Тег: Trust

NAP and contract enforcement, a discussion

Yesterday’s post about whether violent actions to enforce payment for a completed contract violate the NAP, sparked a discussion, so I am returning to the topic.

As Ekaterina Schulmann loves to point out in her lectures, the world is extremely unfair, and societies where there is little trust, bear additional costs due to this, which exacerbates their poverty and further reduces trust—while trust cannot be restored by simple preaching. This observation applies not only to the citizens of a particular state in general, but also to other groups. In the context of the transition to ancap, we are most interested in the agorist society, those engaged in counter-economics, and therefore voluntarily or forcedly cut off from state services for ensuring contract compliance.

For example, any shadow entrepreneur can easily encounter a situation where they have incurred costs while fulfilling the contract terms, after which they are refused payment. In such a situation, you cannot not only file a lawsuit, but you cannot even bring the situation to public attention, because the activity is shadow, and publicity is even more disadvantageous than the losses from unpaid work. Without publicity, the institution of reputation does not work.

Take sex work in modern Russian society as an example. It is illegal, so in case of non-payment under a contract, these funds cannot be recovered through the court, and you cannot even draft a written contract with specified sanctions for non-payment, as it would be evidence. Therefore, even an individual entrepreneur usually has to cooperate with someone to whom she can turn for protection in such cases, so that they can achieve payment through force or the threat of its application. These are additional costs that society bears due to a lack of trust, suivante which allow such a business to remain stably profitable; without the purchase of contract enforcement, sex workers quickly become sex slaves.

In legal business, this manifests itself less often, but it is quite easy to imagine, for example, how a drunk debauchee is kicked out of a bar where he is unable to pay for the damage he caused (see also my old article on vigilantism). Here, a conditional mutual offset of damages is far more common, and not an invoice for payment post-factum, although variants are possible.

Nevertheless, it must be clearly understood that all cases where direct violence is practiced instead of civilized proceedings with installments, penalties, and seizure of property, etc., are precisely excesseses, and the more trust there is between people in society, the fewer such excesses.

In the post Libertarianism ex machina, I referred to Alexander Auzaan’s lecture, where the conditions necessary for the stable existence of a stateless society are discussed. He calls the balance of the potential for violence as the key condition. When a sex worker or a bar owner hires security, they level the balance of the potential for violence, countering the potential aggression of customers with the potential aggression of security. The second condition mentioned in the lecture is a stable community composition. This factor allows the transition from a classic prisoner’s dilemma to a repeated one, launches the institution of reputation, makes it possible to predict others’ actions—and gradually develops trust in society, even if the various additional measures proposed by Ekaterina Schulmann are not used—namely, joining various social organizations to build experience in peaceful, creative interaction (though with them the process is significantly accelerated).

The Internet allows such stable communities to form even without being tied to a specific compact territory: the transmission of information is extraterritorial, and communities are based precisely on the exchange of information. Transaction guarantees, through mechanisms of collateral, escrow, insurance, and other non-violent instruments—these are services that appear on modern markets at fairly early stages of their development, and immediately radically reduce both the level of costs from contract violations, and the level of potential violence necessary to operate in such a market.

So do not violate the NAP—it is not only unsightly, but also unprofitable, there are better tools.

How will things stand with documents under ancap?

For example, a passport, a death certificate, and so on. Will they be issued, and if so, by which organization, and if not, what will replace them?

анонимный вопрос

Probably, if an IT specialist were to tell the history of mankind, the whole thing would boil down to who issued certificates to whom and how…

Any communications in a more or less complex society inevitably run into the problem of trust. Information is transferred from node to node via unsecured channels using an unknown number of intermediaries. Natasha Rostova, tripping while stepping out of a carriage, turns into Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol sitting on a branch after a chain of retellings. Lieutenant Kizhe appears out of nowhere. Orwell writes from Spain about how war reports are composed without any link to real events. Chinese generals use the corpses of their own peasants for reporting purposes because it is easier than winning battles against a real enemy. Russian FSB agents repeat the feats of Chinese generals. And all of this is called the Byzantine Generals’ Problem—which, as is not hard to guess, tells us that the Eastern Roman Empire also had some difficulties with data reliability.

The state solves the Byzantine Generals’ Problem by creating cross-verification procedures, duplicating communication channels, and similar measures. Nevertheless, we frequently encounter episodes where a migrant in the EU had fourteen identity documents and received benefits for each, or conversely, a Russian pensioner spent several months proving to the state that he had not died, as written in the documents, and was still entitled to his pension, or Petrov and Boshirov turn out to be Chepiga and Mishkin.

Fortunately, all the technical means to solve this problem under ancap are already available. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto described a mechanism for solving the Byzantine Generals’ Problem through blockchain. A distributed public ledger stores unfalsifiable and indelible records thanks to the greed of miners and the suspicion of network node owners. And even earlier, asymmetric encryption made it possible to solve the specific problem of abandoning trusted intermediaries in data transmission, and now we communicate in secret chats, knowing that even Durov does not have the encryption keys, let alone Comrade Major.

With a competent approach, it is possible to ensure almost complete certainty that digital data will be preserved without distortion and will fall only into the hands of those to whom it is intended, while for everyone else, it will be nothing more than information junk. The trusted intermediary problem arises only at the stage of digitization. Yes, we can be sure that a document is certified by Alice’s signature, but we have no idea whether the signature has been compromised, whether Alice was under duress, and what kickback she received for her signature. So the problem of offline reputation will not go away even under ancap, but at least you will always know for sure that if Alice has certified a document with her signature, you can trust the document to the same extent that you trust Alice in general—both her competence and her ability not to fuck up her private key.

Perhaps the most well-known example of implementing passports and other documents associated by statists with the state, but without the state, is bitnation. States that look benevolently toward minarchism, such as Estonia, are already cooperating with the project, but any private company could do this with equal success.

In the photo: the most famous of the Byzantine generals and the most famous of the Byzantine emperors (the second one is just tagging along)