La Serenissima and personal sovereignty

The touch off is a discussion on irc. Of course. It went like so :

mircea_popescu You know this multisig thing is tempting conceptually, much like multi addressesⁱ seem the only way to go. However, in practice, one quickly discovers that value accumulates, and a signature or a BTC address is more like a domain name than even a domain name.
BigBitz Multisig is nice.

mircea_popescu I didn't mean the power ranger derpage. I just meant, one having multiple GPG signatures.
BigBitz Subkeys you mean?
los_pantalones Nah, new pubkey. I have a personal one, attached to my activities outside of work and one for work porpoises.

mircea_popescu Maybe that's the right way to go and I'm just seeing the particular effects of my very peculiar personality, where I have no problem receiving slut selfies on office@.ⁱⁱ
los_pantalones I don't technically own the trust i earn working for this company, I think would be the argument they would make.

mircea_popescu Why not ? Fuck them lol. Of course you do. The very point of personal sovereignty is that you do, not they.
los_pantalones Yes yes, but when i'm acting on their behalf am I acting as a sovereign entity?

mircea_popescu Yes. Always. In the immortal words of Poppy, "and on this issue there can be no debate!"

The point here is that identity is strictly, without exception, always, a personal matter. A corporation may have no identity, outside of what it derives from its owners.ⁱⁱⁱ

On one hand, it is already well established law that we will not accept agency excuses : if you do anything whatsoever we don't like, it will not matter if you did it for a government, be it represented as a corporation or anything else. Instead, you will hang for it, much like the nazis hung for their criminal activity. Nobody cared that it was perfectly legitimate, law abiding activity at the time, and nobody will care in your case. No immunity, be it issued by whatever fiat government will help you any more than the fiat currency it issued will help you. So in this approach, if the person can not hide behind the corporation, what sense would it make to allow the pretense of corporate identity ?

On the other hand, I will (and have) negrated people when they shared their WoT credentials. This is the correct approach. In this context, what exact sense does it make to allow the pretense of corporate identity ? Suppose employee works for company, establishes trust, leaves company. Would you now expect a different person being allocated that trust, and benefiting from it on the grounds that "it belongs to the company" ? How is this different from you know, dedicated scammers buying WoT accounts for the purpose of scamming ?

All this dovetails neatly into our general understanding of sovereignty as a personal matter personally invested. If you can't have a government other than as a person who benefits from the investment of other persons, why would you need, or what could you possibly want from a corporation that works like the dog vomit^iv of yore ?

And besides : this policy will serve us well, in that it offers a much better deal to talented, competent people than the fiat world does. As such, they have an incentive to work with us, rather than with them. As such, we will prevail, at which point people will probably clamor for the relaxation of this rule, which I'll oppose as a bad idea if I'll still be around by then, which will tempt them to vilify me as either senile if I'll be old enough or else a wrecker that's lost sight of the best interests of the Reaction.^v Which... you know, whatever.

So for these reasons : La Serenissima does not recognise nor will ever enforce any sort of claim of any entity that purports to impinge on the sovereignty of persons. No entity may claim rights to person's identity under this rule, and if they try to they're being the enemy and should be treated like the enemy. For all intents and purposes identity is allodial property of the person therein represented, and no convention may touch it.^vi

1. Old topic. See pretty much all the derpage coming out of the Power Rangers proposing, see Why exactly reusing Bitcoin addresses strengthens Bitcoin user anonimity and , How to process Bitcoin payments cheaply and easily, The discreet escort, or how Bitcoin makes prostitution unprosecutable etc for the counters. [↩]
2. Yes, I do. All the damned time. What are you waifing for ? [↩]
3. Yes, this reverses fifteen centuries of legal precedent considering corporations persons, just like natural persons. This is not happenstance, but quite deliberate, and more importantly : quite necessary. Quite unavoidable, in fact. Much like the old style contract has outlived its practical usefulness for very strong theoretical reasons, just so the old style corporation has outlived its time and is now being replaced by the MPEx-style corporation.

   The theoretical reasons in question are that a fictitious person is indistinguishable from any other fictitious person, and as such incapable of being trusted. This is why fictitious persons require the expensive, bulky and ultimately unsustainable fiat-style legal system in the first place : they basically are scammers, by their very nature, all the time. This stands in opposition with people, who may be scammers - no matter how many times this potentiality actualises, the fundamental difference remains substantial.

   If you think about it, the above paragraph neatly explains why the early first line defense arrayed by the socialists against Bitcoin was "people scam" : they may not have understood it themselves, but their current implementation of their dysfunctional nonsense requires an implementation of the totalitarian government, just like any historical attempt at running the socialist utopia did. Their current implementation of the totalitarian government relies on fictitious persons of the nature and structure of fiat corporations, ie, little droplet copies of itself. This way it can control everything while still "plausibly" denying it, for some values of plausibility. In allowing me to observe that this governmental-corporation fictitious person is obsolete, Bitcoin threatens (yet again, yet another way) the very foundation of even theoretical possibility of their wet dream. Hence the attempt to show that people are the same as fictitious entities, "practically". As if that does something. Keep looking at "really small empirical values of 4" and "really large empirical values of 3" until who knows, maybe you end up with Global Warming and functioning Worldwide Socialism. An unsurprising mistake to make, I agree, but not less a mistake for that excuse.

   The other fundamental reason is that people eat, corporations do not. This significant problem has been patched over in various ways. Syndicalism is fundamentally an attempt to even the tables, because otherwise the needless corporation can run a very painful wedge against the needy people : either take this or starve. Modern taxation at its lowest, earliest basis is exactly the same : create a minimum cost for staying in business, through reporting requirements, that'll approximate the need to eat for corporations. Minimum wage works towards the same exact purpose, which is why all the libertarian critique showing how it fails to reach "its intended goals" but merely makes it even harder for poor people to find work is so ineffectual : whatever they think the "intended goals" may be, the actual intended goal is to raise the cost for corporationfood, and that it definitely does. Obviously we can't survive in a world drowned in runaway red tape introduced for the otherwise legitimate purpose of making the corporations actually work like the people-equivalent law has misrepresented them as. Nevertheless, this entire set is not really enough : for five centuries all these have been major problems and yet society struggled with them and kept the corporation. What finally kills it is above : the needs and expectations of Bitcoin and WoT people. [↩]

4. It's a slime mold. [↩]
5. This ain't a revolution, yo, and we ain't revolutionaries. We're they who eat revolutionaries. [↩]
6. You may be tempted to think o hey, m-of-n identities are such a brilliant idea, what if our five friends made a collective identity!

   It's not a brilliant idea, because the strength of a chain is the strength of its weakest link. You are basically reimplementing the disaster of commons for absolutely no reason other than ostensibly boredom. Do something productive with your time instead. [↩]