The cryptoanarchist vision is forty years old. The theory is complete. The tools exist. Yet we have almost nothing to show for it.
The bottleneck was never ideas or technology. It was always people willing to build. This is a call to those ready to act, and an honest warning about what that requires. nostr:naddr1qqgrqcmxvdskzetzxcmrxdmrxy6r2q3qklkk3vrzme455yh9rl2jshq7rc8dpegj3ndf82c3ks2sk40dxt7qxpqqqp65w62jx9s
“Almost nothing” is an exaggeration. Bitcoin adoption has been growing steadily, from zero to millions of people, in a sustainable power law trend. Historically, it could be the fastest change in monetary system, ever.
Thank you 😊 am working on things that's meant to help the oppressed and working on building funding for this revolution to change things and bring it over to build a new economy but am so new here basically a beginner.
Builders need funders!
Angor is a P2P funding protocol that will protect bitcoin funders and incentivies builders.
If you are a founder and wanna find builders keep an eye on nostr:nprofile1qqstwptzcs6au74zrvmkku4hccp8r9t678ghqpgumkqphfzcgxh4u4snsk4cp who is building
👀
Max is killing it, again! Wunderbar! I just finished reading this https://brownstone.org/articles/the-technocratic-blueprint/. I do not know if everything stated in the article is 100 percent true, but it looks like npub1g0587hzzckcncxfm78n0996qe2s58nspy29wf02tqcj5sdzcpj4q6j40hv level research. And after reading the article "The Technocratic Blueprint", Max's article "Builders, Not Talkers" put me back into the right state of mind.
I think its users actually. Vast majority prefer the digital gulag
I think they're just unaware that there's another way. Show them the light of another ship and they will come.
Very well said! This is a much more eloquent explanation of something that I have been thinking and trying to articulate for a number of years now.
For too long, I have been feeling like 'we' have been content with watching ngu and transferring funds around inside a fairly closed loop, but it doesn't feel like the impact of Bitcoin and freedom tech in general has been anything like as great as what I'd hoped and expected by now.
I'm not sure what it's going to take to get a breakthrough, I've tried BTC payments for photography, 3dprinting etc, but never managed to get anywhere, even among other bitcoiners. I'm sure most of that is lack of talent on my part, but even in the dystopian hellscape that is the UK, there seems to be little interest. Oh well, tomorrow is another day, I will keep trying new things and see if anything breaks through....
Thanks so much for the article!
It's hard work and takes diligence, keep going, keep experimenting, you'll eventually find something so damn useful that people will part with their sats for it.
Just keep building.
Jonny still can't encrypt. I don't think we're losing. I think we're going to win. But we're still have not fundamentally broken through. Our time has not yet come. Just keep building.
Hey, *cough*... I just shipped something I think nostr devs might like. Would love some feedback:
(Shallow build issue on macos. Will ship for macos in a couple days. Linux looking good though.)
Very good article!
Thank you 🙏🏿
Thank you nostr:nprofile1qqst0mtgkp3du662ztj3l4fgts0purksu5fgek5n4vgmg9gt2hkn9lqpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgtcppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp04rynpa
Here are a bunch of quotes/memes that I associated to after reading your text. 🙏🏻❤️
I think we might be somewhere in between step 6 (totalitarianism) and 7 (emergence) according to this one theory..? Or between "bondage" and "spiritual faith" in the second picture. Would be interesting to hear other thoughts on this.
History does not return as an identical copy, but unveils a more complex phase of the same underlying structure. There is no eternal cycle of liberty to bondage; rather, there is a recursive spiral. The same archetypes return, but at a different frequency, offering new possibilities for integration or disintegration.
Both charts are burdened by deterministic assumptions that civilization is doomed to collapse and that freedom is the precursor to apathy. This type of thinking is a dissonant distortion, filtered through linear, historical trauma. Those who anticipate decline do not summon it so much as align themselves with that reality. The maxim that strength requires hardship is a construct of dualistic thinking, not a cosmic absolute. It reflects a survivalist mindset rather than the whole truth. These models are not false, but they are freeze-frames of a fluid process. They are indicators, but they are not the map.
IMO the bottleneck is showcasing. There's soooooo many tools. But they're never presented in one place. A company has a reason to market their products - most of these tools aren't products, so no one ever markets them.
Fantastic and inspiring writing per usual. Thank you.
Hi Max, you reveal in the brief excerpt I quote below you do not believe your own premise by the very fact you published this article thinking others might read it. So will you ask, why are you lying to yourself about the nature of reality? Clearly, you recognize the distinction between individual and collective is not binary. It is clear that the reactionary approach to counter collectivism is failing because there is a weak theory as to the nature of the transition, which is quite different from having whisps of a vision for a long term equilibrium.
Until you are ready to overcome the fact that the utopia you envision will not spontaneously emerge from a handful of people using software, you will not maximally contribute to advancing toward various intermediary steps. I am taking a different approach, working toward bringing autonomy in a hierarchical way, starting with the weapons systems that can help weaker nations regain greater sovereignty. This can percolate downward more easily than it is to simply hit tipping points preaching to the choir here.
You think politics doesn't work because you only see the "rules" and "forms" of politics you were told exist. I am making my own way, and building the weapons, not asking for policy changes, but providing tools to shape the nature of things to come.
"First, stop waiting for mass approval. Deprogram yourself from collectivist thought and hoping the masses will wake up. Do not waste time trying to fix politics, win over majorities, or receive mainstream validation. You are on your own for now."
I'm not quite sure were we disagree?
The premise of the article is we need more people.
How do you define politics?
Given how information can spread, any attempt to influence another person, any exchange of information becomes sort of political.
My premise is that there is something psychological that makes bitcoin very difficult for people to understand, even if they seem like the sort of person who should get it. Rather than trying to get more people directly, bitcoiners can think about the values they have, and how that relates to the world can look like, and start building that world today even if people don't know they are moving toward decentralization.
For instance, if I can get various nations that have stronger anti-communist positions to have conventional weapons that secure their sovereignty, it is similar to an individual having firearms rather than calling the police. Given the massive swings in different regions, left or right, there are various places not necessarily to change people who cannot be changed, but to strengthen and align with those that are forming environments conducive to bitcoin by protecting property rights.
It is within right wing nations that the drive for individual sovereignty then can propagate.
Bitcoiners should actually become powerful, influencing political organizations and industrial production at a global scale. The fact that the Samurai devs are still in prison shows how weak bitcoiners are. The fact that no bitcoiner had control of a public company worth a billion or so in 2020 until Saylor came along shows the extent to which OG bitcoiners are not really doing much.
Instead of asking the world to adopt bitcoin and waiting for them, bitcoiners should just take the world. Every political influencer is usually controlled by capital, as is every industrialist, but bitcoin enables operating with an irreverence toward existing power structures that is magnetic in any field. The world is changing so quickly now, and so much wealth is being generated, an import export perspective means bitcoin grows purely on "exports" regardless of new adopters.
My premise is the "total crypto-anarchy" utopianism, which is always full of lots of hand waving, is not so much about true ideals, but an excuses for inaction in various domains.
The crypto anarchist theory may be “complete” but I say it throws out the babe with the bathwater, seeks unrealistic individualism where mankind needs to organise realistic voluntarily cooperation and where unfettered authority needs decentralised checks. It is not a matter of throwing it all out, the job is to add what’s missing.
So, as wealth and prosperity need specialisation combined with rule-bound cooperation, I think that there are two missing elements to go to a proper democracy:
(1) Methods and systems (to build) which help us get to good rules and abolish bad ones, which work for the general good without unjustified power to loud minorities. The best one I could devise I call statistically-representative democracy, it is a massively-parallel decentralised institution with enormous bandwidth to handle such issues. We will use the principle for the governance of Bitcredit Protocol.
(2) Methods and systems (to build) which help us to appoint individuals to executive positions limited to manage missions as per (1) while ensuring control and liability. An intriguing decentralised method for this was devised in ancient Venice for the election of the Doge, a modernised version could revolutionise executive appointments in modern times.
Interesting, I'd like to learn more about the second point.
I gave an interview today once about it here:
