39 ms·

Seasteading

156 points by sanqui 7y ago

ceejayoz 7y ago
A cautionary tale on how this is likely to turn out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Foundation > Part of a reef, normally a metre below sea level at high tide, was piled high with sand and a small stone platform was erected carrying the flag of the Republic of Minerva—a white torch on a blue background. The 'President of Minerva,' Morris Davis, declared at the time: "People will be free to do as they damn well please. Nothing will be illegal so long it does not infringe on the rights of others. If a citizen wishes to open a tavern, set up gambling or make pornographic films, the government will not interfere." Tonga’s claim to the reef was recognized by the South Pacific Forum in September 1972. A Tongan expedition was sent to enforce the claim, arriving on 18 June 1972. The Flag of the Tonga was raised on 19 June 1972 on North Minerva and on South Minerva on 21 June 1972.
- Macha 7y ago
  For a more recent example: https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-trader-chad-elwartowski-thai-navy-destroys-floating-house-2019-4?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-trader-chad-elwartow... > Elwartowski and Thepdet's seastead was part of an experiment led by the Seasteading Institute, a group backed by Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire behind PayPal. > The floating home of Chad Elwartowski and his girlfriend, Supranee Thepdet, was towed ashore by Thai authorities on Monday to be taken apart, and the couple have been accused of violating Thailand's sovereignty, an offense that can carry the death penalty or life in prison, Sky News reported.
  - imglorp 7y ago
    Also that story about what happens when you claim an abandoned WWII platform, call it a sovereign country, attempt to web host some sketchy material, and fend off the British Navy. http://web.archive.org/web/20050602082455/http://www.havenco.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20050602082455/http://www.havenco... https://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/the-curious-case-of-sealand-the-hacker-friendly-offshore-micronation https://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/the-curious-case... https://www.sealandgov.org/ https://www.sealandgov.org/
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      RDL is on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rdl https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rdl
fredley 7y ago
Less than two weeks after a 'Seastead' got dismantled and towed away by the Thai navy: https://www.theepochtimes.com/thai-navy-dismantles-floating-seastead-home-of-fugitive-bitcoin-couple_2890832.html https://www.theepochtimes.com/thai-navy-dismantles-floating-...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- noonespecial 7y ago
  A good illustration of why it might not be such a great idea to fly no flag and claim no nation: anybody who floats up with a gun bigger than yours can go right ahead and subject you to whatever "law" they feel like.
  - ryacko 7y ago
    If you fly the US flag, but claim no subdivision, one would have the benefits of citizenship without having to pay state and local taxes. As far as I can tell, registering a ship only requires citizenship, but it would make any dispute complex. Not a lawyer, but there was an era where citizens lived in US territories.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      > If you fly the US flag, but claim no subdivision, one would have the benefits of citizenship without having to pay state and local taxes. That doesn't seem right - why don't refugees, who appear to already be attempting to boat across large swaths of water, simply fly the US flag then?
      - joosters 7y ago
        For a start, they aren't trying to live in those large swathes of water, they're trying to reach somewhere else to live. Turning up at a border waving a US flag but having no valid US passport won't get you in...
october_sky 7y ago
The images here are charming, but there's not nearly enough population density in those to make them viable. The images display floating luxury homes complete with a yard.
sbt 7y ago
Something tells me these guys are more motivated by tax evasion than by saving the environment.
- return1 7y ago
  Seasteading is not motivated by environmental concerns , but mainly by libertarian concerns to escape regulations and governments. How would they evade taxes in international territory where there are no taxes? [edit since i m blocked from replying]: - US is unique in taxing worldwide income. I would assume the colonists would renounce any other citizenship anyway, and the colony does not have taxes. - They could not move any financial assets or to the colony unless it is somehow recognized internationally. There is no way to evade taxes. - The only possible way to tranfer assets is to convert them to cryptocurrency , which presumably would only be useful in the colony. And there 's probably not going to be a way to move large sums of money out of the colony, unless international banks agree to cooperate with it. [and a tangent] It's "interesting" to contrast the reactions of HN 2019 compared to 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=194028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=194028
  - CaptainZapp 7y ago
    They would evade taxes from moving from where they currently live (and pay those taxes, which they're not able to evade via fancy constructs) to "Nowhere Land" where they (apparently) are not taxed at all. Alas, "Nowhere Land" may figure at one point that they need to generate income for basic maintenence and other necessary expenses. Basic maintenance, which can be very, very costly out at sea.
  - jdblair 7y ago
    There are taxes in international waters. If you are a US citizen you owe income tax no matter where you earn your income. Hiding your income and not paying income tax is evading taxation. https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/taxpayers-living-abroad https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/taxp...
- rufusroflpunch 7y ago
fareesh 7y ago
How does sewage treatment and trash disposal work in this kind of setup?
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Dumping in the ocean, I strongly suspect.
- pitaj 7y ago
  Would likely involve incinerators.
- michael_j_ward 7y ago
  Two minute video answering the question[1]. Summary: they'll use a "urine diverting dry toilet" to collect the feces- which supposedly will be used for fertilizer. They don't say what exactly will be done with the urine, so likely dumped back into the ocean. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd2FCpU5wu8&list=PLDgJp6DTkMyGuEiHKVBDTp1TLNQ6RGZab&index=8&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd2FCpU5wu8&list=PLDgJp6DTkM...
- driverdan 7y ago
  It's legal to dump human waste in the ocean once you're in international waters.
  - CaptainZapp 7y ago
    Can you provide more detail on that? I don't think, for example, that cruise ships are allowed to dump their shit (and other refuse) into the sea, provided they're in international waters.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      Depends where they're registered. The vast majority of countries have signed on to the conventions forbidding dumping, and can enforce it on ships flagged in their countries, but a seastead intending to dump would presumably not sign on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78
MaupitiBlue 7y ago
Just buy a sailboat.
- return1 7y ago
  more like , a big ship or something like a retired oil rig. It needs to go in deep waters (>200 miles off the coast) and stay there for extended periods of time (and weather). A cruise ship would be ideal as it can be relatively self-sustaining. A bunch of cruise ships would be enough to start a big city.
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
    People sail around the world all the time. As in: retirees in 30-feet yachts.
ifdefdebug 7y ago
I read: "Seasteading is building floating societies with significant political autonomy". So when they go outside the jurisdiction (and protection) of a nation-state and their law enforcement, the first question that comes to my mind is: what about piracy? And as a matter of fact, they have a youtube channel "tough questions" talking about that (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PLUZ9bzUGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PLUZ9bzUGY) - tldr: it's gonna be private security firms, so it's not gonna be cheap ... and they claim only 2% of world's oceans are even considered piracy waters, but I think that's going to change as soon as there are wealthy communities floating in unprotected waters ...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pitaj 7y ago
  > it's gonna be private security firms, so it's not gonna be cheap One could say that police and military are not cheap either
  - Areading314 7y ago
    Maybe they'll just have to go around and collect donations from residents to pay the security. And just require them to pay if they don't raise enough ...
    - mkohlmyr 7y ago
      While I'm very much on-side with you on this one, I suppose their argument would be that it would be a voluntary association.
      - InitialLastName 7y ago
        Sure, right until they start applying it to people who are born and raised there and don't have the resources to travel and start lives somewhere else.
morkfromork 7y ago
Reminds me of the movie Waterworld.
- ShamelessC 7y ago
  Also "Outer Heaven" from the Metal Gear Solid games.
amalcon 7y ago
This is one of those concepts that seems to come out of thinking of the law as similar to software. It's not, because software is run by computers while law is run by humans. If you find a straightforward loophole in software, the computer running it will e.g. happily hand you information you're not supposed to have[1]. If you find that kind of loophole in the law, then the humans running it will usually just tell you to go home. They know that you know what they meant. Laws can still have loopholes, but they are generally more subtle and complicated. Fixing them often has obvious unintended consequences. They're more like speculative execution bugs[2] than buffer overruns. [1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed [2]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabilit...
- jacquesm 7y ago
  The bigger mistake is that paper and being clever will trump the power of guns.
- fouronnes3 7y ago
  You know you're on HN when the law is explained with an analogy to computer code and not the other way around ;)
- rwmj 7y ago
  Getting way off-topic but Stanford Law School had a project trying to encode law as code: https://law.stanford.edu/codex-the-stanford-center-for-legal-informatics/ https://law.stanford.edu/codex-the-stanford-center-for-legal...
- buboard 7y ago
  You believe that the existence of government-free land is a "loophole in the law" ?
  - M2Ys4U 7y ago
    There is always a government. It might be two guys with guns, or it might be a huge bureaucracy that runs on the rule of law or anywhere in between. But it's always there.
gunn 7y ago
"On January 13, 2017 we signed a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) with French Polynesia [...] agreeing to cooperate on developing legislation for The Floating Island Project by the end of 2017" Is there any more news on this?
- return1 7y ago
  polynesia pulled out of the agreement > On March 3, 2018, a mayor from French Polynesia said the agreement was "not a legal document" and had expired at the end of 2017 in response to a challenger trying to make it an issue for the May, 2018 elections.
christoph-heiss 7y ago
Off-Topic: The site horrible "jitters" when scrolling around, pretty much unreadable/unuseable. At least for me with Chrome 74 on Fedora. Firefox 67 is fine.
lucisferre 7y ago
Rogue waves will be fun.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ckastner 7y ago
It's a simple and frequent mistake to believe that sovereign autonomy is wholly self-determined, and seasteading is the prime example for this. Sovereign autonomy is not determined by oneself. It is determined by others, specifically by recognizing the sovereignty. Without recognition, it's basically impossible to conduct any type of transaction with the outer world, for lack of jurisdiction.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  It almost always requires violence to create a state, and at the very least, it does require the capacity for violence. A State has a violence on monopoly and the ability to defend itself from anyone else who says, "You are part of my State/Country/Kingdom". If you could hire a private army, or maybe an army of pirates, Seasteading would work. But you have to pay them. Conquerors often paid armies by charging taxes to the lands they conquered, placing them in debt. The solders who were injured and missing arms/legs got their reward by collecting taxes and maintaining the taken land. The book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, goes into this concept in great detail. Another book in this genre is The Dictators Handbook.
  - roywiggins 7y ago
    Everyone else might still ignore you. Nobody recognizes Abkhazia, even though it's kinda self-governing.
    - djsumdog 7y ago
      I've never heard of this State. It's very similar to Transnistria (which some of the world recognizes as a nation, but most UN countries still recognize as part of Moldova).
    - htmk 7y ago
      Kinda? Can you be kind enough to elaborate.
      - roywiggins 7y ago
sandworm101 7y ago
These guys are just like every other group that wants to setup their own society "free" of government. But look closely at their plans. They don't want to get rid of nation states. They just want to setup their own nation states under their own legal structure, one that sees them atop everyone else too poor to build their own floating palace. Ask them their opinions on the big crimes (murder/rape/arson etc). Will they allow me to keep slaves on my seastead? Of course not. May I operate an industrial smelter and dump the waste overboard? May I buys some guns, capture other seasteads and setup my own dictatorship? These people don't want to escape the real laws, just the handful of minor regulations with which they disagree. These are nothing more than rich randians complaining about their tax bracket.
- sammyo 7y ago
  And if they ever manage to build a few houses on a barge outside territorial waters, about 12 miles, they'll call on the closest government for emergency rescue a few hours into the first good storm.
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    Or when they need an appendix removed. Then they want a "real" doctor, someone who learned their trade at a well-regulated hospital. Someone who is licensed by a medical board. Someone who has access to nice clean drugs manufactured in a lab subject to inspections. And then they want insurance coverage so they aren't out of pocket if something goes wrong during the operation. And then they expect some sort of rules-based enforcement structure to regulate all of these things. And don't forget some sort payment structure to support all these people ... This is getting complicated. Someone should write all these complicated rules down in a big book. Just don't call them laws.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      Then not too different from living in a undeveloped/least developed country?
  - 7y ago
DennisP 7y ago
I read the seasteading book, and thought it made a fairly convincing case that seasteads could produce vast amounts of food, biofuel, and carbon sequestration. I do think that setting out to build a "city" is not the way forward. Early experiments in deep-water aquaculture have been very profitable. Expand on that, and settlement will happen organically.
- carapace 7y ago
  Your comment reminds me of GreenWave: https://www.greenwave.org/our-work https://www.greenwave.org/our-work Ecologically and economically sustainable underwater 3D farms.
  - DennisP 7y ago
    Yep, exactly the sort of thing I mean. Another good book on the topic is Tim Flannery's Sunlight and Seaweed.
komali2 7y ago
Seems like Peter thiel was tired of not getting libertarians elected in the USA so he went and made his own country. > Obsolete political systems conceived in previous centuries are ill-equipped to unleash the enormous opportunities in twenty-first century innovation. I wonder if woman's suffrage is included in his thoughts on obsolete political systems? > The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron
Tepix 7y ago
Let's ignore the contentious legal aspects and focus on the general idea: Create a floating structure that offers space for living, working or agriculture. Has this been done with areas that are much larger than a typical house boat? What kind of waves/storms can these structures deal with?
- DennisP 7y ago
  Cruise ships do pretty well. I looked up prices and capacities and found you can build a large cruise ship for about $100K per resident. The biggest ship I found could house 9000 people. Seasteads would mostly use aquaculture, so you don't need much growing room on the ship. If you're close to a shipping lane you can trade for other foods you want, just like everybody else does.
- pp19dd 7y ago
  Large ships do very poorly in waves. The last thing you want happening in a storm is to lose power. Without power you can't angle yourself perpendicular to the waves. When that happens, broadside waves make the ship bob like a corkscrew. If you don't capsize, this makes the situation beyond recovery. Waves tend to make large ships lose power easily because the engine oil sloshes in the pan, or the sump pit. The oil pump or inlet is located in a fixed place and can't be moved around. We're talking large engines here. Anyhow, the pump can't keep up with the flow due to this sloshing effectively cycling its flow rate and the engine starts overheating and it has to be throttled down then later shut off so it doesn't seize up. Once the engine is shut off and the vessel is no longer under command, the sloshing gets worse. Emergency battery power drains quickly. Meanwhile the fuel - bunker oil - cools off and turns into asphalt - it needs to be heated up to 120+ degrees F to be usable. Even if you don't shut the engine off, in stormy weather the fuel filters get clogged up faster and have to be constantly cleaned. The fuel itself, bunker oil, is chunky to begin with and the additional sloshing somehow gunks up the filters faster. In one famous case, the engineers had to do it every few minutes in a storm and that required complete enclosure disassembly and reassembly. That particular ship survived that storm, but not another.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
dang 7y ago
A thread from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519863 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4435994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4435994 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310873 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088570 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441310 Others?
dwighttk 7y ago
Odd that, unless I missed it, their blog mentions nothing about the Thai Navy destroying a seastead... https://fee.org/articles/the-world-s-first-seasteaders-are-now-on-the-run-for-their-lives/ https://fee.org/articles/the-world-s-first-seasteaders-are-n...
nradov 7y ago
These clowns have no clue what it takes to live on the sea. None of them have any serious experience in marine engineering, or in operating large ships or offshore platforms. They'll be begging the Coast Guard for rescue when the first big storm comes through.
- buboard 7y ago
  I don't think they plan to build those megastructures with their bare hands.
  - village-idiot 7y ago
    I don’t think that GP was implying that they would. Even a structure built by machines can fail catastrophically if poorly designed or operated. The ocean floor is littered with ships that weren’t “built with their bare hands”.
    - buboard 7y ago
      I assume they will hire qualified people to operate them
- kyledrake 7y ago
  If they even survive it. The open ocean is hostile beyond belief. Anyone trying to setup a stable city out there does not understand or respect it's terrifying power. https://youtu.be/aBM7NgMhg90 https://youtu.be/aBM7NgMhg90 It takes a bay of some kind to do this semi-safely, but you won't find those 12 miles out from continents and if you do (basically reef atolls) they're almost certainly claimed by a government or very, very far away from civilization, and completely incapable of sustaining life in a way most people would want to live.
phkahler 7y ago
Most home owners associations are political messes. This seems like a slightly larger version of that but with far more responsibility in more areas.
crikli 7y ago
These folks take the Bluthton concept a bit too seriously.
tuxxy 7y ago
I've always been curious about initiatives like this. What happens if there becomes resource exhaustion and similar problems? How would the safety of the inhabitants be ensured in events like that?
Traster 7y ago
I wanted to actually dig into this, and see if there's anything that's underlying the ideas that are worth really considering but I've got to say, this really turned me off: "When an Island or Peninsula breaks free from a larger country and creates its own legal structure, dramatic increases in prosperity often occur within 1 generation. Under British rule Hong Kong habour was little more than a dockyard for the Royal Navy. Now thanks to modern trade rules and numerous land reclamation projects, the skyline features an abundance of skyscrapers." That's just dishonest. Firstly, Hong Kong was not just a dockyard for the British Navy in 1997, it was already an incredibly rich place, with many skyscrapers and huge amounts of autonomy. Try googling a photo of Hong Kong in 1997. Secondly, it is has not broken free from a larger country, it was returned from the British Empire to Chinese control. "Before World War 2, rickshaws were the primary form of transport in Singapore. Now there is a vast public transport infrastructure, including high speed rail networks and expressways." Okay, what a funky timeline. Before WW2 Singapore was very poor! Along with basically everyone else in that region. It gained independence in 1959, but let's not talk about what happened in between! None of the examples they give seem to offer anything other than "Pro tip: Be a tax haven". Singapore, Mauritius, Hong Kong? Notice what these places have in common? Like Jesus Christ guys could you not find a single example of a country whose independence made it wealthy without being a straight up tax haven for the surrounding larger countries?
saalweachter 7y ago
There's a certain parallel to "a solution in search of a problem". I haven't thought of a witty way to phrase the problem; "a utopia in search of a social movement", maybe? It's really fun to design your new utopian community: the principles, the laws, the layout of the streets in the city (or the ships, in this case). But this is precisely backwards. You aren't playing SimCity, or SimSeastead. You can't just build (or make blueprints for) your ideal city, then summon a hoard of obedient minion-citizens to build it and inhabit it and behave in the way you have dictated. The social movement has to come first: you need a large group of people, with similar aims and goals, working together, making decisions and plans a group. Then maybe you build a city. Or a commune. Or a co-op. Or who knows; the group may end up with other needs that you didn't anticipate. Hypothetically you could build your community around your utopian vision, but why should they flock to you? All you've got is an idea. I've got some ideas, and so has every other person who might hypothetically be interested in joining your community. Why should I join you on your seastead instead of you joining me in my mountain enclave, or my seastead in a different ocean, or exactly like your seastead started out, except it's my seastead, I make the decisions? Start by building a community, a movement. Or stick to writing fiction and playing the Sims.
hkt 7y ago
Libertarian wet dream if ever there was one. They'll learn by tragedy how international diplomacy works.
madhadron 7y ago
Does it seem odd to anyone else that French Polynesia is their testbed for "a floating legal entity designed to maximize personal and economic freedom," given that personal liberty and pursuit of happiness were not at all underlying principles of Tahitian society?
ivanhoe 7y ago
Sounds very similar to Sealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
wrongly 7y ago
Every July in the California Delta near Rio Vista I go to a weeklong festival called Ephemerisle, created 15 years ago to promote interest in seasteading. It’s full of Burners, SV people, and seasteading investors hanging out on yachts, barges, tugboats, and lots of DIY crafts: DeLorean hovercraft, flame boat with 100kW sound system, etc.
zzyzxroad 7y ago
"Ask them their opinions on the big crimes (murder/rape/arson etc). Will they allow me to keep slaves on my seastead?" Would you like the big crime happen to you? Would you like to be kept as a slave? I guess, these questions are easily answered. Trolling?

156 points by sanqui 7y ago

A cautionary tale on how this is likely to turn out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Foundation > Part of a reef, normally a metre below sea level at high tide, was piled high with sand and a small stone platform was erected carrying the flag of the Republic of Minerva—a white torch on a blue background. The 'President of Minerva,' Morris Davis, declared at the time: "People will be free to do as they damn well please. Nothing will be illegal so long it does not infringe on the rights of others. If a citizen wishes to open a tavern, set up gambling or make pornographic films, the government will not interfere." Tonga’s claim to the reef was recognized by the South Pacific Forum in September 1972. A Tongan expedition was sent to enforce the claim, arriving on 18 June 1972. The Flag of the Tonga was raised on 19 June 1972 on North Minerva and on South Minerva on 21 June 1972.

Macha 7y ago
For a more recent example: https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-trader-chad-elwartowski-thai-navy-destroys-floating-house-2019-4?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-trader-chad-elwartow... > Elwartowski and Thepdet's seastead was part of an experiment led by the Seasteading Institute, a group backed by Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire behind PayPal. > The floating home of Chad Elwartowski and his girlfriend, Supranee Thepdet, was towed ashore by Thai authorities on Monday to be taken apart, and the couple have been accused of violating Thailand's sovereignty, an offense that can carry the death penalty or life in prison, Sky News reported.
- imglorp 7y ago
  Also that story about what happens when you claim an abandoned WWII platform, call it a sovereign country, attempt to web host some sketchy material, and fend off the British Navy. http://web.archive.org/web/20050602082455/http://www.havenco.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20050602082455/http://www.havenco... https://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/the-curious-case-of-sealand-the-hacker-friendly-offshore-micronation https://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/the-curious-case... https://www.sealandgov.org/ https://www.sealandgov.org/
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    RDL is on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rdl https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rdl

fredley 7y ago

Less than two weeks after a 'Seastead' got dismantled and towed away by the Thai navy: https://www.theepochtimes.com/thai-navy-dismantles-floating-seastead-home-of-fugitive-bitcoin-couple_2890832.html https://www.theepochtimes.com/thai-navy-dismantles-floating-...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
noonespecial 7y ago
A good illustration of why it might not be such a great idea to fly no flag and claim no nation: anybody who floats up with a gun bigger than yours can go right ahead and subject you to whatever "law" they feel like.
- ryacko 7y ago
  If you fly the US flag, but claim no subdivision, one would have the benefits of citizenship without having to pay state and local taxes. As far as I can tell, registering a ship only requires citizenship, but it would make any dispute complex. Not a lawyer, but there was an era where citizens lived in US territories.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    > If you fly the US flag, but claim no subdivision, one would have the benefits of citizenship without having to pay state and local taxes. That doesn't seem right - why don't refugees, who appear to already be attempting to boat across large swaths of water, simply fly the US flag then?
    - joosters 7y ago
      For a start, they aren't trying to live in those large swathes of water, they're trying to reach somewhere else to live. Turning up at a border waving a US flag but having no valid US passport won't get you in...

october_sky 7y ago

The images here are charming, but there's not nearly enough population density in those to make them viable. The images display floating luxury homes complete with a yard.

sbt 7y ago

Something tells me these guys are more motivated by tax evasion than by saving the environment.

return1 7y ago
Seasteading is not motivated by environmental concerns , but mainly by libertarian concerns to escape regulations and governments. How would they evade taxes in international territory where there are no taxes? [edit since i m blocked from replying]: - US is unique in taxing worldwide income. I would assume the colonists would renounce any other citizenship anyway, and the colony does not have taxes. - They could not move any financial assets or to the colony unless it is somehow recognized internationally. There is no way to evade taxes. - The only possible way to tranfer assets is to convert them to cryptocurrency , which presumably would only be useful in the colony. And there 's probably not going to be a way to move large sums of money out of the colony, unless international banks agree to cooperate with it. [and a tangent] It's "interesting" to contrast the reactions of HN 2019 compared to 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=194028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=194028
- CaptainZapp 7y ago
  They would evade taxes from moving from where they currently live (and pay those taxes, which they're not able to evade via fancy constructs) to "Nowhere Land" where they (apparently) are not taxed at all. Alas, "Nowhere Land" may figure at one point that they need to generate income for basic maintenence and other necessary expenses. Basic maintenance, which can be very, very costly out at sea.
- jdblair 7y ago
  There are taxes in international waters. If you are a US citizen you owe income tax no matter where you earn your income. Hiding your income and not paying income tax is evading taxation. https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/taxpayers-living-abroad https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/taxp...
rufusroflpunch 7y ago

fareesh 7y ago

How does sewage treatment and trash disposal work in this kind of setup?

ceejayoz 7y ago
Dumping in the ocean, I strongly suspect.
pitaj 7y ago
Would likely involve incinerators.
michael_j_ward 7y ago
Two minute video answering the question[1]. Summary: they'll use a "urine diverting dry toilet" to collect the feces- which supposedly will be used for fertilizer. They don't say what exactly will be done with the urine, so likely dumped back into the ocean. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd2FCpU5wu8&list=PLDgJp6DTkMyGuEiHKVBDTp1TLNQ6RGZab&index=8&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd2FCpU5wu8&list=PLDgJp6DTkM...
driverdan 7y ago
It's legal to dump human waste in the ocean once you're in international waters.
- CaptainZapp 7y ago
  Can you provide more detail on that? I don't think, for example, that cruise ships are allowed to dump their shit (and other refuse) into the sea, provided they're in international waters.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Depends where they're registered. The vast majority of countries have signed on to the conventions forbidding dumping, and can enforce it on ships flagged in their countries, but a seastead intending to dump would presumably not sign on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78

MaupitiBlue 7y ago

Just buy a sailboat.

return1 7y ago
more like , a big ship or something like a retired oil rig. It needs to go in deep waters (>200 miles off the coast) and stay there for extended periods of time (and weather). A cruise ship would be ideal as it can be relatively self-sustaining. A bunch of cruise ships would be enough to start a big city.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  People sail around the world all the time. As in: retirees in 30-feet yachts.

ifdefdebug 7y ago

I read: "Seasteading is building floating societies with significant political autonomy". So when they go outside the jurisdiction (and protection) of a nation-state and their law enforcement, the first question that comes to my mind is: what about piracy? And as a matter of fact, they have a youtube channel "tough questions" talking about that (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PLUZ9bzUGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PLUZ9bzUGY) - tldr: it's gonna be private security firms, so it's not gonna be cheap ... and they claim only 2% of world's oceans are even considered piracy waters, but I think that's going to change as soon as there are wealthy communities floating in unprotected waters ...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pitaj 7y ago
> it's gonna be private security firms, so it's not gonna be cheap One could say that police and military are not cheap either
- Areading314 7y ago
  Maybe they'll just have to go around and collect donations from residents to pay the security. And just require them to pay if they don't raise enough ...
  - mkohlmyr 7y ago
    While I'm very much on-side with you on this one, I suppose their argument would be that it would be a voluntary association.
    - InitialLastName 7y ago
      Sure, right until they start applying it to people who are born and raised there and don't have the resources to travel and start lives somewhere else.

morkfromork 7y ago

Reminds me of the movie Waterworld.

ShamelessC 7y ago
Also "Outer Heaven" from the Metal Gear Solid games.

amalcon 7y ago

This is one of those concepts that seems to come out of thinking of the law as similar to software. It's not, because software is run by computers while law is run by humans. If you find a straightforward loophole in software, the computer running it will e.g. happily hand you information you're not supposed to have[1]. If you find that kind of loophole in the law, then the humans running it will usually just tell you to go home. They know that you know what they meant. Laws can still have loopholes, but they are generally more subtle and complicated. Fixing them often has obvious unintended consequences. They're more like speculative execution bugs[2] than buffer overruns. [1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed [2]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabilit...

jacquesm 7y ago
The bigger mistake is that paper and being clever will trump the power of guns.
fouronnes3 7y ago
You know you're on HN when the law is explained with an analogy to computer code and not the other way around ;)
rwmj 7y ago
Getting way off-topic but Stanford Law School had a project trying to encode law as code: https://law.stanford.edu/codex-the-stanford-center-for-legal-informatics/ https://law.stanford.edu/codex-the-stanford-center-for-legal...
buboard 7y ago
You believe that the existence of government-free land is a "loophole in the law" ?
- M2Ys4U 7y ago
  There is always a government. It might be two guys with guns, or it might be a huge bureaucracy that runs on the rule of law or anywhere in between. But it's always there.

gunn 7y ago

"On January 13, 2017 we signed a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) with French Polynesia [...] agreeing to cooperate on developing legislation for The Floating Island Project by the end of 2017" Is there any more news on this?

return1 7y ago
polynesia pulled out of the agreement > On March 3, 2018, a mayor from French Polynesia said the agreement was "not a legal document" and had expired at the end of 2017 in response to a challenger trying to make it an issue for the May, 2018 elections.

christoph-heiss 7y ago

Off-Topic: The site horrible "jitters" when scrolling around, pretty much unreadable/unuseable. At least for me with Chrome 74 on Fedora. Firefox 67 is fine.

lucisferre 7y ago

Rogue waves will be fun.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ckastner 7y ago

It's a simple and frequent mistake to believe that sovereign autonomy is wholly self-determined, and seasteading is the prime example for this. Sovereign autonomy is not determined by oneself. It is determined by others, specifically by recognizing the sovereignty. Without recognition, it's basically impossible to conduct any type of transaction with the outer world, for lack of jurisdiction.

djsumdog 7y ago
It almost always requires violence to create a state, and at the very least, it does require the capacity for violence. A State has a violence on monopoly and the ability to defend itself from anyone else who says, "You are part of my State/Country/Kingdom". If you could hire a private army, or maybe an army of pirates, Seasteading would work. But you have to pay them. Conquerors often paid armies by charging taxes to the lands they conquered, placing them in debt. The solders who were injured and missing arms/legs got their reward by collecting taxes and maintaining the taken land. The book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, goes into this concept in great detail. Another book in this genre is The Dictators Handbook.
- roywiggins 7y ago
  Everyone else might still ignore you. Nobody recognizes Abkhazia, even though it's kinda self-governing.
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    I've never heard of this State. It's very similar to Transnistria (which some of the world recognizes as a nation, but most UN countries still recognize as part of Moldova).
  - htmk 7y ago
    Kinda? Can you be kind enough to elaborate.
    - roywiggins 7y ago

sandworm101 7y ago

These guys are just like every other group that wants to setup their own society "free" of government. But look closely at their plans. They don't want to get rid of nation states. They just want to setup their own nation states under their own legal structure, one that sees them atop everyone else too poor to build their own floating palace. Ask them their opinions on the big crimes (murder/rape/arson etc). Will they allow me to keep slaves on my seastead? Of course not. May I operate an industrial smelter and dump the waste overboard? May I buys some guns, capture other seasteads and setup my own dictatorship? These people don't want to escape the real laws, just the handful of minor regulations with which they disagree. These are nothing more than rich randians complaining about their tax bracket.

sammyo 7y ago
And if they ever manage to build a few houses on a barge outside territorial waters, about 12 miles, they'll call on the closest government for emergency rescue a few hours into the first good storm.
- sandworm101 7y ago
  Or when they need an appendix removed. Then they want a "real" doctor, someone who learned their trade at a well-regulated hospital. Someone who is licensed by a medical board. Someone who has access to nice clean drugs manufactured in a lab subject to inspections. And then they want insurance coverage so they aren't out of pocket if something goes wrong during the operation. And then they expect some sort of rules-based enforcement structure to regulate all of these things. And don't forget some sort payment structure to support all these people ... This is getting complicated. Someone should write all these complicated rules down in a big book. Just don't call them laws.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Then not too different from living in a undeveloped/least developed country?
- 7y ago

DennisP 7y ago

I read the seasteading book, and thought it made a fairly convincing case that seasteads could produce vast amounts of food, biofuel, and carbon sequestration. I do think that setting out to build a "city" is not the way forward. Early experiments in deep-water aquaculture have been very profitable. Expand on that, and settlement will happen organically.

carapace 7y ago
Your comment reminds me of GreenWave: https://www.greenwave.org/our-work https://www.greenwave.org/our-work Ecologically and economically sustainable underwater 3D farms.
- DennisP 7y ago
  Yep, exactly the sort of thing I mean. Another good book on the topic is Tim Flannery's Sunlight and Seaweed.

komali2 7y ago

Seems like Peter thiel was tired of not getting libertarians elected in the USA so he went and made his own country. > Obsolete political systems conceived in previous centuries are ill-equipped to unleash the enormous opportunities in twenty-first century innovation. I wonder if woman's suffrage is included in his thoughts on obsolete political systems? > The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron

Tepix 7y ago

Let's ignore the contentious legal aspects and focus on the general idea: Create a floating structure that offers space for living, working or agriculture. Has this been done with areas that are much larger than a typical house boat? What kind of waves/storms can these structures deal with?

DennisP 7y ago
Cruise ships do pretty well. I looked up prices and capacities and found you can build a large cruise ship for about $100K per resident. The biggest ship I found could house 9000 people. Seasteads would mostly use aquaculture, so you don't need much growing room on the ship. If you're close to a shipping lane you can trade for other foods you want, just like everybody else does.
pp19dd 7y ago
Large ships do very poorly in waves. The last thing you want happening in a storm is to lose power. Without power you can't angle yourself perpendicular to the waves. When that happens, broadside waves make the ship bob like a corkscrew. If you don't capsize, this makes the situation beyond recovery. Waves tend to make large ships lose power easily because the engine oil sloshes in the pan, or the sump pit. The oil pump or inlet is located in a fixed place and can't be moved around. We're talking large engines here. Anyhow, the pump can't keep up with the flow due to this sloshing effectively cycling its flow rate and the engine starts overheating and it has to be throttled down then later shut off so it doesn't seize up. Once the engine is shut off and the vessel is no longer under command, the sloshing gets worse. Emergency battery power drains quickly. Meanwhile the fuel - bunker oil - cools off and turns into asphalt - it needs to be heated up to 120+ degrees F to be usable. Even if you don't shut the engine off, in stormy weather the fuel filters get clogged up faster and have to be constantly cleaned. The fuel itself, bunker oil, is chunky to begin with and the additional sloshing somehow gunks up the filters faster. In one famous case, the engineers had to do it every few minutes in a storm and that required complete enclosure disassembly and reassembly. That particular ship survived that storm, but not another.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

dang 7y ago

A thread from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519863 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4435994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4435994 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310873 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088570 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441310 Others?

dwighttk 7y ago

Odd that, unless I missed it, their blog mentions nothing about the Thai Navy destroying a seastead... https://fee.org/articles/the-world-s-first-seasteaders-are-now-on-the-run-for-their-lives/ https://fee.org/articles/the-world-s-first-seasteaders-are-n...

nradov 7y ago

These clowns have no clue what it takes to live on the sea. None of them have any serious experience in marine engineering, or in operating large ships or offshore platforms. They'll be begging the Coast Guard for rescue when the first big storm comes through.

buboard 7y ago
I don't think they plan to build those megastructures with their bare hands.
- village-idiot 7y ago
  I don’t think that GP was implying that they would. Even a structure built by machines can fail catastrophically if poorly designed or operated. The ocean floor is littered with ships that weren’t “built with their bare hands”.
  - buboard 7y ago
    I assume they will hire qualified people to operate them
kyledrake 7y ago
If they even survive it. The open ocean is hostile beyond belief. Anyone trying to setup a stable city out there does not understand or respect it's terrifying power. https://youtu.be/aBM7NgMhg90 https://youtu.be/aBM7NgMhg90 It takes a bay of some kind to do this semi-safely, but you won't find those 12 miles out from continents and if you do (basically reef atolls) they're almost certainly claimed by a government or very, very far away from civilization, and completely incapable of sustaining life in a way most people would want to live.

phkahler 7y ago

Most home owners associations are political messes. This seems like a slightly larger version of that but with far more responsibility in more areas.

crikli 7y ago

These folks take the Bluthton concept a bit too seriously.

tuxxy 7y ago

I've always been curious about initiatives like this. What happens if there becomes resource exhaustion and similar problems? How would the safety of the inhabitants be ensured in events like that?

Traster 7y ago

I wanted to actually dig into this, and see if there's anything that's underlying the ideas that are worth really considering but I've got to say, this really turned me off: "When an Island or Peninsula breaks free from a larger country and creates its own legal structure, dramatic increases in prosperity often occur within 1 generation. Under British rule Hong Kong habour was little more than a dockyard for the Royal Navy. Now thanks to modern trade rules and numerous land reclamation projects, the skyline features an abundance of skyscrapers." That's just dishonest. Firstly, Hong Kong was not just a dockyard for the British Navy in 1997, it was already an incredibly rich place, with many skyscrapers and huge amounts of autonomy. Try googling a photo of Hong Kong in 1997. Secondly, it is has not broken free from a larger country, it was returned from the British Empire to Chinese control. "Before World War 2, rickshaws were the primary form of transport in Singapore. Now there is a vast public transport infrastructure, including high speed rail networks and expressways." Okay, what a funky timeline. Before WW2 Singapore was very poor! Along with basically everyone else in that region. It gained independence in 1959, but let's not talk about what happened in between! None of the examples they give seem to offer anything other than "Pro tip: Be a tax haven". Singapore, Mauritius, Hong Kong? Notice what these places have in common? Like Jesus Christ guys could you not find a single example of a country whose independence made it wealthy without being a straight up tax haven for the surrounding larger countries?

saalweachter 7y ago

There's a certain parallel to "a solution in search of a problem". I haven't thought of a witty way to phrase the problem; "a utopia in search of a social movement", maybe? It's really fun to design your new utopian community: the principles, the laws, the layout of the streets in the city (or the ships, in this case). But this is precisely backwards. You aren't playing SimCity, or SimSeastead. You can't just build (or make blueprints for) your ideal city, then summon a hoard of obedient minion-citizens to build it and inhabit it and behave in the way you have dictated. The social movement has to come first: you need a large group of people, with similar aims and goals, working together, making decisions and plans a group. Then maybe you build a city. Or a commune. Or a co-op. Or who knows; the group may end up with other needs that you didn't anticipate. Hypothetically you could build your community around your utopian vision, but why should they flock to you? All you've got is an idea. I've got some ideas, and so has every other person who might hypothetically be interested in joining your community. Why should I join you on your seastead instead of you joining me in my mountain enclave, or my seastead in a different ocean, or exactly like your seastead started out, except it's my seastead, I make the decisions? Start by building a community, a movement. Or stick to writing fiction and playing the Sims.

hkt 7y ago

Libertarian wet dream if ever there was one. They'll learn by tragedy how international diplomacy works.

madhadron 7y ago

Does it seem odd to anyone else that French Polynesia is their testbed for "a floating legal entity designed to maximize personal and economic freedom," given that personal liberty and pursuit of happiness were not at all underlying principles of Tahitian society?

ivanhoe 7y ago

Sounds very similar to Sealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

wrongly 7y ago

Every July in the California Delta near Rio Vista I go to a weeklong festival called Ephemerisle, created 15 years ago to promote interest in seasteading. It’s full of Burners, SV people, and seasteading investors hanging out on yachts, barges, tugboats, and lots of DIY crafts: DeLorean hovercraft, flame boat with 100kW sound system, etc.

zzyzxroad 7y ago

"Ask them their opinions on the big crimes (murder/rape/arson etc). Will they allow me to keep slaves on my seastead?" Would you like the big crime happen to you? Would you like to be kept as a slave? I guess, these questions are easily answered. Trolling?