A manifesto was published on the panarchy.ru website about the launch of a project to resettle European libertarians in Montenegro — an analogue of the American Free State Project. Much to my own surprise, I agreed to join this project at an early stage. If nothing falls through due to some new COVID restrictions, I plan to head to the country in April and begin settling in.
When I talk about an early stage, I mean literally the very beginning, because so far, only one family has actually moved to the country as part of the project; the other potential participants are currently discussing prospects in a Telegram chat that branched off from the main panarchists’ chat and was originally dedicated to systeding.
Thus, my channel, which has been predominantly theoretical until now, will take on the characteristics of a travel blog in some time. Of course, I am far from the idea that once I arrive, the entire country will suddenly take giant leaps toward libertarianism. Rather, I will need to learn how to survive in a new place, since the cost of living there is higher than in my current backwater. But if it becomes slightly easier for those who move after me because of my experience, it will mean that my effort was not in vain.
Thank you, very good channel, I’ve subscribed. Now about the video.
In effect, it was convincingly demonstrated to us, with illustrations, that modern corporations differ little from states, and vice versa. Not every business becomes a mega-corporation capable of effective expansion, but rather the one that performs the function of a platform for other businesses. The costs of scaling a platform business are relatively low, and profit primarily depends on the network effect. Therefore, old-style corporations, like Gazprom for example, will not move the needle in the new global market, but Yandex, for instance, is a serious player with prospects for further growth, especially if it manages to devour the Russian Federation that is getting in its way.
But here is the thing. There are relatively few actual employees in such corporations. However, the development of platforms is a factor that contributes to the success of small businesses, or even freelancers, who earn their living on these very platforms. With every new platform, there are more and more people earning money on them. The platforms themselves have far more, of course, but why should we care?
No, we shouldn’t care, as long as the game looks fair. The video describes several cases where the game was played ruthlessly, while the players were in significantly different weight categories. Corporations, becoming comparable to states in power, can well afford methods that are more appropriate for criminal gangs. Should we expect the good old territorial gangster to take a swing at the young, arrogant, and extraterritorial one? Should we fear the new gangster more than the old one?
Anything is possible. One can easily imagine evil corporations in a free market, as Hollywood has depicted them in abundance. But there is still a certain air of theatricality surrounding such companies. It is much easier to imagine a corporation merged with a classic state in symbiosis, using political methods to eliminate rivals when brute force is more convenient, and economic power when a softer approach is better. We see such corporations already; they eat US presidents for breakfast. But we also see the power of civil opposition to dirty tricks, as exemplified by the recent GameStop story.
Following the author of the video, I shrug my shoulders many times in this post because we see that the rules are changing right before our eyes, and it is not entirely clear exactly how “the market” will resolve it. But for now, I can make a cautious assumption that the market will push states further aside so they don’t interfere, and the owners of various platforms, as the market saturates, will fidget less and value the predictability of rules more. And for this, they will have to follow them themselves. By rules, I don’t mean what the platform owner demands from their users, but what the platform owners have agreed upon among themselves. And with the emergence of law, conflicts are resolved much more easily and cause much less damage.
This Saturday (27.02.21), two lecturers will visit Yekaterinburg. The event begins at 13:00. Address: 12 Rosa Luxemburg St.. Entrance is free. Advance registration on TimePad is required. Come and bring your friends, it will be interesting! Our guests:
● Alexander Kotov, Perm. Author of the blog Crypto-Libertarian, dedicated to libertarianism, crypto-anarchism, and methods of collective decision-making. ● Alexei Nefyodov, Novosibirsk. Cryptocurrency popularizer, bitcoin maximalist. He is not a programmer, therefore he examines this issue from economic and socio-political perspectives.
Lecture Hall Program:
Bitcoin and the Theory of Money (Nefyodov). There is nothing more practical than a good theory. Do you need bitcoin, and if so, for what exactly? To answer these questions, it is important to understand why it is designed this way, what money actually is, what types of money exist, and what they are for.
Bitcoin, First Practical Steps (Nefyodov). You will master the simplest tools for acquiring, transferring, and storing bitcoin, and understand where to dig further. If you have a few rubles on your card, you will have your own bitcoins after the session.
Technological Solutions to Social Problems (Kotov). Digital telecommunications and social networks determine what our society will be. Government regulation and centralization in the hands of corporations provide immense power over minds, allowing for censorship and the control of financial operations. Standard legal defense mechanisms against this are ceasing to work. Technological solutions can come to the rescue. The lecture will discuss the prospects of such an approach and what hinders its implementation. The theory will be accompanied by examples from the world of cryptocurrencies. In practice, the use of a Trezor hardware wallet will be demonstrated.
Many people know about Bitcoin Pizza Day, celebrated on May 22nd, in honor of the first purchase of a product with bitcoin, when on May 18, 2010, a guy from Florida named Laszlo Hanyecz put out a call, saying he wanted pizza and would pay 10,000 bitcoins; he waited four days before finally finding someone who would buy him that very pizza in exchange for bitcoins.
And on February 24th, Lightning Pizza Day is celebrated. On February 24, 2018, the same Laszlo Hanyecz bought pizza again, using the then-recently launched Lightning Network—a second-layer protocol on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. This time, the price of two pizzas was only 649,000 satoshis, which is 0.00649 bitcoin. At today’s prices, that is approximately 330 dollars. Moreover, he handled the purchase significantly faster; there was no long wait for a seller.
Over eight years, the daughter has grown quite a bit
How did I find out about all this? There is a convenient custodial lightning wallet on Telegram @lntxbot, equipped with many third-party services. In particular, you can subscribe to a mailing list of paid advertisements there. Send the bot the command /sats4ads on 15 and you will occasionally receive messages from the bot with very short ads and a claim button. By clicking the button, you receive a reward of 15 millisatoshis per character (this is very little, but you can play with the price—you can receive more expensive ads, but in smaller quantities). And so, today a mailing arrived where I was congratulated on the holiday, told this whole story, and offered cashback in satoshis for every pizza purchased. Unfortunately, the offer did not apply to the Russian Federation, so the bot’s ad targeting isn’t great.
On the other hand, today I received another offer regarding ad placement. And since it’s such a day, I requested payment in Lightning: 10,000 satoshis—exactly one hundred million times less than what the pizza cost in May 2010.
So, I am happy to post an announcement for a lecture on cryptocurrencies, which will take place this coming Saturday in Yekaterinburg. I hope there are residents of this city among my readers who are not yet aware, and that the lecturer’s advertising budget did not go to waste. Bring your acquaintances to the lecture as well, if, of course, you wish them well, because mastering the use of bitcoins is definitely a good thing. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be trying to fine us and tax us for it.
As for the announcement itself, it will be in the next post, to separate it somehow from the prolonged preamble.
I am pleased to present a new video from Libertarian Band — the guys have started the long-awaited series on the tools of agorism. And although I no longer write scripts for them, they are doing a great job, which I am very happy about.
The video provides a historical introduction to encryption and how this entirely state-driven affair suddenly led to cryptocurrencies—tools for liberation from the state—and concludes with recommendations on how to use them.
My reader Sergey Soltys was discussing his anarcho-capitalist beliefs with an acquaintance and from time to time referred to Friedman’s Mechanics of Freedom. This ended with the interlocutor taking up reading the book, managing to get through about half of it, and posting a very detailed review, which I am now presenting for your attention because it is quite characteristic.
From this review, it is evident that the book was read sporadically and that the reader clearly did not grasp certain economic terms used in the text. The term “public good” suffered particularly. The reader believes that the key word in the term is “good,” whereas a good is simply some value, regardless of what it is, and the key is the definition of “public,” in opposition to “private good,” which refers to a very specific type of good possessing a set of characteristic properties.
Does this mean that the reader is an idiot and is fighting straw men? No, he is a smart and well-intentioned social democrat who values life’s comfort very highly, is ready to work hard and pay a lot for it, but is unwilling to delve deeply into how the economy works because he is a specialist in another field. Thus, for him, a complete lack of understanding of the theory of the firm, public choice theory, and similar things is forgivable.
The example of a perfectly intelligent person failing to understand Mechanics of Freedom shows the book’s shortcomings. It is long and disjointed; it was not sufficiently revised from edition to edition, and therefore often appeals to outdated facts about the USA from the middle of the last century; it is not rigorous enough in its use of conceptual apparatus.
Perhaps I refer to Friedman too much. That is a matter of taste. I like his language and characteristic humor; it is not that difficult for me to accept his system of definitions, although I often use slightly different terminology for myself. And simply, we both think roughly within the same paradigm of an economic approach to legal issues.
Perhaps I should still write my own work on ancap. Something clearer and more concise. More modern. Based on facts more accessible to the Russian-speaking reader. Svetov threatened to create something like that, but he isn’t in any hurry. I don’t know. I am not sure I have enough talent and perseverance. In any case, first I will finish polishing the Friedman edition. I have enough talent and perseverance for that.
Forgive me that the post came out more in a blog format. It is just that I am on the threshold of significant changes in my life, and that puts me in a very pensive mood.
One of the most important measures of information hygiene is using a password manager. Recently, I referenced a video by Svetov dedicated to information security, and there he recommended a very specific password manager – KeePass. I agree with him on this matter. However, it has long been known that simply naming a tool is not enough for people; they still won’t start using it until you explain in detail how everything is done. So, I decided to prepare a short manual.
I would be happy to receive your useful instructions on various aspects of life online. I have created a section for such guides on the website and will continue to update it.
Tomorrow, February 20, at 17:00 Moscow time, on the channel @libertarico_debates, I will be indulging in an activity unusual for me — moderating text debates. The topic of the debates is the structure of a minarchist society. @libertsib will defend the position that minarchism should be democratic. His opponent @volunto (a regular contributor to my channel, which I hope does not constitute a conflict of interest for me) was not given a positive assertion, so he will have to attack democracy, which, in my opinion, is too easy a task, so I will lead him toward formulating his own version of the structure of a minarchist society.
If you see a sign saying “buffalo” on a tiger’s cage, do not believe your eyes. The correct start time, if the debate organizers are to be believed, is indeed 17:00.
Bitcoin has just broken a trillion dollars in market capitalization. That is more than the Russian ruble, but still less than the Swiss franc. If any of my readers still haven’t bought at least a little bit—believe me, I sincerely sympathize with you, but you should still try to make a decision. Even at the cost of slightly reducing consumption.
By the way, speaking of reducing consumption. Zolotorev recently posted a translation of an article by Jeffrey Tucker about how Bitcoin is changing consumer behavior. The article is very interesting, and I have fully experienced this effect myself. So, if anyone wishes to immerse themselves in the spirit of the 19th century—welcome to Bitcoin.
I couldn’t find the third edition of The Machinery of Freedom anywhere. Found it on this wonderful site. Thank you very much for the work you do; it is very important for our idea. I wanted to ask: is there any way to get the original book, the third edition, in PDF format?
Alexander
I had it in Word from the author, but since it’s urgently needed, I converted it to PDF. I also wanted it in epub, but the quality of the automatic conversion leaves much to be desired, so let some other enthusiast handle that, while I continue to polish the translation in this format.
Please recommend an introductory book on ancap, one that I could give to an acquaintance who is not familiar with the topic, so that without stumbling over a bunch of terms, they could understand how ancap can work (money, courts, police, etc.). Thank you.
анонимный вопрос
I believe that Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom is exactly such a book; otherwise, I wouldn’t have spent so much effort on it. The author does not bother with presenting the history of libertarianism or even just ancap, nor does he retell economic theory, but rather provides a vision: how it all works in a free market, and what specific forms, in his opinion, it will take (at least in the USA).
So let your acquaintance start reading on the site, and in about a month, I very much hope to finally post the final electronic version.
