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Freedom Easier
by Jim Davidson
[email protected]

Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

You presumably know by now that since December 1998, I have been involved in the free market money industry to an increasingly great extent. You may have heard that I used to be the general partner in a free-market-money-mediated stock exchange. You may have been told that several companies in which I was involved issued gold denominated bonds and paid them off on time, without fail, and with interest. You may also have learned that, over the years, government action has taken out several alternative currencies.

For example, we lost 1MDC in April 2007, Liberty Dollar in September 2007, and effectively closed the book on e-gold in December 2009 with the coerced plea agreement. When you think about it, the fact that government doesn't want you to steal because they hate the competition, and given the vast amounts of wealth that monetary inflation steals out of every bank account without ever changing the balances, you would actually expect serious efforts to close off alternative money. Especially if, like e-gold and Liberty Dollar (among many others) those alternatives offer freedom from exchange risk and finality of settlement.

So in the last few years I've been talking about peer-to-peer alternatives. I've had the honour of being asked to look closely at eCache, Loom (to the point of auditing one of their gold vaults), bitCoin, OpenTransactions, and very recently Voucher Safe. I've also been pleased to hear about PKTP, Trubanc, and many other entries into the field. Naturally, I've also been encouraged to work with virtual privacy network providers, learn and use bitTorrent, learn about proxies, the onion router, Netsukuku, alternative DNS, and many other technologies.

You're flustered
You are, I can tell. And I'm not surprised. All these terms. All these technologies.

Okay, here's where we are. We stand at the edge of The Diamond Age to use the title of a book by Neal Stephenson (which you should probably read [I agree!—Editor]—subtitled "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer") and what I'm talking about is MediaNet. The network of peer-to-peer exchangers, transaction facilitators, and privacy technology systems that make it possible for two individuals anywhere in the world to exchange value without anyone else being able to detect it.

What no one else can detect cannot be taxed, cannot be regulated, and cannot be prohibited. The starvation of the state is at hand.

Withdrawal from the system, which was first proposed at least two thousand four hundred years ago by Laozi, which was emphasised in his essays on Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie, which was written of favourably by Murray Rothbard, and with vigorous enthusiasm by Samuel Edward Konkin III and J. Neil Schulman, now has a new weapon.

But It's Sooo Complicated
Yes, I hear you wail, whine, and gnash your teeth. "There's so much to learn? Can't you tech gurus get it through your thick skulls that we live in an era of instant gratification? Please make it simple to use. We want phone apps and video tutorials. We want ease of use. We want what we want, we don't want to have to learn much, and we want it now!"

Yes, children, your pleas and whines and wails have been heard. Even the gnashing of your teeth has been detected. And finally, coming into view, rising to the call of the market, answering at least in part your concerns is: Voucher Safe.

It has taken a very long time, and a huge amount of effort. I cannot even begin to tell you about it, because it wasn't my effort. And while I've managed very large, distributed, open source software projects in the distant past (as such things go), I didn't manage this one.

So, please learn all about it from their video tutorials. Play with it. They have "funny money" available for their public beta testing. So you can enjoy yourself learning without any consequences, without having anything at stake. Test their system to destruction so they can strengthen it and build it better, please.

The link is here: www.voucher-safe.com

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, and anti-war activist. His 1990 venture to offer a sweepstakes trip into space was destroyed by government action as was his free port and prospective space port in Somalia in 2001. His 2002-2007 venture in free market money and private stock exchange was destroyed by government action in 2007. He's going to Mars if he has to walk. His second book, Being Sovereign is now availble from Lulu and Amazon. He is currently working on a book about travel to Mars with John Wayne Smith, a book with international fugitive Chad Z. Hower on his story, a book on sovereign self-defence, and a book compiling his letters and essays in "The Libertarian Enterprise" since 1995. Contact him at See him wandering around at the Founding Fiesta for Individual Sovereign University 4-6 March 2011 in KCMO.

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