The correct answer is:

D. None of the above.  Start a bitcoin business to start earning more Bitcoin.

It or something like it might reemerge from the market.

But if so, it won't be run by anybody as nice as Rabbit, will it?

You can already do this now.  There are plenty of alternative chains to choose from, and you can also create your own.

Without reading the thread, I am going to guess this is equivalent to the "colored bitcoins" proposal.  I think a lot of people have independently had such ideas.

Substitute "labeled bitcoins" or "labeled tokens" for "colored bitcoins," and the similarities may become clearer.

I would have no problem with an institution (call it the State, or not )that funds itself only from fines collected from criminals and performs some "night watchman" type duties, i.e., give me a call if it looks like I left my doors unlocked, shoot people if they appear to be threatening others.  Ancap doesn't rule out "good samaritan" style behavior as one possible source of the service of defense.  It just states that trying to fund such services through coercion is immoral.

I do think that effective defense organizations would need to collect subscription fees or something similar.  I doubt that funding through criminal fines would be enough.

I did.

To clarify:

Pacifism, as a set of restrictions on one's behavior, is a superset of NAP.  The Pacifism set of restrictions contains all the restrictions of NAP, and more.

Contrast that with the set of Pacifists (people) and the set of people subscribing to NAP.  In this case, it's the other way around.

I see no need to continue this further.  Let's just smile and engage in commerce with Bitcoins together.

You are contradicting yourself with this sentence.  It doesn't matter if the state (or anyone) considers defense "aggression."  It isn't.

Morality (or ethics) is not just subjective opinion.  It is something that can be reasoned about with logic.  It is something that mankind can reason about and discover.

Mankind can work out consistent principles and conclude that violating the rights to life, liberty, and property is immoral.

Violating the right to life, liberty, or property.

Equivalently: initiating force.  (And please don't respond, yet again, with the fallacy that threatening to respond with force is the same as initiating force.  It is not.)

You don't have to agree with it.  You just aren't permitted to violate it, because doing so would be a crime.  You can disagree with the principle all you want!  You can hold any beliefs you want!  But whatever you believe, if you violate someone's right to life, liberty, or property, you are committing a crime.


You can consider it a form of aggression if you want.  That doesn't make it so.


Nope, force is only threatened for people who violate the principle, not for merely disagreeing with it.

No, it is quite different.  In one case, the gun is holstered, the owner is smiling, and he says the gun would only come out if you initiated force.  In the other, the gun is being used to enslave.

A true pacifist would have to support the non-aggression principle; pacifism is a superset of NAP.

Consistent pacifists certainly couldn't support the use of force to do any of the things that government does.

There have actually been many great pacifist thinkers who have made great contributions to libertarian thought, such as Leo Tolstoy.

You can't just randomly call stuff aggression and then use that as a pretense for initiating force.  Aggression is pretty well-defined.  It's not just some subjective opinion.

If I have a bag of weed and you take it, that's aggression.  If I try to stop you from taking my bag of weed, or if I put you on notice that I won't tolerate you taking my bag of weed, that's not aggression at all, and calling it aggression doesn't make it so.

If you take my bag of weed, you've initiated force against me, by violating my right to property.  If I respond with force (proportionately) I have not initiated force.  You were the one who initiated it.

Since I am justified in initiating force against you in that situation, I am not initiating force by putting you on notice that I would use force in such circumstances.

Law and order was another big breaking point for me.  Once I saw law and order as a service that could be provided by a market, I had taken a plunge that took me far beyond where most people are willing to go.  I think that was around the same time as the roads realization.  I think I came to believe law and order would be provided by a free market, and roads was sort of a hazy spot in my thinking for awhile.

No.  You are not being forced to behave in a certain way.  You are being told that you must NOT behave in certain ways, and that if you do it will not be tolerated.

There is a major difference between "forced to do something" and "forced NOT to do something."

You can do anything you want unless you violate someone else's right to life, liberty, or property.  This principle is very consistent.

You can do anything you want to yourself.  You can not do anything you want to other people.  That is why there is a major difference between force that is used to compel others to do something, and force that is used to prohibit you from doing something to other people.

Thanks for the service, Rabbit!  I actually used Terrawallet.com before I even had the Terracoin client running locally.

According to Walter Block, Rand called libertarians/anarchists "Hippies of the right."

I'm sure a lot of such people would blanch at the thought of being labeled "right-wing."

Please confine all posts that advocate force to one thread.  That would include any and all violations of the free market.

Somehow, I'm betting you're not willing for this to go both ways.


People who want to initiate force against me in certain situations are crowding my life, and have been doing so literally for decades.  I wish they would go confine themselves.


Certainly not; the owners of this resource have the right to administrate it however they please.  Nobody has a "right to speech" at the expense of others.