How many acres total now?
Getting up to near 140 acres now. I read a whole Wikipedia page and all I learnt is that you own 124 football field. Given the fact I have never saw a football field (as football is the wrong name for the wrong sport, over there), still, I don't know how much land you do own, but I guess it's a pretty big garden. Well done! Repeat after me : An acre is the area of a rectangle whose length is one furlong and whose width is one chain. You all need to turn in your Pink Floyd fan cards if you missed this reference. https://youtu.be/YR5ApYxkU-U?t=68 |
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How many acres total now?
Getting up to near 140 acres now. I read a whole Wikipedia page and all I learnt is that you own 124 football field. Given the fact I have never saw a football field (as football is the wrong name for the wrong sport, over there), still, I don't know how much land you do own, but I guess it's a pretty big garden. Well done! Repeat after me : An acre is the area of a rectangle whose length is one furlong and whose width is one chain. |
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Everyone should actively work to find some good hobby to stay sane in 2 years after that.  Rick and I just bought another 68 acres of land abutting our existing acquisition. What have I done... More acres for training your killer bees to attack race cars. "Go fast or get stung" |
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- Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) Test — The most accurate of all, slow, detects antigens (i.e., shows if you currently have the virus).
If memory serves, there is some controversy with PCR tests. Specifically, it will also test positive if you've had C19 in the past, as the dead tissue and cells do linger around for some time - is what I'm hearing. Maybe the antibodies even trigger a positive PCR test. Fuck. I dunno. Anal swabs all the way. Most accurate. Trust me. The PCR test, whose inventor said it should not be used to detect a virus, just multiplies whatever you are trying to test for. Essentially they go through cycles to multiply whatever is being tested. Too high of cycles and they pretty much come out positive almost every time. At 40 cycles they pretty much come back positive almost every time. The CDC was requiring PCR tests with 40 cycles up until Biden was inaugurated when it was lowered (and what do ya know, cases started going down). "Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left" "Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,”" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.htmlI will have to trust you on the anal swabs. I've been able to avoid getting tested so far. I opted out of visiting my own cruise ship because Panama required that I get tested to go onboard. Screw those guys, I wasn't willing to add to their numbers. |
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Just as a matter of interest, how has the funding requirements changed since 2017... because I doubt that those prices would still be applicable after 4 years? (Also with the actual building experience done by Elwar) Normally the cost estimation is way different from the actual cost, once you start a project like this. (Lots of things pop up, that was never thought of when it was done on paper)  It is a pity that the Thai government crashed the project, because it would have been a dream come true to see something like that. What about a seastead without the libertarian independence, but rather a seastead for libertarians to live. (based on a Bitcoin economy where most commerce are done with bitcoins) - People can still offer fiat payment for visitors, but the people living there will mostly use Crypto currencies.  The key is that it's really difficult to estimate the price of one of the super megastructure seasteads. I will give a word of advice if you ever consider investing in a seastead project. Only put money in if it's going directly to pay construction workers building the actual thing. Everything else is just paying a bunch of guys to sit around in meetings, paying for marketing, paying for trips to various sunny locations, etc. I put way too much money into seastead projects where this was all that was done. At Ocean Builders I keep pushing the founders to not spend money on marketing or people just sitting around theorising (the founders are not paid salaries, we put almost every bit of our investment into the factory, the materials and the workers). Everything we spend money on, I remind them how much that will push the price of the individual home up for the final buyer. And we are trying to make these affordable. I know of 4 projects right now. One is a super megastructure that has been burning through millions of dollars over the past 5 years coming up with designs, lawyers, negotiations, meetings, etc. They appear to be hoping that someone will be willing to pay over a billion dollars for one of their units. They are not trying to do anything political, just sell luxury homes. I will not endorse this project as it does not seem viable. Another is focusing on floating wave breakers that create energy from the waves. They're approaching it practically, working with a government under the premise of protecting the shores of that country while creating energy. They are self funded with a couple of guys out on a big research vessel trying out their technology. I hope they do well. Another is a small scale floating home like Ocean Builders but theirs can take some rough waves, built so waves could go over them and they'd still be ok: https://ventivefloathouse.com/Ocean Builders https://oceanbuilders.com is focusing right now on manufacturing and sales. We're a bunch of engineers that haven't manufactured anything before so it wouldn't make sense for us to start building and selling seasteads in middle of the ocean. Instead we're taking a phased approach, starting with just what is essentially a "houseboat" that will be like a luxury floating home in a beautiful anchorage in Panama, anchored right next to dozens of other anchored boats near a marina so there's really no legal or new lifestyle we need to create from scratch, there are already people there living in the water. This will allow us to get the process of building floating homes down before expanding into deep water versions. The deep water versions will just put the living portion of the home on a new spar built for different seas. But we're likely a few years from being anywhere other than the small anchorage we're at right now, and most people are not willing to move to Panama just to live in a floating house so we'll be focusing mainly on local investors. We already have plenty of demand, now we need to get production up to meet the demand. |
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From a technical perspective, yes, from a realistic perspective, no.
There isn't any reason why businesses within a state wouldn't be able to use a payment processor to accept bitcoin, provided regulations are not excessively cumbersome. There also isn't any reason why businesses couldn't accept altcoins via the same payment processor.
I also don't see why businesses in Tennessee, for example, would be willing to accept TNcoin in masse if this altcoin doesn't have any special value above what any other random altcoin has. I also don't see why the market would give any special value to this altcoin if state taxes must be paid in dollars, and if dollars must be accepted for payment.
The US Dollar has a world reserve currency status. This means that dollars are accepted throughout the world, and merchants often give preference to Dollars over the local currency. If a US state were to try to do this, the majority of financial transactions would still occur in US dollars.
This would be the key. If you could somehow make the currency attributes specific to that state then people would be encouraged to use it. Like, maybe it's a POS token where there is a rewarded amount given out to every citizen of the state every transaction or some sort of distribution based on property or something unique to that state (oil in Texas, Uranium in Utah, etc.). The USD is a world reserve currency but it is being destroyed. The latest $2 trillion stimulus bill is being used as a weapon against states, tying contingencies to accepting the funds to states such as not allowing them to lower taxes, encouraging them to raise taxes, etc. The Federal Reserve is run by the Federal government and if the individual states keep using the dollar they will lose their independence as the Federal government just needs to print out more dollars to bribe the states into centralising power. If the states want to take their sovereignty back they need to take their currency back into their own hands. Sure, taxes could be paid in USD. Just like when I charge up my phone card on bitrefill with bitcoins. I don't use dollars but the phone company gets dollars. The USD could just be some unused accounting currency for dealing with the government while everything else is in crypto. |
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Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution enumerates several powers to Congress including:
To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;
To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;
Article 1, Section 10, Clause 1 of the US Constitution limits the powers of States, including:
No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit (emphasis added); make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.
As it stands right now, states do not accept gold or silver coin as payment for debts. The Federal government does not coin money.
This is all done by a third party, Federal Reserve.
So why would a state not be able to use a third party crypto created specifically for their state by an anonymous "Satoshi" type?
I recall one push long ago in Iceland where someone created an Iceland currency, they sent X amount of coins to every registered citizen of the country (at least, they made it available to be claimed).
Something similar could certainly be done for a state. The key would be setting it up so businesses and individuals could use the currency within the state fairly easily.
It appears that the US Federal government is ok with destroying the dollar. If a state wanted to protect their economy from going down with everyone else they could start using another currency.
Even if it's required to accept USD for taxes, there could be a single exchange for paying your taxes with the new local currency such that you never even touch a dollar.
Any thoughts?
*Self Moderated due to franky1 likely thinking that a simple question is me trying to pass some "get rich quick" scheme. Even though every project I have invested in since getting involved in Bitcoin has left me with much less money.
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Would you trust your bank with your bitcoin to earn interest?
What's a bank? That some kind of old-timey institution grandpa used? I remember hearing about it as a kid around the camp fire when it was time for scary stories. |
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If you cross reference all of this criteria, you'll find that it narrows it down to about a half dozen states at most.
This is fun stuff. I would personally place a high value on a functioning government: The recent experience in Texas pointed out that you can have a wonderfully independent rancho apocalypse that insulates you from government stupidity however it puts you on a high value target list for your freezing and starving neighbors. I prefer to live in an area where I don't have to evaluate my neighbors based on their caloric content. Mostly because that's a lot of un-needed stress. I'm pretty sure the Texans didn't kill and eat each other during the blackout. You are correct. In fact most of us (who I know) helped each other with water, heat etc. Texans are pissed about what happened, and it exposed issues in our infrastructure, systems, and government. But we will fix it. I am not a native Texan, but I have lived here long enough to appreciate who they (we) are. My brother is in Texas, it was a bit of hot potato with the kids going to stay with whichever families had electricity/water. His house was one of the last to get it but he had one of his kids friends stay because he lived in a trailer park and they were having water issues. I think anyone that can shop for what state they want to live in should also be able to be self sufficient for water and electric. One curveball I'll throw out is that due to the pandemic people are fleeing the big cities leaving apartments and condos at extremely low prices. Just from an investment standpoint it may be wise to buy something downtown New York in the heart of tyranny. Maybe after Cuomo is thrown in jail he'll be replaced by someone slightly less bad and after a year with no more plandemic lockdowns the prices will go up as people realise that they miss being able to walk to the theater. |
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Jamie Dimon is probably spinning in his grave. I think you probably meant J.P. himself. Jamie is still alive, but when bitcoin moons (again) he'll likely have a heart attack and die. Then he'll spin in his grave. I know what I said.  |
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Jamie Dimon is probably spinning in his grave. |
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This is my personal list, or choices, of states, in the US: Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, and North Dakota.
If anyone who lives in those states can comment, would be much appreciated. Although I am currently living in another country and bounce around a couple of them, and I will probably not go to the US to live there for a long time even if I can legally. My relatives live in Illinois, but it's not really an issue for me to live elsewhere.
I've lived in Arizona growing up (in the summers). It's ok...yes, the heat is an issue that you need to get used to. It certainly has its different areas, north in the mountains it can get cool. South near Tucson it's just wide open desert. Phoenix has its rich and poor areas as most cities do. I lived there as a kid so I wouldn't know much about the taxes, gun rights, property rights, etc. The way everyone deals with the heat is they go from their air conditioned house to their air conditioned car to their air conditioned business. You come back to your super hot car where I have literally fogged up the windows from my sweat evaporating from the heat. |
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As some may know, I tend to want to be able to spend my bitcoins so I'm always looking at how to do so. I just found this awesome service that may change everything. https://paywithmoon.com/It just came out but it's a browser extension (I installed it on Brave) that allows you to pay with bitcoin on US websites that accept Visa payments. You go through the payment process on the website as usual...shopping cart, checkout, all that. Then you choose to pay with credit card, it gives you your total. Then you open up your Moon extension which asks you to input your total amount, then takes a Lightning payment (or Coinbase payment if you connect it) and then it gives you a one time prepaid visa card which you can then copy into the credit card payment and you're all set. No bank required. However, I did test it out on some obscure clothing store website that my wife has been wanting some clothes from for months but I told her since they don't accept bitcoin we can only shop on Amazon (through purse.io). The website rejected the payment with an error of "High Risk". Fortunately the extension has the option to refund the funds so no big deal. (Edit: This may be due to me signing in from Panama.) This opens things up quite a bit for the folks asking "but where can I spend my bitcoin?". |
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Sounds good...will be taken under consideration when building a custom "dream house".
The only question right now is: where?
Current thinking is to go bi-coastal (a combo of FL/WA-OR-CO; Caribbean/WA-OR or even FL/Canada (Vancouver?)...less likely is one house in US, one in Europe (London or something sunny, like Portugal).
Portugal has something good going with a golden visa, but learning Portuguese might be difficult (or not).
This is something that many of us WOers will seriously need to consider. And by the looks of it, this will need to happen sooner than some may have imagined. Bob is building a ranch, Jimbo is buying a lake (man, that sounds so cool), Elwar is into seasteading (not without its troubles, but still, he's pursuing his dream). I'm also thinking of different possibilities. It's not easy to be rich. Sometimes not having a choice is much easier than having many choices and not being able to decide (although I'd take the second option anytime). If you live in the U.S., here's my advice to narrow things down (which I did): 1. States that favor private property rights and other freedoms (usually conservative) 2. States that have low or no income taxes 3. States that have low property taxes (this is huge!!) 4. States with moderate climates and a longer growing season 5. States that don't have to deal much, if at all, with natural disasters (i.e., tornadoes, tropical storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, mudslides, etc.) 6. States with low electricity costs 7. States that have lots of available, lost cost land within 10-20 miles of a major city 8. City near where you will live has a decent airport with international flights If you cross reference all of this criteria, you'll find that it narrows it down to about a half dozen states at most. Really you narrowed it down to Texas. Except for #3 which is balanced by #2. Other areas of the gulf coast may qualify, and perhaps Tennessee. Of the "other gulf coast states besides TX and FL", Alabama, for instance, has a ~5% income tax, which applies to capital gains AFAIK, but that could be offset by their very low property tax rate. Also, that state will remain red forever, which would be a pro for me. I like that the Oklahoma house passed a bill saying that the state could decided the constitutionality of any federal law or executive order, as far as wether or not they will enforce it. OK could be a hidden gem. There's always NH, the free state. But most would be turned off by the cold. I won't recommend Panama. They displayed their tyranny during the plandemic by locking us all in our homes, only allowing men to go to the grocery store 2 times a week during a 2 hour window each day. They're finally opening up but at a huge cost to the economy. That's another thing to factor in. These places that destroyed their economies...now they need you to fund the government since nobody else has any money. |
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Sounds good...will be taken under consideration when building a custom "dream house".
The only question right now is: where?
Current thinking is to go bi-coastal (a combo of FL/WA-OR-CO; Caribbean/WA-OR or even FL/Canada (Vancouver?)...less likely is one house in US, one in Europe (London or something sunny, like Portugal).
Portugal has something good going with a golden visa, but learning Portuguese might be difficult (or not).
This is something that many of us WOers will seriously need to consider. And by the looks of it, this will need to happen sooner than some may have imagined. Bob is building a ranch, Jimbo is buying a lake (man, that sounds so cool), Elwar is into seasteading (not without its troubles, but still, he's pursuing his dream). I'm also thinking of different possibilities. It's not easy to be rich. Sometimes not having a choice is much easier than having many choices and not being able to decide (although I'd take the second option anytime). If you live in the U.S., here's my advice to narrow things down (which I did): 1. States that favor private property rights and other freedoms (usually conservative) 2. States that have low or no income taxes 3. States that have low property taxes (this is huge!!) 4. States with moderate climates and a longer growing season 5. States that don't have to deal much, if at all, with natural disasters (i.e., tornadoes, tropical storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, mudslides, etc.) 6. States with low electricity costs 7. States that have lots of available, lost cost land within 10-20 miles of a major city 8. City near where you will live has a decent airport with international flights If you cross reference all of this criteria, you'll find that it narrows it down to about a half dozen states at most. No income tax is not as necessary when you retire from bitcoin. That's mainly capital gains. I would add...gun laws. Eventually you will be gunning down people invading your land. You may want to keep an eye on Nevada's free city laws. Check out https://www.blockchains.com/Tim Draper even mentioned that he is looking to buy 50k acres in Nevada for such a venture. Then again, there are the pro-Bitcoin cities like Miami. |
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So I finally signed up for the Fold card, touted for being bitcoin friendly...rewarding you with satoshis every time you spend using the card...
went to the deposit page to load the card with money for spending and...
no bitcoin option. Just a bunch of bank related options.
Sucks. That was the first card I have signed up for in about 20 years only because it was bitcoin friendly. Only to find out it just has a rewards gimmick.
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I heard you like rockets so I made this gif  this is a video capture from the first successful landing of the new spacex starship rocket. I don't know how they made it, it looks unreal, computer animated. Most likely a drone captured that. Looks like it lost a booster at the end there. |
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Strangely enough, about a week before the Thai navy came after us a friend of mine told me that he has had friends killed who were trying to create technology to go into space.
Mainstreaming space will definitely open a can of worms and rock a few boats. One eye opening thing I was told is...whoever controls Earth's orbit, controls access to space for all humans. And eventually the whole world. This is a good point. Never thought about that. I question this whole idea.. sounds like more pie in the sky man trying to suggest that he can control nature without screwing it up.. how the fuck are you going to change the Earth's orbit without engaging in major screw ups? Fantasy landia in science and military matters might even be worse than the fantasies in the etherhead space... or life extension bullshit suggesting that peeps can live until 500 or some other nonsense like that.. . when you would be lucky to get to 100 and still have anything close to quality of life.. a rare beast who makes it to 100 and still has some semblance of quality of life.. indeed.  I'm not talking about changing the orbit. It's about having control of the space in Earth's orbit. Mainly...if anything flies from Earth to space, they will need approval of whomever has all of their technology up there. Once someone is in a position to shoot down anything coming into space, they have full control over all future access to space. They also likely have the ability to destroy things on Earth from space such that they can now dictate what is done on Earth. Akin to people living on an island and a single company now owns all of the boats right off of the island. Anyone new creating a boat and putting it in the water will have it sunk immediately. These boats may also have artillery to shell the land. Whomever owns all of those boats now controls the island and any considerations of expanding off of the island. |
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[...]
Will Bitcoin crash with the market or will Bitcoin be seen as a hedge. [...]
I think it's still a risk asset so it will tank together with financials. But it will shoot back up again and surprisingly fast. Just because the FED raises interest rates does not mean there will be no (long term) inflation anymore. I would consider this one of the ultimate buy the dip moments that Bitcoin has 1 to 3 times a year. Yeah, I noticed that even with gold back when I followed it. It would initially crash with the stock market during a big event but long term in a bad market it would rise. |
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find a country willing to part with sovereignty
Please find me a country willing to part with a bit of sovereignty. Apparently a nation sees a threat if even one square inch of their country is no longer under benevolent control of its mighty government. To take that away is to imply that the government is not the best in the world. It's like saying "can't we just have one guy on <insert your favorite sportsball team> wear a different uniform?". Government is a religion. To ask your religion to allow just a tiny bit of another religion in their realm is blasphemy. |
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