He's a libertarian for certain strange senses of libertarian. For example he thinks naked short-selling should be banned, which seems more like a pro-regulatory position (not just a randomly chosen position... the campaign against naked short-selling has been his #1 political passion for years). Mostly I think he just dislikes the finance industry.

Naked short selling should be banned. It's not just a regulatory issue.

When you short a stock, you have to borrow the stock first, and then sell it. Obviously at some point you will buy back the stock, hopefully at a lower price so you make a profit, and then return the stock to the original owner.

When you naked short sell, you don't borrow the stock first, you just claim you do. Everybody trades pieces of paper without settling the trade. This might seem convenient but someone can abuse this.

For example, sell a billion shares in a stock which you don't own / have not borrowed, at a fire-sale price, thereby causing the share price of a company to crash because people start panicking once they see huge volumes being traded at a low price.

If one is a libertarian, wouldn't the assumption be that the market will handle this scenario? When someone takes the other end of your short, it's up to them to do appropriate due diligence on the counterparty risk. Maybe they want to demand you own the underlying security; maybe they don't want to demand it. As long as it's free individuals entering into contracts, I don't see the case for banning them from a libertarian perspective specifically.

Somebody would own the stock market, and they could choose not to allow this.

Isn't that the case even today? Both the NYSE and Nasdaq are owned by private companies.

> Both the NYSE and Nasdaq are owned by private companies.

NYSE is owned by Intercontinentalexchange Group which is publicly listed.

To naked short sell, someone has to be willing to buy from you a stock you neither own nor have borrowed. I think if they want to do that, they should be allowed to. Despite what a dumb idea that is.

When you issue a buy order to an exchange, you don't get to specify that the seller needs to have the stock; you will only find out when the seller fails to deliver.

This is mentioned in the article:

> Like so many others, he believes bitcoin can free the world from the control of big banks and big government. “It helps us fight the machine,” he says.

I cringed reading this, mostly because normal people don't feel quite comfortable with sentiment like "fighting the machine."

You might be surprised at what normal people actually think.

Get outside and talk to some folks. Very few are friends of "the machine."

Early movers are often ideologically inspired - Stallman is a radical hippie, Jimmy Wales an objectivist. The crazies make the big bets.