• The Illusion of Permission-Based Freedom
• The Dark History of Legal Tender Laws
• The Corporate-State Nexus
• Understanding Legal Plunder
• Stateless Corporations: Building the Future Beyond Permission
• Bitcoin as Blueprint
• The Stateless Future

The grand experiment known as democracy is crumbling. Remember when free speech was considered a cornerstone of free society? Today, free speech is being systematically crushed by state actors and big tech algorithms. Censorship and shadowbanning have become the new normal. A college education once guaranteed a decent life, now it only guarantees a seat on a debt-fueled hamster wheel where you live solely to pay bills. Privacy used to be sacred (at least on paper), but now algorithms track your every click while the state monitors your every move, harvests your metadata, and archives it “just in case.” Surveillance is now guaranteed.

I won’t even begin discussing the stranglehold big corporations and special interest groups have on your elected officials. The list of things that have gone wrong in the modern world is endless. Freedom and prosperity disappear a little more each day. This rot won’t be reversed by voting for a different candidate or party in the next election. People have been doing that for decades, and things have only gotten worse, not better. The voting booth has become a slot machine rigged by billionaires. Petitions and protests? They’re pressure release valves designed to make you feel heard while changing nothing. They can be effective in the short term, but over time, even noble protest movements get co-opted, captured, and ultimately neutered. History shows this pattern repeatedly.

So what’s the solution? Is there any hope, or are we all doomed to sink like the Titanic? It’s time to reimagine what freedom means and do things differently.

§The Illusion of Permission-Based Freedom

Many people have a misconceived notion of what freedom actually is. They conflate freedom with legalities or permissioned rights granted by the state. In other words: “I am free to do XYZ because it’s legal.” Their definition of freedom begins and ends with the state. The problem is that the state, despite endless propaganda suggesting otherwise, doesn’t have your best interests at heart. The state has one singular goal: the endless expansion of its power at any cost. By definition, it’s an institution that exists as a necessary evil and utilizes coercion to achieve its ends. The history of freedom is the history of resistance to coercion. At every stage of civilization, rulers have cloaked their monopolies in the mantle of legality, presenting theft and privilege as law and order. When you don’t understand how this invisible cage operates, or that it exists at all, you will always be a victim of the state’s predatory policies designed to gradually erode your freedom.

I’ll use two examples to illustrate this point: legal tender laws and incorporation laws. These constructs, often treated as natural features of economic life, are actually political inventions. Both legal tender and incorporation rest on the same principle: the state asserts authority to dictate the terms of exchange and association, coercively binding individuals into frameworks they may not freely choose. Far from ensuring order, both systems perpetuate monopoly, cronyism, and the suppression of spontaneous market processes.

Legal tender laws force individuals to accept government-issued currency as payment for debts, while incorporation laws require businesses to register with the state before they can legally trade. In each case, the state positions itself as the indispensable gatekeeper of economic activity, extracting tribute and compliance from productive individuals who would otherwise organize their affairs through peaceful cooperation.

§The Dark History of Legal Tender Laws

The historical trajectory of legal tender laws reveals a consistent pattern: the systematic replacement of market-chosen money with politically-controlled currency systems designed to benefit rulers at the expense of their subjects.

In medieval Europe, kings discovered they could debase their currencies, reducing precious metal content while maintaining face value, to fund wars and court expenditures. Legal tender laws emerged as the enforcement mechanism for this primitive form of inflation, compelling subjects to accept debased coins at par value with their honest predecessors. Legal tender laws are the authority upon which rests the government’s ability to inflate the money supply. As Dr. Hans F. Sennholz pointed out:

“Legal tender laws permit government to take income and wealth without the people’s consent… Legal tender legislation is one of the great evils of our time, the necessary basis of inflation and monetary destruction. It gnaws at the moral and economic foundations of society, largely because it is misunderstood and ignored.”

Fiat money has been the indispensable lubricant of state control. It allowed governments to expand beyond the limits of honest taxation and provided the financial foundation for the modern corporate-state nexus. Without fiat money, wars of empire, massive welfare states, and endless bailouts of favored corporations would be impossible.

§The Corporate-State Nexus

Just as legal tender emerged from state usurpation of naturally arising institutions, modern corporate incorporation evolved from royal privilege. In the mercantilist era of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, kings granted exclusive corporate charters to medieval guilds and trading companies, like the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company (VOC), not as recognition of natural rights, but as grants of monopoly privilege in exchange for political support and financial tribute. These were not neutral commercial firms competing in open markets, but quasi-sovereign entities vested with monopolies, military power, and territorial authority. They existed as instruments of statecraft, emerging not as market institutions but as tools of economic state power projection.

Their DNA was statist from inception: mercantilist cartels created to channel wealth upward. The corporate form was conceived as a mechanism for mobilizing private capital in service of state objectives, including exploring new territories, establishing trade routes, accumulating gold, and competing with foreign powers for colonies. The modern assumption that incorporation serves primarily private commercial purposes represents a historical revision that obscures these dark origins. Even as liberal reforms in the nineteenth century broadened access to incorporation, the fundamental premise endured: business legitimacy was a gift bestowed by the state, not an inherent right of free people to trade and associate.

§Understanding Legal Plunder

Understanding that both legal tender and incorporation laws are manifestations of legalized plunder is essential to reimagining freedom. In his magnus opus “The Law,“ Frédéric Bastiat identified legal plunder as the perversion of law from its proper function, protecting person and property, into an instrument for taking from some and giving to others.

Legal tender laws represent textbook legal plunder. They create artificial demand for government currency by prohibiting voluntary alternatives. Citizens cannot practically opt out of the monetary system, and legal tender provisions ensure they cannot collectively migrate to superior alternatives. This manufactured dependency enables the state to extract an inflation tax while maintaining the pretense that government currency dominates through market preference rather than legal coercion. Furthermore, creditors are forced to accept fiat currency regardless of its market value, effectively transferring wealth from those who produced goods and services to those who control the printing press.

Incorporation laws operate through the same logic. By positioning business registration as a legal prerequisite for commercial activity, the state creates the illusion that voluntary business association requires political oversight. Entrepreneurs internalize this dependency, rarely questioning why they need governmental permission to trade freely with willing counterparts. The state effectively transforms a natural right into a state-dispensed privilege.

The state must convince its subjects that it provides indispensable services that could not be supplied through voluntary cooperation. This is why both legal tender and incorporation laws serve to manufacture dependency on political authority. In both cases, the state positions itself as the indispensable middleman in what should be purely voluntary transactions. Bastiat’s insight remains as relevant today as it was in 1850:

“The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect.”

§Stateless Corporations: Building the Future Beyond Permission

Every network, whether for money, speech, or enterprise; falls into one of two categories: permissionless or authoritarian. Open or closed. Censorship-resistant or censored.

The internet began open. A wild frontier where anyone could publish, connect, and build without asking permission. But centralization crept in through platforms. Instead of users owning their data, identities, and interactions, we now have rent-seeking intermediaries who monetize attention and harvest data. These platforms capture us, extract value, and then impose rules. They censor not because of some moral crusade, but because incentives demand it: states demand obedience to preserve power, investors demand censorship to protect profits.

This is the real economics of censorship. It’s not arbitrary; it’s structural. Users become the product, their free will traded for “free” connectivity. The longer we remain inside these digital moats, the more entrenched the capture becomes. Permissionless systems are the only way to resist this gravitational pull. If networks cannot remain open without permissionless architecture, why should corporations?

As highlighted earlier, the modern corporation is a paradox. It presents itself as a creature of markets, competition, and entrepreneurial spirit, yet its very existence is contingent on state permission. Articles of incorporation, government registries, compliance regimes, legal fictions, every part of its skeleton is stamped with the insignia of state approval. It masquerades as “private enterprise,” but it is, at its core, a licensed monopoly of form.

The state-corporation nexus is not a neutral arrangement. It is a system of control. By tethering corporations to permissioned charters and capital choke points, states have neutered the entrepreneurial spirit. They have turned “enterprise” into a theater of compliance, where innovation bows to bureaucracy and capital obeys ideology.

This system has enabled Wall Street cartels like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street to enforce ideological mandates on corporations not through voluntary choice, but through capital choke points. ESG scores and woke diversity quotas did not emerge from the market, these pointless metrics were engineered in Davos, incubated in NGOs, and shoved down the throats of corporations via capital markets bound to state-sanctioned structures. Corporations are no longer creatures of free markets. They are creatures of the state. And like all state-dependent creatures, they will eventually serve the interests of the state.

But what if this entire scaffolding is unnecessary? What if the very idea of a state-chartered corporation is obsolete?

§Bitcoin as Blueprint

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published a nine-page whitepaper that quietly shattered centuries of economic orthodoxy. It was not merely the birth of Bitcoin, but it was the birth of an idea: that trust, coordination, and value exchange could exist without kings, without bankers, without the suffocating middleman of the state. Bitcoin was not just money; it was a blueprint for organizing human action permissionlessly. That principle does not stop at payments. It extends to corporations themselves.

Bitcoin can be thought of as a stateless corporation. It has no CEO, no board, no incorporation papers filed anywhere. Yet it commands a $2 trillion market cap, secures hundreds of billions of dollars in value, and has settled over $19 trillion worth of transactions in 2024 alone. How? Through cryptography, aligned incentives, and a protocol that anyone can join without permission.

That is the blueprint, not just for money, but for enterprise itself.

A stateless corporation borrows this architecture. It is not incorporated in Delaware. It does not ask for permission in Singapore. It does not file compliance reports in Brussels. It exists as a set of cryptographic primitives and social contracts that allow humans to coordinate without a state.

Identity: No Articles of Incorporation. No signatures before a registrar. The identity of a stateless corporation is rooted in keys. A set of public-private key pairs (as used in Bitcoin or Nostr) defines its “existence.” Keys represent stakeholders, contributors, or autonomous agents. Ownership is proven, not declared.

Governance: No board of directors appointed by shareholders in a wood-paneled room (though nothing stops entrepreneurs from having one should they please). Governance is executed via multisig, threshold signatures, and web-of-trust. The rules are transparent and enforced by mathematics.

Operations: Stateless corporations run as distributed protocols, both online and offline. They can own Bitcoin addresses, sign transactions, and hold capital in multisig. They can authenticate themselves to clients and partners via cryptographic proofs. No secretary of state required.

Capital Formation: Instead of IPOs, stateless corporations raise capital through permissionless markets, crowdfunding using Bitcoin or distributing equity through cryptographic shares. Investors don’t rely on regulators; they rely on code and contracts.

A stateless corporation is not a “company.” It is a living protocol; a shell of rules and incentives, hardened by cryptography, animated by human action. This is not a new idea; but it’s a revolutionary one that will transform how we do business in the 21st century.

If the incentives are aligned correctly, things like censorship and deplatforming will only be possible in the fiat world. Using Bitcoin as an example, not all market participants on the network are honest actors with good intentions, but because of the protocol’s architecture, they are forced to play by the rules should they intend to enjoy the benefits of the Bitcoin network.

Stateless corporations will operate by the same logic. Even more importantly, they will enable Bitcoin commerce without using state or fiat services in the physical world. That’s what truly winning looks like.

§The Stateless Future

The corporation was one of humanity’s most powerful inventions, but it has been captured, neutered, and turned into a weapon against the very spirit of free enterprise. Not only that, since it is built on the bedrock of fiat money, it is also a major cog in the permissioned economic system we exist in today. If we leave it in the hands of states and bureaucrats, it will become nothing more than an appendage of planned economies, fiat zombies performing ideological theater. It’s time to reimagine what freedom to trade looks like. Bitcoin already showed the possibility of building a parallel monetary foundation based on a different set of rules. It’s time to raise the stakes and build fiat-free institutions from the ground up.

Imagine a future where entrepreneurs launch corporations the way developers spin up Bitcoin nodes. No permission. No filing fees. No state oversight. Just a private key and a protocol.

Imagine marketplaces of stateless corporations competing for capital, reputation, and customers, without ever once seeking permission from Delaware or the SEC. Imagine investors allocating capital directly to protocols secured by cryptography, where fraud is harder to hide than ever before. Imagine a world where “going public” doesn’t mean kneeling before the NYSE, but broadcasting your keys to a network of peers.

Bitcoin gave us decentralized capital. Nostr gave us decentralized identity and communication. The web of trust gave us decentralized reputation.

All that remains is to assemble them into a new model of corporate life.