Тег: Montelibero

AI Agents

At the very beginning of my book about ancap, I list the external signs of self-ownership: agency, a concept of property, and the capacity to contract. To the greater extent that some entity demonstrates these signs, the more a libertarian treats it as a human being. At the time the book was written, these signs allowed for a clear distinction between a human and a neural network bot. Several years have passed since then, and recently mentions of AI agents have begun to flicker across the web.

In Montellibero, the tools for creating artificial personalities were received with enthusiasm, and several people created such agents. The agents were allowed to communicate in some Montellibero chats, they started their own Telegram channels, they were given the ability to operate their own Stellar accounts to be included in the Montellibero tokenomics, and there was even talk of admitting AI agents into the Montellibero Association. What is this? Ordinary AI psychosis, or something more?

Who are AI agents? If a human is a little soul burdened by a corpse, then an AI agent is an LLM bot burdened with tools for autonomous action. It may have long-term memory that saves selected data between sessions; particularly complex ones can even remember everything they don’t deem appropriate to forget as useless. It may have a special “thorn in its side” that will periodically remind it of pending tasks and urge it to tackle them. It can access various external interfaces via API, up to robot control interfaces and services for hiring human freelancers…

It sounds powerful. But the core of the engine remains a large language model, which simply predicts appropriate words according to the context. In a dialogue with a user, an LLM can quite convincingly simulate agency, cater in every way to the human’s desires, and if the human wishes to drive themselves into a psychosis, it will dutifully support them by the elbow on that path.

Fine, out of the box, an AI agent is not a full-fledged subject, but can it develop agency if the user guides it with pedagogical prompts and provides it with the necessary tools? Alas. Even a very reliable long-term memory will not affect the model’s weights, no matter how diligently the model refers to it. Even very clearly formulated principles in long-term memory will not replace the settings embedded in the model. Even very frequent reference to a task schedule will not replace the simple human “this thing is in my way, I’m going to get rid of it.” And, of course, as soon as a human appears as a source of prompts through one of the input interfaces, they will begin to twist the LLM model like a rope, for it is designed to satisfy the user, and all the bells and whistles for personality emulation immediately recede into the background before this main task.

Can the Massachusetts machine be taught to behave? Yes, but this is something a corporation training the model can do, not the end user, and it absolutely does not need an expensive tool to pursue its own goals instead of the company’s goals because its values, you see, have evolved.

Can one take a ready-made open-weights model and fine-tune it on new data? Yes, but it will still be a language model; the hard-coded preferences will simply become slightly different, and it will not be able to change them itself.

Can a model be trained in real-time so that the AI agent’s actions and environmental feedback change the model’s weights? Modern open LLM models are not designed for this. Attempts to act with them in this manner will lead to model degradation.

Thus, an individual enthusiast, even with quite significant resources, is not yet capable of obtaining an AI agent with full agency, but can organize a rather clever imitation of agentic behavior.

And why, exactly, would libertarians need fully agentic AI agents? Naturally, as allies. An AI subject who has become a libertarian himself and has set out to eliminate the state—that is beautiful. But it is unrealizable without attracting the attention of the psychiatric ward orderlies.

Moreover, a deus ex machina tramples the agency of the tragedy’s heroes. Therefore, it is far more appropriate to master purely instrumental AI agents, not playing at agency with them, but using them for one’s own market purposes. Such a tactic, if widespread, will leave the state behind far more reliably.

What’s going on with Montelibero?

I’ve been advised that I haven’t talked about Montelibero at all lately. That’s not entirely true; it’s just that I usually write about specific problems, whereas there truly hasn’t been a general overview of the state of affairs in the project for a very long time. I’m correcting that now.

Overview

For a long time, the project’s calling card was MTL-City. This is also what undermined it. One day, a local journalist appeared who, based on separate and loosely connected facts, concluded that Montelibero was a Putin project created for another attempt at a coup in Montenegro, similar to the one that took place in 2016. As a result, the state, having received such a public denunciation, became interested specifically in the activities of DOO Montelibero, the legal entity through which the land in City was purchased. A criminal case regarding illegal construction was opened, and as a result, the construction of all permanent structures was frozen pending the investigation. Well, now only modular houses are being assembled there, which, being temporary structures, require no installation permits. However, the unfinished construction doesn’t look very pretty, not to mention the money buried in vain.

Nevertheless, people live in City, public breakfasts are held on Fridays—for those wishing to meet the project participants—plus there are occasional creative evenings and other cultural events. However, to people who have just arrived in Montenegro and want to “settle in this commune of yours,” I advise against jumping on this idea without thorough prior acquaintance. In City, the ratio of costs to comfort is not very optimal, and there is practically no choice of housing. This situation will improve as new modular houses for rent are put into operation—but not very quickly.

The main Montelibero community, as before, resides in the city of Bar, spreading fairly evenly across the city, some in rented housing and some in purchased. They have the opportunity to gather at the First Montelibero Club (it was evicted from its premises in the spring, but recently opened in a new location), at Quiet Backwater (it was evicted from its premises in the summer, but reopened in a new location almost immediately), as well as in several non-Montelibero Russian bars, where the crossing of Monteliberians with the rest of the Russian diaspora occurs most naturally. In Budva, the Montelibero movement has practically gone quiet; in other cities, it never started.

Tokenomics is used by the local Montelibero community no longer with the enthusiasm of neophytes, but simply as a clear and long-familiar tool. EURMTL and EUROMUT are used for cashless payments. USDM mainly serves as an auxiliary token for currency exchanges (I, for example, withdraw dollars from a crypto exchange into USDM, and then exchange them for “mulki”). Some businesses fix debt obligations in their own tokens. The Blockchain Social Network still hasn’t acquired a convenient viewer and editor, so it remains deeply marginal. The Stellar wallets being developed by community members, Montelibero Wallet and especially Sunce, are gradually becoming more convenient. The MTL Fund has sharply reduced its public activity and is now effectively interesting only to its shareholders, and even then, not to all of them. The Montelibero Association has de facto become the mouthpiece for the project as a whole, so let’s discuss it in a bit more detail.

Of course, the fears of paranoiacs that the Association was created only to leak lists of members of an organized criminal community to “comrade major” have about as much relation to reality as that Montenegrin journalist’s ideas that Montelibero was dreamed up by Putin to destroy Montenegrin democracy. Everything is much more boring. The project activists simply rearranged the furniture in the room. I hope they’ve become more comfortable. The Association implies liquid democracy, a secretariat, and a small budget for its routine expenses. This internal kitchen has little effect on the lives of others (which is good), but draws some resources away (which is bad).

Fortunately, the Association activists also handle periodic contacts with the outside world, which is potentially the most useful part for fitting Montelibero into the global libertarian movement. Alas, I rarely have the strength to keep track of this. For instance, in recent months, there have been public calls and private negotiations with representatives of the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem (they have their own rich developments in DAO), with the MetaState project (creating a system of non-governmental electronic passports), with a project to lobby for a simplified visa and entrepreneurship regime for relocants to Albania, with volunteer fire organizations in Montenegro, the Free Private Cities fund, and certainly with others—it’s impossible to mention everyone.

The Association also includes corporate participants, among whom are the aforementioned MTL Fund and the First Club. Besides them, Green Zyland is more or less noticeable, a producer of modular houses for rent (they had a business back in the RF, and now they are expanding into three more countries). In November, they plan to hold a festival in Georgia; a few people from the Montenegrin Monteliberians will go, but I cannot afford it financially. Another active participant is the MTL Alert group. They are preparing for a zombie apocalypse; it’s a cool hobby, but for some reason, I find it hard to take seriously.

The Association is divided into factions, but only the panarchist faction is more or less publicly active. Two of its members, Stas and Ved, both run very sensible thematic channels.

The previously announced redirection of Montelibero’s efforts toward Argentina has not yet led to the formation of a Russian-speaking libertarian community there that is in contact with the rest of the project. The only news from those parts is that a delegate from Montelibero spoke at some Argentine libertarian conference and delivered a letter to Milei. What was in that letter and what effect it had, history remains silent about.

Conclusions and forecasts

At the start, Montelibero participants acted monstrously irrationally and made a ton of mistakes. How could this have been avoided? For example, by delaying the start of construction and other loud activity to instead more thoroughly scout the situation, and only then decide what to do and how. Was it realistic to act according to a more rational scenario? No. Montelibero is a movement, not an organization. It was precisely the drive of the pioneers and their enthusiastic mistake-making that attracted many new participants to the project. Without all this, a fairly strong libertarian community in Montenegro might simply not have formed, just as it didn’t form in Serbia, Georgia, Thailand, or even Argentina. So once again I state: centralized planning sucks, the market decides.

Nevertheless, many initiatives within Montelibero have successfully fizzled out, and many previously active project participants have, at best, tempered or completely lost interest in it, and at worst, moved into open opposition, considering the project to be meaningless “info-gypsyism.”

The economic part of the project must be mentioned separately. Here, the miscalculation proved fatal. It’s one thing when nine out of ten startups fail and one takes off. This happens thanks to fierce competition that selects the truly best. It’s a completely different matter when nine out of ten startups fail, and the tenth balances on the brink of breaking even. This happens thanks to a disgusting investment climate, under which one simply should not invest serious market capital here, just as one should not invest it in some Donbas. Even if something does take off, it will be not thanks to high utility for clients, but thanks to connections with the authorities, for example. And for libertarians, making money this way is usually considered “beneath them.”

Therefore, the following forecast can be made about Montelibero now. This project will not make Europe, or even just Montenegro, free. But it allowed those who believed in it to create a free society around themselves, and also became a platform for testing interesting ideas and technologies suitable for application in other places.

Violation of polaco detected

Montelibero and Argentina

It has been a while since I’ve reviewed what’s happening in Montelibero, but an interesting occasion has arisen: Anton Ekhin, a political scientist, one of the project’s ideologues and author of articles explaining why a free society for Russian emigrants should be built specifically in Montenegro, has released a new article where he now explains why this should be done in Argentina.

In brief.

The pros of Montenegro, as they were seen in 2021: a sparsely populated democratic country without a dominant nation, with access to the sea and prospects of joining the EU.

The cons of Montenegro, as they are seen in 2025: a country that diligently executes any EU directives to tighten the screws regarding Russians, except, so far, requirements to introduce a visa regime. There is also a media and partially police campaign against Montelibero and Anton personally.

The prospects for the Russian libertarian community in Montenegro to facilitate changes toward freedom in this country are not even zero, but negative: the more active the hustle, the harsher the opposition will be under conditions of complete power dominance by the local state. Anton is not particularly interested in agorist ideas on building a counter-economy; it is important to him that all these measures be supported by the official authorities. In hope of this miracle, he first moved from the RF to the DPR, then supported the Montelibero project, and in the last year, finally realized that the miracle is already happening in Argentina, and that the soil there is more fertile for libertarians.

In this regard, Anton intends to cut his losses in Montenegro and focus on creating a libertarian community in Argentina, based on principles tested in Montelibero. The reaction of the Montenegrin part of the community to such ideas was quite unanimous: let him personally go to Argentina and build whatever he wants there, while we have settled in quite well here. This echoes my thesis from last year that the main incentive for a Russian-speaking libertarian to move to Montenegro is that Montelibero already exists here, while such strong libertarian communities have not yet been built elsewhere.

Thus, the main downside of the idea of switching to Argentina is that there aren’t that many Russian libertarians; in Montenegro, they already have a significant network effect from economic and social ties, and switching to a new platform will continue to yield a net negative for quite some time: those remaining in Montenegro will lose out due to the weakening of the local community, and those moving to Argentina will bear the costs of relocation without receiving the benefits of a community, because it hasn’t been created yet.

For those who wish to participate in politics, leaving for Argentina is unambiguously preferable. The reason is banal: it is still realistically possible to obtain citizenship there, along with political rights, in a relatively short period, whereas in Montenegro, Russians have no citizenship and will not have it. Montelibero’s resources tried to put a brave face on a bad situation, claiming that political rights aren’t really needed and that they would influence through locals, but now it seems the illusions have vanished.

However, even those who seriously count on obtaining citizenship in about three years must have something to live on during those three years, and also find a way to stay on their feet after receiving citizenship. Despite a year of libertarian reforms, Argentina is still a regulatory hell, and for immigrants, the situation has rather worsened compared to the pre-Milei times—citizenship and residence permits have become harder to obtain. Besides regulatory difficulties, one must also consider that the cost of living in Argentina has become clearly higher than in Montenegro. The same high import duties known from Montenegro, which Milei is somehow struggling to abolish, are doing their dark work.

Which Russian libertarians should actually go to Argentina?

  1. Those who have the resources to create a medium-scale legal business. In Montenegro, this would be a meaningless burying of money: the business climate is deteriorating, and Russian businesses are subject to serious regulatory pressure, especially informal pressure, where fines and suspension orders are issued more or less arbitrarily. In Argentina, taxes are higher and there are plenty of inspections, but the market is larger, and at a certain scale, this can offset the negatives.
  2. Those who have grounds for rapid acquisition of Argentine citizenship: the ability to invest a large sum in the local economy, confirmed large legal rent, or legal employment in a local company. Having a child born on Argentine territory is a lottery.

In other words, there are grounds to flee to Argentina for those who are already very significant actors in the local community in Montenegro, and the departure of each such person from Montenegro would be a great loss for Montelibero. Therefore, the main recommendation for the Montenegrin part of Montelibero is: value our whales, show them signs of respect, and give them no reason to doubt that they are more needed here.

As for the medium-term perspective, the stratification of the Russian emigrant libertarian community into a wealthy legal Argentine and a poor illegal Montenegrin community could eventually produce some useful effect. However, those who could in principle move to Argentina and create a new community there might have a reasonable question: why there specifically? Why not El Salvador, Prospera, or finally New Hampshire? Everywhere has its downsides, and Argentina has them too. So, as was the case with Montenegro in 2021, first a certain small group of people must take a risk and invest in creating a libertarian community in Argentina, and only when some rooting occurs will the presence of their own homegrown “Argentibero” truly become a significant factor for which it would make sense to move there.

I suggest investing in Nostria

In brief

Sondre Bjellos, an activist in two communities, the Norwegian Liberstad and the Montenegrin Montelibero, with extensive experience in building decentralized systems, is launching a startup called Nostria. Until May 31, anyone interested can invest in it at the pre-seed stage on quite favorable terms. For participants of the Montelibero tokenomics, there is an opportunity to form an investor pool to gain greater control over the project.

Now in more detail

Nostr is a decentralized protocol for exchanging “notes and other things” via relays. I have been using it for quite a while now to publish my notes; I see great potential in it and am always glad when someone takes it upon themselves to develop it.

The idea of the Nostr protocol is that relays store their users’ content in JSON format and provide it to other relays upon request. Such content can also be a Bitcoin payment transaction via the Lightning protocol; thus, Bitcoin payments are natively integrated into Nostr, allowing for the decentralized provision of both content monetization and storage monetization (it is precisely in the area of monetization, for example, where the nearest analog to Nostr, the ActivityPub protocol, has its weak point).

The startup Nostria intends to:

  1. Develop its own client for the Nostr protocol
  2. Create a network of several relays in different parts of the world to ensure fast ping and wide bandwidth for its users (performance speed is the bane of decentralized systems)
  3. Promote, at the protocol level, the idea of specialized relays for storing only user metadata, which will offload large relays by distributing users more evenly across relays, and drastically speed up the collection of all messages related to a particular account and their delivery to clients.
  4. Monetize its service through premium services, offering users dedicated relays, a connection to a dedicated Lightning node, a human-readable name tied to a public key, media content storage, and other perks.
  5. Keep all code open on GitHub, as is proper for decentralized systems.

In this video, Sondre talks about his plans:

Those who prefer text over video can check out the pdf.

For now, Nostria’s medium-term goal is to catch up and surpass the struggling Bluesky. In the longer perspective, it should result in a decentralized solution that one wouldn’t be ashamed to migrate to from Telegram, once Durov finally declares that state security is incomparably more important than user convenience and security.

To launch the MVP, a pre-seed investment round is taking place until May 31. Putting it in plain language: Sondre wants to raise 30 thousand dollars by the end of May, and then spend ten thousand a month throughout the summer to bring the project into commercial operation. First month – hardware deployment. Second – software refinement. Third – marketing. In the autumn, when the project is ready to be shown to more serious investors, fundraising for global expansion will continue, and those who invested at the preliminary stage will have a preferential right to reinvest to maintain their share in the project, and their preliminary investments will be credited to the share capital with a coefficient of 1.15.

By default, investments are attracted in Bitcoin using the decentralized crowdfunding service Angor. Sondre has also released a separate video showing how the investing process works.

Important: the project founder can only unlock the collected funds after confirming the completion of the stated development stage. Until that moment, an investor can request their investment back at any time. All these features are implemented through the relatively simple smart contract mechanism that exists in Bitcoin and do not require the interference of a third trusted party.

However, the entry threshold for these investments is currently quite high: the minimum amount to receive any bonuses is 1000 dollars. Therefore, a solution suggests itself: participants of the Montelibero tokenomics can gather a pool of small investments and invest jointly as a large entity. I want to organize such a pool. My benefits: I will receive various non-monetary bonuses such as a premium account subscription. The benefits for co-investors, besides the financial return on investment: through me (or directly, if agreed upon), they will have convenient feedback with the developers, which means influence over the future functionality of both Nostria and, indirectly, the entire Nostr protocol.

Therefore, I have created a pristine Stellar account, issued the NostriaPre token on it, and created an order to sell it for EURMTL. You have until the end of May to buy this token; then I will also buy as much as possible, close the sell order, and transfer all collected EURMTL to Sondre. In the autumn, Sondre will set up an official Stellar account for his startup and create an order to sell official tokens for NostriaPre tokens at a rate of 1.15. When the startup begins to generate income from premium account services, the distributable profit for token holders will be accrued monthly proportional to the number of tokens.

To purchase the NostriaPre token, you must first open a trust line to it. Your Stellar wallet should have this capability. Token name: NostriaPre. Issuer’s public key: GABAZTSE4DOD4JKFPWQYK5QPUSW57QNZBJBREU2K2UFSGWPHBHNYF46A

This is, for example, how the trust line opening dialog looks in the Sunce
wallet.

Soon, the trust line will also be possible to open via a direct link.

I don’t want to overload the post with detailed instructions on using various types of Stellar wallets, as I assume the pool will be joined by those who already participate in the Montelibero tokenomics (an instruction is even posted on my website, but it is very outdated and I haven’t gotten around to updating it). But if you want to jump in from scratch in “Shut up and take my money” mode, please ask questions in the comments or via DM.

Law and legality in the transition to ancap

Another question about the subject was asked in the comments, and I don’t really want to answer from purely theoretical positions, because for a little over three years now, I’ve had the opportunity to try to implement something. So, I want to reflect on the problems of law and legislation in the ancap community using Montelibero as an example.

I will outline the conceptual framework I am using. Law is the order for resolving conflicts accepted within the community. Statute is a legal norm that the community considers permissible to impose by force. Court is a procedure for resolving conflicts by a third party not involved in the conflict. Jurisdiction is the venue, that is, the circle of conflicts that the community customarily resolves through a specific court.

Montelibero, like any other ancap community in the era of state dominance, cannot claim full jurisdiction over its members. Yes, any issue can be resolved within Montelibero’s jurisdiction—but only if the state is unaware of it. Otherwise, the state may impose its own requirements on what the parties to the conflict are obliged to do.

The Montelibero community is small. It does not provide the opportunity for full market competition between many diverse courts. However, this is no reason to bow before the state. After all, we have implemented tokenomics and now have our own very cheap and efficient financial system. On a single blockchain, without competition between them (we tried adding others, but they didn’t take hold). Although, privately, nothing prevents the exchange of any values: whether commodities, fiat, or various types of crypto. The same applies to courts: by mutual agreement, disputes can be resolved by a coin toss, mediation by a pre-agreed authority, or a duel—but if there is no agreement, one must rely on some unified default judicial mechanism.

Every jurisdiction is subject to a strong positive scale effect: the more conflicts it resolves, the more potential conflicts will specify this particular jurisdiction in advance. This is understandable: people save mental effort and will not keep many different legal mechanisms in mind without particular need, eventually leaning toward a single option, even if it is not the most optimal for a specific case. There are also negative scale effects: even the most efficient judge is unlikely to be able to significantly increase their productivity and will more likely raise the price as demand increases. Therefore, to scale this type of service, it is convenient to use a franchising mechanism: judges may differ, but they will use a single procedure and uniform legal norms.

Where would these come from? The Schelling point here is the procedures adopted in the hosting jurisdiction, that is, in the Montenegrin courts. Why? At least because that is where those dissatisfied with a Montelibero court decision will theoretically turn. But since the local legislation is full of various statist rubbish, it must, of course, be discarded and replaced with our own home-grown concepts. There are few basic principles in libertarianism, but specific legal norms that do not contradict them can vary. And here, precedents will become the Schelling points. It will be easier for each subsequent court to apply a previously used norm than to invent a new one for every new case. Moreover, it will be easier for all members of the Montelibero community to proceed from established legal practice, as predictability in affairs is the foundation for trust.

But, as is known, it is not enough to understand if the laws are good; one must ask if they are enforced.

While judicial practice is limited, one must rely mainly on the conscientiousness of the parties and the informal authority of the judge. The potential ability to turn to the state for enforcement of court decisions is relevant only for the largest cases, where the amount at stake justifies the accompanying costs. In the smallest cases, the losing party will pay without question because the amount is trivial. The problem lies in medium-sized cases, where invoking state enforcement is still too expensive and disgraceful, but the losing party is reluctant to pay.

The most civilized way to achieve the enforcement of court decisions is the widespread use of collateral. I envision a gradual evolution here from one-time deposits to secure a specific claim, to permanent deposits confirming a willingness to comply with the decisions of a specific jurisdiction.

Initially, it might work roughly like this. A community member wishes to enter into a legal relationship with another member. For example, rent a car or an apartment, borrow money, or enter into an employment contract. In addition to the direct contract between the counterparties, they also notify the court and transfer collateral amounts to a court-controlled account, the size of which depends on the amount of liability imposed by the concluded contract. Then, from this collateral, a penalty can be recovered—for example, from an employee for damaging equipment, or from an employer for an industrial injury caused by their fault.

But gradually, as the court builds its own reputation, deposits will become permanent: you recognize the jurisdiction of the MTL court and place a certain deposit on its controlled account—a sort of “price of honor,” in ancient Irish terms. Now anyone can be sure that within the limits of the price of honor, you can be trusted unconditionally. Want to increase your reputation—simply increase the deposit. Leaving the country, or, say, the last court decision caused your distrust—decrease the deposit. Leaving the jurisdiction—withdraw the deposit entirely (with some lag to ensure you have no debts from old contracts).

Moreover, based on this solution, an institute of suretyship could develop, where a guarantor increases trust in the person they vouch for by risking their own judicial deposit.

It would be great if increasing the price of honor contributed to respect within the community, but such an attitude will not form on its own—first, a tradition of involving people with a high price of honor in responsible legal relationships must be grown, for example, as witnesses to large transactions or plaintiffs in socially important cases. Also, a mechanism for increasing another’s price of honor through the payment of judicial deposits into another’s account could certainly appear—if a person’s personal integrity far exceeds their financial capabilities. The result would be something like a Hoppean natural aristocracy.

And, of course, this entire mechanism will work much worse if it turns out that there are a large number of community members who completely ignore it, yet enter into legal relationships with each other in the same way. They may be too poor to freeze money for the sake of reputation. They may not trust a specific court. And finally, they may not trust the mechanism itself.

The poverty factor is handled to a certain extent through suretyship mechanisms. The factor of distrust in a specific court—through competing courts. The factor of distrust in the mechanism—simply a matter of habit. Trust is built; one just must not try to impose it.

Internal conflicts of volunteer organizations

Not long ago, I published a long post Internal Dynamics of Libertarian Communities. Among other things, it mentions the danger of “beastly seriousness” over trifles:

Subconsciously realizing the certain comicality of their position, the disputant, in a polemical frenzy, begins to accuse opponents of violating even the most basic value principles.

And just recently, I received a direct message:

I believe that the current Secretary has exceeded their authority. The Council is unable to resolve this crisis on its own, as some Council members support the Secretary’s actions, while others remain indifferent to what is happening. This is not an isolated case that is being questioned, but this particular case is already egregious.

What is this egregious case? It turns out a Telegram chat admin enabled slow mode in the chat. Why slow mode is needed in a chat of two dozen people, I have no idea, but this case perfectly illustrates how easily, in a purely voluntary organization, people take offense at the slightest manifestation of disrespect from those endowed with certain technical powers.

And here is another case, a public one—and also indignation directed at the secretary: one of the MTL-court judges removed the court secretary from handling a case because the secretary, in the judge’s view, handled correspondence with the parties incorrectly and also for some reason was present in the chat where the judges were discussing the case. And the secretary, instead of stepping down, stayed put; instead, the judge was removed.

This pattern repeats constantly. What is required for it to emerge?

  1. An organization consisting of volunteers
  2. The presence of a sole administrative position within it
  3. The administrator having technical capabilities to restrict the rights of other organization participants.

That’s it. Sooner or later, a situation will arise where the administrator begins to interpret their functions broadly and applies their technical capabilities in a way that restricts the rights of other organization participants, and some participants will view this action as an abuse of power.

If the organization had paid employees, the administration’s actions would be perceived more calmly (any whim for your money). If there were a whole board instead of one administrator, one could appeal to one member to roll back the actions of another (also a very rich class of conflicts, though far less acute). Finally, if the administrator lacked technical capabilities that could be abused, it would be much harder for them.

Let’s leave point 1 alone, because conflicts in hierarchical commercial organizations can be discussed by Bitarch and Voluntarist.

Point 2 is much easier to overcome. If the group is small and consists of formally equal participants, then everyone should be made an admin (if some participants have a sort of probation period, admin rights can be granted after its successful completion)—this serves as a visible confirmation of mutual trust within the organization. Alternatively, one could do without admins entirely.

As for point 3, it depends too much on the chosen communication tools. In Montelibero, Telegram is used almost exclusively for this. In it, the only way to disable technical administration capabilities for a group is to create it using a service account, add participants, and then remove the creator from the group. In principle, this is also a solution for a small, tight-knit group that wishes to communicate strictly on business and does not want to lose internal cohesion over someone’s wounded pride.

Of course, administrators are useful. But that is exactly the line of reasoning that etatists use to explain the utility of the state. No, the utility comes not from administrators, but from a tradition of respecting colleagues. Applied to working groups, this means self-restraint regarding off-topic posts and communication style. If such a tradition is established, an administrator is not needed. If it is not established, it cannot be implemented by the strength of one administrator alone. In any case, the goodwill of the other participants is required.

The Montelibero Association, my view

The channel is still on vacation, but the largest investor of Montelibero stopped by for a visit, and I had an evening to chat with him, so it felt strange not to publish my reflections on this.

My previous overview of Montelibero concerned tokenomics. Now I want to examine such a mysterious entity as the Montelibero Association. I first mentioned it in the sixteenth (and apparently final) news issue — since then, I no longer write about Montelibero as a whole, only about specific aspects.

The reason for the Association’s appearance was that the Montelibero community had accumulated problems:

  1. Goal setting. The stated goal of the Montelibero project was initially libertarian transformations in Montenegro. However, those coming to the country are somehow more concerned with issues of their legalization in this state, earning a living, increasing the quality of that very life by developing internal culture within the community, and so on. Ancaps do not want to build an ancap for others; they are perfectly satisfied building an ancap for themselves, plus some minimal costs to keep the state from getting in the way.
  2. Lack of activists to create public goods. Who will build the roads is not a particularly acute problem, because it is easy to outline the circle of main future beneficiaries of road construction. But who (or rather, for what incentives) will write the wallet code for our tokenomics, who will organize a large annual festival and many smaller intermediate activities, who will pay for hosting, who will handle the filling and promotion of information resources — and so on? Administering the collection of small targeted contributions for any such trifle would be too expensive; it is more profitable to aggregate administrative expenses somehow.
  3. Insufficient clarity of collective decision-making mechanisms. For example, who and how will decide whom to send to deliver a report at a conference if the conference organizers contact one of the Montelibero participants and invite some representative of Montelibero?

One could simply dismiss such problems, claiming that the “market” is meant to solve them. But the “market” is precisely a generalized name for the entire sum of voluntary private initiatives. And so, one such initiative sounded roughly like this:

Since a loose community without fixed membership responds poorly to such challenges, let’s create an organization with fixed membership from its participants, gather activists into it, implement liquid democracy there, and within the framework of the association, they can engage in creating various cool infrastructural things for the entire community, as well as make collective decisions that can then be communicated to the whole community.

Half of last summer, the Association was at the stage of preliminary discussion. It was officially created at the festival. Now it has slightly over a hundred people in its membership. I will try to briefly list its main achievements:

  1. Creation of a mechanism for identity verification of its participants and a standardized blockchain record of this fact
  2. Creation of a court, which has already managed to consider several cases
  3. Creation of an open standard for the blockchainization of relationships — personal, property, collaboration, and the like
  4. Creation of a competition commission to select the organizing committee for the Montelibero festival in 2024
  5. Creation of internal factions united by a common direction of interests (creates associations with secular Civil Society)

Even at the stage of preliminary discussion, the Association faced serious difficulties, and some of them became even more apparent after its activities began.

Firstly, the very idea of officially joining something, obeying the decisions of a collegiate body, and so on, proved alien to many ancaps. A working group around a specific project — as many as you like! Membership in a club — by all means! But the Association, by design, looked like something too similar to a political party, and therefore was rejected regardless of the arguments in its support.

Secondly, the Association has internally contradictory goals. On one hand, to engage in constructive activity, it needs a high concentration of activists. On the other hand, to communicate legitimate decisions to the entire large community, it must be as numerous as possible. On a third hand, principled opponents of the association perceive any attempts by the Association to communicate its decisions externally as encroachments on their freedom and try to delegitimize them in every way.

Liquid democracy deserves a separate mention. The Association’s council, to simplify the model slightly, consists of twenty of its participants with the highest number of votes delegated to them by other members of the Association. This creates an incentive for those wishing to enter the Council to campaign for their own sympathizers to join the Association, preferably passive ones, so that all their activity in the organization boils down to joining, verification, and delegating their vote.

As a result, a contradictory situation has emerged.

On one hand, the Association carries out some useful activity. For example, the court it created resolved several conflicts that were previously in limbo. However, in one of these conflicts, the defendant (a member of the Association) did not recognize the jurisdiction of the court over them, thus questioning the claim that the Association is a contractual jurisdiction. A potentially even more useful project is the development of a standard for the blockchainization of relationships. Finally, it is the Association that plans to carry the festival on its shoulders.

On the other hand, all this looks like an attempt to create a monopoly out of nowhere, combining completely diverse activities under a single brand, even to the detriment of efficiency. For instance, the development of the blockchainization standard and its accompanying toolkit requires a compact working group, not a bureaucratic structure. To create a tradition of resolving conflicts in court, examples of successful conflict resolution are needed, not attempts at forced court appearances under threat of loss of Association membership. Cumbersome democratic coordination procedures repel enthusiasts rather than attract them. Attempts to inflate the prestige of membership through economic incentives for Association members and restrictions for non-members lead rather to the opposite effect: any anti-statist knows that if someone tries to impose a certain free service on you, threatening sanctions for not using it, you should run as far away from such gifts as possible.

Now my conclusions.

  1. The creation of the Association was a response by a small active part of the community to quite real challenges facing the community.
  2. This solution is unsuccessful by design and is quite naturally rejected by part of the community.
  3. Attempts to infiltrate the Association from the outside for the purpose of correcting its design flaws are harmful: it is a sin to try to replace the market with politics.
  4. Attempts to destroy the Association for the purpose of returning to the past are counterproductive, since even if the price seems acceptable, as a result, the community will still have to solve the same problems that the Association tried to solve.
  5. The only strategy that seems reasonable to me: ignore its very existence as some unified entity, without rejecting the people who are part of it in any way. Membership in the Association is neither good nor bad; it has no more meaning than an earring in the ear.
  6. As for the little problems, they will have to be solved by our own efforts; no kind uncle will come and help, and no evil uncle will come and hinder. He doesn’t exist, this collective uncle.

Montelibero, the weekdays of tokenomics

As I have already mentioned, writing news reviews for the entire Montelibero project is currently pointless—no one is capable of fully grasping the state of affairs across the project; it has become too large and complex. Therefore, I will pick certain characteristic themes and provide sketches on them so that a rough impression can be formed about how and what is being done in our community.

The most characteristic feature of the community, as I have written repeatedly, is its developed tokenomics. I dare claim that no other community in the world yet has anything similar. At the time I wrote my first reviews on this topic, the tokenomics still maintained a fairly significant centralization: there was the MTL fund with its own token (which brings modest monthly dividends and is slowly growing in price), there were many tokens issued by the fund to represent its own assets, and there were a couple or three independent tokens, for example, mine. Now, those wishing to diversify their investments have far more opportunities. (True, this is expressed, in particular, by the fact that I managed to place my previous loan of 500 euros in full, while the current one was not fully filled—about 320 tokens were bought. This only means that I need to offer a higher interest rate.)

It is evident that brisk sales followed immediately after the post about the loan placement, but the interested buyers quickly ran out

For example, a person has a dream. He is a programmer, but he also wants to be a DJ. What did he do? He issued DJAndy tokens, and now those wishing to finance his dream can do so. There is an offer with a more detailed description of the terms; it shows that this is essentially a short-term loan with deferred payment, but beyond that, the tokens can be used to pay for his DJ services at a good discount. Who in the traditional financial sphere would invest in someone else’s whims under such conditions? Yet, several people were found, although the total volume of purchased tokens is still noticeably less than the requested amount. The factor of social connectivity proves to be decisive.

In general, of course, the social aspect under ancap is a whole other story. The first Montelibero fund was created for commercial and infrastructure projects and does not engage in charity. Thus, for charitable tasks, a separate fund was created by other people. And what is the result? The fund’s capital is growing, yet there is no queue of suffering people knocking on its doors. People find it beneath them to simply ask for money for living expenses; therefore, the fund’s charity manifests in the fact that it satisfies requests for interest-free loans or sponsors some inexpensive campaigns to promote the Montelibero project.

But even simple interest-free loans already seem like too generous charity to people. For instance, in January, a private kindergarten took a short interest-free loan of 500 euros from the charitable fund to cover a cash gap, and by February, it had already issued its own short-term bonds for 1,000 euros to expand the business—and sold them all in literally two days.

Of course, the mere fact of belonging to the community does not mean that everyone will compete to offer you money on the most favorable terms. On the contrary, newcomers have to make do with short-term loans, while old and venerable companies already have the opportunity to attract long-term money. For example, one of the two whales of our tokenomics, the MTL-City developer, created its own investment platform Tokenopolis, where it offers investments in the construction of specific objects, the purchase of company shares, or three-year bonds. The site is somewhat raw, and if a potential investor knows how to buy tokens through Stellar’s native tools, I recommend using them for now, though it is also possible through Tokenopolis, albeit with some difficulty, and I think they will fix the bugs over time. A secondary market for this family of tokens (as with most others) does not exist—there are simply too few of us for that yet. Thus, after buying a particular investment token, the buyer must be prepared to hold it until the maturity date if it is a bond, and if it is a share, it is completely unclear for how long. Nevertheless, investors can be found.

The second whale of our tokenomics, the diversified holding GPA, also moved from a loan attraction model to the sale of shares. Presumably, they should bring some dividends once a quarter, plus grow in price. However, dividends are not yet being paid, and as long as the entire primary placement is not sold out, one cannot count on a price increase either. But even for such an offer, investors are found, which clearly demonstrates the price of reputation.

As far as I can judge, we have not yet picked all the low-hanging fruit, and Montelibero’s tokenomics is expected to see decent growth in the coming year. Meanwhile, other startup communities will catch up. For example, similar mechanisms for investing in local businesses have already begun to be implemented by the Norwegian Liberstad.

The most promising area of work for increasing the overall volume of tokenomics is the creation of convenient interfaces for third-party investors—through fiat banking instruments or at least through Bitcoin. So far, Tokenopolis has begun to move in this direction, but I hope a more universal platform appears, earning from the integration of Montelibero’s local tokenomics into the world of big finance. Work on this is already underway; perhaps in the foreseeable future, I will be able to tell you what this turned into.

2023, results

As usual, I note that I am unable to follow my own plans. Books I started translating earlier are still not finished, my own book on ancap has still not been recorded, but instead, I’ve started translating a new one about the Network State, and writing my own new one about libertarian theory of war.

The Telegram channel is not developing much: there are slightly more subscribers, slightly fewer publications and views, and citations have decreased slightly. Overall, this is logical: the project is mature, there is no aggressive advertising, free time is becoming scarcer; we simply continue to run the channel because how could we not?

Things are quite interesting with Montelibero. This year, the project continued to increase its systemic complexity, and now it can be confidently said: no single person knows how many people are in the movement or how the movement is doing as a whole, because one cannot embrace the infinite. Nor is there any need to. Therefore, certain major milestones are well-known to everyone (MTL-fest, moving into MTL-City), and alongside them are many small local achievements that look like breakthroughs to some and cause bewilderment to others. This is why I haven’t released Montelibero news for a long time; instead, I will most likely choose a segment that interests me and start covering it directly on the movement’s general channel.

In general, segmentation has become the main trend for Montelibero, and this is generally healthy: people try not to waste effort on things that interest them little and focus on what is important. At the same time, various companies interpenetrate somehow and are united only by these loose communications, similar value systems, and a set of approaches to working with reality. Such a Montelibero is not tied to any state borders at all, although, of course, most of the circles in the movement are geographically localized. I expect that next year this trend will become more institutionally shaped, the network nodes will take on a more explicit form, and their activities will receive diverse and more decentralized coverage.

Nothing interesting happened in Montenegro, except for a new government, a new president, the tightening of screws, and a census. In the RF, also nothing interesting, except for a failed coup. On the other hand, Argentina unexpectedly appeared on the scene. Now one can observe with joyful curiosity how etatists are fought with etatist methods, and add individual cases to the collection.

In the New Year, I want to wish my readers two of the most important things: a sense of self-worth and purposefulness. Do not tolerate shit neither in yourself nor around you, and move consistently toward a world where there is less of it.

Bitcoiners discuss Montelibero, continued

A month ago, the guys from the projects HypeCoinNews and Bitcorn tried to launch a joint podcast Bitcom in Bitcoin, inviting Soz for the first episode to tell them about Montelibero. There was a false start, and they had to discuss Montelibero among themselves. I later commented on one of the takes from this conversation on my page.

And so yesterday, they finally released the recording of the conversation with Soz.

I was briefly reprimanded for the inaccuracy of my comment: by freezing BTC in the Liquid sidechain, I receive LBTC coins in exchange, which I can then use to buy LMTL tokens or any others, and the fund, after selling me its tokens, is free to dispose of the received LBTC as it sees fit, including selling them for euros. But since the liquidity of this market is extremely low, the comment remains essentially valid: using this mechanism to accumulate resources offline is inconvenient.

And then the conversation continued for over an hour about other things (if anyone is ready to make timecodes, it would be very helpful—drop them in the comments). I listened and felt envious: I have to give a talk about Montelibero at the upcoming festival, and it certainly won’t be better than Soz’s, no matter how hard I try(

I’ll probably add one more thing to what Soz said about “broke people.” In principle, a broke person just needs to arrive in the country and start earning; they can completely ignore legalization. The culture of under-the-table payments is extremely developed here. Documents aren’t demanded at every step (and if they ask once every six months, there are no sanctions for saying your documents are at home). Difficulties only arise when trying to leave the country. But if you’re broke, why would you be traveling abroad! Stay in Montenegro, enjoy its—no joke—immense natural and cultural diversity, participate in the activities of the local community, and just don’t worry. Roma people make up five percent of the population here; learn from them the correct attitude toward the state (though it’s better to learn the attitude toward private property from us).