When people claim that property is an inalienable right - like freedoms of expression or association are - then "property is theft", as Proudhon famously put it. But as long as they accept that property is a social agreement, subject to negotiation and consensus, then "property is freedom" (a lesser known quote from Proudhon).

Having said that, being open to the idea of a place for markets in a free society does *not* make an anarchist right-leaning. It just makes them not a Stalinist.

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@cy
> So markets both cannot exist in a free society and a free society cannot persist with any sort of market in place

David Graeber covered this in Debt, better than I possibly could. If you haven't read that, I recommend you do. If you have, maybe time for a refresh?

But one argument against what you say here is that it's ahistorical. In his book Life Inc. Douglas Rushkoff pointed out that the importation of the tradition of the bazaar into Europe had a profoundly liberating effect.

@cy
> The freedom to do business without government interference.

This is some serious reading out of context. Did you even read the thread you're replying to? By what tortured logic did you extract that conclusion from references to Graeber and Rushkoff FFS?

@light

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@cy Ok, now I've calmed down a bit, let me flesh out my point and see if it clarifies anything for you.

This turns on how we're defining "business". Does a subsistence farmer selling surplus veges in a bazaar-inspired medieval market, or a baker selling bread there, count as "business"? In the broadest sense, sure, but not in the sense that I think concerns you here.

For this explanation, I'll use 'bazaar' instead of 'market' to avoid confusion with other uses of 'market'.

@light

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Were medieval bazaars free from central government interference (ie the King and the Crown)? Yes, as most governance functions in the Middle Ages were more localised. Nation-state scale government didn't become practical until the emergence of tech like national train networks and reliable postal system, which were originally inseparable from them.

Were bazaars unregulated? certainly not. For a start they existed by the grace of the local landlord and church authorities.

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Within that, a bazaar was a commons, run by and for the community that bought and sold in it. Like any sustainable commons, this required regulation, eg to avoid having stallholders selling poisonous food or faulty goods, or people stealing from stallholders, or anything else that would threaten the market's reputation.

The modern equivalent would be a supermarket run as a multi-stakeholder co-op, where workers, producers and customers all have a stake in ownership and decision-making.

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Is a bazaar or a co-op supermarket the ideal model for food exchange in a community too large to do it by trading veges over the back fence? The question makes no sense to me. There are no 'ideal' models, only what makes the most sense as a response to a given situation.

Gaining this understanding this is one thing that makes slogging through the dense prose of situationist writing worthwhile. Revolutionary Self-Theory isn't too hard a read, and is a good intro;

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/larry-law-revolutionary-self-theory

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Are Farmer's Markets (also inspired by the medieval bazaar) and co-op supermarkets an improvement on corporate supermarkets and their highly centralised, too-big-to-fail supply chains? I think so. Keep in mind that union-driven projects like this were used to build worker self-management in the lead up to the Spanish revolution.

Could there be a place for them in a society run mostly on anarchist principles? On what basis could we suppress them without becoming Stalinists or Red Guards?

@strypey

while i agree with the goals here and am in favour of street markets and bazaars and farmwrs markets and mutual aid networks and worker co-ops and so on...
...i would step back and wonder what are prerequsites for those?

certainly all of the above have in common that they use money owned by the capitalists and billionaires, who would love all the above and then print money for themselves to buy the most popular ppl and products who are happy to receive lots of money we all work for

@strypey

... that IS the centralizing/consolidating/bullying effect @cy mentioned, but imho misleadingly associated it with any kind of market in general, ...its in the money we use.

@light @KevinCarson1 @strypey @cy imho that has been tried by a project called "Ripple" and it didnt scale so that turned into XRP.

The best or closest system to that today is imho bitcoin lightning and its amazing.

Maybe theres a way to scale the original idea, but it requires imho open supply chain and a massive amount of people keen to try hard to work with this and even then its unclear. if it works we can still switch to it, but bitcoin lightning with open supply chains could get us there

@cy @light @KevinCarson1 @strypey
feel free to get it started.
i think its super hard and having a transparent supply chain and maybe an app that supports this kind of economic relation might help it to exist in practice.

so far i dont see anyone trying and succeeding.
ripple tried and they stopped.

..if it was a good idea, anyone can start, because since XRP there is now room for somebody picking up the original ripple idea 🙂

i personally think it could be a complementary system to bitcoin

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@serapath
> When you try to minimax the whole world you're opening the door to scammers

This! This is what the design of ATProto tries to do, and why it can't scale without oligopoly;

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

> there are arguments for lax accounting even between people you're helping directly

In the context of an ongoing relationship, as Graeber points out in Debt, trying to balance the books is like telling someone you don't want to know them anymore.

@cy @light @KevinCarson1

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@light
> What about Thomas Greco's "credit clearing" institutions or perhaps a decentralised equivalent?

A guy I know tried to build something like this. They called it "Cashless", which was ... not great, but the concept and the UX design was really good;

https://github.com/CashlessSociety/cashless

They chose SSB as the transport protocol. Which ran into all the same problems most SSB software has. Maybe DAT would be better for this kind of experiment? Don't know.

@strypey

hm.. its web3 scam.
atproto or bsky is as much decentralization theather as ethereum.

the thing you linked uses ganache and infura (owned by consensys) ... basically its trash.

everything with web3 in the name is essentially trash 🤷‍♀️ ....sadly

Just for context, the repo I pointed to was an early alpha. Most of the work done was on concept, UX and SSB. The ETH-based prototype was just a PoC.

The goal for Cashless, as with Taler, was for it to be usable with any form of backing. Currency, crypto-tokens, time credits, surplus veges for that matter, whatever people chose to back their time promises with. But unlike Taler, no backing was actually needed. Someone could accept a promise of future work on reputation alone.

@light @serapath

@strypey @light

hm, i dont really understand how its supposed to work.

if its ripple like, they tried that and it didnt work. ...

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@serapath
> dont really understand how its supposed to work

The best person to explain it would be the founder. They gave a talk at a blockchain conference in Te Wanganui-a-Tara when the project was live. I'll try to dig up a recording.

FYI we met through the Aotearoa Indymedia email list. They were involved with the NY group too (the Indypendent, etc), while doing a tech job at a Wall St clearinghouse back in the late 1990s/ early noughties.

@light

@strypey @light

usually in order to buzz, some folks get some money to pitch a quick idea and hack something together to attract more people to ethereum/web3 but nobody really cares and once funds are used up those projects die, because nobody in web3 has real believes and values to fight for, they are all mercenaries that vibe and go where money directs them.

Now i could dig out the old website from the wayback machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230313224937/https://cashless.social/index

@strypey @light

the initial sentence is already very ridiculous:

"we provide trust and transparency"
"but you are your own bank"

what is it now? A or B, cant be both, but maybe they explain what thats supposed to mean later...

@strypey @light

next: distributed, not on central server and not in cloud or blockchain

...thats a mouth full - there is tech that can do this, but i highly doubt they use that - they could mention it - the repository didnt mention it either so sounds like empty words.

next: automonous, you choose whom to accept from, but we provide "credit clearing"... ehh, whats automnomous about it?

there is 0 analysis who is custodial or not.

we can say bsky is decentralized too, but its not 🤷

@strypey @light

The gist imho:

Instead of money issued by banks ppl create credit: payment = promise.

a reputation system - questionable who actually checks (e.g. on linkedin fakers inflate each others skills, like for like, or fake amazon reviews, etc...)

then its reciprocity loops (like bitcoin lightning, but without any anchor)
...and thats even supposed to be done by THEM.

They also want to back it withstablecoins, so essentially who can print them can print in this system too, lol

@strypey @light

they even have a demurrage, so if i help and dont request help from others quickly, my claim melts away ...maybe others let me wait, because the longer they let me wait to help me, the less value my claim has.

also quite strange.
also great for them, because the stable coind that backed it doesnt melt, so they earn . yay :D

they also keep local ledgers, so how to have wide spanning exchange at all?

and then they wishywashy claim AI assisted clearing - ultimate black box

@strypey @light

...oh and super centralized + probably runs on a server even though they claimed its all without servers and without cloud and without blockchain - how can one take them seriously?

white paper is "work in progress" not even ready for public view yet...exactly, who needs a solid idea when vaporware is enough to get funding & scam ppl :P

there is:
no working protocol spec
no consensus mechanism
no security model
no working code
no economic simulation
no identiy/accountability

@strypey @light

biggest gaps:
1. if anyone can issue credit, who stops spam and fraud?
2. whats the algorithm for reputation?
3. without global ledger, how do nodes agree on balances?
4. if somebody disappears, who absorbs losses? ...they talk vaguely about "community tokens & reserves" - no mechanism
5. why would ppl accept your credit instead of cash?

its very much set up the way typical web3/crypto vaporware scam is setup and the website doesnt even exist anymore - everything disappeared

@strypey @light

bitcoin is real!
bitcoin is 70k USD today.
bitcoin works and grows for 17 years straight
bitcoin has no money printing class
bitcoins value grows forever because its limited but economic growth is not.

bitcoin lightning works instantly and global and can handle more transactions than visa/mastercard

bitcoin works worldwide.

bitcoin is open source, has a white paper and implementation and transparent ledger when "whales move" but privacy for small folks.

bitcoiners care too

@strypey @light

bitcoin changes ultra conservatively and thats a feature, because if we want everyone in the world to be able to learn and understand how bitcoin works, what it is cant be a moving target.

any change no matter how small goes through intense public scrutiny ans a community who is absolute zealot about ever detail, which means a small group cannot just hijack the project under the radar like in crypto/web3 where nobody follows and nobody cares.

@strypey @light

you can organise a defense against a super important open source project if the culture around is so that users trust the experts or dont care... you have to habe a culture that is loud and scrutinizes ... and it has to be many so that if anyone rings the alarm, everyone checks, informs others and even acts if needed to defend.

this is a vital feature for any alternative, otherwise any alternative dies in an instant on the first attack

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@serapath
> set up the way typical web3/crypto vaporware scam is setup

The setup was typical of self-funded startups. Entirely orthogonal to whether something is a scam, and not at all useful way to identify one.

If your main criteria for a scam is 'doesn't involve BitCoin' (or DAT), that's even less useful. I honestly hope you get beyond this light-bendingly powerful confirmation bias, before a con sells you a bridge in BTC, or a P2P perpetual motion machine with a Hypercore ; }

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Do you have a blog post that collects all your BitCoin apologetics in one place? If so, link me, and I'll reply in a blog post. That way the next time we go round the Merkle Tree on this, as we've already done at least twice, I can just tap the sign.