Welcome to the third week of our book club reading A Lodging for Wayfaring Men. We're reading one chapter every two weeks, so we'll be discussing Chapter 2 next Saturday, but in between-weeks we are having a look at the essays in Appendix A. They are short and accessible.

You can find the book club reading schedule here: #1582413

Was there a time when all Bitcoiners wanted was to be able to withdraw from the existing system?

Farber opens with what sounds to my ears like a pretty classic description of the non-aggression principle (I will admit however, that I am a rather ignorant libertarian): all governments are based on violence. But then he has this somewhat startling line:

If you have wondered why some of us are so determined to keep governments out of cyberspace, please understand that this is why. We've had enough of centralized force. We're removing the whole mechanism. We think it was a mistake from the beginning. We don't want there to be anything for the two percent to grab.

After reading it a second time, I spent a bit of time pondering whether we have succeeded in this endeavor of keeping governments out of cyberspace. The surface answer seems to be negative: governments control much of what happens in cyberspace -- and their powergrab seems to be quickly accelerating. But, perhaps their control is not so thorough as I imagine. ICANN and the IETF aren't government organizations (this is possibly easy to refute). I can have an encrypted chat with someone in a different country with relative ease (I think?) and there is Bitcoin.

Farber describes how cyberspace is not based on coercion:

Things work by economic means here. If you don't like the way a market operates, just move to a different one. Or, if no one does it the way you think is right, start your own. There are no protected services here, and nothing mandatory. You may opt out of anything you don't like, or offer any service you like.

The entire system is built around the idea that persuading people to trade with you is moral, and that forcing them is not.

Interestingly, he then makes the claim that such a system should be free of politics:

Once you remove the mechanisms of coercion, you remove something else -- politics. Politics is the art and science of managing centralized coercion. This is the reason political debates are so infuriating: the final decision leads to unopposable force Once the political process is completed, you have the choice either to obey or to be punished.

And I think our experience of Bitcoin has been that its voluntary nature has definitely not removed politics -- although it may have made the results of politics far less damaging. At the end of the day, the people who seek to coerce have no choice but to walk away -- good riddance, BIP 110ers.

But that aside, Farber ultimately gets to this point:

We do not want to control your governments. We are not asking to change your lives. We are only withdrawing from your game. Go your own way in peace.

Donning my rose-colored glasses for a minute, I like to think that there was some of this in the original Bitcoin ethos. Bitcoin is the exit, it's the way to opt-out from a system that we all perceive to be so twisted and coercive that it severely degrades the human experience. While I still hear most Bitcoiners parrot the message that fiat is bad, I think far fewer of us are content to withdraw from the system. We seem to want to take over the system.

Farber says:

If we were simply one more reform movement, we would seek to conquer your system and run it our way.

This sounds much more like what Bitcoin culture has become. It's not enough that we peacefully withdraw and use bitcoin on our own, we want to destroy the fiat system.

So, I wonder: have we gone astray? Do you think Bitcoiner culture has come to hope for coercion more than self-sovereignty? If Bitcoin allows you to withdraw from the fiat game, is that enough for you -- even if the fiat game remains dominate mode of society (and the home of most of the number go up stuff)?