Thanks for spelling that out, I did miss the complementary part. Different people working different fronts at the same time, with the alternative already there to catch the demand, makes a lot more sense than the way I framed it. I also really liked your bounty hunter comparison. It sums up the case for spreading the risk nicely.

Really glad to hear you'll write it regardless, dying to read it whenever it's ready.

The direct action angle makes theoretical sense, but the part that gives me pause is: unless you've already got a genuinely massive number of people ideologically on board, doing anything overtly disruptive just exposes you to something with an almost unimaginable amount of force behind it. And people don't actually hate authority itself, they hate specific people holding it, which makes that mass conversion a slow, uphill fight either way.

That's actually why Lysander Spooner's American Letter Mail Company sticks with me as the better model. He undercut the USPS so badly they had to drop their own rates to compete, real proof that a parallel system can work. But it's also a warning: the government still hunted him and his agents down with arrests and pressure on the railroads, and eventually just legislated a monopoly to shut him down for good. Even a purely peaceful, "just build something better" approach got crushed once it actually worked.

Which is why we need to be careful even about how we build these things. The good news is we've actually gotten a lot better at this since Spooner's time. Decentralized, anonymous-by-default systems end up close to unkillable, Monero's a great example, they can delist it from every exchange they want and it just keeps running regardless.

So my instinct is that the only route that's both safe and actually persuasive across every class of people is building something unbreakable and broad enough to survive that kind of pressure, which is a much slower and less exciting answer, but maybe the only one that doesn't just paint a target on you early.

I'd be curious to hear more specifics on your ideal anarchist setup, specifically the transition problem. What happens to wealth that was built up under the current system, especially by companies that got there through state subsidies, protections, or tax breaks? Who decides how that gets redistributed, and based on what?

Rothbard actually tackled this in "Confiscation and the Homestead Principle," arguing state-subsidized property should go to the workers/users already homesteading it, and even floated a 50% government-revenue threshold as a cutoff. But even there the mechanism stays pretty vague past that point, just "the workers" or "the taxpayers" without settling who exactly.

I'd genuinely like to read your thoughts on this in article form. Honestly, I'd read whatever you write on anarchism more broadly too.

I got into all of this almost by accident. Back in high school, I was annoyed by the "Activate Windows" watermark and the general feeling that Windows was watching everything I did on my own laptop. That annoyance made me look for alternatives, and I'd only ever heard the word "Linux" in passing before that.

Once I actually looked into it, the phrase "completely free and the source code is fully open" genuinely amazed me. The idea that anyone could open the code and see exactly what it does, and use it however they wanted, felt like a different way of thinking about software entirely. I picked a distro, followed a YouTube tutorial, and installed it on my laptop.

That was the domino that started everything. Linux led me to open source in general, and open source, to me, was really just another word for privacy: nothing hidden, nothing running behind your back. That need for privacy pushed me (already leaning libertarian) further into anarcho-capitalism.

I was hanging around small ancap circles on Twitter when I saw someone mention Monero. I already knew Bitcoin existed, but only in passing, I'd never really looked into it. This person was talking about Monero's untraceability and fungibility, the fact that a coin can't get "tainted" the way it can with Bitcoin, and something about that just clicked for me. I started digging into how it actually worked.

Somewhere in that research I learned Monero's mining algorithm was CPU-friendly, so I ended up pool mining from my own computer at home. First real thing I did with what I mined was buy a gift card and use it on Steam.

That gift card was a small thing, but what really hit me was the feeling of having real, solid money that actually meant something, and that no one could touch. These days, instead of just using Monero, I try to build tools around it.