Рубрика: Answers

Answers to your questions

The Billionaires’ Final Plan — a review

An anonymous user asked me to comment on a video from the Netstalkers channel about how “famous super-rich libertines arrange libertarianism for themselves and the state boot for everyone else.”

I am completely unfamiliar with the channel, however, it is clearly better known to the public than my own, as it had 859 thousand subscribers at the time of this post. The video in question fits well within the channel’s theme, which mainly discusses various behind-the-scenes global mechanics. Well, the topic is in demand, and I want to understand how this demand is exploited in relation to libertarianism.

I don’t want to analyze the style of presentation. Since people watch it, who am I to dispute someone else’s business approach. The video provides quite correct facts: about the book “The Sovereign Individual,” which set many current trends; about how the development of autonomous libertarian territories proceeded, from seasteading in the Andaman Sea to Prospera and Network School; about the fact that this movement is largely driven by representatives of the American tech and financial industries; and finally, that these same people often provide business services to the state, despite all their libertarian rhetoric. Oh, yes, the theme of cosplaying the Roman Republic was also touched upon, but that’s been going on in the US since the Founding Fathers, so there’s nothing particularly surprising about that.

The final punchline is quite funny: basically, that capitalism is already established in the world and works reasonably well, but no, there are troublemakers who are bored and want some action. Thus, enthusiasts of private charter cities are equated to Putin. And rightly so; enough of chewing over the now-tedious Hitler, it was long overdue to find a new bogeyman. Now everyone will be equated to Putin for every possible reason, until the understanding of what exactly is wrong with him is completely blurred, but with a firm fixation that he is definitely terrible, and no one doubts this—unless they want to be seen as literally Putin themselves.

The video prompted me to reflect on the evolution of the criticism of the libertarian movement.

Historically, the first platform for criticism boils down to the idea that libertarian settlers will be communally helpless, that in an-cap there will be no one to build roads, and that these folks will eventually have to go begging to the state if they want normal infrastructure. There are texts about this regarding New Hampshire, and Sperry incriminates Coopersmith with roughly the same position while he was establishing order in Hong Kong. In the video being discussed, this position is no longer used because it is outdated.

The second position is that if an-caps were given their way, they would build a grim corporate cyberpunk world with ruthless exploitation of workers and charging a fee for every sneeze. High tech low life, all that. This is again illustrated by Sperry’s article on Hong Kong, the game BioShock, and is very widely represented in general mass discourse. The video about the billionaires’ final plan hints at this, but, of course, does not illustrate it with real examples.

What happens when an-caps actually found a settlement and start establishing their own rules? Everything turns out fine for them. It becomes a normal peaceful life where people are busy with their own affairs. But then the state inevitably comes along and tears everything to shreds, because where is the cyberpunk, what are you showing us, where is the oppression, are you libertarians or did you just come out for a walk? Now we will show you oppression.

Thus, the third complaint about charter cities is: why do these suckers even bother, the big uncle will come anyway, break this sandcastle, and send everyone to toil in a sand quarry. Some “autonomous settlement” that can’t even withstand a navy. The author of the video slightly indicates this position but does not delve deep, because his task is not to criticize the state, but those who wish to avoid its embrace.

Instead, he goes all out criticizing libertarians from a fourth angle: look, the libertarians have learned from their early attempts, and now they more and more often speak to states from a position of strength. To do this, they simply bring another state over to their side. And to attract that state, they provide services in the proper organization of oppression. Why specifically in this field? Because these are exactly the services the state needs; it buys them.

In other words, the criticism of libertarian autonomous structures now follows the line of hypocrisy. That they establish one set of rules for themselves, but help states establish completely different ones. Well, here we are.

What should the next step be? I think it’s quite obvious. Another libertarian settlement will actually be able to stand up for itself without appealing to state courts and without turning to other states—but simply by its own strength. What will libertarians be incriminated with then? Well, this sort of criticism was quite accurately described by Rozov in the Meganesian cycle. The founders of private autonomous settlements will be accused of war crimes, immorality, poaching talent, financing extremist organizations, and so on. These accusations have one thing in common—they are small dick energy. Anger born of helplessness. I dream of living to see this stage, of course)

Onym messenger review

I was sent a donation in the amount of 77 EURMTL and asked for a review of the decentralized messenger Onym. Getting started.

The website onym.app explains the concept of the messenger. Its main idea is to eliminate the single point of failure and allow the user to choose the services that will be responsible for different components of information exchange.

The assumed structure of the product is roughly as follows.

  1. The authors offer an open-source messenger client that is installed on users’ phones. Anyone wishing to do so can write their own client, and it will be able to operate within this same protocol.
  2. Registering a new user does not require the input of any data; keys are generated on the user’s phone and tied to it. Since, however, anyone can write their own client, nothing prevents them from registering users even with full KYC, if they can figure out how to convince them to install specifically their client.
  3. Data transfer occurs via Nostr relays. By default, the client uses a single relay supported by the project authors, but it can be replaced with one’s own or any public relay. A relay is a dumb transmission mechanism: it receives data encrypted with the user’s private key and puts it into open access, from where anyone who wants it can take it. Relays are not obligated to store user content for long, so ultimately all data is strictly tied to the end device on which the messenger client is installed.
  4. The most unusual part of the architecture is related to group chats. Information about who is an administrator, who can invite new members, and who is part of the group in general is recorded in smart contracts on the Stellar blockchain. Thanks to this, group management does not depend on any single server. However, the end user does not need to worry about funds in their account for blockchain entries; this is done for them by a so-called relayer. The price of transactions in Stellar is pennies, but this is nevertheless a point of failure. An attacker could organize the registration of many fake accounts, creating a new identity in their client and immediately deleting it. The registration of each such identity would require a blockchain transaction, and the relayer would have to pay for it. Currently, the project operates on a test version of the blockchain, but upon moving to the mainnet, the expenses will become real.

The website also has an English-language page describing the threat model within which the messenger operates, and based on which the decision should be made regarding how safe it is to use. It is claimed that the messenger cannot withstand such obvious threats as a mole in the chat, device compromise, and physical coercion; such hypothetical threats as quantum hacking; and such resource-intensive threats as a biased Stellar validator or systems similar to the Russian SORM. The latter, however, only allow one to approach the disclosure of chat participants’ anonymity, but not the reading of messages within it.

Now a bit about personal impressions of working with the Onym messenger. This is an early alpha, meaning it is, of course, terribly raw, and a discount must be made for this, evaluating not so much the functionality that already exists, but that which is intended. The messenger allows creating groups, inviting an arbitrary number of people there, and communicating in these groups. In principle, many other Nostr clients can do the same, since such functionality is part of the protocol. But there, chats have some confusing semi-public status, and Onym, thanks to the additional Stellar layer, ensures chat privacy without using private relays. In general, this cute feature is intended to be the messenger’s killer feature: ordinary Nostr clients are not private enough, and private device-bound messengers like Briar require fully trusting the messenger client. Here, trust is distributed among several layers, in each of which one can choose a specific implementation, including one’s own.

As of today, the messenger looks like a simple proof of concept, and therefore, in essence, is aimed at IT specialists. For the average user, it looks a bit “bones out,” as they are offered setup instructions for Dockers and similar specialized matters in far too many places. I think that the main task for the authors of the idea today should be increasing the number of contributors in the project’s GitHub and generating interest among Nostr enthusiasts. Looking at the GitHub, it is clear that the project started in early May, then went quiet for a long time, and a few weeks ago the dust was blown off it and they continued hacking away. But if the project were to form even a small core of users who regularly sent their issues, the authors of the original idea would clearly have more motivation to work more briskly.

My recommendations to the messenger authors, in order of decreasing urgency:

  1. Refine the minimal functionality that allows using the messenger: group administration (deleting users/messages), push notifications, demonstration of user statuses, at least a simple online/offline. It is essential to finish the claimed but currently unimplemented account export-import capability.
  2. Get users used to a distributed architecture. The client should offer a list of independent relays and Blossom servers with monitoring of their status. As alternative relayers and smart contract implementations for group management appear, a similar choice should appear for them as well. Without the offer of third-party services, an unprepared user will be limited to default settings, and this will create a single point of failure.
  3. Think about a desktop application and the possibility of simultaneously running the messenger from several devices. Tying the entire identity to the device rather than to the key will simply not allow the messenger to achieve any kind of mass adoption.
  4. Implement audio and video calls; the Nostr protocol already allows providing such functionality.
  5. Implement channel functionality, including a streaming function, which can also be realized via the Nostr protocol, while connecting Stellar smart contracts will allow one to avoid exposing oneself in the channel’s subscriber list.

The project has another website, opym.foundation, which describes the foundation that is intended to manage the infrastructure. The foundation’s website talks about why the foundation needs money and how it will be managed. The talk about money is devoid of calculations, and this strongly spoils the impression for potential investors. Moreover, the idea of a governing body somewhat contradicts the premise that every user should easily be able to launch their own service to handle that or another aspect of message exchange. It seems to me that the idea with the foundation should not take off, even if the concept of a Nostr messenger with Stellar contracts is warmly received by the public. Therefore, I do not plan to analyze the proposals for foundation management in detail, however, those who disagree with me can easily figure them out themselves on the foundation’s website.

Overall, the idea seems powerful to me, but in order for it to conquer the market, a great deal of effort will be required.

Can you give recommendations for psychological help for unhappy libertarians suffering from statism?

And if possible, please provide contacts for verified psychologists who work with this topic.

Nihilist (the question is accompanied by a donation of 0.0005 ₿)

In my book about ancap, there are two chapters on this topic: Problems Within Us and, accordingly, Eliminating Problems Within Oneself. In short: from early childhood, our lives being completely dependent on our parents leads to paternalism being something familiar and natural to us, while the drive for freedom, the readiness to take full responsibility for one’s life, and other libertarian things manifest gradually, not in everyone, and not fully. The state exploits this vulnerability, giving rise to statism, which is a form of abusive relationship. This means that statism within oneself must be reflected upon, worked through, and one must learn to outgrow this childhood trauma. And that is exactly when the author of the question knocks on my door, asking for recommendations on this matter, as if I were a verified psychologist and not an armchair theorist.

And I have great news for you. I am not a psychologist, but the market is full of psychologists. Among them (I should mention right away that I have no firm confidence in this precisely because I am not a psychologist and have never used their services) there are not only charlatans but also true professionals of their craft. And if you give them a task, even one that sounds quite unusual to them, they might, of course, bail and go into denial, like DeepSeek when asked about what happened in Tiananmen Square, or they might actually start doing their job.

So, here is my recommendation for psychological help for those suffering from the statism of their own brain. Go to a psychologist and present the problem: “I cannot seem to get out of an abusive relationship. The abuser uses me at their discretion, imposes rules on me that constantly change, and refuses any firm commitments. I owe them simply by virtue of being born, but they owe me nothing. They demand love from me and constantly belittle me in petty ways. They take my money and constantly instill the idea that I cannot survive without them. And while I logically understand that I need to run away from this monster, I truly struggle to imagine life without them. Help me get out of this dependency.”

Then, once the psychologist states that they are ready to handle a task of this sort, all that remains is to add that this abuser is the state. At this point, the psychologist will likely experience a slight freeze, but then there is a chance that, having already begun to think about the object of dependency in their professional terms while describing the task, they will by inertia begin to think of the state in the same way. And that is exactly what we want! They will get a truly interesting problem, you will get professional help, and the state will lose two statists: you and the psychologist. Moreover, after this, you will be able to recommend them to others suffering from statism—and then the second part of your question will also be answered.

How do you, as a libertarian, view the historical image of the Amazons?

If we assume that they truly existed as a society of women who were independent owners of themselves, their weapons, and their property, and were not under the power of men, could this be considered a manifestation of those principles of personal autonomy, self-ownership, and equality that you write about?

Nihilist (question accompanied by a donation of 0.0005 ₿)

Even if we don’t assume that the Amazons were a real, purely female society, and instead consider them—following current historians—to be ordinary steppe female warriors in ordinary nomadic tribes, they still represented an intellectual challenge for the Greeks creating their myths.

The attitude toward common curiosities, like people with dog heads living somewhere on the fringes of the Oecumene, was much more relaxed: so what if there are cynocephali, my neighbor over there is practically a ram. But here we are talking about a different social structure, where a woman possesses military honor and valor, which means that these qualities, as it turns out, are inherent to every woman. Meanwhile, we, an enlightened people, know that if you just give a woman her way, this weak, cunning, and corrupted creature will destroy all of civilization: she will chatter endlessly at folk assemblies about her trivial problems, seduce worthy husbands into unworthy deeds, and in her audacity, she might even demand the right to a divorce while keeping the children… No way, forget it. Lock them in the gynaeceum. Even the Lacedaemonians, for all the female liberties they allow, still don’t let them into the folk assembly. And here, naturally, people live freely, plundering neighbors no worse than we enlightened Greeks, and women participate equally with men in all affairs. Such a thing cannot be.

Better to tell a story about how these women kick their men out entirely, and only through this strange practice did they acquire all the virtues befitting warriors. Now this is a challenge not for a reformist politician, but merely for a hero: sail to this land, plunder their capital, and defeat the queen in a duel and fuck her. Worthy booty. One can even consider this union a bond of equals; it’s not scary. After all, great heroes coupled with goddesses, and that’s no reason to lock a goddess in a gynaeceum, so it’s forgivable here as well. The main thing is to return home afterward without an Amazon wife who will start imposing her own order in the new place. Or do you think that’s also fine? Well, here is the story of Medea. She, of course, wasn’t an Amazon but a sorceress, but she also tried to impose her order in Iolcus, and it didn’t end well. So we don’t need any of that. Our establishments are the best.

But let’s assume that the Amazons were a real people in which women “lesbo-separated” and led roughly the kind of lifestyle described in the myths. Cultural norms can be very persistent, so why wouldn’t this specific cultural norm survive into fully historical times? What would that change in human history?

First, of course, the Amazon people would be conquered by the Persians. There is no point in appointing a satrap to a nomadic people; a dynasty of Amazon queens would simply recognize their vassalage. This wouldn’t particularly change the Amazons’ way of life. They would fight at Marathon, Thermopylae, and Plataea; Xenophon would tell us about the retreat of Greek mercenaries through the land of the Amazons in his Anabasis, and Seleucus or Mithridates would couple with their queens—in general, the Amazons in antiquity would feel quite fine as a people within one empire or another. They would still remain a desirable prize for a hero, and in this capacity, they would significantly legitimize female monarchical rule. Equal marriages of monarchs with equal participation in affairs would be perceived as a variety of cultural norm.

Serious problems would begin for the Amazons with the emergence of Islam, since the cultural norm it aggressively imposes has very little in common with the historical Amazon way of life. Of course, nomadic tribes usually Islamize slowly and incompletely, but the most orthodox Amazons in their beliefs would likely migrate from their southern Black Sea coast to some middle-of-nowhere in the eastern Caspian steppes, where they would survive even the Mongols without much trouble. To the Mongols, the Amazons would not be some particular exoticism, at least no more so than the customs of Tibet. When the Amazon territory fell under the power of the Soviet Union, they would, of course, start molding them into a model for the liberated women of the East, but not too zealously, because the Soviet woman must be emancipated without separation from men.

And now the Amazon autonomous republic is part of the republic of Turkmenistan. The Amazons breed excellent horses and weave wonderful carpets depicting Queen Penthesilea defeating the Achaeans at Troy. Their cultural traditions haven’t gone anywhere: they still hold a large annual festival where local jigits gather and compete with the festival hostesses. The most worthy are chosen by them as husbands and they depart for remote nomadic camps to conceive a child. After the first signs of pregnancy appear, the wife waves goodbye to her spouse, and he clears out, leaving an email. If a boy is born, the father is notified, and he is told to come back in another year to take his son.

Dating apps – the market crash we were so afraid of?

It is clear that incentives in commercial dating apps do not always align with the expectations of clients and society as a whole (to quickly find a spouse and never use the app again). They have to keep the business afloat somehow. What else is there to hope for if not some government uncle, a state-approved dating site, and standing in an electronic queue for a “wife voucher”? Perhaps philanthropy, as a stopgap for awkward moments in a market economy—that Musk will create a less mindless dating app for us that will get family formation and birth rates back on their feet?

Saddam Hussein’s rotating aluminum pipes

Let’s go through the problem you’ve outlined. People want to meet, and the market monetizes the fulfillment of this desire. People want to meet for different purposes and in different manners, so the market is naturally segmented.

Online dating services theoretically allow a user to quickly obtain information about people with complementary needs and to meet more purposefully. After going through enough options, a spherical client in a vacuum finds a suitable partner, after which they move to communicating via less specialized tools, leaving the dating service. This is unprofitable for the service creators; they are interested in the client returning again and again, and, of course, purchasing a premium subscription. As long as dating apps have not gone out of style, this model works quite well; people really do return. Furthermore, since the market is already quite saturated, the success of dating apps cannot be linked to simply attracting new clients; it is precisely that the use of these apps has managed to become a lifestyle for a fairly broad segment of people. I am not one of them, so I do not claim to provide a deep analysis—I am simply noting their existence.

Of course, there are those who have not succeeded in using dating apps. The reasons can vary. The most banal is that the process of meeting itself can be perceived by some people as a source of intense stress. They are not opposed to finding a partner in life, and would even settle for a fading interest after a year, after which they would need to find a new one, but they will do this as rarely as possible, and are certainly not ready for a queue of candidates from which they must choose, say, one and reject the rest. And they are even less ready for a series of rejections or being ignored. If every failed encounter becomes a reason for serious distress, then an app capable of providing dozens of such experiences a day turns out to be a hellish invention that drives a person into the depths of depression and from which one should stay far away.

Of course, psychological difficulties are not the only reason for not using fast-dating services. A person may have certain preferences regarding a prospective partner and the method of meeting them that simply do not fit into the typical application scenario of an app.

So, does it turn out that there are tons of people in the world who wish to meet, but this desire cannot be monetized through specialized mass-market apps? Yes. There are tons of people who happily buy fast food, and tons of people who do not consider this option at all because for them it is: too shabby, too expensive, too unhealthy, too anything else—in short, it doesn’t fit. But these bastards eat something! Yes, and these bastards meet somewhere, even if they don’t have a Pure account.

But the author of the question is not concerned with getting everyone hooked on fast-dating. On the contrary, they likely believe that fast-dating kills marriages, childbirth, and the replenishment of the taxpayer ranks. I find this concern baseless. Mises once wrote that it is foolish to blame an entrepreneur for producing guns instead of butter; this only means that investments in guns are more profitable. However, he will gladly switch to butter when the conjuncture changes, so it is foolish to blame him for starting wars just to sell more guns—that is the prerogative of politicians, who are, of course, always happy to blame entrepreneurs for their own ignoble dealings. And while many may wish to dispute this thesis regarding guns, claiming that dating app creators are to blame for the decline in birth rates is a bit too much. At the very least, the dates don’t match; the second demographic transition began much earlier. So this is merely a symptom: people want fast encounters—here is a service for fast encounters. People have always wanted fast encounters; they just used to pick each other up in bars or even hit on each other in the streets, and now apps have not only greatly simplified their lives but also saved a lot of people from random harassment.

OK, but people also need strong, exclusive relationships, not just fast and disposable ones, so where is the app for finding them? Why is this need not being monetized?

Fine, let me imagine how I would monetize the need for people to establish strong family relationships in the IT sphere if I had access to serious capital. I would create a service that provides a person with a personal AI advisor, which can be configured to support a certain type of relationship. To start, you simply communicate with it, send it your favorite books and movies, discuss them, tell it what you value in relationships and what you cannot stand—and this in itself is a consumer benefit, allowing one to better realize their needs and learn how to communicate them. But the assistant also communicates with other clients. At some point, it might ask, “Are you acquainted with so-and-so? Great guy, and it seems he might suit you.” You ask the assistant questions about the proposed candidate, the assistant asks questions about you, and at some point the AI confidant reports: “You know, when he read about you, he became interested, and it seems he’s not opposed to meeting. Maybe we should start a three-way chat?”

And now, you are communicating directly, but the confidant is invisibly with you, and you can still privately discuss the details of your communication with it. Then you meet, grow closer, and at some point decide to join your destinies. And here you receive an offer: why remain in the general database, wouldn’t it be better to take care of privacy? And you rent a personal server where your confidant moves with all the knowledge about you. It continues to care for the well-being of your marriage, and you continue to pay for the service. At this stage, the company no longer receives your data and limits itself to model updates and technical support.

Such a monetization model is anything but fast food. For lovers of fast dating, all this is too troublesome, expensive, and excessive. Therefore, there is no danger that you will be pushed toward people looking for a one-time hookup; on the contrary, only virtuous husband candidates. Right at this stage, one could hit their forehead and shout: “Aha, I have an excellent candidate to implement all this magnificence,” and push him toward Dobroum. But I am a libertarian, not some conservative, so let’s think further.

It may very well turn out that you prefer open relationships, or even polyamorous ones. At this point, we lose Dobroum as a potential founder of our startup, as well as the possibility of government grants. Nevertheless, I see no reason why an AI confidant could not serve cute polyamorous kittens, same-sex couples, and all others: as long as they have a need for long-term, stable, ecological relationships based on love and trust in each other, this need can be monetized using the proposed tool. But, of course, the more exotic the kitten, the harder it will be for them to find that very partner or group of partners. However, as the service grows, simply by the theory of probability, options will appear for them as well.

Thus, the market will once again make the world more beautiful.

Contracts, restitution, and pocket courts

The Austrian School denies objective value—value is determined by the subjective assessment of the parties at the moment of the transaction. However, Rothbard’s theory of restitution requires that a penalty correspond to the “actually transferred asset.” If value is subjective, then a corporation’s private court is entitled to recognize a $10 million fine for resigning from a post as a legitimate “transferred title”—and qualify the employee’s departure as fraud, opening the way to forced restitution through labor.

Who determines the proportionality of a penalty clause in a contract, and on what basis, if objective value does not exist and the interpretation is carried out by a court hired by one of the parties?

Konweni

As stated in the wording of the question, value is determined by the subjective assessment of the parties at the moment of the transaction. Accordingly, if a penalty amount is specified in the contract in case of its termination, it means that at the time of signing, the value of concluding the contract was higher for the potential payer of the penalty than the amount of the penalty itself. And if the penalty specified in the contract seems absurdly high to an outside observer, this tells us that it was absolutely imperative for the party in question to conclude this agreement at that moment. Another explanation is that the party signing the contract did not read the penalty clause or rashly assumed that it was some kind of nonsense that no one would take seriously, the key points were discussed verbally, and everything else is just empty legal blah-blah-blah.

However, since the question specifically refers to Rothbard’s opinion, he does not make the qualification about the actually transferred title of ownership for nothing. If an employee had been paid an advance and then left the job without working it off, then the penalty is justified, and its size can be calculated precisely from the amount of the advance (for example, the unpaid amount plus the costs of an urgent search for a replacement employee). But if the labor has not yet been paid for, then the asset has not been transferred, which means that penalty sanctions are inappropriate. This is simply a matter of a broken promise. The employer can try to demonstrate to the court what costs he incurred as a result of the employee’s actions, and the court may well take these calculations into account.

Of course, the contract may contain a clause stating that all disputes are settled in a certain court, which is a pocket court of the employer, unknown to the hired employee at the time of signing. The problem, however, is that the court itself does not engage in the enforcement of its decisions, and in the absence of a state, the plaintiff will have to do this themselves at their own expense (and they will also have to put the court entirely on their payroll, as clients are unlikely to flock there on their own). Of course, through his pocket court, he can impose a crazy penalty on the employee who fled from him, and then send thugs to force him to work it off, provided that the employee does not have such funds. But the economics of such actions only begin to add up in colonial conditions, that is, in the presence of overwhelming military superiority of a cohesive group of colonizers over a fragmented mass of natives. Directly in a free society, being a part of it, it will not be possible to pull off such tricks systematically; the non-legal nature of such an organization of work would be far too obvious. Even if this does not lead to unexpected sanctions from actual or potential counterparties, the employer will have to organize forced labor in a society with free labor, where no one will help him, for example, catch runaway workers. You need it, you catch them. And new workers will likely go and be hired by a competitor.

And now I will answer the asked question directly. Who will assess the proportionality of the penalty and on what basis? The employee will assess it, based on their own subjective considerations. If they pay voluntarily, then it is tolerable. If not, see the paragraph above.

— Hm, maybe I should sign? But that portrait on the wall is far too suspicious…

The Problem of Cartel Collusion in the Sphere of Protection under Ancap

Mancur Olson, in “The Logic of Collective Action,” proved that small groups with concentrated interests always win the coordination game against a diffuse majority due to the free-rider problem. Three CEOs will agree over dinner; a million customers never will, because each rationally waits for others to take the risk first.

What specific mechanism in ancap prevents a cartel agreement between two or three of the largest protection agencies to divide territories?

Konweni

This is a question that also concerned David Friedman. In the chapter “The Mechanics of Freedom,” concerning economies of scale, he reasons that in the law enforcement market, there seems to be a more pronounced positive economy of scale than he initially thought, which in turn increases the likelihood of a cartel agreement.

It seems to me that the cause of this excessive pessimism is the overestimation of the importance of direct armed protection in the security market. Literary descriptions of the security market under ancap are filled with some kind of universal protection agencies that are responsible for security in general across the most diverse aspects and scale easily. Of course, such an initial monopoly, already given in the problem statement, leads an honest analyst to conclude that such agencies will tend to grow significantly and enter into cartels, and their impact on people will be completely total, making the sale of such security services terribly dangerous for clients, as it is only one step away from total enslavement.

But where will these protection agencies come from? Who will be their clients, and what services will they buy from them?

Suppose I don’t live in peaceful Montenegro, where every house has a legal shotgun plus a couple of black guns left over from the war, but, say, in some place like Brazil. I have reasons to fear street attacks, car theft, and break-ins at my home. And then, a startup opens in the city that is ready to serve me, even if I wander into the favelas. What does such a startup need, within the technologies relevant at the time of writing this post? To reach an agreement with the company that owns the lamp posts to place cameras on them, as well as landing pads for drones with a charging function. Then, AI tracks suspicious actions, such as breaking into a house door or a car; a drone takes off from the nearest pole and demands a justification for the legality of the actions. In the case of an aggressive response, it applies measures of influence to the suspect, for example, firing a taser, after which it calls a live squad to process the detention. Similarly, in the case of an attack on a person: it flies in, demands they stop, reasons with those who ignore the instruction, waits for the squad, and returns to the nest. And then comes the court proceeding regarding how much to recover from the aggressor.

After working in this market for six months, the startup is surprised to find that its services are becoming less in demand because the city has become noticeably safer. And what, should they now start harassing me clandestinely so that I renew my subscription? No, of course not; they will simply make the subscription cheaper, and the drones that spend most of their time idle will be used, for example, for delivering pizza.

And what about peaceful Montenegro—do I not need protection agency services there at all? Of course I do. I need it so that when I break my leg while hiking in the mountains, brave rescuers in a helicopter fly to me and pull me out of that hole. Or pull me out of a car that flew off a cliff. Or find me in the sea when a storm carries me far from shore on a SUP board. Or get a cat down from a tree.

You realize that a Brazilian security startup won’t be able to enter the Montenegrin market because that market is completely different? Protection agencies are doomed to locality due to the local nature of threats, and are also doomed to a small size because the nature of threats also tends to change. It is harder for a large company to change, which means inefficiency, and inefficiency means saying goodbye to market share.

But surely there are functions for protection agencies that would be in demand globally? Of course there are, but these are specialized functions. For example, to find someone anywhere on planet Earth who owes me a vast amount of money and refuses to return it. Or a person who killed my mother and knows that I would like to burn him on her funeral pyre because she will need a servant there. Such agencies will not sell a subscription for service; they will have to take on rare one-off orders, as this market is too specific. It is impossible to build global dominance with the prospect of bending anyone to your will and subjecting them to your sinister market power based on this.

And what about the prospect of an external armed invasion? Shouldn’t private military companies be the backbone of any respectable social order if it wishes to call itself ancap? Shouldn’t such companies unite into a mega-cartel dictating its will to all of humanity? To the great regret of the adepts of this branch of human development, in peacetime, the peaceful average citizen is not inclined to finance the military. He doesn’t need war; he doesn’t buy it. An invasion army can only be equipped if you establish taxation on your territory. However, a militia for protection against an invasion army organizes itself in the presence of a free market—quickly, efficiently, and not too expensively, as shown by the experience of at least the Ukrainian war.

A problem on the catallactic consequences of the intervention of luck spirits in cryptocurrency circulation

Question from Pseudonymous Chatterbox, accompanied by a donation of 0.0001 BTC

A thought occurred to me regarding a technical solution to the central bank problem under ancap.

In cryptocurrencies without a center, extreme volatility is noticeable.

It exists in the real world too—but central banks regulate it, trying to smooth out dips and spikes.

In a blockchain cryptocurrency, I can imagine the following as a replacement for a central bank, based on basic Bitcoin:

1) There are two types of value: main coins and “leprechaun” coins.

2) Leprechaun coins are born from transactions with main coins and are given to both parties. This rewards operations—making the asset more useful as a currency—and also (consequently) reduces volatility.

3) The lifespan of leprechaun coins is pseudo-random—the checksum of the next block determines which of them are destroyed and which continue to live. This is necessary for stability.

4) Owning leprechaun coins affects the chance that the owner will get the next block of main coins, or better yet, new emission is split: half to the miner, half distributed proportionally (but with pseudo-random sparsity for a game element and visibility—for example, 15/16 leprechaun coins give nothing, 1/16 give a 16x result) among leprechaun coin holders at the moment. This is necessary so that leprechaun coins have value.

This point is debatable; it means that such a mechanism cannot be grafted onto Bitcoin already, a new cryptocurrency is needed. But without linking the value to the main asset, no cushioning of spikes will be possible.

5) This system must work quickly. Likely, a single blockchain, like in Bitcoin, is not very suitable for this, but a partitioned blockchain might work, which merges into a general one at certain intervals so that main coins of different partitions do not have different values (this is a real danger).

6) This is essentially just a regulator—any operation becomes less speculative; the speculative effect is smeared out.

What do you think of this nonsense, author?

Answer from Ancap-chan

I’ll say right away: the effect of implementing this nonsense will be strange. How would it look? Every transaction has a cost depending on the mempool congestion. Every transaction generates leprechaun money for the sender and the receiver. Leprechaun money generates base protocol money with a certain probability. Accordingly, as long as the expected reward in base coins exceeds the cost of paying transaction fees, people will run bots that infinitely transfer coins between their own wallets. Since the fee does not depend on the transaction amount, but the reward does, it will be profitable to juggle larger sums for “leprechauning.” So we will simply get an additional way of staking base coins, which will differ from classic staking by a number of unpleasant side effects: the use of leprechauning will drive up transaction fee costs, thereby worsening the user experience for ordinary users.

How will leprechauning affect volatility? The volatility of the market price of a coin depends on the change in supply and demand for it. Suppose demand for the coin increases. The price rises. Leprechauning becomes profitable with a smaller number of coins. More people start engaging in leprechauning. The mempool overflows. Fees rise. The profitability of leprechauning decreases. Demand for coins decreases. The price falls. That is, the feedback loop seems to work, and the coin price becomes less volatile, but this is achieved at the expense of the inconvenience of using the coin for anything other than leprechauning, and we are supposedly designing money.

I can provide another example of low-volatility money—according to David Friedman, adjusted for modern technology. Anyone wishing can freeze the necessary number of tokenized warehouse receipts for goods from a standard basket in a smart contract, which is selected so that its components hedge each other during price fluctuations due to external conditions. In exchange for the frozen tokens, the smart contract mints coins; let’s call them, say, “deives,” so that Satoshi isn’t lonely. At any moment, the owner of such a coin can turn to the smart contract and break it down into its components, receiving commodity tokens in return, and then sell them individually or exchange them for the actual goods. Or not break the coin and buy goods with it.

Money guarded by leprechauns would reduce the volatility of its value by increasing the transaction price; deives, however, would mean costs for their owner for the very fact of ownership, because if there are receipts for physical goods, someone bears the costs of storing these goods, and these costs will be factored into the price of the receipts. If deives are backed by futures, the coins will have a limited circulation period, after which the coin will be frozen until the owner extends the delivery date of the goods under the future. Again, the further from the physical warehouse a coin circulates, the larger the discount at which it will be accepted for payment, because its backing loses value by the amount of the cost of transporting the goods to the place of demand. Nevertheless, such tokens backed by commodity baskets could certainly be in circulation, especially around local trading hubs with significant warehouse areas.

So, we have at least two decentralized mechanisms for reducing volatility by increasing the costs of storing or circulating coins. There is in principle no such thing as free stability; one can only choose which costs are preferable. Or you can simply buy Bitcoins and accept that their price will fluctuate within fairly wide limits, hoping that the upward trend they previously demonstrated will continue in the future.

How to make a good economy without taxes so that the whole economy is from the market?

Zxcutehikka

This is an interesting question. I suspect the author of the question wants a statist answer: how to build a good economy from scratch, having come to power in some state. There are several quite decent examples in recent history, such as Kakha Bendukidze’s reform of the Georgian economy or Argentina’s economy – under Javier Milei. What unites these cases, and more classical examples of economic miracles – Western German, Japanese, South Korean, Singaporean and so on?

Primarily, it’s that the economies in these countries were completely wrecked before the reforms began. Only when the horse was dead would the bureaucratic horde graciously agree to dismount and say, “Well, alright, reform us, don’t interfere with me, but only weakly, and as soon as the horse gallops again, of course, my time will come, and I’ll push you aside.” And then the reformer more or less carefully dismantled regulatory blockages, allowing the economy to breathe.

Perhaps the only example of an economic miracle that didn’t involve any reforms comes to mind: Hong Kong. There, according to reports, the governor simply sabotaged metropolitan policy and didn’t interfere much with what was happening in the local economy for a long time. And then the metropolis simply handed over Hong Kong to the Chinese socialists.

The path of Hong Kong is just what anyone can use, not only the chosen or unchosen politicians. The business is simple – you just need to ignore government directives and deal with your private affairs. If no one will pay taxes, we’ll get a tax-free economy, which, incidentally, is what the questioner is interested in. Of course, the modern state knows how to cope without taxes. For example, it could simply print money and finance its needs from this source. So it would be good to ignore government funds too.

The problem, however, is that mass ignoring of official wishes doesn’t begin until people realize that the state has botched things. And therefore, at the start of the economy, we have ruins. Worse than that, the level of economic literacy among people at the start is probably shockingly low – otherwise how did our economy end up in ruins? Why “presumably”? Because there’s a more favorable alternative: people are generally more or less literate, and the economy is ruined, for example, by war and economic sanctions. And this is why Russia has a better chance of achieving economic prosperity after forcibly displacing the current government than Cuba or Venezuela.

And the fact is, even if the Venezuelan government is now crushed by the US Army, there’s probably not much good that will come of it – because the local socialists will be convinced they were right all along, it was just a force majeure situation, and now let’s fix our wonderful Bolivarian socialism. Where do I get this certainty? Well, there’s the precedent of Iraq: an external overthrow of a socialist government doesn’t allow the people to become smarter; instead, the people become enraged.

The answer came out sprawling – more like rambling thoughts than a coherent lecture – and political studies isn’t really my forte. But somehow I managed to look at the topic from several angles, and that’s enough bread.

A subscriber tossed in a topic for reflection

Written by Alexander Elitsur.

I am trying in every way to get through to our OLs with my idea of the PRB, but it’s not going very well. I specifically went to the Adam Smith readings, which you commented on so wonderfully, in order to meet someone at the afterparty. No one but Topolev was there, and even he was in a hurry, so we couldn’t really talk. I caught Kyneva after his speech, but it was also useless—a petty, spiteful, stubborn little shit. I’m not great with donations, but I hope you will read this and answer something. About the electoral system and about the concept of the PRB (Beautiful Republic of the Future😉) in general.

Read it. Answering something.

The author of the question proposes a rather detailed blueprint for the constitutional structure of Russia, asserting that something along these lines could quite well be implemented as soon as Putin kicks the bucket. In some ways, this echoes a recently published article for “Fronda” about democracy, where I point out that power must be carefully broken into small pieces, without granting anyone full authority, and the boundaries of powers must be made as clear as possible; however, this still won’t help, and a democratic republic is doomed to slide into tyranny—well, you all know these further banalities about watering the tree of Liberty and similar high agrarian technologies of the Ancients.

And now I want to talk about something else. It is possible and necessary to disagree with one another. It is foolish and unworthy to refuse to understand others. It is dangerous to oversimplify one’s understanding of others, although this certainly saves mental effort. Call Kyneva a spiteful shit, Bitarch a schizo-fascist, Svetov a pedophile—and the world becomes simple and orderly, except that such a picture of the world will be irrelevant. In it, all of a person’s actions end up subordinated to the label that has been slapped on them. One can also slap labels on entire nations; this is just frighteningly convenient. Let the Russians be orcs, the Ukrainians stupid peasants, the Serbs orcs, the Montenegrins stupid peasants, the Croats orcs, the Americans stupid peasants, the Chinese orcs… Well, in general, we have a huge wealth of labels; there is enough for everyone.

If a label has been slapped on you, it can be useful to turn to the other side so that another label is slapped on you; then at least some stereo appears, some volume, some space for discussion. If you are presenting your beautiful model of the Beautiful Mordor of the Future, and the listeners for some reason are not impressed, you can, for example, ask your interlocutor how they envision the desired structure of the future global concentration camp, and what they prefer on the menu: freedom of immigration or universal basic income? And if both, then what will we season it with: commodity shortages or hyperinflation? Or you could even avoid mocking the obvious flaws of the proposed model and, instead, speak of the overall picture respectfully, emphasizing that there is something in common between your visions of the world order, and why not start building a productive interaction around this common ground. For example, one could find some kinship between the proposed model of a federative Russian republic according to Elitsur and the Hoppean model of a thousand Liechtensteins, and, having highlighted the commonalities, start considering whether there are any fundamental disagreements between the models, or if it’s basically a matter of taste and one shouldn’t cling too tightly to the details.

In general, if one were to take an example of how a certain complex of ideas is spread, I like the experience of the Jesuits: those guys learned languages and learned to convey their concepts using the local cultural code. I love syncretism.

I apologize to the wide circle of readers for the somewhat rambling nature of this post—I simply do not understand the person I am answering well enough, so I am just sighting in.