As much as I hate broaching the topic on HN, I'm really excited about the potential for blockchain or other distributed consensus-based technologies to disrupt the many centralized authorities that are currently so critical to operation of the internet. Namecoin, for example, is really interesting for this reason.
Amusingly, NearlyFreeSpeech.net, which is a hosting provider run by libertarians, does not allow their customers to be anonymous to them. (Except by very special arrangement for people facing serious threats in non-US countries.) [1] They accept payment in Bitcoin, so, technically, they could offer a fully anonymous service.
So they want to prohibit anonymity when it might hurt them, but allow it when it might hurt the customers of their hosting clients.
Why do you say they are libertarian? Or do you mean libertarian in the strict sense of supporting free speech?
I think requiring real names from their clients but opposing it for publicly accessible WHOIS records is perfectly consistent with their views:
Since we started back in 2002, one of the things that's repeatedly been made clear to us is that governments aren't the biggest threat to free speech. They certainly bear watching and perpetual wariness, but they're just not the source of the everyday threats to our members' ability to express themselves.
The most common threats come from corporations and the pressure they can bring. Not a week goes by that we don't hear from some cheap lawyer about how mad some company is that some website said something that they don't like and what horrible things they're going to do to us if we don't hop to and do their bidding.
If the WHOIS records were only viewable by the courts, or at least ICANN, your implication of hypocrisy would carry some weight, but they're viewable by everyone, and that makes it a much larger threat.
It's not necessarily a contradiction to want anonymity to be piercable by a court's subpoena (which would force NFS to divulge their records), but not by anyone who can send a convincing looking letter. A hosting service which makes a point of protecting its members in the event of complaints, even if this is intended for the type of stuff you'd classify as "free speech" (which is mostly, though not entirely, legally protected in the U.S.), is likely to attract a lot of users with various less sympathetic purposes; whether or not you think any particular such purpose should be allowed on the Internet, they have the right to think it shouldn't.
