We made Grant our CEO a few weeks ago. The plan is to transition things to him as the face of the company for things moving forward in Panama. I am certainly happy to be out of the spotlight. I was more protecting our engineer from the spotlight as he is socially...well, he's a great engineer.

If you want to create your own business and believe you can do it better then great! We are open sourcing our design, we want these in the water. All of us involved just want to live on the ocean so if someone else does it better then that makes our lives easier. I am retired so this is just my passion project.

I would hope that other companies would sprout up creating great homes on the ocean but having been involved in seasteading for a dozen years now I know that it is mainly people just talking on the Internet and nobody actually doing anything. So until that time, we will be the ones actually doing anything while the arm chair quarterbacks sit back and talk about what we should have done while they don't do anything at all.

I can't think of any canned food that I would eat. I saw some canned ham at the store...as I was holding it contemplating if things would get so bad as to need to eat ham from a can...I figured I'd rather go catch some fresh fish than have to resort to such savagery.

I live about 2.5 hours from the closest "Costco" type of store. We usually get supplies for a few weeks at a time when we are there so this time we just got a bit extra just in case.

The thoughts being that if things start getting bad people will flood the grocery stores. There is not much food grown in Panama so it is almost all imported (strangely enough, people always poo pooed the fact that our small 6 meter wide seastead did not produce all of the food we need while full nations do not produce food). If they are importing it from places that get locked down or whichever, then food supply runs low.

Fortunately there is fruit growing on the trees and we bought fishing supplies. So we bought food that goes well with fish and fruit.

If things get really bad we jump on a sailboat and go to the ocean.

Speaking of...the next video in "The First Seasteaders" series is out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OovkeOuZsqU

I was poor enough to get government cheese in the 80s. Apparently they paid farmers to farm cheese but had too much of it so they gave it out to the poor.

https://www.history.com/news/government-cheese-dairy-farmers-reagan

If that is a bookshelf full of hand lotion then it is ideal for a good many people.

The lead up to the halving is usually volatile. The price will drop again once any major publication posts the theory that at halving the miners will all stop mining (along with the implications of what happens to Bitcoin then).

Just enough people will be worried enough to sell bringing the price down yet again.

The lower the better to launch the price rise at halving, when mining continues at its normal pace.


This time around I am not sure how this Corona virus will affect the price. It may turn into a hedge, the Fed will certainly pump as much as they can which helps.

The US is finally getting cases of people affected. China started in November and by January there was full panic. US having first deaths in March could mean full panic mode in May just as the halving happens.

If the mining panic drives the price down, people may not see it as a safe haven during the crisis.

It could either be a perfect storm for a big bitcoin price or the timing counters sentiment such that it is just a normal rise starting at halving.

I certainly went out and stocked up on enough food for about a month. Fortunately I am far from Panama City and there are no reported cases here yet.

Here is the latest video in the series: "The First Seasteaders"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OovkeOuZsqU

Ocean Builders' engineer, Rudiger, bought it with his own funds. He is a big bitcoin holder.

As the bitcoin price rises, our project will thrive with it.

Ocean Builders is getting an Erectorbot 3D printer. One of the largest 3D printers in the world.

http://www.erectorbot.com/

When did scientists stop working to cure diseases?

Is it because they can make more money injecting the 99.99% of people that do not have the disease than they can make curing the .001%?

People fell for this fake tweet back in 2018 too.

https://www.businessinsider.com/fake-trump-tweet-about-stock-market-dow-jones-2018-2?op=1

Do not fear the coronavirus.

Prepare for the government exploitation/reaction to the hysteria.

They knew it was a lot of bitcoins they had control of. They joked at times that they were together (rare) that maybe they should put the keys together and be rich. If at any time I felt worried I could move my coins. They put them in safety deposit boxes.


Ya, that was another portion of my coins. I had my backup passphrase on the seastead. I had the trezor with me.

Fleeing the navy on a sailboat under threat of death while also believing I may have just lost a few hundred k worth of bitcoins was beyond stressful.

Protecting your keys is no joke. Most people don't figure "what happens if the government comes and steals my house".

Before my flight from Thailand I had most of my bitcoins on cryptosteel wallets evenly distributed which I carried around all over the world (letters and numbers scrambled in a way that only I knew).

I also created a printed copy, 2 halves of each private key.

I gave them to two of my non-crypto family members that I knew could keep them safe. I told them if I die to combine the papers. They didn't really know what that meant but were fine with locking them away safely for me.

After I made it safely to Panama after Thailand took my house (along with my cryptosteel), I got on a video chat with each of my two family members and had them read off the numbers so I could combine them and secure my bitcoins.

That was my dead man's switch.

Sure, in theory, my family members could have combined the papers and took all of my money...but I trust them with my life so I was not worried about that.

Earth by decree?

No king is going to tell me that this is Earth!

All of my factory orders in China have told me that they went back to work this week.

The dude proved it in his death. If the Earth was round, he would have launched into space and would now be dead floating in space.

Instead he bounced off of the (giant ceiling?) and plummeted back to his death.

QED

The generator was necessary for running the water pumps that we used to pump the water out of the spar after lowering it to put the platform on top. We used it for some welding as well and decided to keep it there as a backup generator.

You like to mix the 3 different projects I've been involved in to somehow be one project. I worked with a couple of guys about 6 years ago on a project called Marinea. The plan for that was initially to build a large concrete seastead in the Bahamas, we spent about a year planning the design and working on things like "how do we get water, Internet, electricity, food, waste disposal, etc."...typical stuff you discuss when talking about seasteading. We sent letters to some people in government of the Bahamas (by "we", I don't mean we all sat there writing a document). The architect and construction guy had a disagreement with the marketing guy who was in charge so the marketing guy shifted focus to buying a floating hotel that he had been researching for years (he sent his brother down to Florida to inspect it, I saw it once as I drove by but never got on it). With all of the SEC laws that prevent people from raising money, the strategy for raising funds to buy the boat was through some sort of membership deal. Pay $100 for membership and you get some sort of benefits at the hotel (free night, etc.). The marketing guy had big dreams that we'd get tens of thousands of people joining up. Once we were ready to move forward on it I posted a couple of times about the idea (which Franky immediately attacked). I was the only one in that project that actually put money into it. I did not have a huge amount of money but I put $10k toward the project so we could get the website going and pay for things like establishing a company, opening a bank account, paying for some professional renderings of our final design, etc.
They only had about 5 people buy membership which were all refunded after we realized we would not raise the $10 million or so needed to make things work.

Marinea is still trying to exist but it's just one guy and his wife with the dream of buying that floating hotel.

Taking the lessons learned from that experience I moved on to the more prominent project from the Seasteading Institute of Blue Frontiers. I flew to Tahiti to meet everyone involved at their conference. There were about 100 people at the conference and there was a great energy of people wanting to make this happen. So I jumped into that project as a volunteer focusing on blockchain solutions for the seastead. With all of the very intelligent people involved and the Memorandum of Understanding with French Polynesia I was confident that this project would actually happen after 10 years of seastead talk. Fortunately at that time the bitcoin price was going up to $20k and I no longer needed to work at my day job and I was able to retire thanks to bitcoin. I did invest about a quarter million into Blue Frontiers but was only one of several major investors. My role in that company was as a volunteer because I wanted it to work out and put my money where my mouth was. They spent about 10 months working on the funding strategy working with lawyers and ICO companies, they had a call with Vitalik, they were spending a lot of money so they had a lot of high profile individuals involved trying to figure out the whole situation of building in French Polynesia while trying to raise money from every nation in the world, including the US and its draconian laws. Their final solution was a token called Varyon which would be a token used as payment for anything related to Blue Frontiers (an Ethererum smart contract), Blue Frontiers would be in charge of the sea zone so this would allow them to charge for use of the sea zone. I promoted Varyon as much as I could as one of hundreds of people promoting it (everyone else was getting paid to do so, I did it out of passion for the project).
The ICO went live as bitcoin was crashing and the ICO bubble had popped. Part of the smart contract included a signed contract that refunded all of the money if they did not reach X number of varyon purchased. They raised almost a million dollars but fell short of the goal by about $50k (not many people knew about the refund until it was too late). All of the money was refunded (except us initial investors who were left with nothing).

Blue Frontiers still has the occasional meeting and I believe they are still trying to find a country that will give them a sea zone, but they are likely out of money by now.

As I was wrapping things up with Blue Frontiers I met this german aeronautical engineer in Bangok (Rudiger). He had already begun working on his floating platform and explained that his ultimate goal is to build a launch loop for launching payloads into space. I left Tahiti and went to see what he was working on in Thailand. He had the spar and platform being built by two separate companies. The spar was being built by a steel company that was used to building large pontoons for gold mining rigs. The platform was being built by a french boat builder who specialized in large party catamarans.
I arrived in Thailand and stayed on Rudiger's yacht as we discussed seasteading and the idea that if he wants to build a launch loop in middle of the ocean he'll need a full city of floating homes for the workers as well as supporting businesses and structures, etc. He liked that he would be able to go back to his home town and work on his superconductors while my girlfriend and I stayed on the seastead (which was initially meant just as a watch tower for his launch prototype). He thought it would be a good idea to replicate these things and sell them. His goal not being to make any money off of them (he's Vladmir club wealthy), but to get things built up so he can have homes for the workers of the launch loop. I volunteered to help, my gf speaks Thai and English so she was useful in translating with the steel workers. We would visit the sites when he was off working on his superconductor experiments and give him status reports. I brought my full SCUBA gear and he had plenty of his own so we would go diving at the site and sailing, I began some biorock experiments because he wanted to build large structures in the water and we felt that biorock was a viable option as the price of solar comes down. He paid for the full build of the platform and spar. I would catch a check here and there as he was letting me stay on his boat but it was Thailand so I was hardly spending any money (fortunately since the bitcoin price had dipped). I put Rudiger in contact with everyone he needed to talk to through my contacts with Ocean Builders and the Seasteading Institute. After having seen so many crypto projects get started promising the world only to never deliver I stressed that we should not advertise the sale of any of our seasteads until we had one in the water. We were excited about the project as it moved forward but kept it under wraps publicly because we did not want to promise something only for the thing to fail and disappoint a lot of people (like with Blue Frontiers). We also didn't want to waste money on advertising and marketing (avoiding all of the failures of Blue Frontiers) and lawyers and endless money pit meetings, etc. We did contact a few lawyers in Thailand and spoke to the harbor master about what we were doing. Each lawyer told us that because what we were doing was 12nm out Thailand had no say in it. The harbor master didn't want to be bothered by it (it didn't fit into any category he knew how to deal with). So our plan was to prove ourselves to Thailand by building the first structure then getting 20 orders to show Thailand that we would be bringing money to their country. We planned on taking a 1% deposit keeping the first 20 homes at or below the cost to build them. We brought out a group of people from Blue Frontiers who were likely customers to show them the launch of the seastead. Unfortunately the biggest storm in 60 years hit on the week we planned to launch so we had to postpone (still not going public). Joe Quirk brought a camera crew for the event and got plenty of good footage for his videos. Once we got it in the water I started posting blogs and contacting friendly independent media (I had been talking to Reason about it for a while and we've been talking to a journalist at Wired who is still working with us). I posted on bitcointalk but of course Franky attacked me talking about Blue Frontiers and Marinea and how we don't know what solar panels are and have no idea that there are off the shelf water makers that our boat manufacturer has been installing on boats for years.
That venture left me down about $100k worth of stuff in Thailand (my boat, vehicle, all of my possessions on the seastead, etc.).

So now we move forward in Panama. At this point I am more than a volunteer. I am now one of the founders along with our CEO that joined us to move forward on the business side. We are still only taking deposits toward peoples' homes. Refundable $100 deposit which will require 20% deposit when we begin building the customer's actual home (likely to take place this summer). We already have a few people that have reserved their SeaPods. Each of the founders plans on buying one, we have the eco resort guy and we've actually not even started advertising that we are taking deposits yet outside of Anarchapulco and silently updating our website. I have an e-mail list of about 1000 people who have expressed interest on the website that I have not updated yet. We're all still getting back from travel before we begin letting them know. We are busy setting up our factory (the building material just arrived last week). The concrete has been poured for the footings and we pour the floor next week. Our 3D printer has been delayed but we will finally get that in about a month (we've been waiting for that for a while to get moving forward). The coronavirus has delayed our rolling machine and crane for the factory but we're hoping they all get here around the beginning of April (hopefully the factory is finished by then).

Ocean Builders' ultimate goal is a space launch, it always has been. That's why in Thailand I knew that when they were charging us with trying to create a new nation they would not find any evidence of it because that was never the goal. Sure, as a libertarian I am in it for the ability to live somewhere away from territorial law, but as I have stated many times, a seastead nation makes about as much sense as a bitcoin bank. It seems people who supposedly understand Bitcoin don't even grasp that concept.

We're moving forward, all with our own money. We don't actually need investors and Rudiger does not want any (until he's built his small scale launch loop prototype). We've spent around half a million of our own money so far moving this project forward in Panama. Workers are happy, Panama is happy, we are going to make sure our customers get the most awesome homes they've ever seen. If the bitcoin price hits $40k or higher...this project is going to be crazy funded (we are all bitcoin hodlers).

Not sure what to tell ya, we're going to make it happen. You'll just have to sit back and witness history being made from behind your computer screen.

Again...source?


You literally just posted a picture of the solar panels on top of the seastead (which ran our water maker which you keep going on and on about).

6 240 Watt panels connected to 6 12V marine batteries, plenty of energy for our refrigerator, lights, water pump, water maker and wall sockets for charging our phones, laptops, repeater (for 22Mbps Internet) and marine radios.


But you do not listen so I am going back to ignoring you and your "you (and the many people working on this project) aren't thinking about "<insert things we're constantly thinking about here>" due to not explaining every little thing to me online (even though I have no intention of ever supporting the project and will only ignore or twist anything you say and make up my own BS to fit my narrative).