Ryan Burgett | The Libertarian Institute

The One-Size-Fits-All Blockchain

by Ryan Burgett | Feb 17, 2021 | Blog

Recently, I tuned into the LBRY Community Podcast and near the end, they brought up a question that someone had asked about LBRY. This person wanted to know why it was not built on a privacy coin like Monero. They implied that LBRY should move to a private chain like that. Now, apart from the obvious technical issues regarding such a request, this does bring up something that I often see when people discuss crypto. People love one-size-fits-all technology. They love to pick one favorite thing or company that does everything. They might be an Apple person who stupidly uses Apple for...

The Memory Hole

by Ryan Burgett | Jan 18, 2021 | Blog

Censorship has been in the news a lot lately. You have probably heard it mentioned in relation to Donald Trump. Twitter, Facebook, and many other online platforms permanently suspended his accounts last week. That's pretty wild, but there is a lot more worth talking about than any one person losing their Twitter account. In the past, censorship has taken many forms. Originally, it involved physically stopping people from speaking, either by violence or threat of violence. Then, as speech moved to paper it involved destroying scrolls and later books. George Orwell, in his classic book 1984...

Crypto Is Money

by Ryan Burgett | Jan 6, 2021 | Blog

People who think of cryptocurrencies as something to hold, something to invest in miss the point. Crypto is designed to do things that only crypto can do and its value is in its utility, in its use as money.

The What About Bobification of America

by Ryan Burgett | Dec 22, 2020 | Blog

I love Bill Murray. I enjoy basically every movie he has ever done. One of my favorites is called What About Bob. No matter how many decades pass, I can't help but laugh out loud while watching it. In that classic, Bill Murray plays a man named Bob who is scared of everything. He is desperately scared, everywhere he goes, about getting sick. Everyday things are almost impossible for him because of this extreme fear. He can't open a door without first wiping the knob. He can't get on a bus with other people. Things like getting into an elevator are monumental tasks for him. In one scene, he...

TechnoAgorist: Agorism as a Means, Not an End

by Ryan Burgett | Nov 30, 2020 | Blog

Agorism did not appear out of a vacuum; it is the spiritual and practical successor to libertarianism as defined by Murray Rothbard in For A New Liberty. Samuel Konkin III said as much in his New Libertarian Manifesto, the classic which first defined agorism. In his manifesto, he built on the earlier philosophical and economic work of Rothbard and defined what he called "New Libertarianism." I like to call agorism "libertarianism with feet." Samuel Kokin knew that philosophical libertarianism on its own would not bring the world any closer to the libertarian end of a free society. He also...

TechnoAgorist: President Gilligan

by Ryan Burgett | Nov 16, 2020 | Blog

My children love watching Gilligan's Island. I appreciate that the show is mindless fun and that I don't have to worry about it pushing some stupid, progressive agenda on my children. Recently, after dinner we were watching our daily episode and in it the characters were having trouble finding fresh water. They needed to dig a well, but nobody was taking the initiative to do what they knew needed to be done! In their typical, cartoonish way of thinking, they decide that what they need is a president of the island, who can keep order and make sure that the things get done that need getting...

Techno-Agorist: Do NPCs Dream of Electric Sheep?

by Ryan Burgett | Nov 9, 2020 | Blog

I am a huge fan of Philip K. Dick. His short stories have always been my favorite science fiction of all time. In high school, I read through my big volume of his short stories so many times that the binding literally fell apart. Recently, I decided to read through his full-length book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Boy-oh-boy was that weird. After finishing, I decided to revisit the movie Blade Runner, which was loosely based on that classic. The movie is dramatically different from the book, but it is still immensely enjoyable. It asks important questions about humanity and about...

Techno-Agorist: Broken Security Is No Security

by Ryan Burgett | Nov 9, 2020 | Blog

Every few years, we once again hear about the federal government discussing ways to get around encryption. Usually, thankfully, it doesn't head anywhere. The most spectacular failure was in the nineties when the federal government tried to get tech companies to use special chips which would give the feds access to people's data. There was an outcry at the time and it led to the federal government abandoning that proposal and it also led to people open-sourcing hard encryption. Folks realized that the best way to protect encryption technology was to release it into the wild so that it could...