Ah the token blockchain bad HN comment

I'm doing my part!

Oh no! Not blockchain!! /s

If you meme yourself into getting the ick around libertarians, you cripple your ability to defend liberty. Imagine that.

Libertarians call themselves that, that doesn't mean that they're inherently the primary defenders of liberty.

Much like how the difference between Republicans and Democrats aren't an argument over whether the United States is better run as a Republic or a Democracy.

Money is an artifice used to track the payment of taxes. It happens to be useful for tracking other kinds of scarcity, especially with people you do not know, so societies in which the use of money is imposed tend to move the rest of their economic relationships over to it. In other words, Bitcoin is not valuable because it is scarce, it is valuable because you can pay data ransoms to cybercriminals with it. If, tomorrow, every ransomware vendor demanded payment in POGS or Beanie Babies, you'd see the value of those skyrocket as every IT professional went and hoarded them.

Satoshi Nakamoto saw the state, with it's coercive taxation and central banking, and thought the answer was to make decentralized money you couldn't shut down. Hence, Bitcoin and it's millions of forks. The problem is that Bitcoin's valuations are based on the same coercive taxation, just carried out by the illegitimate criminal underworld rather than the legitimate state. That's not liberty, that's just changing who wears the jackboots.

That is an interesting perspective, but it doesn't actually change my point, which is that if you want to build a distributed system that cannot be shut down, you have to be willing to collaborate with distributed system that cannot be shut down enjoyers.

No memeing necessary - most vocal and visible (eg mainstream or platformed) libertarians are…a lot, and not in a good way. I’m sure it’s very similar in nuance to democrat and republican - the faces and voices in the media aren’t necessarily representative of the average people who use the same labels.

You understand that their work is fully open-source right? So there is no need to believe any promises, just fork the code and move on.

But yeah, Microsoft, with its myriad of cases against it, is an organisation to trust. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation)