14 ms·

The crypto bros crowdfunding a new country

41 points by griffzhowl 2y ago

griffzhowl 2y ago
Quite vague on any details about how this would actually be workable, but that might just be the reporter's slant. Is there some version of this that doesn't sound like a corporate technofascist dystopian anti-fantasy? The most interesting idea for me was about whether something similar could emerge within already existing states, performing some of their functions but otherwise hybridizing with them. Remote work and starlink and so on open up some geographic possibilities for networked communities.
- thephyber 2y ago
  “Seasteading”, Prospera, LiberLand. Lots of attempts. Nothing that stands the test of time. Except maybe SeaOrg of L Ron Hubbard infamy.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    > Except maybe SeaOrg of L Ron Hubbard infamy Yeah, that’s probably the closest, but it only works because it parasitises an actual country (the US), and is very circumspect about what it actually _is_. It wouldn’t be tolerated for a _minute_ if it went around openly calling itself a country.
    - thephyber 2y ago
      Agree. I’m not advocating for any of these, just pointing out that they exist.
justinclift 2y ago
No mention of how they're going to pay any potential military, so this is a complete non-starter. And if they ever do figure out how to pay a potential military, then I'm sure the current actual owners of the land they're on (ie the country whose territory they're in) will quickly want to have a chat with them and disabuse them of that notion.
- trilbyglens 2y ago
  *disabuse
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Thanks, fixed. :)
bigbinary 2y ago
So instead of policy, these citizens would just have common interests? Idk if he’s bullshitting or actually huffing his own glue
adampwells 2y ago
wow, sounds like someone is taking the back story of Snow Crash a bit too seriously!
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
This whole group of a16z are scared folks who will do anything to keep a seat on the table. One needs to be careful they don't sell state secrets to Saudi. They have no morality or national pride.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  > They have no morality or national pride. Actually, the more you learn about the country we live in, the more you will realize that it has little morality and is hardly worth much pride. To give just one example, we have the worst healthcare in developed countries despite spending the most on it. We have introduced and have been accumulating PFAS toxin like it doesn't matter at all, even adding it to pesticides to intentionally be sprayed on food. In general, the more our governmental agencies can be lobbied, the more corrupted they already are by corporations.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    I will not argue with you about our health care. I agree it's a complete shit show. But to hide your plans as love for the country but just protecting your seat at the table is heinous.
_nalply 2y ago
Human rights are important, for example the right to be heard in conflicts. Let me explain why I believe that a new form of country will appear: Companies will turn into countries. Currently large companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and so on, don't "offer" human rights. People however want them to have more responsibility, especially in Europe. This is a changing force already in progress. Perhaps it will turn out that the European Court of Human Rights or a similar institution will do the same thing to Corporate what it already does for many countries. Of course the ECHR is not working well today, there are many problems, but should we just give up and let Corporate become feudal? At least I propose we should think about what we people need from countries and corporate entities and how to gain these needs. I guess at some point Europe could enforce corporate entities to give the right to be heard to people, for example. And that's one step of them turning into countries. Perhaps you think, a country, that's something with an army. But an army is not really neccessary if there is some other way to control power. Currently, however, the world doesn't seem to have a lot of power as we see with many different wars. I am a bit pessimistic about the future of humanity, but I still hope that in the long-term we will find a way without raw material power to resolve conflicts, because this is really wasteful and might even lead to our demise.
- senectus1 2y ago
  sounds like the setup to a William Gibson novel.
  - more_corn 2y ago
    Or a Neil Stephenson one. “You would choose your nationality like you choose your broadband provider. You would become a citizen of the franchised cyber statelet of your choice.“ Maybe the story could focus around a plucky courier named YT, a reluctant hero in black and feature swashbuckling hi jinx in a Balkanized landscape of competing franchised techno micro states. Pretty sure he’s just pitching the social layout of Snow Crash.
  - dsr_ 2y ago
    Max Barry, actually. JENNIFER GOVERNMENT is the novel.
renewiltord 2y ago
It's like Hives in Too Like The Lightning. I do admit I like the idea of having a different set of laws in the same geographical space. There are some things that are like that: accredited investor, etc. And it would be good to broaden the amount of things where you can say "I'm an adult; if I lose, I lose" and then refuse it to people who could not possibly reasonably say that.
- voltaireodactyl 2y ago
  In this proposed world, whom decides what constitutes “reasonable”?
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Same way we decided on the accredited investor thing or how we decide on informed consent. You can self-assert and lose protection to get freedom. And of course you must be literate etc. We don’t need to invent new things. We can just use the existing technology we have.
    - voltaireodactyl 2y ago
      Whom decides what the requirements are re: the accredited investor thing analogue? The corporation? Because that sounds like reinventing feudalism.
      - renewiltord 2y ago
        Are you familiar with Rule 506(b) offerings? If so, then I don't understand why you'd ask the question; there seems like an obvious answer. If not, then perhaps there's just a gulf of understanding here that it will take a while to bridge, so it's unlikely this conversation will be useful to you.
        voltaireodactyl 2y ago
        How are Rule 506(b) offerings relevant in a post government world? The point I’m trying to make here is that you’re assuming certain structures will outlive the governments that created the rules in the first place, which seems unlikely given the significant divergence between the goals of government and the goals of for-profit industry (in theory, at least). For example: I wonder who will tell the folks with nuclear weapons what to do, and insist Rule 506(b) offerings that don’t benefit said folks be respected? Probably something lost in my gulf of misunderstanding. I sure hope so!
keiferski 2y ago
I find the idea of new countries fascinating and the constant disparagement of their supporters as “crypto bros” annoying and inappropriate for a supposedly serious news organization like the BBC. Otherwise, though, I think the obsession with making a new country is slightly off the mark. Labeling yourself as a country puts the target on your back in a way that doesn’t really exist for a global distributed corporation/organization with a specific purpose. Many of these efforts would be better served creating novel forms of corporations that exist within existing states, not trying to found a new state itself. The model should be the Hanseatic League or something similar, not a fully-fledged nation state. Even a private club like SoHo House is probably a better first step.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
[flagged]
- piva00 2y ago
  Let me know which right-wing state allows for private entities to forge their own laws. The closest example I can think of is Disney but even that is a huge stretch to call "making their own laws".
- greenhearth 2y ago
  What "rights?" The rights of a corporation to exploit and pollute?
- squigz 2y ago
  Dang. Lefties ruining this too, huh?
Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
The 'crypto ideology' (for lack of a better phrase) of some who completely believed in the power of crypto to change the world and unshackle the masses from the tyranny of financial regulations. But then all the scams happened (and keep happening), and many commented how its was like they were speed running the last few hundred years of financial markets in realization that many rules/laws were they for good reason. I don't see this country thing as being any different. More cynically, I see this as a bunch of divas who want to officially be above the law because they feel they are better than that and its only holding back their greatness. They, and they alone, are the only ones smart enough to create utopia.
- ETH_start 2y ago
  There is no empirical evidence that the laws you're talking about benefit society. Take anti-money laundering laws for example, which have demonstrated no evidence of policy effectiveness: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1725366 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1... For a more personal look, see how it affects people born in the "wrong country": https://www.reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/s/XYh1ajhP0P https://www.reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/s/XYh1ajhP0P The actual laws that are needed, are those against victimful acts, like fraud, and you don't need the kind of freedom-reducing regulatory restrictions that have become so numerous in recent decades to have anti-fraud laws. Effective enforcement of anti-fraud laws alone would be sufficient to stop the bulk of the scams in the crypto space, and there is nothing inherent to crypto that prevents legal authorities from pursuing those who perpetrate fraud and bringing them to justice. On the plus side, free market competition has fostered innovation and discipline in the crypto space. We've gone from bug-prone smart contracts like the DAO eight years ago to highly secure bluechip DeFi applications like Aave, Uniswap, Compound and MakerDAO surviving completely unscathed in the last crypto crash. Scams still abound unfortunately, and I believe that will only subside once people at large understand that crypto is more like cash than like a bank account, in that there is no social consensus system that can reverse fraudulent transactions in crypto like there is in banking. This is the flip side of being able to control your own funds, and transfer them without censorship. Once people do broadly come to realize this aspect of crypto, I believe they will be far more cautious in how they choose to handle it.
sevensor 2y ago
> Then they acquire land, becoming physical “countries” with their own laws. These would exist alongside existing nation states, and eventually, replace them altogether. Let’s assume for a moment they’re not as stupid as this makes them sound. (Because, good luck getting nation states to let go one inch of territory their people have bled over for hundreds of years.) What are they really after? More tax havens? Free trade zones? Regimes with weaker enforcement against money laundering? Ultimately private companies can exist only because the state allows it. Just last year we all saw what happens when a private army threatens state power.
- inquisitorG 2y ago
  I read this as the delusional fantasy of a wanna be little dictator: “Obviously, democracy is great,” he said. “But the best ruler is a moral dictator. Some people call [that] the philosopher king.”
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  > Because, good luck getting nation states to let go one inch of territory their people have bled over for hundreds of years. That claim feels right to me, but it's weird when you look at how much territory the US has bought for less than a thousand dollars per square mile in today's money.
  - a_victorp 2y ago
    The difference is that the US already had an army
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      But can you even imagine two countries doing a deal like that today?
Suppafly 2y ago
I'm sure it'll go as well as everything else crypto bros are involved with.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  There's a part of me that hopes that the crypto bros succeed in forming their own country, so they'll be there instead of here.
kwere 2y ago
The best way to create new countries to try different societal models is by claiming the only unclaimed territories in the world, international waters with floating cities. There are various projects going on [0][1][2] [0]https://www.seasteading.org/ https://www.seasteading.org/ [1]https://www.ubm-development.com/magazin/en/maldives-floating-city-climate-innovators-at-work/ https://www.ubm-development.com/magazin/en/maldives-floating... [2]https://oceanix.com/busan/ https://oceanix.com/busan/
krapp 2y ago
Does anyone else read stories like this and wish Tool had written Aenima about Silicon Valley? Fuck Curtis Yarvin and fuck all his clones. Fuck all these billionaire nerd gangster wannabees. Fret for your AI and fret for your crypto and fret for your commute back to the campus and fret for your contracts and fret for the wokes who just can't understand why you should be king. Fret for the market and fret for the government fret for the homeless who shit where you want to eat fret for your Cybertruck fret for the white man and fret for the ape juice that slurped up your NFTs. We know what happens when you hand absolute power to a single person. We know what happens when corporations become more powerful than governments (literally, not in the way people now say that Facebook and Twitter are, just because they can ban A SITTING PRESIDENT, but because they have private armies and guns and slaves.) A benevolent dictator is a contradiction in terms. But this time it'll work because the god-king is an ardent Randian capitalist who can reverse a b-tree on a whiteboard, and runs the country like Amazon but now with company scrip and a monopoly on violence! Some say a comet will fall from the sky. Followed by degaussing drives and flipped bozo bits. Followed by segfaults and use after frees. Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits. And some say the end is near. Some say we'll see Armageddon soon. I certainly hope we will.
7e 2y ago
I guess someone's been re-reading The Diamond Age.

41 points by griffzhowl 2y ago

Quite vague on any details about how this would actually be workable, but that might just be the reporter's slant. Is there some version of this that doesn't sound like a corporate technofascist dystopian anti-fantasy? The most interesting idea for me was about whether something similar could emerge within already existing states, performing some of their functions but otherwise hybridizing with them. Remote work and starlink and so on open up some geographic possibilities for networked communities.

thephyber 2y ago
“Seasteading”, Prospera, LiberLand. Lots of attempts. Nothing that stands the test of time. Except maybe SeaOrg of L Ron Hubbard infamy.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > Except maybe SeaOrg of L Ron Hubbard infamy Yeah, that’s probably the closest, but it only works because it parasitises an actual country (the US), and is very circumspect about what it actually _is_. It wouldn’t be tolerated for a _minute_ if it went around openly calling itself a country.
  - thephyber 2y ago
    Agree. I’m not advocating for any of these, just pointing out that they exist.

justinclift 2y ago

No mention of how they're going to pay any potential military, so this is a complete non-starter. And if they ever do figure out how to pay a potential military, then I'm sure the current actual owners of the land they're on (ie the country whose territory they're in) will quickly want to have a chat with them and disabuse them of that notion.

trilbyglens 2y ago
*disabuse
- justinclift 2y ago
  Thanks, fixed. :)

bigbinary 2y ago

So instead of policy, these citizens would just have common interests? Idk if he’s bullshitting or actually huffing his own glue

adampwells 2y ago

wow, sounds like someone is taking the back story of Snow Crash a bit too seriously!

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

This whole group of a16z are scared folks who will do anything to keep a seat on the table. One needs to be careful they don't sell state secrets to Saudi. They have no morality or national pride.

OutOfHere 2y ago
> They have no morality or national pride. Actually, the more you learn about the country we live in, the more you will realize that it has little morality and is hardly worth much pride. To give just one example, we have the worst healthcare in developed countries despite spending the most on it. We have introduced and have been accumulating PFAS toxin like it doesn't matter at all, even adding it to pesticides to intentionally be sprayed on food. In general, the more our governmental agencies can be lobbied, the more corrupted they already are by corporations.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  I will not argue with you about our health care. I agree it's a complete shit show. But to hide your plans as love for the country but just protecting your seat at the table is heinous.

_nalply 2y ago

Human rights are important, for example the right to be heard in conflicts. Let me explain why I believe that a new form of country will appear: Companies will turn into countries. Currently large companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and so on, don't "offer" human rights. People however want them to have more responsibility, especially in Europe. This is a changing force already in progress. Perhaps it will turn out that the European Court of Human Rights or a similar institution will do the same thing to Corporate what it already does for many countries. Of course the ECHR is not working well today, there are many problems, but should we just give up and let Corporate become feudal? At least I propose we should think about what we people need from countries and corporate entities and how to gain these needs. I guess at some point Europe could enforce corporate entities to give the right to be heard to people, for example. And that's one step of them turning into countries. Perhaps you think, a country, that's something with an army. But an army is not really neccessary if there is some other way to control power. Currently, however, the world doesn't seem to have a lot of power as we see with many different wars. I am a bit pessimistic about the future of humanity, but I still hope that in the long-term we will find a way without raw material power to resolve conflicts, because this is really wasteful and might even lead to our demise.

senectus1 2y ago
sounds like the setup to a William Gibson novel.
- more_corn 2y ago
  Or a Neil Stephenson one. “You would choose your nationality like you choose your broadband provider. You would become a citizen of the franchised cyber statelet of your choice.“ Maybe the story could focus around a plucky courier named YT, a reluctant hero in black and feature swashbuckling hi jinx in a Balkanized landscape of competing franchised techno micro states. Pretty sure he’s just pitching the social layout of Snow Crash.
- dsr_ 2y ago
  Max Barry, actually. JENNIFER GOVERNMENT is the novel.

renewiltord 2y ago

It's like Hives in Too Like The Lightning. I do admit I like the idea of having a different set of laws in the same geographical space. There are some things that are like that: accredited investor, etc. And it would be good to broaden the amount of things where you can say "I'm an adult; if I lose, I lose" and then refuse it to people who could not possibly reasonably say that.

voltaireodactyl 2y ago
In this proposed world, whom decides what constitutes “reasonable”?
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Same way we decided on the accredited investor thing or how we decide on informed consent. You can self-assert and lose protection to get freedom. And of course you must be literate etc. We don’t need to invent new things. We can just use the existing technology we have.
  - voltaireodactyl 2y ago
    Whom decides what the requirements are re: the accredited investor thing analogue? The corporation? Because that sounds like reinventing feudalism.
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      Are you familiar with Rule 506(b) offerings? If so, then I don't understand why you'd ask the question; there seems like an obvious answer. If not, then perhaps there's just a gulf of understanding here that it will take a while to bridge, so it's unlikely this conversation will be useful to you.
      - voltaireodactyl 2y ago
        How are Rule 506(b) offerings relevant in a post government world? The point I’m trying to make here is that you’re assuming certain structures will outlive the governments that created the rules in the first place, which seems unlikely given the significant divergence between the goals of government and the goals of for-profit industry (in theory, at least). For example: I wonder who will tell the folks with nuclear weapons what to do, and insist Rule 506(b) offerings that don’t benefit said folks be respected? Probably something lost in my gulf of misunderstanding. I sure hope so!

keiferski 2y ago

I find the idea of new countries fascinating and the constant disparagement of their supporters as “crypto bros” annoying and inappropriate for a supposedly serious news organization like the BBC. Otherwise, though, I think the obsession with making a new country is slightly off the mark. Labeling yourself as a country puts the target on your back in a way that doesn’t really exist for a global distributed corporation/organization with a specific purpose. Many of these efforts would be better served creating novel forms of corporations that exist within existing states, not trying to found a new state itself. The model should be the Hanseatic League or something similar, not a fully-fledged nation state. Even a private club like SoHo House is probably a better first step.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

[flagged]

piva00 2y ago
Let me know which right-wing state allows for private entities to forge their own laws. The closest example I can think of is Disney but even that is a huge stretch to call "making their own laws".
greenhearth 2y ago
What "rights?" The rights of a corporation to exploit and pollute?
squigz 2y ago
Dang. Lefties ruining this too, huh?

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago

The 'crypto ideology' (for lack of a better phrase) of some who completely believed in the power of crypto to change the world and unshackle the masses from the tyranny of financial regulations. But then all the scams happened (and keep happening), and many commented how its was like they were speed running the last few hundred years of financial markets in realization that many rules/laws were they for good reason. I don't see this country thing as being any different. More cynically, I see this as a bunch of divas who want to officially be above the law because they feel they are better than that and its only holding back their greatness. They, and they alone, are the only ones smart enough to create utopia.

ETH_start 2y ago
There is no empirical evidence that the laws you're talking about benefit society. Take anti-money laundering laws for example, which have demonstrated no evidence of policy effectiveness: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1725366 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1... For a more personal look, see how it affects people born in the "wrong country": https://www.reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/s/XYh1ajhP0P https://www.reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/s/XYh1ajhP0P The actual laws that are needed, are those against victimful acts, like fraud, and you don't need the kind of freedom-reducing regulatory restrictions that have become so numerous in recent decades to have anti-fraud laws. Effective enforcement of anti-fraud laws alone would be sufficient to stop the bulk of the scams in the crypto space, and there is nothing inherent to crypto that prevents legal authorities from pursuing those who perpetrate fraud and bringing them to justice. On the plus side, free market competition has fostered innovation and discipline in the crypto space. We've gone from bug-prone smart contracts like the DAO eight years ago to highly secure bluechip DeFi applications like Aave, Uniswap, Compound and MakerDAO surviving completely unscathed in the last crypto crash. Scams still abound unfortunately, and I believe that will only subside once people at large understand that crypto is more like cash than like a bank account, in that there is no social consensus system that can reverse fraudulent transactions in crypto like there is in banking. This is the flip side of being able to control your own funds, and transfer them without censorship. Once people do broadly come to realize this aspect of crypto, I believe they will be far more cautious in how they choose to handle it.

sevensor 2y ago

> Then they acquire land, becoming physical “countries” with their own laws. These would exist alongside existing nation states, and eventually, replace them altogether. Let’s assume for a moment they’re not as stupid as this makes them sound. (Because, good luck getting nation states to let go one inch of territory their people have bled over for hundreds of years.) What are they really after? More tax havens? Free trade zones? Regimes with weaker enforcement against money laundering? Ultimately private companies can exist only because the state allows it. Just last year we all saw what happens when a private army threatens state power.

inquisitorG 2y ago
I read this as the delusional fantasy of a wanna be little dictator: “Obviously, democracy is great,” he said. “But the best ruler is a moral dictator. Some people call [that] the philosopher king.”
Dylan16807 2y ago
> Because, good luck getting nation states to let go one inch of territory their people have bled over for hundreds of years. That claim feels right to me, but it's weird when you look at how much territory the US has bought for less than a thousand dollars per square mile in today's money.
- a_victorp 2y ago
  The difference is that the US already had an army
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    But can you even imagine two countries doing a deal like that today?

Suppafly 2y ago

I'm sure it'll go as well as everything else crypto bros are involved with.

JohnFen 2y ago
There's a part of me that hopes that the crypto bros succeed in forming their own country, so they'll be there instead of here.

kwere 2y ago

The best way to create new countries to try different societal models is by claiming the only unclaimed territories in the world, international waters with floating cities. There are various projects going on [0][1][2] [0]https://www.seasteading.org/ https://www.seasteading.org/ [1]https://www.ubm-development.com/magazin/en/maldives-floating-city-climate-innovators-at-work/ https://www.ubm-development.com/magazin/en/maldives-floating... [2]https://oceanix.com/busan/ https://oceanix.com/busan/

krapp 2y ago

Does anyone else read stories like this and wish Tool had written Aenima about Silicon Valley? Fuck Curtis Yarvin and fuck all his clones. Fuck all these billionaire nerd gangster wannabees. Fret for your AI and fret for your crypto and fret for your commute back to the campus and fret for your contracts and fret for the wokes who just can't understand why you should be king. Fret for the market and fret for the government fret for the homeless who shit where you want to eat fret for your Cybertruck fret for the white man and fret for the ape juice that slurped up your NFTs. We know what happens when you hand absolute power to a single person. We know what happens when corporations become more powerful than governments (literally, not in the way people now say that Facebook and Twitter are, just because they can ban A SITTING PRESIDENT, but because they have private armies and guns and slaves.) A benevolent dictator is a contradiction in terms. But this time it'll work because the god-king is an ardent Randian capitalist who can reverse a b-tree on a whiteboard, and runs the country like Amazon but now with company scrip and a monopoly on violence! Some say a comet will fall from the sky. Followed by degaussing drives and flipped bozo bits. Followed by segfaults and use after frees. Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits. And some say the end is near. Some say we'll see Armageddon soon. I certainly hope we will.

7e 2y ago

I guess someone's been re-reading The Diamond Age.