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The underlying wrench in the works for cyberlibertarianism is spam. This is a fundamental problem that messes with the very notion of free speech. This was true even before LLMs, though obviously the problem is much worse now.
In case it’s not clear how this is related, consider trying to run a website like this one according to cyberlibertarian ideals: ideally, the website would be distributed somehow, not hosted on a centralised server where whoever is paying the bill has arbitrary control over what happens on the site. Each participant on the network would contribute some minor amount of resources for storing messages, and messages would be synced by having the peers talk to each other. But what do you do when someone spams the network with terabytes of messages? You say "Ok, well let’s put a rate limit for each user" alright, the spammer makes new accounts and uploads at the max rate for each account as fast as they can create accounts. You say "Ok, well let’s limit account creation." But how? Who decides whether you’re allowed to make an account or not?
With the advent of blockchain, I actually do think there are some answers here—you can bind account and post creation to payment on a blockchain, and that will cull the spam. But now you have a pay-to-play system, which is arguably not very cyberpunk-ish at least according to colloquial intuition, but moreover, who’s going to participate when they could just join a forum like this one for free?
And this isn’t even touching on the fact that building decentralised systems is really hard compared to building a typical centralised website. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together and a bit of grit can make their own website. But making your own decentralised system requires you to be a legit 140+ IQ big brain who knows the arcanery of software engineering inside and out.
For these reasons, the ideal is rarely pursued, and even when it is, it’s in clunky ways that don’t provide the "full service" experience you get with centralised software. For example, torrents are decentralised, but they don’t address the very-much-relevant question of "where do you get the metadata for the torrent you want in the first place?" And answering that question has traditionally landed right back at "use a centralised service like ThePirateBay," where you get the regular old whac-a-mole dynamics of law enforcement seizing domain names and issuing warrants while the devs run off to some Pacific island and register a new domain there (and the US government will promptly bribe the local government to close the domain and arrest the devs, which may or may not work—they tend to just take the bribe money and not actually do what was asked, so you have to resort to aggressive negotiations, yada yada, but I digress)
Proof-of-work was invented specifically to solve this problem, and it did. Sybil attacks are not a fatality.
We can own purely digital goods now.
That hasn't been true for more than two decades. Magnet links date back to 2002. And we have far more sophisticated things like IPFS or eth.limo now.
Dapps are not the future, they're the present. Hyperliquid moves hundreds of millions of dollars every day and it completely decentralized. This isn't the 2010s anymore.
I agree in spirit, but in practice, I've gotta disagree. Many of the services you name aren't really decentralised: they're riding on venture capital, masquerading as decentralised systems, and in my estimation is there is no serious technical model to survive beyond the "subsidised by venture capital" phase.
SInce that's what I was referencing, Hyperliquid has famously no VC equity whatsoever. And 2025 numbers are ~$843M in revenue on $2.95T of trading volume.
I think your view of the sector is a few years out of date really. This is still true of a lot of small projects, but we're way past the point where crypto is just VC moonshots. Now it's just another part of "serious" finance. Which is where the real worry actually is: established actors like Circle pulling the ladder behind them with regulation.
IPFS is riding on venture capital. HL is not decentralised: it’s just a normal centralised gambling platform, where blockchain is as relevant as the stones in stone soup.
Flatly wrong claims are not an argument.
HL is a smart contract run by a foundation. It legally has very little to do with a custodial platform.
And IPFS is a decade old open source protocol. The viability of protocol labs is as irrelevant to it as the viability of Rainberry to BitTorrent.
You may have had a point if I said Filecoin. I did not.
That was not my claim. Look, I'm aware of the smoke and mirrors behind all this, I don't care to discuss it further.
Technically true while de facto not true at all. The only way to connect IPFS to any relevant degree of real-world usage is via a domain owned by Protocol, otherwise you have to run an IPFS daemon locally, which nobody does. Like, I'm literally a software nerd and I have never met one person in my entire life who has done this (besides me, and that was only to try it out and be annoyed with how comically inefficient it was before turning it off and deleting it). Contrast that with torrents -- even many non-technical people I know who couldn't program their way out of a Python tutorial use torrents!
Dogma is no more an argument than ignorance, and nobody knows how U.S. v. Storm's 1a implications are going to be fully decided.
Once again it just sounds like you're talking to me from decades ago.
Most nodes run in browser like essentially all dapp infrastructure. Only nerds think about installing their own client anymore.
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I'm not sure Cyberlibertarianism implies that companies (or other owners) should be unable to moderate their forums, since normal libertarianism doesn't argue that people and companies should be unable to trespass unwanted guests and intruders in their owned buildings.
In your home, you can kick out people for any reason. You don't like their hair, you think they suck too much at Mario Party, and yes, because you don't like something they said or they were too loud or they wouldn't shut up. Why shouldn't that be the same rights to your privately owned internet forum?
This is what I call the "mandated friend" issue. Your friend choosing to not hang out with you after you called his mom a whore isn't a free speech issue, they're exercising their own right to association which is an associated right of free speech. Free speech does not mandate you a friend.
It's when government gets involved, as the party that claims a monopoly over violence and whose every action is subtly backed with that potential violence in the background, that rights start to be violated. Bad individuals use violence from time to time too, whether a bar fight or a political assassination, but those are not accepted and they get arrested and charged. It is government that asserts a monopoly on force.
Most free speech complaints in the western democracies nowadays are mandated friend style complaints, government does get involved at points, sometimes overtly bullshit but these tend to stick out because they're relatively rare now.
It's not merely a matter of moderation -- in the traditional tech model, there's actually only one governance system: absolute monarchy. Whoever controls the server controls the forum, and that's the end of it. They can moderate their forum, yes, but they can also edit the comments of users they don't like to make them say whatever they want. I'd wager this level of power is not what anyone actually wants out of a discussion forum. The reason everything is built this way isn't because people want it this way, but because it's easy to build.
The intuition libertarians are trying to capture is we want to somehow have a governance model that is something other than absolute monarchy: it should be possible to have a forum that belongs to the participants, and have this be enforced on a technical level. Unfortunately, this is not easy to program.
For what it's worth, even centralised platforms targeted at technical users often do have some level of mitigation to monarchal power here: for example, on Github (or any similar service), you can upload your SSH public key to the service and sign your commits. This means it's literally not possible for /u/spez to use his control over the platform to make malicious edits in your name, because he doesn't have your private key. (Well, there's a lot of asterisks here... but I'll spare the pedantry).
I'm not sure that actually matters too much. Most people are not going to use sites where such explicit abuse is constantly being done and Spez faced a lot of backlash over it, and the bad PR forced him to apologize.
Sure there might be some abuse in small communities but major ones will shy away from it as they currently do. The risk is just too great to constantly employ. Abuse can happen, especially thanks to the Network Effect. But still at the end of the day they can only step down a little bit before most people start to leave.
Ultimately someone or something has to be in charge of it, at the very least to remove stuff like child porn. And once they have that power, they can abuse that power. Except for the whole market thing.
And if you want alternative types of communities because you personally don't trust the mainstream as hosts or you're the type of rare rare niche where no one is boycotting for you, you can also just go make your own and go to them. Like say, TheMotte! I heard that's a site that some people use for a specific niche.
Aren't free markets neat? Without government regulations to tell you otherwise (enforced through violence), you really can just go build your own theme park with blackjack and hookers if you want.
Not really. There’s technically child porn stored in the bits of the Bitcoin blockchain, and there’s no way to remove it, yet this doesn’t seem to bother anyone. I was honestly kind of shocked that no major government tried to use this as an excuse to prosecute anyone running Bitcoin as a trafficker of child porn, because this is in a literal sense technically true.
Anyway, people often conflate filtering and censorship, but these aren’t the same thing: filtering is the ability to control what you see; censorship is the ability to control what others see. You can indeed have the former without the latter, and that’s all you need to have a decent user experience. For example, like Bitcoin, torrents have nobody in charge to do censorship. You can just make a torrent of child porn, and I’m sure many have, yet nobody associates torrents with child porn, and you’re unlikely to ever encounter it unless you explicitly search for it. Filtering works!
The issue here is that there is material that general society agrees on removing even in the US, which is one of the most open and free speech focused nations like the aforementioned child porn. That Bitcoin gets away with it on some technical issues doesn't mean that the world is going to be happy if this becomes the default of the internet and pedophiles are spreading around undeletable images.
There's also of course, stuff that people want to delete of themselves. Accidently posted a nude selfie of yourself from your phone instead of the pic of your dog? People are gonna want to delete that, not have it enshrined forever in the public eye. There's also stuff like trade secrets, and copyright. Piracy is already a major issue for creators today, companies are not going to embrace a widespread system where everything is permanent and takedowns are impossible. Or about how lies that cross the line into legally defamatory material? Gotta figure out a way for courts to order it removed.
There has to be a way to remove things, and once there is a way to remove things that way can be abused. "You can choose to not see the child porn or copyrighted material" isn't going to make society or companies happy.
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Oh great, I just got a spam email that hacked one of my email accounts to send me "pay us bitcoin or we send your naughty browsing history to everyone" blackmail attempt.
I don't have a camera and microphone attached to my PC so I laugh to scorn your clumsy efforts at "we took control and recorded you self-abusing to disgusting porn", criminals!
But these idiots want to make it even easier for criminals to scare money out of the gullible, and more importantly, clog up the inboxes of those of us who don't care if the world sees our perverted kinks history?
No, thank you. That's like the "all drugs of whatever sort should be legal and available without limit" notion, only considered a good idea by those who don't have to deal with the kinds of people who want to take all sorts of drugs all day long and/or deal in same.
I live in a locale in which hard drugs are illegal and simultaneously there are addicts all over some regions of the nearest major city. There are trash strewn druggie encampments and Hep C infected shit everywhere. It is pure anarcho-tyranny.
Given wide scale non-enforcement, I'd like it to be officially legal. Or I'd like actual enforcement.
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Also this kinda super libertarian internet ethos essentially means you've gotta boot the elderly and mentally impaired off it. I'd get it if the internet was wholly an artistic and communicative realm for nerds but the second you move commercial functions on it you need guardrails or it's an absolute PVP mess.
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What? Nonsense! That's the purest expression of cyberlibertarianism!
People are too used to everything on the internet being "free". Many people who might be associated with cyberlibertarianism in truth really want cybersocialism.
But in the long run, if the internet is indeed to retain some degree of liberty instead of being turned into a state-controlled panopticon, more granular and automated models of actually paying for what you want are going to become the norm, or else we will drown in ads and spam as you correctly pointed out.
Everyone, since again as you correctly pointed out, public and free spaces will be utterly destroyed by bots sooner or later.
I'm not saying it should be free, but your power level should definitely not be proportional to your real-world wealth. If you want that system, there's no reason for cyber libertarianism in the first place: just play in the existing system, which already works that way.
The compute cost of good-faith contributors in a forum like this is a rounding error from zero. In a space where people share media, it could be non-zero, but I still think it's small. Cost only really becomes relevant in the presence of bad-faith actors (i.e., spammers). PoW is one method of mitigation, but it's not the only one. For example, making a space invite-only basically renders spam a moot problem, The problem then of course is how do you get an invite in the first place? Perhaps you could make the invite request PoW, relative to the current spam pressure on applications or something,
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