I am constrained by physical infrastructure to a finite number of ISPs.

Security providers are equally constrained by infrastructure to a region.

For example, my local county puts up for bid the area contract for Emergency Medical Services (EMS) every couple of years.  The EMS contract basically entails providing medical transport service to the nearest hospital.  This does not take a huge infrastructure but it is enough that we normally only see two bids and this is because we are in a border region between two EMS companies.  A third bid has not happened in a decade. That third bid has to resources to put people and equipment into the region.  Lack of adjacency to the area becomes cost prohibitive.

A similar problem occurs for provision of more physical security in my neighborhood

My local neighborhood is outside of city limits.  Our police security is provided by the county.  We, as a group, decided it was not sufficient for our needs.  We then let out an RFP and received bids from two companies.  One was serving the community immediately up the road from us, the other was serving the community immediately down the road.  Again, proximity drove the economics of the bids.  The company providing services in the next valley over declined to submit a bid since they did not have resources in the area.

Unlike the RFP to have someone code your latest and greatest computer game, security is tied to location.  I would be foolish to hire a security team that did not have a physical presence in my immediate area.  A security company would be foolish to accept contracts in places where they have no presence.  Neither I as a customer nor they as a vendor want their business to be dispersed across the land.  This leads to a natural monopoly.


The more power and authority given to the provider, ostensibly to perform their responsibilities, the more defined the borders are. 

The EMS company in the example above does not provide services beyond the end of the dirt road.  Instead an air evacuation service using helicopters is called in.  Different company, different bids, different service area and a different price structure.  When I chose to go beyond the dirt road, I purchase insurance in case I get a broken leg at 3500 feet in a box canyon.  It covers the helicopter evacuation.

The security guard in my neighborhood has a cell phone and a camera.  He documents and calls for back up.  The sheriff provides the physical security at gun point.  However, the sheriff does not have jurisdiction in the town I drive through on the way to work nor in the harbor district I actually work in.  The town has it's own police force.  The harbor district has a security force and a mutual aid agreement with the federal coast guard facility.  Again, borders that are clearly defined by resources, authority and responsibility.

Simply put, in theory there is no difference between the theory of market based security and the practice of security.  In practice, market based security is not infinitely divisible with neighbors A, B and C each choosing a different policeman to watch their street.

More likely, you could only sell arms to those selected by the local seapower.  Given that effective seapower tends to be reserved for the larger powers in the world, they tend to act against destabilizing influences, and selling arms tends to be destabilizing, your list of allowed customers might be very short.

And yet the borderlands are where the trouble always starts...

The problem for the consumer is that there is some tacit level of cooperation between A and B.  Unless the security violation by A is above a certain threshold B will not be willing to incur the cost of dealing with it.  The territorial ambitions of China in the Philippine Sea is an excellent example of this.  Fishermen from the wrong security provider are experiencing losses due to theft by fishermen from the right security provider.  The various involved security providers are unwilling to escalate beyond a certain point.  Fishermen have reduced security.

No.  Have not read referenced book.  How does it explain the Parcel islands and Falkland Islands security situations?

You want security from that too?  Your bitcoin wallet is not big enough.  Better stay inside the US associated treaty networks and don't piss off them off.

Either that or go to to Iran/NK/??? and see if you like/trust their offer better.

Just noticed the color of his ignore button.

That explains much.

Two security organizations are competing for your business.  You pick A as your provider.  B now has an incentive to reduce your security (either actively or passively)  in order to show you the error of your choice. 

This is destabilizing at the interaction boundaries between security providers.

Even if both A and B don't act in a selfish manner (unlikely),  there is still an additional cost to determining whether A or B has jurisdiction when a security upset occurs. Even assuming they have an agreement in hand before the upset,  jurisdiction and extradition will add cost,  reduce effectiveness and generally reduce security provided to the consumer.

9/10ths of the way to 1000 posts and I don't see "americans" in the thread discussion.

False advertising or just off topic?

I think you have missed the point that totally separate from any deal enforcement, a military force is needed to protect people and property from theft.  Whether that force is "military ", "militia ", "police " or the local street gang; there has always been a market for providing security.

The nature of the provided resource "security " is a natural monopoly since local competition reduces security and larger providers increase service levels.

For a real world example look at the past twenty years in Somalia.

For a small fee, I will write up a security plan.  I happen to have some contacts with folks who can implement the plan once it is agreed on.  Seal Team 6 would no longer be a concern.

Guaranteed to attract Seal Team 6.

And buying your own private island was hugely different from seasteading?

I'm not seeing a realistic threat assessment or security plan for Bitcoin Island either.

In fact it looks like a perfect kidnapping / hostage taking opportunity.   Bunch of nobodies with money in an obscure location holding  a fortune in untraceable currency.

What could go wrong?

Multinational anti piracy force

http://www.straitstimes.com/breaking-news/singapore/story/saf-takes-over-command-multinational-anti-piracy-task-force-20130307


If you think this is better handled by private companies read about the Dutch East India Trading Company.

Security from who?

What is the threat assessment?

Why does this thread read like a bunch of 14 year old kids planning to run away from home so they don't have to do chores any more?

I don't know what the problem is.

I always pay every tax that I owe promptly and without complaint.

To say anything else would give the IRS probable cause to investigate me, right?

In an infinite amount of time perhaps. 

In the mean time, it will just asymptotically approach zero and we will redefine British Thermal Units (BTU) to British Thermal Counters.

This will solve all of our energy and monetary problems for the foreseeable future.

 

Personally, I have just started paying with BTC for all my purchases....

Of course, it is not my problem if the merchant doesn't have the technological skills to accept BTC.

I don't know why they are calling me the Bitcoin Bandit.

Let me fix your problem for you...

As BTC become so rare that even one Sotashi is too large a unit for routine purchases, the transactioners will implement the following change on all bit coins that are transacted:

One Byte coin will be issued in place of each Sotashi worth of BTC that would be issued.  The new BYT will be as sub-divisible as the old BTC.

Seems like it works for me...

I would go twice the depth of the longest period wave known to have happened in the region and in water at least 10 times as deep as that period.  Anything less and life could get interesting.  I remember a storm where at 200 feet down, the low pressure area between the wave crests pulled our submarine up to the surface.  It was interesting getting back down.  Luckily there were no broken bones and all the gear was repairable.

If your goal is to avoid seasickness, I recommend staying on dry land.  IF that is a dominant concern in your design for a seastead, you really should not be going to sea.  Not everyone should go to sea.


You would contemplate commuting from your seastead to where???  You would allow the systems you depend on to protect your family and all you possess to be in anything less than perfect working order?  Please don't seastead and if you must, please don't do it near me.


A 400 foot snorkel?

That "military grade" equipment is actually SUBSAFE grade.  Go read about SUBSAFE and the USS Thresher for a better understanding of why SUBSAFE is not cheap.  Those CO2 scrubbers and O2 generators are not military luxuries, they are what allow you to live long enough that you can fix the crap that put you at the bottom of the sea.  Besides, what is so fancy about purifying water and splitting it to get O2?  If that is not a simple process you can sketch out on a napkin over beers with your neighbor, you might not want to be going to sea in a submarine.


I will not go to sea in a concrete vessel ever again.  Please never mention that idea again.



They appear to be worth every dollar that was paid for them.

How does that freedom from non-libertarian regulations and taxes compare to the increased taxes and regulations that will be part of keeping the seastead floating?  We _know_ there will be an increase in cost to do anything at sea.  You _hope_ that libertarian regulations and taxes will be more efficient and effective in an at sea environment than _any_ current system anywhere on land and that the increase in efficiency will offset the increase in cost.

Even if you are correct that libertarian regulations and taxes are dramatically better than anything we have today, as soon as Nauru decides to emulate you, your competitive advantage is gone.


The organizing force of most new world nations shared a heritage and language.  The individual national histories are how they consolidated the people around them to that heritage and language.  That process (and conflict) continues today.  Ideally your seastead won't have to deal with a civil war over debt based labor slavery or "Indian wars" over land use or religious wars between the Minnowites and the Sharkafians.  Of course, if you are not careful about making sure you have "common ground" with your neighbors you may find they will take your ground and leave you "treading water".

How much time have you spent at sea?  Have you ever watched barnacle growth sink a float?  Ever seen a boat sunk by sea lions climbing up on it?  This is the daily stuff that happens at the water front.

Ever watch storm waves bend steel?  Ever see waves sweep decks clear of protecting bulwarks?  When the sea decides to take something there is nothing you can do.

That is not the scary part.  The scariest part of the ocean is the part we don't know.  Rogue waves were a myth when I first went to sea.  Now we know they are real.  Giant squid were inventions of map makers when I first started looking at charts.  Now we have pictures of them.

We know so little about what is out there that ships and submarines run into (submerged) mountains where none are supposed to exist.  Even in well charted waters, reefs are recorded miles away from where they actually are.  We are just starting to get a handle on what kind of risks are entailed by subsea land slides.   This stuff is just starting to be figured out (http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1707/).  Kind of hard to engineer for risks that are not even well understood.  Makes me think of this kind of problem .(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TankerSchenectady.jpg)


I have looked through the seastead literature several times in my life.  If it had as much reality to it as this design  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Artisan_(AFDB-1)) I would be a little less skeptical.  At least AFDB-1 could lift up it's own parts for maintenance without depending on running back to land.

Everything that goes to sea will break.  If your life depends on it, it needs to have two separate backup systems, a full load of spare parts and smart people maintaining who can make capacitors out of tin foil and wax paper.  The discussion about submersible habitats discussed having manual bilge pumps in case of system failures.  I'm trying to imagine a manual bilge pump that can generate a discharge pressure in excess of 500 psi at a flow rate that could actually keep up with a leak.  Then I'm trying to imagine the genetically modified gorilla necessary to operate such a thing.

Don't get me wrong.  I would love to live on the ocean for the rest of my life, raise my children and grand children there.  I grew up next to the sea, had my first boat before my first bike and spend my life focused on the ocean.  

Seasteaders who don't know if oil rigs can be moved, think that floating concrete balls are a stable surface to build a city on or believe they will be exempt from the laws of all nations if they are just a few hundred miles out to sea are the folks who make it sound like the seasteading ideas are not well thought out.

I'll take bitcoins over seasteading any day of the week.  Bitcoin is based in solid mathematics.  At present seasteading is encrusted with the masturbatory fantasies of a bunch of -topians who think someone else will clean the bilge when things start to go wrong.  Good luck with that.

They don't submerge.  They are evacuated.
http://www.weather.com/news/oil-companies-pull-back-isaac-20120826

I doubt that is a reasonable model for an autonomous nation built on a seastead.  "Excuse me mister land dweller, but hurricane season has arrived so we are going to evacuate all of our women and children to your cities."


Bluntly, anyone can make a chart with lots of tasks and little yellow boxes.  Attempting to harvest energy from the ocean in useful quantities, store it and then have it available when desired at a useful power level is not trivial.  Just to make the challenge more interesting, do it without depending on importing lots of manufactured goods or raw materials.  If the seastead is depending on PV panels with an effective life time of 10 years, it needs to have an intrinsic ability to build them or the ability to stock pile a significant quantity of replacements so it can deal with an embargo.  All of a sudden wind mills made from woven seaweed and whale bone that lift water to a reservoir to run a turbine to make electricity seems like state of the art technology...

Don't get me wrong.  There are very clever devices out there.  I personally like this one: 
http://liquidr.com/technology/wave-glider.html

There are also really cool efforts to convert wave energy to stored energy like this one:
http://scitechdaily.com/floating-power-buoy-creates-electricity-from-ocean-waves/

Notice that they are at the bleeding edge of engineering and dependent on a pretty massive shore based infrastructure.



Why would any of those business models not be more successful on land?  Cuba already does the "offshore medical treatment" for anyone looking for an alternative to western medicine.  Fish farming or aquaculture either require expensive structures (remember everything on a seastead will cost more than similar structures on dry land) or require control over the surrounding ocean.  Does the seastead intend to claim a 200 nm EEZ around whereever it happens to be?  Will it have the military muscle to be able to even symbolically enforce such a claim?  Even the "offshore tech center" and "offshore data haven" concepts are better served by Greenland, Sri Lanka or Tasmania

A successful economic model for a seastead has to be built on what a seastead provides for less than any other reasonable competitor, without becoming a target for those bent on "law enforcement".  Pirate havens attract negative attention.  Ones that sink will be sunk. These means a seastead has to be a model of "good society" to those who control the sea and produce something of value for less than the same item in the homelands of those who control the sea.  Attempting to be an outpost for extra-legal operations is just inviting the folks who enforce the laws to come pay a visit.


Not quite what I mean by "social engineering".  Successful organizations don't happen by accident.  Either they evolved in a forgiving environment (not seastead land) or they were planned by really smart people.  How a seastead deals with the need for an executive power to keep the infrastructure working with out either becoming subjects of that power or making the executive so weak it is unable to attract the people needed to keep the thing afloat is a huge challenge.  The age old ship captain concept works because eventually the voyage is over.  Anything less than a ship captain concept can be very risky.  A legislative discussion about the merits of expending energy to avoid a storm may still be in the planning stages as the category 5 hurricane starts ripping parts off the seastead.  Finding the balance between these levels of societal control can be tricky.

If we toss in the idea of "family unit" seastead conglomerates, it gets even more challenging.  If the Minnowites don't get along with the followers of Sharkaria, how does the seastead maintain a critical mass of people?


Finally, the idea of what it takes to make a nation is pretty clear in the eyes of the world.  A shared language, a shared heritage, a shared living space (land or seastead) are all starting points.  These are necessary but not sufficient.  What is really necessary is generational self sufficiency.  If your state is not self sufficient in the long run, you fail.  The long run this means a minimum viable breeding population.  I would look at Nauru as a minimum population size.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru

Nauru might also be an example of the challenges faced by a seastead except their island is not in daily danger of sinking.  BTW, it seems a bit ironic that the only thing Nauru seems to be able to offer on the world market today is a detention facility.  Perhaps the seastead community should approach the Naura government about setting up a seastead in ocean around Naura.  They seem to be willing to cut a deal on just about anything that will keep their children from starving.