Silk Road 2.0: A concept of a distributed anonymous marketplace

Miss a detail, change the story.

Otherwise all crypto projects are off limits, including Tor and Bitcoin

It might not be true, but remember, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and this is a case where risk really is unbounded, so you better be cautious.

Man, I really wish people would stop saying this. It's just completely false. It's a basic result of probability theory that if A is evidence of B, ¬A is evidence of ¬B.

“A government afraid of its citizens is a Democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny!”

If you aren't, you're still completely wrong. Russia, America or any nationstate that is made aware of something can seize whatever it wants whenever it wants and wherever it wants. That's why any controversial app must be distributed, fault resilient for both development AND production. Centralized will never work, even with perfect security hygiene. It's a good thing that Git has a full copy, because a single dev server seizure would be annoying but not fatal.

Do you have any other flaws to point out that pertain to my original comment?

> pfraze: "This strikes me as extremely inappropriate. Don't publicly advertise tools for subverting the state. ... Handle grievances with regulations or criminal code by organizing popular support for policy changes, not by building systems to break the law. Otherwise, expect to be treated as a criminal." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6510947

Equating resistance of tyranny, and even the discussion surrounding it, as being "inappropriate" alone exemplifies, at least partially, the conflation of authority with a moral imperative. Then he or she makes this clear by blatantly suggesting that the only [appropriate] method of resistance is limited to the context of authority. That's patently absurd, of course. In any real-world application of people attempting to liberate themselves conscientiously, wherever law is oppressing them, usually they cannot attempt to do so without serious action, resistance, and cultural pressure: not remaining shackled. Free action breaks barriers. It creates a social impetus for the increase of people to follow and change to occur (culturally or legally).

If the author gave it all of the same properties and abilities, claimed that he intended it to share knitting patterns, named it "Yarn Road", and never mentioned a single thing about drugs, would it bother you?

There is no such thing as a system that provides privacy only for legal activities. Therefore if you want to fight for the freedom and ability to share information without surveillance, then you must design systems that can, incidentally or otherwise, be used to share drugs (and you must fight attempts to surveil existing systems.)

So if you piss off "the corporation", you have their private militia come after you. Then their courts sentence you to death, or slave labor. How is this anarchistic? Seems pretty top-down to me. Just because a company is running things doesn't mean it's not a government.

I just don't really understand libertarianism, I guess. It makes sense if you're filthy rich, but otherwise you'd just go from being middle class to a peasant with no rights almost instantly. Are all libertarians filthy rich and just very vocal (there seem to be a lot of them), delusional, misinformed, or am I missing some large part of the theory behind it?

The only way I could ever see the phasing of government out working successfully is in a shared economy (anarcho-communism). Not that I think human nature would ever permit a system like this until tens of thousands of years of psychological/spiritual evolution take place, but I think at the time humans are able to self-organize in every sense there will no longer be the need for personal possessions. Oddly enough, we would be a lot like ants.

The intention of the law to "meet a need or solve a problem" doesn't necessarily reflect the actual behavior of the law. Adopting this mindset can also bring the attitude of "we need a law to protect children" while packing the "Protect Children Act" full of special interest material.

I would personally disagree with the assertion that the majority of laws solve a problem or result in a net meeting of needs.

This is very true, but it doesn't represent the views of all libertarians or even all anarcho-capitalists. For a much better approach to anarcho-capitalism—one that focuses primarily on economics and not on morality—check out David Friedman's writings and talks. Here's a basic introduction to his proposal of a polycentric legal system where the market produces all goods and services including law, law enforcement, arbitration (courts), and even national defense: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o. Along with Murray Rothbard's primarily moral/ethical/legal arguments (which seem slightly more prominent, and seem to be the ones you've encountered), Friedman's economic arguments make up the main "branches of anarcho-capitalism."

I don't know any libertarians or ancaps who insist that the non-aggression principle solves anything, much less everything. What we say is that it's simply the ethically Right Thing To Do, and that if "solving" a problem requires violating the NAF, then it's better left unsolved, even if there are negative consequences.

The idea that libertarians believe in some kind of "libertopia" is one of the most persistent, while completely unfounded and mistaken, myths that exists about libertarians. It's the libertarians who, more than any other group, take reality into account by acknowledging that we can't engineer a "perfect" society by using force against one another.

Libertarianism has pathologies at the edges? Big deal, so does every system that has ever been proposed as an alternative.

And there also is a number of unhealthy uses of cars, like using it to transport yourself right after robbing a bank. Should we ban cars?

Anything that can be used for the good, can be used for the bad as well. That shouldn't however mean that that thing should not be produced/sold/used.

Those transactions are still going to have "meatspace" components which are, and will remain, the weak point that law enforcement will target.

Tor and bitcoin already exist, if mobs want to use those systems, they already can. The utility in systems like SR is reputation management and connection discovery. In other words, this system would really be nothing more than a craigslist that doesn't claim to take down ads for hookers. It shouldn't frighten you.

No, you should be frightened by the fact that governments, being monopolies, tend to create less economically efficient products (including laws) than competitive markets, so if you assume that societies are better off if they have legal systems which prevent slavery/kidnapping/etc., competitive markets will be more likely to produce those legal systems than governments.

It's presumptuous to claim that "not every law is oppressive." What might be unnoticeable to many people could become oppressive to you. Ultimately, the subjective ethics and conscience of an individual is more valid than any arbitrary system into which that person is thrown, on an individual basis. In other terms, that which is "worth fighting for" -- worth resistance to oppression -- is, as always, relative and subjective. Fortunately, quite a lot of people feel that it's extremely oppressive to inflict restrictions, caging, and great violence upon nonviolent, consenting people. Oppression comes in many forms. Given this thread, I'll use drugs as the context. A single lone person who wants to grow and use drugs is still oppressed (according to my ethical framework) even if the entirety of all other people on Earth, all 7+ billion, summarily and vehemently want to violently restrict that person from doing so.