Do you think such a governance model would be able to compete with others? Would people actually voluntarily live on a seastead with that goal or would they float their home away somewhere else?

A core structural feature of current models of government is centralization.Too much centralized authority leads to inefficient bureaucracies and representatives disconnected from the people they are meant to serve. Given a suitable technological solution, governments are ripe for decentralization. One technological solution is seasteading.

Seasteading brings decentralization beyond the digital world of bits and into the world of atoms by providing modular, floating structures – seasteads – on which the evolution of new societies and forms of governance can occur. Promising solutions can branch off at any time by physically separating to create new seasteads – enabling a high level of evolvability and quick rate of adaptation. Mimicking nature’s time-tested method of variation and selection, the process of decentralizing governance through seasteading could spark the creation and evolution of new advancements in civilization.

When our homes and businesses can float to locations we choose, we can relatively easily rearrange our cities and sail our residence to other locations. Governments would no longer have a monopoly on the space where citizens live and businesses conduct their commercial activities. Instead governments would need to act like service providers, competing to attract citizens and businesses. Consequently, we could have an ever-evolving marketplace for government in a decentralized world.


Do you think such a thing is possible? Do you think other solutions for decentralizing governments could happen using the blockchain or other means?

I'm actually heading to Thailand tomorrow to stay for about 2 months. Will be mostly in the Bangkok area.

More free BTC from another forkcoin?

Dancing girls all the time. It is the main hobby of most females here.

The hope is to have this in as many countries around the world as will allow it. The key being that the government has to grant a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in one of its protected waterways.

Blue Frontiers has opened discussions with other nations that are just as concerned about sea level rise, the fate of their people, their culture, and their homeland.

Hmm...I do know what happens if it is that easy to transfer real wealth 2000 miles away instantly with a mouse click. I get my web hosting service paid for.

But I guess my web hosting service has no value? So you're saying I should not have paid my hosting service any money for that service? They scammed me!?!

Should I be shorting Google stock because all of their value is in digital services?

The sad fact (for you) is that some ones and zeros have value. Just like the word yes or no in certain situations. Yes you got that job. That yes is a pretty great thing. A no would be bad. A picture made up of bits can be a beautiful thing. A whole lot of pictures and sound made out of bits makes some pretty spectacular movies. Saying that the movie is just a bunch of ones and zeros changes nothing about the experience.

I'm not sure how you're even sharing your information about those ones and zeros across thousands of miles without ones and zeros.

I think in Thailand you have to be a citizen to buy...you can lease, which is what most foreigners do. Actually most marry a local and the wife buys the property.

Giving up your US citizenship comes with an exit fee plus you have to pay taxes on all of your assets as if you sold them right then (even without selling it).

You can take the foreign earned income exclusion which is about $102k if you are outside of the US for 330 days out of the year.

The thing is, that's different from capital gains tax...no exclusion there.

I have tried every avenue to turn my bitcoin capital into income. My original idea was to give/loan/etc. my bitcoins to a foreign company in Turks & Caicos (allows for a single owner of a company, 0% capital gains and income taxes).

But there is a law in the US where if you have over 10% ownership in a company and they sell any capital, you have to pay taxes on it as if you yourself sold that capital.

I considered a Charitable Remainder Trust that allows you to put your money into a trust with a certain amount going to a charity upon your death with the rest held by the trust and you can earn income from that. But with that you have to hand over control of all of that money to another entity to invest with no input from you. Part of your investment would be held for the charitable contribution.

Instead I am just hodling until the US collapses. I can cash out (spend) about $37k of my bitcoins each year and pay no taxes. I am a minimalist so that is plenty for me.

Was going to say not to quote the troll but another problem gold and silver has is my situation as a digital nomad traveling the world. How do I pack up all of my belongings and relocate to my next country (as I tend to do) with all of my gold in my suitcase?

The amount of bitcoins I have I can protect with some steel plates and information in my head. I can carry them through even countries like Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam without worrying about them getting stolen or having security confiscate it at the airport. To carry the amount of gold or silver equivalent to how much I have in bitcoins...well, actually I literally could not carry it.

I have no idea how I would pay my hosting service every month with gold. Or buy my plane tickets, book my hotel rooms, buy stuff on Amazon, etc.

I haven't needed to open a bank account here in Tahiti thanks to Bitcoin...I don't need to go to the rip off exchanges in the countries I visit. The rate charged at the local exchange from USD to CPF is literally 20%.

True, there was a movement of textile workers back in the 1800s when weaving machinery was being used to replace the workers. They protested and ended up smashing some of the machinery to stop the take over and save their jobs. The Luddites, as they were known, ended up winning and their jobs were saved. That is why all textiles to this day are made by hand. With millions of people employed as textile workers.

Same thing happened with Gutenberg's printing press. The scribes of the day protested and their managers backed down saving all of their jobs. Thanks to them we all read hand written books and if you are skilled as a scribe it is very easy to find a job.

I doubt that there are many people out there that don't know that Ebola exists. It was on the news a few years ago scaring everyone making them hide in their homes.

But, I'll do my part for social awareness right now.

Ebola exists.

#ebolaawareness

I remember when social awareness was just called education. Or being educated.

But I guess it's not PC to say someone is educated because there are soooo many stupid people out there that at most they can be aware of things.

My social awareness duty for the day: there is breast cancer out there. There, now you are aware. #breastcancerawareness

I paid mine. Long and tedious, especially with the high amount of bitcoin spending I do.

I didn't use any bitcoin tools to do so so it took a lot of hand jamming.

The plan is to have seasteads all over the world and once they're in international waters there will be no visa requirements (other than local requirements).

Well, the site won't mention most of the engineering that is being worked on. There have been many solutions worked on for waste and the goal is full recycling of the waste integrated with hydroponics and food growth. The tricky part will be desalination and not dumping excess salt back into the lagoon which would change the salinity of the water. We may be able to export salt if we can get a process for preparing it for consumption or even use for other things. Much of the water will be gathered from the rain but depending upon storage and different times of the year that may not work all of the time. The waste and food systems guys we have are brilliant and do this stuff for a living.


Here is an initial model of what they would like to have for the pilot project in a French Polynesian lagoon:





This video gives some sea level views of the model:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPIKR8UDDgo

I agree. Building something in middle of the sea is daunting and it will take several years before that will happen. It would be much better to do a gradual approach such as starting in a protected body of water like a lagoon or bay with calm waters. Get all of the logistics figured out there, the engineering, the social challenges, everything you can figure out while still within a safe distance of land to get through that first phase.

Then you can move 12nm out into the ocean where you're still close to land for many supply/logistic type of things but you are challenged by the waves and other things, but at that point you have more national sovereignty. You're protected by the host nation's military but are outside of the jurisdiction of most of their laws which allows you to experiment even more with new social structures.

Then finally you move 200nm out where you have full sovereignty. At that point you're looking to start a nation and have to be out that far to get started. That is certainly a decade away for sure.

This is the approach Blue Frontiers is taking. They will start in a protected lagoon off of one of the islands of French Polynesia. Then go from there. But the key is to at least get started so we're not waiting 100 years to finally start utilizing the 70% of the earth that is covered by oceans.

So a few folks have asked to be kept up to date on the seasteading thing. I'll get into that and some of the reason why Youtube, Google and Facebook banned ICO ads.

We (by "we" I mean Blue Frontiers mostly, I am just a volunteer and am not a paid employee I just help out because I like the project) started working on an ICO last July or August. Being a business of seasteading it was difficult to figure out how to legally raise funds. Being an actual company that will be selling physical products (seasteads) we could not create a utility token. All of the companies we talked to would do utility tokens but hardly any would do a security token (selling shares of the company). We had to talk to many different lawyers, the best in the US (in the crypto world). The uniqueness of a Singapore company with founders in several different countries building seasteads in French Polynesia and likely all over the world made everything very difficult with the lawyers and staying legal by selling shares of the company. There may be some things in the works but nothing that has been tested and vetted.

I learned a lot about securities for those 6 months or so. Not only in the US but then we had to look at jurisdictions all over the world (since we would be selling to everyone in the world). The SEC came out with some guidance basically almost labeling all ICOs as securities. They even brought up the bounty programs that pay people to endorse or advertise their ICO. With a security there are all sorts of laws and rules when it comes to advertising which all of these people posting signature campaigns, bounty programs, etc. are violating those security laws. The same thing applies to Google, Youtube, Facebook advertising ICOs...they would need to evaluate each advertisement to make sure they're not violating those SEC laws. So they just decided to ban them all. One of the big things is that if you claim the token will be more valuable after it is first purchased, you are considered a security. Some company got hit by the SEC in December because one line somewhere online said that the token price might go up in the future. They had to pay back all of the money they raised.

With all of this in mind Blue Frontiers decided to go with an actual currency to be used on the seasteads and be the only currency the company would accept for payment for anything on the seasteads (any private business on the seastead can accept whatever they want, but the company will only take the token as payment). So they will be limiting the amount and distributing a portion in the public ICO on May 15. The token name is Varyon (there were literally 2 other ICOs using the name Seacoin). The name Varyon is a play on the idea that there will be a varyation in governments on these seasteads. They will be starting their pre-sales this week with discounts of 5-15%. All of the nitty gritty is on their white paper.

Being on the ground here in Tahiti...one small group in one of the cities we were considering wanted to use the project as an election time issue (oh no...the evil American billionaires want to come to our lagoon and dump toxic chemicals...and our mayor supports the project...he needs to go!). They aren't really in one of the preferred locations but we decided to tone things down locally until after the election (first election is next week and then the run off is mid-May).

This isn't a discussion about an alt coin, it's a discussion about seasteading.

While Blue Frontiers is doing an ICO for their seastead token (Varyon), I'll leave Blue Frontiers to create a thread in the altcoin section to discuss Varyon.

We need Bitcoin people to get involved in seasteading so that bitcoin can be an integral part in the blockchain based protocols on the seasteads for things like governance, voting, property registration, etc.  Maybe using something like Rootstock or other Bitcoin advances to do so. Implementing Lightning Network as the popular payment system for most seasteads..