The Bitcoin price is amazingly high, and it has stayed amazingly high for quite some time. I've been expecting it to crash for the last year, and I was especially expecting it to crash in response to the various B2X nonsense, but it's still quite high. These high prices may well be long-term-stable. Therefore, since we gentlemen are in fact the new wealthy elite, I think that the time has come to work toward a project that I know a lot of early Bitcoiners (including myself) have always dreamed of: a mostly-sovereign libertarian seastead. There must be a lot of Bitcoin millionaires who would be willing to work toward this.
Putting aside my thoughts about the stability of the $7800+ BTC pricepoint at this point in time, how about we don't follow in the steps of
fictional villains? Even if we did,
politically extreme utopian societies don't really have a good track record. Then again maybe an echo chamber of rich guys in the middle of the ocean will work better.
The Seasteading Institute (TSI) has an example
seastead design with a total estimated cost of $115 million with room for 270 people. So that'd be an average of $425,000 per person up-front, plus a yearly maintenance cost of $13,000 per person. IMO it should be fairly easy to fund something this size from Bitcoiners, and you could probably go even bigger/better. TSI has already done a ton of research/engineering work and built a ton of connections, so a project to actually build something like this would have a great head-start.
Yet for some reason I haven't heard of any major scale project that pulled it off. Could it be that the unpredictability of the sea (extreme weather conditions, piracy, political pressures) isn't exactly the best place to permanently house hundreds of people? Though again, who knows? Maybe tech reached a point as to where it's already possible though I'm still thoroughly skeptical in regards to possible external issues.
The main goal of seasteading is to have a jurisdiction with minimal-possible regulation and government involvement, creating a space for extreme innovation. Like Hong Kong, but even better. At least to start with, you'd probably have to officially be under some government's jurisdiction (via a special agreement with that government), but it will hopefully be possible to keep this very minimal. TSI has already had some success in negotiating this stuff with some governments. Another goal would be to create a good environment for the people living on the seastead: fast Internet (maybe via laser links), high security, overall good facilities, etc.
Any sovereign micro-nation in the middle of literally nowhere, who isn't associated with a world power (or is an offshore tax haven), is sooner or later going to either face "liberation" or a
coup (lust for power tends to corrupt). Take it from the guy whose nation was annexed by, no, I'm sorry, "voluntarily joined" the USSR. Also, Hong Kong? So,
restrictions on freedom of the press, crackdowns on protestors and covert surveillance with China breathing down your neck.
Who here is interested in participating in this, and what would you want a seastead to have before living on one? I'm not going to collect any money from people, but if there's enough interest (maybe $75 million or so), we can hire some people who actually know what they're doing and create a proper company with a board of directors, etc. Maybe it could even be made into an ICO, though I'm pretty skeptical of those in general.
Throwing money to run away from society's problems seems a bit childish TBH. I mean it does work if you have astronomical amounts of it but a few mil isn't going to be enough to patch up any of the aforementioned holes once they pop up. Then again if this was some sort of a temporary hotel / resort (as the Seasteding Institute's linked design mentioned), it might work though I really think this is going to cost way beyond several million dollars each.
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