By Is there any doubt that finance isn’t the most powerful geo-political tool of our time? Debt can break a nation in a day, but it can also be used to build roads, sanitation and health care facilities over time. For too long the tools of finance, and the laws upon which it relies, has been monopolized by a tiny elite who use intellectual property laws and sham elections to keep these tools out of the hands of normal people. The elite do this mostly because they want to profit from their access, but also because they’re scared the tools will be misused. It’s easy to believe that (financial) abundance will mean someone, somewhere, will use it to kill people via a 3D printed firearm, a nuclear bomb or some other technically complicated weapon. Learning to live with the fear of death is a discussion for another essay. In “Finance without Force” I argue that fiat currency binds finance to law, and thus gives those who control finance the ability to coordinate the state’s application of force. It’s through this process that, for example, a sheriff can be compelled by a bank to kick someone out of their home. As cryptocurrencies emerge that begin to compete with fiat currency, it will become increasingly easy for people to create economic relationships that don’t include the state. If the state isn’t involved, than no one can apply the legitimate use of force in that economic relationship. To me, that sounds like the type of economic relationships I was to engage in: casual relationships that people can break without fear or personal injury, homelessness or starvation. There’s a work for systems that promote and productively utilize these types of relationships: games. At the end of this essay I will explain how, through “productive play”, people engaging in consensual (not-fiat) currencies transactions will, through the legal act of play, become productive enough to sustain enterprise networks (syndicates). These networks will allow people to avoid fiat currency transactions as much as possible, enabling them to organize for themselves a different type of lifestyle – one that is as consensual as possible. Finally, in the appendix, I’ll explain how you can build the technical systems to (at least theoretically) facilitate these types of relationships… in under an hour using WordPress! Full text: