Тег: Donations

A Boosty replacement for true bitcoiners

Until recently, a fairly significant source of income for my channel was my Boosty page, a service that allows for the collection of recurring payments. To be fair, Boosty is a way to earn from premium content, but since my premium content is free, I simply posted diary-like snippets there—not that I believed they were worth the money, but that’s just how Boosty works: you have to offer different content for different subscription levels.

Either way, that story is in the past because almost all of my ruble-based tools have been blocked, and I wouldn’t want to gift your donations to the bank once my last card is blocked. So, I started looking for a replacement, and I found one.

I have added instructions on how to use this new tool to the donations page. Donations are sent in Bitcoin using the Lightning and the trendy Nostr protocols. I borrowed the idea from the 21 Idea project, and as a trial, I set up a daily payment of 100 satoshis for it. So far, the first hundred has been deducted; we’ll see how it goes from here and how well the parameter editing works—I want to play around more with the frequency and amount of the payments.

Overall, however, I have no reason to believe that anything is seriously glitching, so you don’t have to wait until I’m done experimenting and can set up recurring donations right now. It’s currently the low season at my main job, so I have more free time, and I could devote much more attention to my channel if it gave me a way to earn.

Currently, the Bitcoin blockchain is heavily congested, so if it weren’t for Lightning, very little would be moving at all. I recommend getting some satoshis for fast Bitcoin payments as soon as possible; their popularity will clearly continue to grow rapidly. Moreover, payments on Lightning are more private than on-chain.

Mechanics of freedom — that’s it! (now in audio)

The translation of David Friedman’s book The Machinery of Freedom has finally been fully narrated. Now you can finally pump iron at some gym while simultaneously pumping your brain with libertarian theory.

On this occasion, I want to promote the new channel of Oleg, the volunteer who narrated the book. In the channel, he posts his narrations of various literary works. And, obviously, the higher the interest in the channel, the more incentives there will be for new audio to appear.

As a reminder, I have translations of three more books in progress: Libertarianism by Eric Mack, Practical Anarchy by Stephan Mol liqueur, and Legal Systems Very Different from Our Own by our own David Friedman. Translations move much faster when donations are made, so don’t be shy. The same considerations apply to my own book on ancap; it’s long overdue for completion, but I’m always short on time. However, when a fresh donation is hanging over my soul, whining about not being “worked off,” there’s no choice but to get to the keyboard.

Nothing special, just a small summary and a request for feedback

I continue to write the introductory part of the book about ancap bit by bit, describing the main principles of libertarianism. I think that later I will reformat the text a bit, but for now, it’s becoming quite a large chapter in one piece.

Usually, when I answer a question, I do it in a detailed manner, with examples, metaphors, and other rhetorical gems. In the book, I try not to ramble, and now I’m wondering if I should, and whether it’s becoming too dry. I would like to know your opinion.

On May 20, I fly to Montenegro. This may affect the regularity of posts for about three days, or it may not. I usually don’t schedule publications, so such things are not very predictable.

Since living in Montenegro will be more expensive for me than in Russia, I will have to pay more attention to making money. If you want me to be less distracted from working on the channel, send donations. It will be especially helpful to chip in for the book — the more financial enthusiasm it generates, the faster I will write and the sooner I will finish. The same applies to current translation projects.

Since I will need to register a company to obtain a residence permit in Montenegro, I will try to take advantage of this and organize the acceptance of donations directly in Telegram — Durov created this possibility quite a long time ago, but I didn’t use it because connecting a Telegram store requires a legal entity — and that’s exactly what I will now have.

Also, in the comments of the donations page, I was asked to set up a Monero wallet. I downloaded the wallet from the official website, synchronized the blockchain, and now I’ve even started mining, although that is just for fun, of course. So, here is the Monero address for donations:

84CVRC5iqexHMzLSrUwhcUgw5LkqrkbV5FGWugs6EgQX1YQEM7Kvrvm2sBVjfGwrrhfhvL6j3PdcuaiB6R6Y9ULQPjKWotH

Most likely, I will use the flights to read the Strugatsky brothers’ “Snail on the Slope,” which was ordered for a review long ago — what else is there to do on a plane besides reading books? It’s getting a bit embarrassing; payment for the review was received back in April, which is quite untidy.

Possibly, I will post some fresh travel impressions if they don’t clash too much with the general theme of the channel. If they do — I’ll post them on Boosty.

Nonviolent State. A new video from Libertarian Band.

The team I previously had the honor of representing has released their latest video, partially based on my script, which in turn was based on Bitarch’s article of the same name. On boosty, I posted a whole series of iterations showing how the script evolved. The next video is already terra incognita; my work is not involved there, and I am curious to see what they come up with. If it turns out well, who knows, perhaps I will be able to hand over my main text channel to someone over time.

Readers are wondering why Bitarch’s share on my channel has grown so sharply. It’s quite simple: he purchased a subscription for such publications for 5,000 rubles per month. These terms turned out to be more convenient for me than pondering every time whether or not to post a particular piece of material he suggested for free. Similarly, I guaranteed to answer questions accompanied by donations, while all others will be answered as I can.

By the way, speaking of questions. I want to test a certain model. I have created a separate subscription level on boosty for 50 rubles a month. Subscribers will see all the questions I receive and will be able to mark in the comments which ones they would be interested in seeing answered. In this way, even if a question was not accompanied by a donation, a paid subscriber can promote it (Of course, subscribers of more expensive plans will also have this capability). As we know from economic theory, it is through the pricing structure that real human needs are determined. Let’s see how this works in our case.

Mechanics of Freedom, Chapter 61

I’ve received another donation for the Friedman translation project, as well as a question: will the translated Mechanics of Freedom be available in fb2 format? Actually, I planned to stick with epub, but since that’s the case, there will be an fb2 as well. And since money has come in, it’s a great excuse to post a new chapter.

Chapter 61 has a grand title: A Bet I Lost: Where My Moral Philosophy Begins. Friedman shares memories from half a century ago about how he bet with philosopher Isaiah Berlin and failed to prove to him that moral judgments are more a matter of taste than objective facts.

The venerable philosopher explained to the student David, as simply as two plus two, that as long as we rely on the testimony of our sense organs, the objectivity of any facts is extremely conditional. He then developed the idea that mutually consistent impressions are perhaps useful enough to be considered facts, since they align well with each other and with the impressions of other people. In the same way, mutually consistent moral judgments can boldly be considered moral facts, and those incapable of perceiving them can be considered insane.

As a result, Friedman largely changed his position on morality and is now much more inclined to perceive basic moral statements as akin to facts of physical reality. However, he is aware that he lacks a decent argument against moral nihilism, and it is unlikely that one will emerge.

Mechanics of Freedom, Chapter 57

I received a small donation for the translation of Friedman; I took the hint, so here is a fresh chapter.

I published Chapter 56 earlier, together with Chapter 34, since their themes are closely related. So those who wish to read in order can refresh their memory on the topic of national defense and then proceed to Chapter 57.

Original appropriation, a brief excursion into moral philosophy. The chapter is dedicated to answering the question of what grounds libertarians can even have for appropriating that which is not produced, specifically, land. Two approaches are explored: according to Brodie (if it cannot be done, but is very profitable, then it can, provided compensation is paid) and according to Locke (by mixing honey with tar, the owner of the honey claims rights to the entire barrel).

By mixing Locke’s argumentation with his own, the author concludes that the resulting product is barely edible, but in principle capable of serving as a libertarian basis for the appropriation of unproduced resources.

Started a personal blog

Several times, I have been suggested to start a Patreon or some other system for providing premium content in exchange for regular donations. The idea of receiving regular donations certainly appeals to me (although it’s unclear what stops a reader from simply donating regularly without using intermediary services) — but for a long time, I couldn’t figure out what kind of premium content I would be willing to offer. Share smarter thoughts with paid subscribers and less smart ones with free ones? Well, that’s not quite it…

Then an idea occurred to me. In my main channel, on the website, and in all the linked social networks, I talk about libertarianism, while I usually remain behind the scenes. So, as premium content, I could provide my own personal perspective on the world around me — basically, various things that don’t fit into the format of a channel about libertarianism.

So, I started a live channel on the Boosty service (chosen for banal economic reasons — it takes less for mediation than its competitors: 7%, plus the payment system commission). I will post personal things there, while still trying to avoid my deanonymization. There is only one subscription level, 200 rubles per month, and so far I don’t see any reason to create more. If you have suggestions on what else could be written there, subscribe and let me know in the comments. As you know, I always highly value the opinion of those who are willing to back it with money, and I try to fulfill such requests.

Donations in rubles

I have added the ability to make donations in rubles. The forms for sending rubles differ slightly on different pages so that I can understand whether the donation is for a question, for Eric Mac’s translation, or simply for the project’s development. Unfortunately, I cannot trust you to write the payment purpose yourselves—the state does not react well to joking payment purposes such as “to overthrow Putin” or “4.20” (congrats, by the way!).

It looks something like this:

From time to time, I write reviews of various articles or videos, and it occurred to me that you could also suggest materials for reviews to me, if you are interested. Naturally, preference will be given to requests accompanied by donations. This option could be especially interesting for Telegram channel owners, because it is certainly more interesting to readers than a standard promo post.

Translation of Mechanics of Freedom, Chapter 43

After a very long pause, I am posting the edited version of Chapter 43 The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman. The translation itself was done long ago by Elena Makeeva by order of the LPR. I had to bring the terminology of the early translation into alignment with the one I use in the new one. The old translation seems to have aimed to present the material as simply as possible. In doing so, a number of terms were not translated but paraphrased—much like if I were to write “words close in meaning” everywhere instead of the word “synonyms” in a linguistics article. I had to sacrifice ease for the sake of more rigorous terminology used in economic theory.

The chapter is titled Answers: The Economic Analysis of Law and is of a completely monstrous size. This is not surprising, as Friedman essentially tried to squeeze into one chapter the material from his separate work titled Law’s Order, a reference to which is provided in the appendix to the book, and which, unfortunately, is currently available only in English.

The peculiarity of Friedman’s approach is that he derives law from economics, rather than from libertarian principles, as the latter are unable to provide clear answers to many specific applied legal problems (greetings to all supporters of the opinion that any legal norms can be derived from a single simple NAP).

I received a request to organize a way to subscribe to regular donations to support the project. Unfortunately, I am not very familiar with the tools usually used for this. Therefore, to start with, I suggest that everyone interested in ensuring sufficiently broad and regular funding for the project message me privately on Telegram or Facebook. Then we will discuss how best to organize this so that it is convenient for you to pay and I do not need to reveal my identity.

Radically reworked the donations page

Today is a day of serious upheavals: the Russian government has resigned, the US Congress has sent impeachment documents for the president to the Senate, and I have completely rewritten the donations page.

Since the project is anonymous, collecting donations for it has its specifics: money mostly arrives in bitcoins, but I have been repeatedly asked to provide the possibility of payments in fiat as well. Rejoice, a method has been found, and the description is provided.

Topping up a Lightning wallet has now become very simple, fast, and cheap, managed by a new concise Telegram bot.

Previously, various ways of acquiring and using crypto were described across as many as four different pages; now all key things are grouped directly on the “Donations” page, and only the purchase of bitcoins has been left as separate text just in case as an optional supplement.