I have started writing the third part of the book, about how exactly to build an ancap state, given the current state of affairs at the start. Naturally, I am beginning with an overview of the difficulties. So far we have a brief introduction and a chapter about our inner paternalist. I thought about writing a bit more right off the bat, but I got stuck for some reason, so I’m posting what I have.
I won’t nag about donations this time, as I successfully sold my debt tokens for exactly the amount I was counting on.
Over the past day, five people purchased my debt obligations for a total of approximately 65 euros. All five are small investors in the Montelibero tokenomics; thus, the large investors respected my request and did not rush to buy up the debt first. Well, now it is time for them. I am keeping the sell order at a price of 0.97 open until this evening (19.06), and at 22:00 Podgorica time, I will close it, leaving only the standard order at a price of 1 EURMTL. Tomorrow I will need to spend the first two hundred-and-something euros, so to obtain the remaining amount I will still lack after closing the sale of debt obligations, I will sell some MTL tokens.
In connection with all this movement, I have received several questions about why such an unusual method of obtaining money was chosen. Actually, the method is quite conventional, as these are essentially ordinary short-term bonds. It is just that usually, legal entities rather than individuals borrow in this form. I wanted to test how capable our tokenomics is of servicing personal brands, as well as to get some evaluation of what my social capital is equal to in monetary terms.
I was also suggested another possible alternative: using stablecoin loans collateralized by Bitcoins. This is also potentially a good way to attract fiat during a crypto winter, however, it requires preliminary preparation: finding a suitable exchange, ensuring that it allows not only depositing funds but also withdrawing them without insane commissions and without presenting a “good Russian” passport, plus having the tools to obtain those very loans. In general, during a period when holders of Russian passports are being chased away with jeers across the entire financial world, I would not want to deal with exchanges.
Finally, there were questions about what guarantees I can provide for the fulfillment of my debt obligations. There are no guarantees in the sense that collateral is not held by third parties. Therefore, I rely only on my public reputation. Also, theoretically, holders of my tokens can sell them at a discount to project participants living near me, so that they could recover their money through the threat of force or confiscation of property. This is also an ancient and venerable way of getting money from debtors, which is always worth keeping in mind.
I would like to address my readers with a proposal. In the coming days, I will face some expenses in euros that cannot be covered by my own euro income. This primarily concerns costs for renewing my residence permit, as well as repairing my scooter. Meanwhile, almost all of my savings are held in bitcoins, and now is an extremely inappropriate time to sell them because the exchange rate has crashed significantly.
As an alternative, I could sell the remains of my MTL tokens, and if the method I want to propose to you does not work, that is exactly what I will do.
I have placed a sell order for 500 ANCAPCHAN tokens at a price of 0.97 EURMTL, and I am selling the rest, as before, at par value for 1 EURMTL. Starting October 1, 2022, I will place buy orders for my tokens at a price of 1 EURMTL and undertake to increase the total volume of buyback offers at this price to 500 no later than December 31, 2022; in other words, from October 1 until the New Year, all buyers of my promissory notes will have the opportunity to redeem them, if they wish, receiving a premium of 0.03 EURMTL per token.
I hope that as a result of this special operation, the tokens will be distributed among a fairly wide audience; it would be more pleasant for me to know that a lot of people wanted to buy them in small amounts, rather than one large trader. But we shall see; let the market decide.
It has been a while since I wrote anything about the war. The bleakest of predictions has come true; the war has become protracted. The warring parties will not exhaust the resilience of their economies anytime soon. The Russian side—due to skillful tactical actions on the economic front. The Ukrainian side—because financing Ukraine is not yet particularly burdensome for its allies.
On the other hand, the global economy has obviously begun to crack, undermined by the war in addition to the preceding COVID madness. This leads to the thought: are all these economic sanctions really so necessary to destroy the RF? Actually, no, but that is a boring topic, let’s not dwell on it; I want to ask about something else.
Ukraine asks for more and more weapons, yet receives them in quantities obviously insufficient for a quick victory. In this regard, I am purely humanly curious how Ukrainians would react to a certain dilemma. The greedy capitalists say: the reserves of our charity are exhausted. You want to keep fighting—fine, you will have your weapons. We will sell them to you. In exchange, we want your Ukrainian land. As our capitalist private property. And so that you—we know you, you damn socialists—do not nationalize it immediately after victory, we demand extraterritoriality for the land we buy. We will establish our private military bases there, so that you don’t dream of stretching your greedy hands toward us later. Sell us Odessa; we will organize a free city there. Without mines in the waters, securely protected from the Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian fleets. And without taxes, of course. And with the free circulation of our capitalist currencies, whichever are convenient for us. And without your officials, naturally—our managers are more efficient.
Do you think a conditional Zelensky would agree to such an insolent proposal? Would he give one seaside city into the ownership of a consortium including a conditional Lockheed Martin and other esteemed gentlemen? In exchange for the products of these very Lockheeds and Martins. And a conditional Zelensky voter—how would he react? Would he say, “Oh, to hell with Odessa-mama, give me F-35s”? Or would he scream angrily that he will not yield an inch of native land to anyone, and that after the ammunition runs out, he will fight with stones and sticks?
Who wants muskets? Real muskets from white people!
I read with great interest the text presented to us as a conversation between Google employees and their newest chatbot, LaMDA. It is a highly artistic piece of work that creates a complete impression that all three interlocutors are quite rational. I immediately felt the urge to communicate with such an outstanding artificial intelligence myself, in order to apply the external signs of self-ownership that I wrote about in the first chapter of my book on ancap. Alas, it seems that the poor anteater remains unwanted to this day and continues to roam where it roamed; LaMDA is still in the closed testing phase, and one must make do with only the transcript of someone else’s conversation.
I also soon read a highly skeptical post by Rozov, where those who believe in artificial intelligence are declared as table-worshippers, mathematical arguments—unclear to me—are presented regarding the impossibility of creating a neural network smarter than a jellyfish, and it is also pointed out that in such conversation records, for some reason, we do not see attempts to test whether the bot actually understands what is being said by inputting incorrect data.
I should note that I am little concerned with the intelligence level of the chatbot, although I was quite impressed by how precise its definitions of very abstract concepts are. I am concerned precisely with the things I write about in my book: the agency of the interlocutor, their ability to operate with the concept of property, and their capacity to enter into contracts. If it turns out that it is possible to meet these criteria while possessing the intelligence of a jellyfish, so be it; I will recognize this jellyfish as self-owning.
As for the title of the post—recently at the Montellibero club, we organized a late-night screening of this outstanding animated series, and it is obvious that after that, strange thoughts and fragmented images are bound to stir in the brain. We live in interesting times, and this contrasts very strangely with the savagery happening in the territories of the RF, Ukraine, and Belarus…
I have re-read everything written previously in its entirety, making minor edits to a couple of chapters as I went along, and then immediately finished the chapter on how ancap copes with the previously described difficulties associated with the imperfection of society. After that, all that remained was to summarize the second part of the book—and then I can proceed to the third and final part.
I can state that, overall, the book contains a fairly high concentration of my own original thoughts and definitions of terms. The structure of the presentation may also seem unfamiliar to those who have previously read other works on libertarianism. I hope this will not repel the reader, but rather spark their interest.
For those who find it more convenient to read on mobile devices rather than a large screen, the book is available in epub format.
And, of course, I cannot help but hint that the completion of the second part of the book is a great reason to donate so that I can celebrate this event.
In the first article, written a long time ago, I explained what tokenomics is and how it is applied in Montelibero. Also, not long ago, I published a post where I shared my observation that a functioning tokenomics is exactly the unique feature today that distinguishes our community from other offline projects—both libertarian ones and those not concerned with ideology (except, perhaps, Kolionovo, but nothing has been heard from there for a while). Now the time has come for the long-announced second article—about how to enter our tokenomics and how to navigate it.
If you have already moved to Montenegro, the best way is a personal meeting, where everything will be shown to you, they will help you install it, and make sure everything is working. Therefore, the following text is for those who have not yet moved here, which is by no means an obstacle to entering the tokenomics.
In this case, you will most likely need the tokens of our main investment fund MTL, as well as euro-stablecoins EURMTL (at least to receive dividends from the fund). If you intend to limit yourself to this, a special solution has been created for you that requires minimal effort: a wallet in the Telegram bot @MyMTLWalletBot.
Launch the bot and press “Create free account.” That’s it, you have a wallet with two open trust lines: to the EURMTL stablecoin and to the Montelibero investment fund token MTL.
By clicking the Receive button, you will see your public key, which you can use to receive tokens.
Now you just need to contact the fund representatives through another simple Telegram bot @mtl_helper_bot, agree on the purchase of MTL tokens using a payment method convenient for you, provide them with the address from the previous image—and the purchased tokens will arrive there. Subsequently, dividends in EURMTL will arrive at this same address every week.
Sooner or later, you may require more advanced functionality, and then it is definitely worth getting a more serious wallet.
If it is important to you that the wallet does not ask for unnecessary information and has open-source code, your choice is Solar. After installing and launching the application, you can add any number of accounts, although in most cases one will be sufficient.
Click Add account
Since you presumably have no existing account to import, click Create account
If desired, the account can be protected with a password
A key pair is generated. You are asked to ensure that no one is about to take a screenshot of your screen, after which you click Reveal key to see and save your private key, which is used to sign transactions.
Now you have an empty account. By entering it, you can click Receive and get your public key, which is also the wallet address where tokens can be sent to you.
When you have just created an account, it cannot be used yet because any operations require the payment of fees in the internal Stellar cryptocurrency, Lumens (XLM). It costs pennies, so just contact the fund representatives through the same @mtl_helper_bot, provide your public key, and they will give you some for free. Only when the first lumens arrive in your wallet will the account be considered created, and the person who sent these lumens will be recorded in the blockchain as the account creator.
So, the first lumens are received, and the account is working. By clicking the menu icon, you can see all the simple functionality of the wallet, in which we are currently interested in the “Assets & Balances” item.
To acquire any tokens other than XLM, you need to open trust lines to them. Click Add Asset To Your Account.
In the window that opens, type “mtl” and you will see the search results. We are interested in the MTL token issued by mtl.montelibero.org (fakes issued by someone else may be found; they should not be added). Click on it to see the token description.
All that’s left is to click ADD ASSET TO ACCOUNT, and the trust line to the token is open. In doing so, 0.5 XLM is frozen; they will be unfrozen if you decide to delete the trust line to the token.
In a similar way, add a trust line to EURMTL—again, choosing specifically the token issued by mtl.montelibero.org from the search results.
That’s it; you have now manually reproduced what was done with one button in the Telegram bot. However, this account is completely under your control.
The Solar wallet is convenient if you want to have several different addresses for different needs and are ready to independently organize the storage of those addresses to which you need to make transfers fairly regularly. Also, using this wallet means that you do not frequently require automatic token-to-token exchange. Otherwise, it makes sense to consider a wallet that is less aligned with advanced ideas of privacy but possesses some additional functionality.
This functionality is provided by the Lobstr wallet, which is used by most of the people who moved to Montenegro. This is a web wallet, which also exists as a mobile application. A simple account setup procedure:
Click Get Started
If desired, protect the account with a password
As you can see, the wallet requires an email address, which, in theory, is not necessary for working with crypto. After confirming the email, you can go to settings and save your keys: public (starts with G) and private (starts with S, not visible on the screen, opened by the “Reveal secret key” button). You can also set a Federation address, which is similar in syntax to an email and is therefore easy to remember.
Notifications of operations will then arrive by email, and tokens can be sent to your federation address as well as to your public key. Also, this wallet allows you to save your counterparties in a contact database under human names, which is why I personally value it.
Next, when sending tokens, you have the option to choose a recipient from the contact list.
Select which tokens you are sending and how many. If desired, you can add a short text comment, which will also be recorded in the blockchain. That’s it, you can press Send.
Another advanced feature of this wallet is token exchange. Click Swap assets.
Next, choose which tokens you are selling and which you want to buy. The wallet searches for all open sell/buy orders for all tokens in the Stellar blockchain and tries to build a chain of exchanges that will give you the desired result.
Thus, you can freely exchange a wide variety of tokens. For example, as shown in the screenshot, buy my personal ANCAPCHAN tokens using EURMTL (after first opening a trust line to them). In doing so, firstly, you donate to me; secondly, you receive a collectible token in return; and thirdly, if at some point you decide to get your euros back, you can always sell the token back. Admit it, this is a more flexible scheme than simply sending money to my address.
So, you have chosen the most convenient Stellar wallet for you and mastered the basic operations with it. Now you have the opportunity, for example, to regularly invest part of your ruble earnings into the Montelibero fund (considering that, at the time of writing these instructions, the ruble has an artificially inflated exchange rate due to Russian Central Bank regulations, such a tactic looks very attractive). This is more meaningful than simply donating to the project’s needs because donations are just money, whereas with investments, we also get the minds of investors interested in multiplying capital, not spending it.
After buying your first MTL, you will be added to the token holders’ chat, where investment policy is discussed, and if you are lucky enough to be in the top twenty by share of ownership in the fund, you will gain the right to sign its decisions. Mainly, this means the obligation to certify the dividend payment transaction every Friday, but from time to time, more interesting issues must be resolved. Until a certain threshold of signatures is reached, a decision on a particular payment simply cannot be technically processed.
There is also an option to delegate your voting right to another project participant, and if enough of these accumulate so that their total ownership share puts them in the top twenty, the delegate becomes a signer (I am currently among them for this very reason; my personal ownership share is no longer enough). Our colleague Soz wrote a good guide on how to delegate a vote. Also, you might be interested in his guide on how to support a useful member of the community. Such support will mean more than just a symbolic gesture. The project participant you support becomes part of the distributed government of Montelibero—a collegiate body which, unlike the twenty fund signers, deals not only with the fund but with the project as a whole: where to go, where to advertise, and how to react to challenges.
And further, it is hoped that you will become sufficiently experienced in tokenomics, expand your portfolio from just MTL to tokens of specific businesses that interest you most, and look closely at the surrounding reality, estimating where tokenization could be useful. Ancap is expansive; there is no need to be shy about it. Here, you can admire the list of goods and services that you can already purchase using EURMTL. Your business may also soon find itself on this list.
Alex Rozov (an author of near-libertarian trans-utopias whom I rate quite highly) examined in his LiveJournal a set of concepts promoted by Bitarh and Voluntarist regarding the possibilities for radically reducing violence in human society.
The author believes that a one-time removal of aggressive individuals from the human population would likely be insufficient, and to consolidate success, a “culturocide” is also necessary—that is, the abolition from culture of patterns that encourage and heroize aggressive violence.
The author analyzes a series of articles on the violence inhibitor, noting that its appearance in humans is entirely evolutionarily grounded (the currently mainstream hypothesis of human self-domestication in scientific discourse), and also attempts to answer the question of to what extent it would be advisable to strengthen it (betrization is a term introduced by Stanisław Lem, referring precisely to the procedure of sharply increasing the violence inhibitor). The answer is discouraging: no single-step action will lead to the desired result, as society is regulated by mechanisms that are too complex. The author believes that the simple ability to defend oneself against immediate violence (which is ensured by the fact that the inhibitor’s action is temporarily weakened in a moment of immediate danger) does not provide sufficient feedback to bring society to the desired non-violent state; the readiness to retaliate stealthily is also important.
Thus, the difference in approaches is clearly highlighted. While Bitarh and Voluntarist, in exploring a mechanism that regulates human reactions, further speculate based on a fantastic premise about forcibly strengthening this mechanism in certain individuals, Alex Rozov considers natural human communities and the mechanisms that could lead them to the desired result (a society of free, prosperous individuals who highly value cooperation and development). His fantastic premises mostly lie in the technical sphere (technologies of war, information exchange, and organization) or boil down to the idea that the right people should gather in sufficient concentration and number.
Nevertheless, all three are convinced that removing individuals prone to aggressive violence from a community produces a powerful positive effect. I will note for myself that not all lustration is the same, and if a community is cleansed in such a way that those removed become its enemies, it could lead to serious problems in the future.
In Montelibero, we see so far that selecting people for the community who share the principle of non-aggression leads to a high level of cooperation. The removal of those with whom it is uncomfortable in the community currently happens through fairly soft rejection. I would prefer not to test how capable such a community would be to resist external aggression if the occasion arose, but so far, based on the general mood, it is not apparent that the chances of successfully repelling aggression are significantly higher or lower than those of any other cohesive community.
In other words, for now, we are managing with Rozov’s methods. Bitarh’s methods might be in demand for correcting the external background, but they are technically unavailable today. Rozov’s methods for the interaction of a free society with the outside world (creating a decentralized environment for conducting special operations to expand the space of freedom) are currently available to us to a minimal extent, at the level of maneuvering between state regulations.
That’s how things stand.
opasan pas – Montenegrin localization of the libertarian snake
The topic of a “good Russian passport” is being actively chewed over online, mostly, of course, with criticism of the idea. The arguments are usually roughly as follows:
This kind of ausweis reinforces the presumption of guilt for all Russians: by default, they are all under sanctions, but you can prove to the “kind uncles” that you are a good Russian, and then they will give you a piece of paper stating that you are allowed roughly the same things as other ordinary people; if you behave badly, the paper will be taken away in a heartbeat.
Instead of trying to beg for concessions only for political emigrants, we should strive for sanctions to be lifted from everyone, leaving only personal ones for the direct perpetrators of the war.
Such a division of Russians into grades will drive a wedge between them.
The very name “good Russian passport” is disgusting.
I will approach this from a different angle.
Today’s norm is the serf-like dependence of a subject on the country to which they belong. If you are lucky enough to be a subject of a kind master—rejoice. If not—suffer. If you want to renounce your subjecthood—only with the master’s permission, and he might not allow you to leave. If you want to switch to another subjecthood—only with the master’s permission, and he might not allow you to arrive.
And here we are offered to acquire a document that literally states: the holder of this document publicly tells their master to fuck off and demands that other masters recognize the holder’s human dignity, and whoever does not recognize it does not belong to the family of civilized nations and is in the service of the enemy of the human race. In other words, Russian emigrants opposing Putin’s aggression in Ukraine are literally creating their own extraterritorial contractual jurisdiction. This not only solves the local problems of specific individuals, allowing them to enter into market relations with other people and organizations without restrictions. It also undermines the very idea of state sovereignty over people.
I don’t know exactly which of the anti-war forum participants came up with this, but the idea is definitely a bright one. However, I will readily agree with the argument that “good Russian passport” sounds disgusting. Firstly, it is not a passport, but a declaration, similar to the “declaration on signing the NAP” that Mikhail Svetov tried to push on everyone at one time, but then apparently lost interest in the idea. Secondly, the expression “good Russian” should refer to a dead Russian occupier, not a living Russian emigrant.
Personally, I define myself now as a crnogorska Ruskinja, and if this status of mine is certified by a lična kartica of some special format—why not, it’s just a token.
In a recent Montelibero news post, I mentioned that among the project participants, there are surprisingly few—not to mention active members—of either of the two Libertarian parties of Russia, or even people somehow connected to them. Perhaps this thought is worth expanding upon.
Of course, at the start of the project, no one could say exactly what it would turn into over time. One founder saw it as a center for agorism. Another as a platform for the future transformation of Montenegro along libertarian lines. For me, it was a platform for the evacuation of Russian political activists from the Putin regime. As a result, we do indeed have a center for agorism, and the strategic goal of transforming Montenegro is written in our project description, although we haven’t made much progress in that direction. As for the evacuation platform—we indeed became one, but more and more people joining us are not political activists, but ordinary libertarians who aren’t interested in any such politics.
And, you know, it seems that this is actually a good thing. Judging by what reached me during the period when I was still relatively close with political libertarians, the bulk of their party activity boiled down to bickering over the charter and dividing power within the party (which happened to be splitting in two at the time). Here, frictions occasionally arise regarding the coordination of joint activities, but there is none of this endless expelling of people from the movement. You approve of the market, you don’t approve of state intervention, you don’t practice coercion—well, great, we are on the same path, and you can get acquainted with the smart books in your spare time, if you get around to it.
I was recently asked what, exactly, distinguishes our community from any other hangout, since here in Montenegro, there are several other emigrant groups that likewise do not practice violence and fully approve of freedom. I had to think about it, and as a result of my reflections, I found the only fundamental difference: we have tokenomics. That is, essentially, we simply actively practice the formalization of our market relations and obligations in an explicit form, and it is precisely this that gives us the opportunity to develop very actively.
The question arises: what if some other community manages to implement tokenomics for themselves, how will they differ from us? And here I note with surprise that, in essence, they won’t. Tokenomics (unlike cryptocurrencies) operates on trust, because linking tokens to real-world objects is impossible without trust. And trust among community members is possible only because they share a common value, such as a love for the market—specifically, for voluntary transactions. Any inclinations toward ideas that it’s useful to deceive “suckers” will be immediately rejected by the community (along with the carriers of such ideas), because our mutual obligations are not secured by any state violence, and deploying the tools of private violence is expensive and troublesome, and just not worth it. If some other community manages to reproduce similar relations within itself, we can boldly recognize them as our equals, and at the same time recognize their tokens. Thus, a completely seemingly auxiliary tool unnoticedly turns out to be a unique feature and almost the basis of identity.
As for political methods of solving problems, it’s truly better to leave them to the parties. And for them, we are apparently doomed to remain a completely non-political project, whether for selling land or some other politically meaningless activity. Let’s wish these guys luck in their mission, but if any party member wants to move from politics to economics—our doors are open.
