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Comment by _lqaf | Hacker News Reader

I was on the mailing list where the original paper and first implementation was released.

Of course I can't speak to what was in "Satoshi"'s heart. But I am convinced that person was a member of the list, and shared the anarcho-capitalist goals/dreams that many of the members had.

More generally, other attempts at digital cash were highly discussed topics in those crowds, and the interest was primarily in the ability to transact anonymously and confidentially, because of what that would do to taxation.

If you're interested in what that crowd was thinking at the time, there's an exhaustive "FAQ" still available, written by one of the more vocal proponents of digital anarcho-capitalism:

https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/cyphernomicon.txt

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While I would agree that the libertarian anti-establishment cypherpunk culture was ingrained in the early stages of Bitcoins adoption, I would argue the driving motivation of BTC participants have changed.

The overwhelming culture of Bitcoin now is Number Go Up, which will be tested should US regulators fall more anti-crypto than pro-crypto.

FWIW, reducing the power of states - and especially nation-states - is not specifically an anarcho-capitalist dream or goal. It was left-wing anarchists that started that ball rolling.

So as somebody whos probably pretty close to left-wing anarchism, I think markets are the more dangerous shackle when compared to the state.

We need the state to abolish markets, only then can we abolish the state.

Doing it the other way round will just result in all of us being slaves to Jeff Bezos.

Left-wing anarchism comes in many flavors, and not all of them are hostile to the markets - think "freed markets" etc.

Speaking for myself, I'm probably closest to mutualism than anything else, and I just don't see how you can have a state that strong that doesn't inevitably lead to stratification and rigid hierarchy.

Conversely, I don't see how markets are the problem. Capitalism is a problem, sure - but capitalism requires the state! To accumulate capital indefinitely, you need abstract property rights, and then you need the state to maintain the registries of who owns what, and to enforce - with violence if need be - the owner's monopoly on the property. Conversely, if the government, or the society at large, simply refuses to acknowledge such property rights, how would Jeff Bezos become himself?

(Yes, ancaps themselves think that removing the state would usher hyper-capitalism, but I don't understand why everybody is so ready to accept that claim while ridiculing most everything else they have to say.)

Do you not believe that Jeff Bezos would gladly take the monopoly on violence from the state if it were offered? And without the state maintaining those registries, what would stop him from just laying claim to anything he wants?

And maybe it wouldn't be him, but somebody who's shown more propensity for violence, say Erik Prince. If we don't use the state to rob those people of their power first, there will be nothing in their way once we abolish the state.

You're basically saying that Jeff Bezos would become the government of his newly-formed state, which would be bad for its subjects. I agree with that last part.

But the state is just an abstraction. It's the people who are in the way of Jeff Bezos doing something like that. In a centralized state, it's people who are in service of the state - which, in practice, usually means people in service of someone like Jeff Bezos, simply because sociopaths can play the power game better than anyone else. I don't see any fundamental difference between Amazon and the US Government in that regard. The latter is ostensibly democratic, but in practice, representative democracy at best just gives voters the opportunity to back one elite group against the other - so on matters where they're all in agreement (e.g. that elites should have all the effective political and economic power), it doesn't really solve anything.

In a decentralized society, it's organized community that stands in the way. You can argue that it's not strong enough to face someone like Bezos - but, again, Bezos only has the economic power that he has because our government actively protects his concentration of it. If it's not there to do so, how would he acquire the monopoly on violence in the first place? A lone guy with a gun doesn't have a monopoly on violence. A lone guy with enough capital to subsidize a private army might, but that's not possible in a society where capital can't be accumulated indefinitely.

> The latter is ostensibly democratic, but in practice, representative democracy at best just gives voters the opportunity to back one elite group against the other - so on matters where they're all in agreement (e.g. that elites should have all the effective political and economic power), it doesn't really solve anything.

I agree with you here.

> A lone guy with a gun doesn't have a monopoly on violence. A lone guy with enough capital to subsidize a private army might, but that's not possible in a society where capital can't be accumulated indefinitely.

This is where I disagree. He already accumulated plenty of capital and that's exactly the problem. Nothing stopping him from hiring an army with his amazon bucks.

In order to switch to this decentralized society, we need to reset hierarchies, like ones based on capital accumulation first. The only entity I see that would possibly be strong enough to do so is the state.

Now getting it to do so is the tricky part. I'm not sure anything short of a vanguard revolution would do the trick, but vanguards have the unfortunate property of trying to hold on to power after the revolution is done.

This seems to have worked pretty well for the Zapatistas so far, and more recently in Rojava:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_power#Strategy_and_ideolo...

(Note that crypto meshes really well with this paradigm.)

I will also add that "resetting" accumulation of capital doesn't require any physical acts of violence, either. The only reason why e.g. Bezos owns as much as he does, is because he says so, the government confirms it, and we all collectively accept it as a society. But take that last part away, and it all falls down like a house of cards. And you can't pay for an army with wealth that you don't actually control.

OTOH if you try to "reset the hierarchy" through centralization of power, it just replaces one set of elites with another. Worse yet, the new elites get more tools at their disposal to maintain their dominant position - all while talking about how they're really doing it for the sake of public good etc.

I'm not sure it is even true that "lefty" anarchists got there first, but in any case I'm talking about a specific "salon" of people who spanned a couple mailing lists and about a decade of conversation.

If you're interested, I suggest reading some of Tim May's writings. He was very much a very right-wing anarchist focused on destroying the state, and saw encryption, privacy tech and digital cash as mechanisms to do so. I distinctly recall reading a long essay he wrote explaining why he vehemently disagreed with Kropotkin, if you're looking for a way to distinguish this school of thought from Syndicalists.

(I do not endorse his views at all, my highly simplified view is his philosophy played out in reality ends up being indistinguishable from feudalism. I focus on him because he was a sort of spokesman for that crowd, wrote just a ton of messages and essays over a long time, so there's a huge record of his thought, and he was really smart, well educated, and capable of writing cogently.)

I would say that Montesquieu was on the "reducing the power of the state" bandwagon even before then.

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