Bitcoin Forum

Billionaire Marc Lore is fleshing out his plan to build a utopian city called Telosa for 5 million people in the American desert — and he's not the only one with such ambitions.

Why it matters: There are about a dozen projects worldwide to create sustainable, hypermodern cities-from-scratch. While they may never come to fruition, the proposals themselves hint at what the city of the future might look like.

Driving the news: Telosa is set to be built on 150,000 acres in either Nevada, Utah or Arizona, and 50,000 "diverse" people will call it home by 2030, according to newly released details from Lore — a serial entrepreneur who sold Jet.com to Walmart for $3.3 billion and the parent company of Diapers.com to Amazon for $545 million.

• "We're not just building a new city — this is a new model for society," Lore said at a Telosa "town hall meeting" in July, adding that he wants his new city to be "sustainable and equitable to all."
• It'll be governed by a principle he calls "equitism," which seems to be a mashup of democracy, capitalism and socialism.

In Lore's vision, vehicles will be electric and autonomous, and roads won't have curbs (which could hinder differently-abled people), or on-street parking.

• Telosa's 36 districts will each be "15-minute cities," where everything a resident needs is a short walk away.
• Every building will be "green," with rooftop panels producing renewable energy.
• The design calls for fresh water to be "stored, cleaned and reused on site," creating a "diverse and efficient water system that is resistant to drought."

How it'll work: A nonprofit called the Telosa Community Foundation will purchase the land to build the city — "land that is virtually worthless," as Lore put it.

• The hope is that development will increase the land's value, and then the foundation eventually would be able to create a market for it — investing the proceeds in an endowment-style vehicle that would fund education, job training, health care, housing and more.
• This structure "allows us to offer these incredible social services without having to increase taxes. That is the Holy Grail," says Lore.

Among those working to make Telosa happen: Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and a childhood friend of Lore's, and Bjarke Ingels, the prominent Danish architect whose firm is designing the city.

The big picture: Telosa, a name derived from the ancient Greek word meaning "highest purpose," is one of a growing number of dewy-eyed ambitions to build centrally planned and sustainable communities on a blank landscape — despite obvious impediments, like a lack of fresh water.

• In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is constructing a megacity named The Line, part of a larger development called Neom.

• The Line's plan calls for a city 105 miles long but only 220 yards wide, enclosed by mirrored walls and powered entirely by renewable energy, according to newly released designs.
• Water will be plentiful, according to the project's claims, through desalinization, wastewater and seawater processing, and smart metering.
• "Saudi projections call for 1.5 million people to live in The Line by 2030," NPR reports, with eventual plans for 9 million residents.
• But recent Businessweek reporting suggests the broader Neom project has been plagued by indecision at the top and other problems.

• Floating City in the Maldives is envisioned as a large cluster of hexagonal structures that rise and fall with the sea, with room for up to 20,000 people. It's set to be completed in 2027.
• Toyota Woven City is a company town being built in the foothills of Japan's Mount Fuji. The proposal calls for a 2,000-person city where Toyota "will test autonomous vehicles, smart technology and robot-assisted living," per CNN.
• Masdar City in Abu Dhabi is a "master-planned eco-complex designed to show off the UAE’s commitment to sustainability," Bloomberg has reported.
• Net City in Shenzhen, China, is another company town being built by tech giant Tencent. It'll be a Monaco-size metropolis for 80,000 workers, CNN reports.

Other billionaires with city-building aspirations include Bill Gates, who wants to build a "smart city" called Belmont in the Arizona desert, and Elon Musk.

• On Earth, Musk has discussed creating a city called Starbase in southernmost Texas, as a hub for space exploration — and, of course, he aims to one day build a "self-sustaining city on Mars."

Reality check: Some of the claims being made by the utopian planners strain credulity — like Telosa's assertion that it'll eventually be a net exporter of water and energy.

• In the real world, the promise of smart cities — where intelligent sensors, cameras, and Big Data combine to improve everything from traffic flow to city services — has been a consistent disappointment.

The bottom line: The road to utopia is littered with shattered dreams.

• "We still haven't figured out how to make utopian environments work for people," Professor Sylvie Albert of the University of Winnipeg writes in The Conversation.
• She reviews the flaws in experiments like Brasília, Levittown, Celebration, Songdo, Eko Atlantic and Sidewalk Toronto.

https://www.axios.com/2022/08/25/city-of-the-future-neom-telosa-lore-mbs

Billionaire Marc Lore is fleshing out his plan to build a utopian city called Telosa for 5 million people in the American desert

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I'm not certain if the proposed Akon City in africa, linked to the cryptocurrency akoin, ~

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There are interesting and innovative ideas being proposed. The saudi arabia project is constructed around a mass transit length of rail. Built above the surface of the desert like a skyscraper. Elon Musk has discussed building a city devoted towards space exploration in texas. I was hoping UAE dubai and middle eastern real estate development would explore the viability of building cities underground to save on insulation and cooling costs. That seems like a natural progression. Interestingly enough, no one seems to like the idea.
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Who the hell would want to live in the American desert?
All those visionaries, who are dreaming of creating utopian cities have to pick a good location first. Creating a city in the desert has two main benefits:
1.Cheap land.
2.Sunny weather for the solar panels.
Those are the only benefits I can think of. The problems are way more:
1.The weather is going to be hot during the entire year.
2.Finding enough water supplies.
3.Finding people, who would want to live in a city in the desert.
4.Creating good infrastructure around the city.
The people, who are building such innovative cities are missing one key point. Making the city comfortable for the people that will live there.

I think it's not linked to akoin. If you google it, you get this result:

The project is still on for planned to have large skyscrapers, shopping malls, technology hub, music studios, "Senewood", and eco-friendly tourist resorts. Akon envisions Akoin, a cryptocurrency which he founded, to be the central currency.

In the illustration of the desert city. There are towers which appear to be condensation towers. They can passively generate water by cooling air through natural wind motion. Dune Sea farmers in star wars have a similar water evaporation technology used by moisture farmers.

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Anyhow the project is dead, the coin is dead -98.3% (https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/akoin), everything can be forgotten!
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In Lagos Nigeria, there's a new city of the future called Eko Atlantic City (https://www.ekoatlantic.com/about-us/) being built from scratch -  10 million square metres of land reclaimed from the ocean and protected by an 8.5 kilometre long sea wall.

Self-sufficient and sustainable, it includes state-of-the-art urban design, its own power generation, clean water, advanced telecommunications, spacious roads, and tree-lined streets. This is the first of its kind.

I personally feel sorry that this project has failed. I don't think the organizers were planning to scam investors, or something. I think they really had good intentions, but, like so many others, they were a bit ahead of their time. Maybe in 20 years cities like Akon City will be successfully built. I certainly hope so, anyway.

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Mao had good intentions too and probably truly believed in them, but everyone knows what some of the consequences have been.
Building a futuristic city at cost of billions for a few hundred thousand people when millions don't have water and electricity from my point of view it's not a good idea, it's not even a good plan, it's straight from the books on machiavellianism.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Bitcoin City, in El Salvador:

I'm wondering if a city design can effectively benefit Bitcoin usage. Besides of fast Internet, a government facilitating tax payments in BTC, I can't find much. Maybe citizen-owned mining facilities powered by renewable energy?

If anyone wonders why future cities are gaining attention at the moment. It is possible that apocalypse bunkers are boring concepts to many of the rich and famous. People may not be well adapted to living a solitary existence locked inside a survival bunker for prolonged periods of time. They would prefer to have apocalypse cities where they could retain a vestige of social life and have others to interact with in a catastrophic scenario. It is also possible that having access to a panel of experts inside of a community would increase their chances of survival.

Its possible these futuristic city plans are designed and structured along an avenue of organizing a community of survivors under apocalyptic conditions. ~

In my opinion, the first thing you need to survive under apocalyptic conditions is a good army equipped with heavy weapons. I don't think there is any futuristic city designed with that in mind (CMIIW). Unfortunately, there are still organized military groups acting like weare living in the Stone Age. They end up miserably when confronted with serious force, but you have to have that force.

In a major emergency. Even armies might have nothing to eat. If you have an army, you need extra food to feed them.

In some scenarios, it could be better to have a city in a remote location, there are no roads too. Where no one would think to look. Than to have a big army. With a small population that is easy to feed and sustain over the long term. That would make it easier to survive disasters.

Rising cost of oil and fossil fuels carry a potential to render armies useless. Much of modern war is built upon oil. Even nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers need massive amounts of oil to grease the moving parts.

I think russia vs ukraine is showing the limited capability of modern war. Militaries of today may not be able to fully mobilize without incurring costs in the trillions of dollars range. It may not be affordable to launch $400,000 missiles at each other over the long term. High tech weapons are expensive.

Who the hell would want to live in the American desert?
All those visionaries, who are dreaming of creating utopian cities have to pick a good location first. Creating a city in the desert has two main benefits:
1.Cheap land.
2.Sunny weather for the solar panels.
Those are the only benefits I can think of. The problems are way more:
1.The weather is going to be hot during the entire year.
2.Finding enough water supplies.
3.Finding people, who would want to live in a city in the desert.
4.Creating good infrastructure around the city.
The people, who are building such innovative cities are missing one key point. Making the city comfortable for the people that will live there.

Las Vegas was built in a desert. They turned a wasteland into a casino/competitive sports hub. I don't have the specifics on how they're able to import water to supply the city, but it can be done.

That is correct Vegas is built on sand, so is Dubai and Singapore.
Singapore is even very beautiful with so much green and they did by importing soil from other countries.

Singapore's climate is classified as tropical rainforest climate (Köppen climate classification Af), with no true distinct seasons. Owing to its geographical location and maritime exposure, its climate is characterized by uniform temperature and pressure, high humidity and abundant rainfall.

What if a techno city of the future forked bitcoin. Then limited mining exclusively to the city district. Allowing only city residents to mine it. That could be one path to recreating the early adopter days of crypto mining while reserving control of a crypto token inside a city or specific region's borders. The number of miner's a single party can own could also be capped in an effort to prevent it from becoming too monopolized and centralized.

If someone starts such a megaproject at a time when everyone is looking to save money, then it is obvious that they have so much money that they can set the whole desert on fire with it if they want to. What you see as "waste of money" is certainly not for them, and their current ruler, like many before him, is obsessed with leaving something spectacular behind.

It just strikes me that they are building the city of the future, and at the same time, they are behaving like barbarians from the Middle Ages because they are condemning to death the members of the local tribe who protested the project. A lot of money combined with very strange laws and the lack of respect for human rights put that country at the very bottom of those I would ever visit.

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On top of that, how is such a city deemed eco-friendly?

Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman boasted that the city, planned for nine million people, "will challenge the traditional flat, horizontal cities and create a model for nature preservation and enhanced human liveability".

They are literally building a huge tall wall, stretching over 170 kilometres in the desert. I fully understand their desire to build something "magnificent" and technologically advanced, but why build such an eyesore? Most importantly, it will take ages to get from one side to the other, unless you use a ridiculously expensive means of transport, such as a train. What's ecological about that?

Couldn't they, at the very least, settle for a different shape? This thing will be visible from hundreds of kilometres away.