaved you. For example, the state.

If you are enslaved, but the enslaver themselves does not perceive slaves as a commodity — congratulations, you won’t be sold either; you will remain a slave to whoever enslaved you, meaning, for example, the state.

If you are enslaved, they want to sell you, a potential buyer is ready to buy, but all those around do not consider slaves to be a commodity — congratulations, a free market for slaves will not emerge, the transaction is unlikely to take place because it will be considered illegitimate, and you, again, will remain in slavery to whoever enslaved you, for example, the state.

But if everyone around considers not only the purchase and sale of slaves to be illegitimate, but the very acts of enslavement themselves — well, then — alas for you — you will not only not be sold, but you are unlikely to be enslaved at all; you will somehow survive without a master.

There is no one to enslave the poor fellow: feed him, give him a bunk, provide him with work. Even Navalny was given a bunk! And free housing!

A Boosty replacement for true bitcoiners

Until recently, a fairly significant source of income for my channel was my Boosty page, a service that allows for the collection of recurring payments. To be fair, Boosty is a way to earn from premium content, but since my premium content is free, I simply posted diary-like snippets there—not that I believed they were worth the money, but that’s just how Boosty works: you have to offer different content for different subscription levels.

Either way, that story is in the past because almost all of my ruble-based tools have been blocked, and I wouldn’t want to gift your donations to the bank once my last card is blocked. So, I started looking for a replacement, and I found one.

I have added instructions on how to use this new tool to the donations page. Donations are sent in Bitcoin using the Lightning and the trendy Nostr protocols. I borrowed the idea from the 21 Idea project, and as a trial, I set up a daily payment of 100 satoshis for it. So far, the first hundred has been deducted; we’ll see how it goes from here and how well the parameter editing works—I want to play around more with the frequency and amount of the payments.

Overall, however, I have no reason to believe that anything is seriously glitching, so you don’t have to wait until I’m done experimenting and can set up recurring donations right now. It’s currently the low season at my main job, so I have more free time, and I could devote much more attention to my channel if it gave me a way to earn.

Currently, the Bitcoin blockchain is heavily congested, so if it weren’t for Lightning, very little would be moving at all. I recommend getting some satoshis for fast Bitcoin payments as soon as possible; their popularity will clearly continue to grow rapidly. Moreover, payments on Lightning are more private than on-chain.

Why did you decide to build the basic theory through rights, rather than through freedoms?

Did it turn out that way? Is it easier to explain to liberals with remnants of religious consciousness? Are there some non-obvious pitfalls with liberties that aren’t present in an explanation through rights?

Λ (taken from the chat)

Freedom is the natural state of a human being outside of society. Robinson is free on a deserted island until Friday appears, and he has no rights, because there is no one to whom he can make claims, and no one to whom he must yield. When society emerges, it means the restriction of liberties and the appearance of rights. Since the book on ancap is dedicated specifically to life in society, it discusses rights rather, as they are generated by society itself.

A free person before the emergence of the need for ancap

Another introductory video about libertarianism from Svetov

Mikhail Svetov has released another introductory video about libertarianism.

Apparently, the very first video on the SVTV channel, “Five Minutes About Libertarianism,” through which many people indeed first learned about this ideology, had ceased to satisfy him in some way.

Let’s compare what has changed.

The old video is a tongue-twister of tightly edited libertarian talking points, weakly linked into a single logical line. Key points: libertarianism is about the fact that the end does not justify the means, about the victim’s right to protection from violence, and about the right to love and hate. Libertarianism is a moral compass. The video contains mentions of Mikhail’s personal tastes, which are unrelated to the topic.

The new video is read in the measured tone of a storyteller, equipped with simple but quite captivating animation, and is far more logically precise.

I, of course, do not like the very beginning of the video, where self-ownership is presented as something inherent and given by someone unknown, while the non-aggression principle is for some reason called a contract. Why not the other way around: a contract on self-ownership and an inherent natural right to resist violence? This is, in general, important, because according to Mikhail, violating the non-aggression contract removes a person from the legal field, and here the question arises: what exactly is the legal field?

By the way, the visuals in this part directly contradict the text. An aggressor threatens violence, thereby supposedly exiting the legal field; an external defender appears, and what does the aggressor do? He drops the knife and surrenders. That is, he resorts to a legal procedure! He demonstrates that he is no longer an aggressor, and that shooting him from all barrels is no longer so attractive in the eyes of an outside observer. In other words, the aggressor does not exit any legal field. Or rather, he exits it precisely at the moment of aggression, when it is permissible to pump him full of lead. At least, that is how it can be understood from the video.

In short, Svetov has never been distinguished by the rigor of his conceptual framework, but for a politician, this is an excessive requirement; his job is to attract an audience. The video should presumably handle this quite well, and I can boldly recommend it for distribution.

Montelibero on different platforms

On April 30, the Kakha Bendukidze Forum took place in Tbilisi — organized by the same committee that previously held the Adam Smith Readings in Moscow. Judging by the photos, about a hundred people attended, but it seems that such a modest number was due to the room’s capacity limit; there likely could have been more. The broadcast was of very poor technical quality, with the sound dropping out periodically. The 26 people who gathered to listen to the broadcast in Budva, I assume, had the opportunity to fill this tedious silence by discussing what they had managed to hear. I hope a normal recording, without glitches, will appear soon.

Eight reports were presented, of which two were of the greatest interest to me: an overview of Russian economic trends by Natalia Zubarevich (in short — don’t hope, at this rate it won’t collapse on its own for a long time, this fat one will take a long time to wither) and an overview of private city development trends by Vera Kichanova (in short — it’s too early to bury Prospera, and there is also a project called Montellibero). I don’t even know why I’m highlighting these two reports specifically — let’s just call it sexism.

Also around the same time in Montenegro near Tivat, at a two-month event with the strange name Zuzalu, Montellibero was presented by one of our project’s activists. One of the event’s sections was entirely dedicated to charter cities and network states. There was a broadcast, but I found out about it after the fact. The recording hasn’t been uploaded to the archive yet, so I’ll have to wait. Once I do, I’ll try to make a brief overview of the interesting things Titus Gebel, Patri Friedman, and other less-known guys managed to tell — of whom I only happened to chat with Peter Young at the Montellibero club.

Meanwhile, in Russia, there is complete stability: recently, the police snatched two members of the LPR; one was robbed and put in a cellar for 12 days, and nothing is known about the second one at all. I continue to consider the position of the LPR leadership a crime. Instead of organizing the evacuation of libertarians from Russia, they continue to hang around there pointlessly and at risk to their lives, and recently even decided to hold another party congress in September. I urge my readers remaining in the RF to leave these idiots in their hopelessly miserable state and finally complete their relocation to where libertarians are much more needed. After all, the conquest of the world is in full swing here.

Eric Mack. Libertarianism. The chapter in which the author analyzes Rawls’s critique of libertarianism.

I have translated another chapter of Eric Mack’s book Libertarianism. Here, the author briefly (well, as far as the word “briefly” applies to Eric Mack) explains that when Rawls tries to explain why libertarians are wrong by denying the need for a certain basic structure introduced by Rawls—which would impose uniform rules and procedures on everyone in the name of justice—he cannot simultaneously claim that this structure will be white and fluffy, introducing clear and reasonable rules according to which one can pay taxes and sleep soundly. No, according to Rawls, taxes will need to be paid, but that will not give you the right to sleep soundly: after the fact, your income may still be deemed unfair, and you will be forced to shell out more in the name of justice.

By the way, speaking of shelling out. My access to my Qiwi wallet was blocked, and when I tried to recover it, I discovered that with all my moves, I had long since lost the Russian SIM card it was linked to. I managed to withdraw the money, but I no longer consider this channel of receiving funds reliable. Thus, you no longer have the option to donate to me in state-regulated fiat instruments (and all posts in the private channel on Boosty are now open—you are unlikely to find much interesting there). For one-time donations, only various types of cryptocurrencies remain at your service (I especially recommend tokens circulating within the Montelibero project). Cryptocurrency wallets are usually not designed for regular donations; that requires custodial storage. So, as a temporary workaround, you can simply set a monthly reminder for yourself to “donate to Ancap-chan”.

Is it kosher to punch the faces of runners in Z-shirts on the spot? Or should one first clarify, “Are you truly part of the force that deprived me of my country?”

VoiceInTel

Nothing is good or bad in itself; everything depends on the circumstances. Let’s look at what our circumstances are.

First of all—both you and I, and the “Z-supporters” you mentioned, are emigrants.

There is a conflict between us and the Z-supporters. That is, we intend to use the same object for different, mutually exclusive purposes. What is this object of conflict? It is public opinion among the citizens of the state receiving us, namely Montenegro.

We plan to use it so that Montenegrins believe: all Russians who have moved to Montenegro are against Putin and Putin’s aggression; they are peaceful, civilized European people just like the Montenegrins themselves, and they should be welcomed in the country with the same readiness as Ukrainian refugees, or at least on general grounds, like some Germans.

The Z-supporters require a completely different public opinion—that Montenegrins know: all Russians support Putin, he is waging a just war against NATO, which attacked Russia in Ukraine, Russia has always been a friend and an elder brother to all the brotherly Balkan peoples, and now, when Russia drives NATO out of Ukraine, it will come and drive NATO out of Montenegro too, because this malicious Anglo-Saxon organization, generally speaking, bombed Montenegro, so let it get out. And in general—Crna Gora je Srbija. The Montenegrin brothers are doing great; look, they’ve elected a pro-Serbian president, let them keep going in the same vein.

It would seem that we and the Z-supporters have the same desire—to have good relations with the locals. However, we are appealing to different groups of locals. They appeal to those suffering from Great Serbian ressentiment. We appeal to those who consider wars of aggression unacceptable. In other words, both we and the Z-supporters are exploiting the local political divide. Where could this lead? To a situation where Russian citizens start being expelled from the country—simply for interfering in local politics, since this is a private fight, and both high-fighting parties do not wish for escalation.

That is exactly why we don’t run through the streets with FSB flags and shout that Putin is a dick. Running through the streets with flags is a privilege of Ukrainians; no one will expel them from the country.

So, of course, we are interested in making sure that Z-supporters don’t run through the streets of Montenegro. However, punching them in the face right away is still not “kosher.” First, a Z-supporter might actually be a Serb, and to avoid awkwardness, it makes sense to find this out before punching them in the face. Second, a Z-supporter, even if they are Russian, might simply not understand the reasoning laid out above and view running around with Z-symbolism simply as supporting a favorite sports team.

In short, in our situation, it is better to approach them and start a conversation. And if it’s a Russian, then argue reasonably to make them understand that Russians should not wave their political orientation in the street—it’s against “spiritual staples.” But if they start getting aggressive about it—then, of course, they should be provoked—and then punch them in the face within the framework of self-defense, as the great and terrible principle of non-aggression teaches us.