Libertaria

Welcome to Libertaria, a project dedicated to building the tools to allow people to create fully decentralized communities and economies of their own making and choosing. These are communities in which people can communicate, share ideas, collaborate, transact, define and enforce agreements, create goods and services, exchange money – basically do all the things they are used to doing today in their social and economic lives, but directly between each other, without any central authorities involved. There is a lot to be said for such decentralized communities. They give people more control over their own lives, more privacy, more choice, as well as more responsibility. Decentralized communities and person-to-person economies can also unlock huge value for individuals and businesses, being generally more local, more efficient and, economically speaking, more fair than the large, centralized constructs we are used to living under now. They are, by their nature, more democratic too. We think decentralized communities can act as a counterweight to the growing centralization and authoritarianism in much of our world, tendencies we believe are of concern to a great many people today from all political persuasions and socio-economic backgrounds. Libertaria is explicitly an apolitical, non-partisan project. We are not here to tear anything down, but to make use of the technologies available today to offer people simple and inexpensive alternatives to the status quo. In our vision of the decentralized future people will move effortlessly between various local communities and mainstream structures as they see fit, enjoying the advantages of different models and approaches. Crucial to our vision, however, is that it is the individual who makes these choices. We are not the only people who think this way. Driven by new technologies, chief among them the blockchain, there is a broad-based decentralization movement gathering pace all over the world. But while most of these projects address just one or two of the technologies needed for a decentralized society, as far as we know Libertaria is the first to attempt to build the whole stack and to do so in an open-source, free to use way. In this paper we discuss the Libertaria vision in detail: why we are doing what we are doing, how we are going about doing it, what kind of communities we can build, what technologies we are developing to support those communities, how we see the new peer-to-peer economics, how we intend to raise funds to make this vision a reality, what we intend to do with those funds and – perhaps most importantly – how Libertaria can benefit those who use it: from normal people to businesses to those interested in investing their time and resources into helping this vision become a reality.