Cryptocurrency Investors Try To Turn Private Islands Into Blockchain Utopias (vice.com) 87
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: For as long as cryptocurrencies have existed, libertarians have dreamed of using them to create communities, seasteads, and cities free from the prying eyes of the state and its tax collectors. We've seen crypto-inspired attempts to claim disputed lands as tax havens, use UFOs and fireworks to christen a new tax-free Bitcoin town, build cities with DAOs, and establish communities inside of U.S. colonies to avoid taxes. But there's now a wave of attempts to buy entire islands and build the next crypto "paradise."
The first one to look at is "Cryptoland," founded by Max Oliver and Helena Lopez, who reportedly have a checkered history with the Spanish YouTuber community mired in allegations of doxxing and the resulting boycott of an awards show linked to the pair. Cryptoland burrowed into the public's mind when its unlisted 18-minute animated sales pitch was found on YouTube in December. It features three sections littered with bombastic rhetoric about what is to come, a manifesto of sorts, a memorial to Bitconnect -- arguably the most infamous scam in Bitcoin history -- and promises to "make crypto enrich a harmonious co-existence with the world energy of its surroundings." Since going viral, Cryptoland has taken down its unlisted sales pitch but a shorter public version is still available to behold. [...]
Cryptoland isn't alone. Satoshi Island is another crypto utopia supposedly in the works, featuring a 32 million square foot island (approx 1.1 square miles) in Vanuatu -- an archipelago of islands between Australia and Fiji. It's slightly larger than Cryptoland, but has substantially less information available on it. Its website states that the island is owned by Satoshi Island Limited, but there's no information on who runs the company or how beyond a Team section listing some individuals involved. It also claims to have "a green light from the Vanuatu Ministry Of Finance and all approvals in place." Motherboard reached out to various Vanuatu offices to confirm this, but has not heard back. Satoshi Island told Motherboard they have owned the island for some years, but when asked about the company's ownership said "Some of the public team and advisors have legal control of the company" and pointed at the Team section. "It's important to note that, for both islands, almost none of this exists yet," adds Motherboard's Edward Ongweso Jr. "It's not clear if any of it will ever exist, as the details offered are not only relatively scant and nebulous, but it's not clear if it's possible even if tens of millions are not raised through NFTs and other means. And, given that Cryptoland and Satoshi Island are just two examples of a growing trend, it's starting to look like bespoke crypto-utopias are another bubble within a bubble."
The first one to look at is "Cryptoland," founded by Max Oliver and Helena Lopez, who reportedly have a checkered history with the Spanish YouTuber community mired in allegations of doxxing and the resulting boycott of an awards show linked to the pair. Cryptoland burrowed into the public's mind when its unlisted 18-minute animated sales pitch was found on YouTube in December. It features three sections littered with bombastic rhetoric about what is to come, a manifesto of sorts, a memorial to Bitconnect -- arguably the most infamous scam in Bitcoin history -- and promises to "make crypto enrich a harmonious co-existence with the world energy of its surroundings." Since going viral, Cryptoland has taken down its unlisted sales pitch but a shorter public version is still available to behold. [...]
Cryptoland isn't alone. Satoshi Island is another crypto utopia supposedly in the works, featuring a 32 million square foot island (approx 1.1 square miles) in Vanuatu -- an archipelago of islands between Australia and Fiji. It's slightly larger than Cryptoland, but has substantially less information available on it. Its website states that the island is owned by Satoshi Island Limited, but there's no information on who runs the company or how beyond a Team section listing some individuals involved. It also claims to have "a green light from the Vanuatu Ministry Of Finance and all approvals in place." Motherboard reached out to various Vanuatu offices to confirm this, but has not heard back. Satoshi Island told Motherboard they have owned the island for some years, but when asked about the company's ownership said "Some of the public team and advisors have legal control of the company" and pointed at the Team section. "It's important to note that, for both islands, almost none of this exists yet," adds Motherboard's Edward Ongweso Jr. "It's not clear if any of it will ever exist, as the details offered are not only relatively scant and nebulous, but it's not clear if it's possible even if tens of millions are not raised through NFTs and other means. And, given that Cryptoland and Satoshi Island are just two examples of a growing trend, it's starting to look like bespoke crypto-utopias are another bubble within a bubble."
If you buy into this (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm still laughing at the nonexistent libertardian paradise in South America that someone was selling lots on.
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That one was funny, but not as funny as the various ships. The idea of a seagoing ship populated by libertarians is hilarious... from afar.
Re:If you buy into this (Score:5, Insightful)
The pandemic has had me thinking about sociobiology. The idea that the huge human brain enhances individual survival may be overblown. I think it may exist to give our populations behavioral diversity, letting circumstances sort out which behaviors were smart and which were stupid *after the fact*.
Imagine that all of humanity lived around Pompeii; the eruption of Vesuvius would *not* have been an extinction event because with 20,000 inhabitants, a significant number would have taken the "right" action, no matter what that action happened to be. Ride it out, flee early, get your stuff together and leave when it doesn't quiet down... we now know that *all* of these responses had groups of people trying them. No matter what they chose, it might have been the "right" decision... if circumstances were different.
This is the problem with Utopian schemes; even when a radical restructuring of society is successful, it never lasts because people living with that success *will* tinker with it. Arguably modern democratic societies with free markets are as close to Utopia as humanity has ever managed, but some people are going to try to make something better. If they succeed, the *exact same fate* lies in store for their experiment, no matter how modest or radical that experiment is.
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I'm purchasing sea pirate stock: live by no rules, die by no rules.
Yar har fiddle de dee (Score:2)
Plundering uninhabitated islands without navy protectino is alright with me!
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That is about a U.S. WWII base that was literally dumped into the sea in 1946.
They have a Police Maritime WIng [nationmaster.com], so some cops have boats - makes sense for an island nation.
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This is where the summary kind of messes up. The place this on libertarians, but real libertarians are not anti-government, they just don't want government to do more than it should. And having a military and police to protect the citizens is something most libertarians actually do want. But to keep things simple, the minimum number of sets are being used; everyone who doesn't want big government is labeled as libertarian, everyone who thinks some regulation is good gets labeled a liberal, everyone who s
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It seems a lot of American libertarians just want the government out of the way so they can practice their own authoritarianism.
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I'm not libertarian, but I know a lot of them and authoritarianism is the polar opposite of their political beliefs. They're basically liberal on social policy, and liberal (with the old definition) on economic policy. That is, limited government regulation in both social life and economic life. So, dope smoking, gay, low taxes, and a free market can all co-exist :-) Authoritarian is the opposite: tight control over social and economic life both.
Don't confuse libertarianism with some politicians who mer
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Perhaps it is just the loud ones that come across that way. Still seems like a lot of them vote for authoritarianism, with the libertarian party getting relatively very few votes.
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This is the no true Scotsman fallacy.
There's no objective standard for how much government action is too much government action. I don't even know if libertarians even agree on how much law enforcement there should be.
I wager its trivial to find libertarians who don't want much, if any, law enforcement because of the symbolism or practical risk that it will empower government to use coercion to increase their authority. They would argue that personal self defense, voluntary cooperative arrangements or eve
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navy protectino
Crypto stories have rattled my brain to the point that I was trying to parse a typo out as some sort of jokingly-proposed cryptocoin.
Early candidate for worst tweet of the year (Score:5, Informative)
In response to the question "what will the age of consent be in Cryptoland?", they respond with the most sinister-looking winking smilie I have ever seen:
"Mental maturity should be more than enough! ;)" [archive.org]
Stay classy, blockchainers.
Re:Early candidate for worst tweet of the year (Score:5, Insightful)
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*Unmatched*
"Females don't know what they're missing out on."
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In response to the question "what will the age of consent be in Cryptoland?", they respond with the most sinister-looking winking smilie I have ever seen:
"Mental maturity should be more than enough! ;)" [archive.org]
Stay classy, blockchainers.
If I required "mental maturity", my dating pool would drop significantly. Whilst I knew a few 18 yr olds wise beyond their years, that number is dwarfed by the amount of 40 yr olds I know who are completely and utterly without maturity. And yes, there is nothing sadder than a 40 yr old woman who still carries on like a 16 yr old girl.
Yeah, I know, anecdote != data... but lets be honest, is your experience much different?
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I think that in general a major problem in the west is that people refuse to act their age. You can see it in Burning Man camps where people pretend to be boyscout, you can see it in adults watching teenager anime, and you can see it, as you said, in 40 year old women who are still looking for a bad boy biker instead of a man. However, I truly don't think the problem is somehow unique to women.
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Actually I'm a millenial, but unlike many of my peers, I grew up in a shitty town and learned to earn my own salary.
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... there is nothing sadder than a 40 yr old woman who still carries on like a 16 yr old girl.
Yes there is. A 40 year old guy carrying on like 16 year old boy.
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...there is nothing sadder than a 40 yr old woman who still carries on like a 16 yr old girl.
Oh, what did you say/do to your wife this time?
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Actually, age of consent even in the USA varies widely [wikipedia.org], so it was a loaded question from the start.
It also seems to be a thing that states with the higher age of consent laws have also make it a crime to travel out of state for an underage sex vacation, so Cryptoland won't work as a "lolita island" if you ever planned on returning home.
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That makes sense (Score:3)
Cryptocurrency as we know it will come and go, and living on these islands will also; both will come to an unfortunate end for most of the people involved.
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The appropriate ironic ending is that the island sinks and the remaining boat operators refuse to take bitcoin as payment to leave.
Even if they get the money to start (Score:5, Insightful)
Without taxes, there's no infrastructure, no standards, no cooperation, no municipal services, no common resources of any kind because these all work from a tax system.
It's not clear you can run any kind of business in such an environment, unless it is entirely self-contained. You couldn't rely on anything outside because there's no standards. Businesses naturally trend towards monopolies and entry costs into a market naturally inflate with time. Under such conditions, customers have no choice but to accept whatever they're given, or do it entirely themselves (so no economy of scale).
You could run such a society, but you're going to end up with a feudal, largely agrarian, society run by competing warlords, more closely resembling Somalia or rural districts in Afghanistan than even the worst parts of the Bay Area.
To be perfectly fair, though, I see that as the inevitable end point of ANY purist doctrine. No system is perfect from the outset and will have myriad flaws. If those flaws run the entire length and breadth of that social system, the best result you can get is the entire system fracturing. The most likely outcome, though, is got the system to just shatter.
Purist orthodoxy cannot evolve because it inherently cannot conceive of itself as flawed and any refinement in any aspect breaks the purity of the orthodoxy.
They also rely on hatred of all other systems to remain pure. If individuals were allowed to imagine alternative systems as having value, you'll always end up with a heterodoxy. The least pure system possible.
And that is why purist systems are always fragile, regardless of their political leanings.
Re:Even if they get the money to start (Score:5, Insightful)
Without taxes, there's no infrastructure, no standards, no cooperation, no municipal services, no common resources of any kind because these all work from a tax system.
It's not clear you can run any kind of business in such an environment, unless it is entirely self-contained. You couldn't rely on anything outside because there's no standards. Businesses naturally trend towards monopolies and entry costs into a market naturally inflate with time. Under such conditions, customers have no choice but to accept whatever they're given, or do it entirely themselves (so no economy of scale).
There in lies the problem. A Libertarian will tell you that the market will take care of it but the market will just end up with one company owning everything and it's not like 20 different waste management providers will run individual pipes up to your lavatory. Municipal systems exist because a monopoly is inevitable in some business and it's best to control that monopoly from the outset to ensure it meets the needs of those it's servicing.
Also this is why we don't let people nominate where their tax money goes. Popular things like education, the military, police and fire will see no end of funding... no-one thinks of sanitation.
And that is why purist systems are always fragile, regardless of their political leanings.
Any system based extremism is bound for failure. Any society that requires all people to believe and think exactly the same, from Marxist and Agrarian to Libertarian to religious theocracies. All end up having to be enforced by violence and fear because people are different. Representative systems certainly have their flaws but are built to account for the fact that people have different wants and needs, liberal (as in free) systems are also built to recognise that humans are flawed, we're often greedy, self-centred and irrational, thus work to best negate those flaws from gaining control of society by preventing one person or group from becoming too powerful to oppose (especially without violence).
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Re:Even if they get the money to start (Score:4, Insightful)
Most libertarians do agree that there is a need for laws and regulations. Something without rules or government is not a libertarian utopia, it's an anarchist utopia.
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Much like every other ideology, Libertarians don't agree on *which* laws and regulations are needed. When you get the point of picking up your toys and heading off to your own private island, you are talking about the sort of Libertarian that believes in very, very few rules, and is very intolerant of anything outsid
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Any system based extremism is bound for failure.
Any system? Absolutely no exception? Isn't that an extreme point of view? Just asking for a friend.
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The problem seems to be with systems, rather than individual rules. Individual rules seem fine, so "thou shalt not violate the second law of thermodynamics" as part of a nation's constitution would be fine even with a no exception clause, it won't cause failure. But if the system in its entirety was extreme, that's a very different kettle of pentaquarks.
It's awesome! (Score:3)
Without taxes, there's no infrastructure, no standards, no cooperation, no municipal services, no common resources of any kind because these all work from a tax system.
You left out the best part! They won't have a military. If they are hoarding large amounts of money (digitally or otherwise) then it's ripe of the picking. It would only take a small paramilitary group to overtake the island and plunder all the riches. They could hire a PMC but having them around full-time is not only going to be expensive but since they are basically soldiers of fortune then you can cut a deal with the company.
This seems like an awesome idea for how to educate libertarians on the value
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Don't worry, they have that handled. You know how those "No interest for six months!!" deals technically don't charge interest, but instead have a "service fee" that's about 20% of the principle? Well, the libertarian paradises don't have evil taxes, but they do have lots of fees. An unkind person might even call it "rent."
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Without taxes, there's no infrastructure, no standards, no cooperation, no municipal services, no common resources of any kind because these all work from a tax system.
Haven't you heard of reality TV franchise contracts? The world's first civil infrastructure system entirely funded by advertising revenue!
Of course, everything will be staffed by migrant workers. I'm assuming that there will also be no laws to determine how migrant workers will be treated & what their rights will be or who will ensure any enforcement of such rights by their rich overlord employers. Does that sound Utopian to you?
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But just think of all the disruption you could achieve!
Private islands are not autonomous countries (Score:4, Insightful)
The laws of the country which the island is part of still apply. Anyway, try this with China. I dare ya.
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https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Crazy AND dumb. (Score:2)
Is Tom Nook an investor? (Score:2)
Sounds like Animal Crossing to me. No government and one corporate body owns everything.
Cryptoland mirror (Score:3)
https://peertube.social/w/iHHq... [peertube.social]
Somehow it was removed, but here it is mirrored.
Already within the first few minutes I see "scam". Just someone parting money from the crypto-rich fools.
There's nothing. Or as one of my friends who saw it said, "it's a cruise ship that doesn't move".
No infrastructure, no basic services (electricity/water/sewer/internet), etc. On the other hand, establishing the requisite food delivery services and such might be useful if you can then separate them from more of their money using outrageous fees. I mean, people will want pizza delivery, food delivery and other such services, so an island full of rich people seems like a good target. And what about other services - police, fire, etc? I'm sure you can probably establish a for-profit fire service that charges by the fire...
This time will be different... (Score:2, Informative)
Every Utopian experiment in history has ended in complete failure, but the problem with all those past experiments is that they were naive and unrealistic. This one will be different because these people have figured out a way to perfect society that resolves, once and for all, every source of conflict and dissatisfaction.
Historical precedents be damned, this is the end of history [middlebury.edu] predicted by Hegel and Marx. It won't be naivete if they're right.
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I didn't know Hegel went to Middlebury...
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I know some people who've left colonies who would dispute the utopian part. If you're into that kind of thing it's okay, but it definitely depends on a very different surrounding society to export dissenters and import all manner of other things.
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You definitely wouldn't want to be gay. But if you happen to not like the job you're assigned, or the fact that someone assigns you your job in the first place, you might also have to leave. There's lots of political maneuvering too, so you might get Game of Thronesed.
The communities do work, but I think it's mostly because they're purposely kept under about 150 people, and dissenters have a very attractive option to leave. Also, by being able to import technology from outside, they avoid the whole medieval
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This is my point; one person's Utopia is another person's Dystopia. A modern market economy with moderate regulation by a democratically elected government is as close to perfection in meeting human needs as humanity has ever got, but there are still people who think they can improve on it. The belief there is something better within their grasp makes them perceive the minor shortcomings in this merely *near-* Utopia as hellish.
People are terrible at knowing what will make them happy in the future. Even l
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It's funny, I think if Marx were suddenly revived and introduced to a western democracy, even the US, he'd quickly conclude that he was right, the socialist revolution had occurred, and half the world was now living in utopia.
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A modern market economy with moderate regulation by a democratically elected government is as close to perfection in meeting human needs as humanity has ever got
Unluckily, we can't all live in Scandinavia. I live somewhere considered almost as good and shelter is becoming a huge issue, with a lot of people living on the streets and even more living in their cars or couch surfing. Plus a powerful neighbour which seems to have decided to do away with the democratic thing along with many regulations which makes the future look not very good.
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Well done, very subtle. Even with the sig.
What could go wrong? (Score:2)
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Deeply antisocial rich people try to found own society. Why don't they like the vast & varied array of already established & viable societies already available to them?
Did anybody tell them that they have to be the janitor, garbageman and maintain the sewage lines? Also they need to do all of the cooking (I would be fine with that, but most people consider it a chore).
There won't be anybody on the island to provide them with any services at all. The bitcoin boat paradise that failed a year or so back at least had a crew to maintain the basic systems (and if you call taxes "fees" then it is totally good to charge them).
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Do you want to own a land ? (Score:2)
Don't forget the underage masseuses and Clintons (Score:1)
If we're going to re-establish some island paradises for elite crypt-gazillionaires, don't forget to staff them with underage island girls to "welcome" the guests, and lavish parties with political talking heads like the Clintons, English royalty, and lavish funding gifts to universities where they can scout for underaged girls. Look up the MIT Media Center and the Epstein funding. Why do you think Epstein liked funding college girls? They were bait for the underaged ones.
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[...]lavish parties with political talking heads like the Clintons, [...] Why do you think Epstein liked funding college girls? They were bait for the underaged ones.
You mean like the 13 year old Trump allegedly raped on Epstein's island?
Dear Editors (Score:2)
Could you please post more news about crypto crap? We love that shit.
Fraudulent condo development (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sounds great, but (Score:2)
Small detail (Score:2)
Oh well.
Last time libertarians tried to govern ... (Score:3)
Their cluelessness and incompetence in governing makes a fascinating reading: [theguardian.com]
Just a sample: The libertarian paradise residency required limiting their pets to 20 lb or smaller and agreeing to compliance audit by whatever they called their government.
Libertarian paradise? (Score:2)
That's the one where the people that control the money tell everybody else what to do. Liberty for the rich. I suppose that there are people who want to experience what it is like to be a serf. "I owe my soul to the company store" (Tennessee Ernie Ford). Doesn't sound much like fun to me.
Morons merit mulcting (Score:2)
This sort of thing perfectly targets the deserving.
It is laughably entertaining so laugh and be entertained.
Ironic (Score:2)
Utopia until the first ... (Score:1)
... murders take place for screwing each other over about crypto and wives.
Someone call the Rajneeshees (Score:2)
It's like 1980s Oregon with less orgies?