Comment by failuser

You say that like writing them off would be a bad thing

because web3 was a smuggling/laundering operation and those are illegal. basically, all cryptocurrency activity is immediately a suspicious activity.

“Is it legal?” should be a question adventurous libertarian should ask himself. Something being illegal never stopped hackers, being it exploiting vulnerabilities for profit or not complying with outdated regulation. That is just good strategy. I don’t expect libertarians to ask a question “is it ethical” the more anarchist wing of the hacker community might ask themselves.

>Anyone else remember when HackerNews had an adventurous libertarian ethos before the school marms infested the place with irrelevant and low vibrational commentary?

Boy will you not like the "high vibrational" commentary people would have for that adventurous™ libertarianism©* of yours.

The "medium vibrational" ones merely wish its pursuers behind bars, the more energetic ones are discussing optimal guillotine blade shape profiles.

* * * * * * *

Question to you.

Would a startup that maintains a public database of names, addresses, and approximate locations of people with net worth over $1B be libertariously adventurous enough by your standards?

You know, like Page, but crowdsourced, and with wage workers as the users (not as product). Purely opt-in. Give it a higher-energy vibe name, like, say, 'rage (as in "average" - for the average people).

Anyone who sees Elon Musk could anonymously report his location to 'rage, giving wage workers an option to avoid providing services to him - just like Pave gives employers an option to avoid getting services from undesirable workers.

Are you a pastry seller who'd rather call in sick the day Peter Thiel or his buddy JD Vance are in town again? Get 'rage, and avoid the awkward interaction.

Anyone who gets a wind of someone fitting the wealth profile will have an option to anonymously contribute this data to 'rage's Wealth Accumulator Registry (Rage WAR™).

They may be breaking their NDA's while doing so, but that won't be 'rage's problem, of course. 'rage will not be in the business of policing individual actions and limiting users' personal freedoms.

The user identity will be e2e encrypted, guaranteeing anonymity. It will be impossible to prove that someone has a 'rage account against their will, or find out they have one.

The app, however, will also allow users to confirm that they have a 'rage account if they choose to do so. This way, wage workers who are concerned about their peers could ask them to privately confirm their account status and contribution karma to avoid sharing a workplace with a scab.

Registration will require entering your own personal wealth data into 'rage WAR™.

While tax returns can be faked, someone uploading a copy of their W-2 paystub will practically ensure that one does not fit the target wealth profile for the B-status.

Those could be faked too, of course - and one could see large employers not wanting to collaborate with 'rage for whatever reasons.

That's exactly where startups like Pave come into play to verify the correctness of the data.

'rage and Pave would not only complement each other in the financial data ecosystem, they would form a natural symbiosis, giving wage workers incentives to ask their employers to use Pave. As for Pave, 'rage would merely be one of its clients, consuming W-2 data just like everyone else.

I hope you will find this proposal sufficiently adventurous and relevant; and I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter.

[flagged]

There's a difference between "doing an illegal thing as a product" and "lying to investors about your product"

> Which makes total sense for consumers as well.

Kinda. Often this casual law breaking isn’t entirely victimless even if it benefits both consumer and the startup. I think Schmidt was talking about using content to train models. So artists getting short end of stick. Or Airbnb causing locals getting prices out or whatever.

There is certainly some dodgy protectionism happening of the sort you describe but there are also externalities borne by society for this break laws startup style.

Uber is objectively worse for every single party involved. Driver makes less, customer pays more, Uber has to coordinate a huge system.

Uber "won" because they cheated. They operated at a loss for almost 15 years, on the welfare of investors. Guess what, mom and pop running a taxi can't live on a negative wage.

Totally. I propose we start a brothelBnB next door to your home. Home owner wins, customer wins, worker wins, startup wins! Score! Market has spoken!

I also recommend HoboSleepinCar Driveway as a service next to your home. The consumer has spoken!

I’m saying that government regulations that fix prices should be scrutinized and repealed if they reduce opportunity for ordinary people. Such as zoning codes that price out the poor.

> Yes, that's kind of the main difference between government functions and private companies

Perhaps that should change. Or at least it’s a reason to scrutinize and repeal laws that are used for price fixing.

> Are you saying the very idea of zoning strikes you as a problem? Or are you trying to call out the bad implementations which strangle urban prosperity in the US?

Zoning Rules! by William Fischel gives good a history of zoning. Zoning was originally for segregation within the city but to the question of prices, no it was not inherently problematic. It was not until the 1970s that zoning was used for growth control to make entire cities unaffordable.

Unless it's pollution-based zoning, I agree that the idea of zoning is a problem.

It’s ironic that in response to a question about price fixing, failuser brought up other companies that were formed to circumvent government price fixing, and in his examples the governments doing the price fixing were supposedly the good guys!

In the case of Uber, they successfully broke up the taxi cartel since the state PUC ruled that ride hail is a separate category.

In the case of Airbnb, according to their founding story they were created to help economize on space because rents were high in San Francisco due to zoning. Although they made a useful service, they did not succeed in reducing rents because the underlying zoning is still the constraint that keeps rents high.

compete or die

Can you give examples of the topic at hand, price fixing, that are justified? There are a handful of progressive forms of price fixing (e.g. minimum wage laws), but many others should be added to the Niskanen Center’s list of bad regulations in the Captured Economy.

You have heard of the Prison Indistrial Complex right? Our Prisons have been For-Profit for a long time now. Totally legal, government sanctioned privatized penitentiaries.