What, again? Neither of the "Bitcoin island" schemes ever happened. The seasteading people failed to convince anybody that living on an old anchored cruise ship just for a tax break was worth it. The Sea Pod didn't look survivable in a storm.
Red Rock Island in San Francisco Bay [1] is apparently for sale again. It was supposedly sold in 2025, but that deal may have fallen through. Nobody built anything on it. Five acres of rock with cliffs.
It's basically a mountain peak sticking out of water. It would take a lot of money and work to do something with it. At least as much as the Eagle's Nest [2], plus the costs of operating on an island.
Which means there are about a dozen people in the Bay Area who could afford it.
I'm eternally disappointed that none of these libertarian projects even manage to survive long enough to hit the "oops we just reinvented government and taxes" stage.
They don't want to actually create anything for anyone else or the messaging would be different.
It's the same energy of a kid running away from home to the tree house in the yard. All they want is to have all the benefits of society (imagine if they were barred from reentering their home country or traveling anywhere else because Pirate-Monaco-Dubai-island(tm) doesn't have real passports) and not be held responsible for their destructive behavior and impulses.
I would reframe this as the rent-seekers not wanting to create anything for anyone else.
The reason Pirate-Monaco-Dubai-Island isn't productive is because all of the productive land is being squatted by rent-seekers. There is some history that indicates that anarchistic sort of socities can be productive, for example kowloon walled city.
Libertarianism is a spectrum. The majority believe in some form of government, just limited in what it can do to varying degrees. The are also anarchists, yes, but that's not all libertarians.
True, but this is what distinguishes libertarianism from anarchism. Libertarians aren't pursing anarchy, they're pursuing a minimal government and a global environment that makes governments compete on taxes/protections/benefits/etc.
The most extreme form of libertarianism, minarchism, still proposes the existence of a government
Casting seasteading as a tax avoidance strategy because some loud self proclaimed Libertarians were briefly involved is really sad. Some people really are entranced with the idea of living on the seas and building communities there. Given what goes on with cruise ships and aircraft carriers this isn't even a particularly challenging goal. Put down your aggressively critical politics for a moment and let yourself enjoy that others can dream.
Great username. I too wished to live at sea once, but I gotta be honest with you; hang around any of the big submariner/shipwright/offshore groups for long enough and it will shock you how few people with money in those circles are not Andrew Ryan wannabes. As an avid Cousteau and Earle fan all my life, it broke my heart. If you're uber-wealthy, seeking recognition for that success makes enough sense; that recognition typically comes from people who inevitably live on shore someplace. They might commission a big yacht like Gaben or Zuck, but it serves multiple purposes, not the least of which being "hey, look at me!" But there is a particular type of personality for whom keeping to themselves is the height of luxury, and a couple folks of this persuasion are incredibly wealth. These dragons hoard their keep because, philosophically, it is theirs to do with as they please and not anybody else's. For them, the inherent eroticism of the sea calls their name. I swear to God, it happens every time.
Libertarians did make an actual island, Republic of Minerva, but the Australian/western and Polynesian governments were so scared shitless of a tiny island of libertarians that they concocted a story about it being "Tongan fishing lands" (despite the fact being way out of Tongan waters and Tonga basically ~never having mentioned it until some other people decided to put an island there). Then they sent the Tongan Navy to take it by force.
From "might makes right" is Tongan because the Tongans were able to take it. From the perspective of homesteading, owning the fruit of your labor, etc I think you can argue since the Minervans both made the island, homesteaded, "discovered" (didn't exist until they made it), and claimed and were actively using it they have senior property rights (you can argue any of these individually but in summation it's quite weighty over any Tongan claim).
Of course might make right ultimately trumps everything else, it is just interesting that you so often hear that if libertarians want to escape society they shouldn't use force to make others follow their ideals, they should just go off into the woods or their own island or some such. But then when they actually make their own island, actually "society" decides they will just take their shit under the auspices of a military force that will kill them if they defend themselves (although the only homicide on Minerva was one Tongan killing another Tongan).
Right now Fiji and Tonga are fighting over it and in reality neither one actually gives much a shit about the actual property rights to hold the island and as a fiji/tongan dispute suddenly the Navy is not so interested anymore. The Tongan claims were initiated after a conference with Polynesian countries and Australia where the goal was not to preserve some Tongan fishing but to smack down the libertarians using it -- Polynesian claims were never an actual reason for the invasion, only kicking the libertarians off the island.
This article is about a project called "Destiny" (https://destiny.com), an economic zone to be created in an undeveloped region of Nevis (of St. Kitts & Nevis)
The project goal is to become like Dubai with a 50m dollar investment, which I don't think is an admirable goal btw.
St Kitts & Nevis has had a history of being friendly to crypto and there was an initiative to make bitcoin cash legal tender, although don't think it ever actually happened.
I been to St. Kitts & Nevis. The only thing I can remember is the very stark contrast between the commercialized beaches versus where the locals lived, and the roaming cows everywhere.
Nevis (the baseball) was only boat accessible, and St. Kitts (the bat) is mostly hills of national park.
Vast majority of things must be flown or shipped in. I am hard pressed to see some "techno libertarians" doing techno without Amazon/Temu/Walmart/<insert fav vendor> in 24h drop ship.
>Vast majority of things must be flown or shipped in. I am hard pressed to see some "techno libertarians" doing techno without Amazon/Temu/Walmart/<insert fav vendor> in 24h drop ship.
I think this is an unreasonable bar. All the fertile land in the world has been accounted for. There's no way to accomplish that type of sustainability without conquering existing land or some major technological breakthrough.
I think a fair bar would be economic sustainability. Plenty of countries depend on trade for food, but can make up for it in exports.
I have my doctor on WhatsApp. America is trash and its SOOOOO easy to live without Amazon when you have a fixer / emissary. We have AGI interfaces to everything.
These projects obviously have limited success. I found it interesting to learn about a couple that were very successful, though.
1) the Republic of Venice from 7th to 18th centuries, basically a merchant-run state controlled by a tight circle of wealthy traders. Its whole setup revolved around safeguarding trade and property and staying clear of the Catholic church and European kings.
2) the Republic of Ragusa from 14th to 19th centuries, in what’s now Dubrovnik, run by a small group of merchant families. Strong focus on open commerce and neutrality, made early advances in public health and infrastructure and had its own privately funded healthcare and insurance, all paid for by trade profits
If you consider them libertarian projects they failed. That's the thing about libertarianism - to succeed it needs to reinvent stuff that it is so opposed to.
Venice and Ragusa (and Genoa) were oligarchic states, had laws, and used force to enforce these laws. Civic liberties were suspended or heavily restricted.
As someone with no plans to live or vacation in the caribbean, I'm curious. Is there a specific notable reason, or is it just a combination of littler things (cost, convenience, politics, weather, etc.)?
I've spend a total of about 2 months in the Carribean. One of those being an entire month straight.
It's the convenience really, and the fact that nobody is in a hurry. Island time is real. You cannot be demanding. You can't really be upset at service. Most people are there to chill out, even if they are doing a job. Life is just slower.
This is good, IMO. But if you are a hedonically adapted/burned out western metropolis dweller, this culture shock could be distressing.
There's nothing wrong with living in the Caribbean. Tons of people live there for a reason. Biggest issue with the Caribbean is the price of property, susceptibility to climate disasters and susceptibility to external political forces which means constant securit threat.
Have you spent time in the Carribean and SEA? SEA prices are better, it's safer, people are more honest in most areas, and while food is subjective, IMO SEA has that locked as well.
In 2014 it was Chile, in 2017 it was Honduras, then Colombia and El Salvador in the early 2020s. In Chile and Colombia they were coasting on tax authorities not pursuing them and relying on the cultural cachet of being thought-leading risk takers who were forward-thinking enough to take on a new frontier (remember this is when they started flying south for ayahuasca ceremonies). In the case of Honduras and El Salvador, they were setting up in tax-free zones (which is effectively a transfer of wealth from those outside of the zone to those inside). Notable that the periods of Chilean and Salvadorian history that these “libertarians” tend to celebrate were periods of political repression. I can’t imagine these ventures will be any different.
Remember the scene in Blow when Johnny Depp’s character goes to Columbia to make a withdrawal from the millions he’s been sending to their banks and they are like like “huh, we don’t remember you creating an account here. Good day sir. Please leave.”
"Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute."
"And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldn’t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn’t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle."
Great stuff! Apologies for the snark before, there weren't many comments and I was miffed that one of the few was so short. I stepped outside my office into the sun right after posting and felt ridiculous. Go outside, people!
Yeah if you take any system and quickly replace it you'll run into issue. My town is so libertarian it doesn't even have public roads and absolutely zero public services, no police officer either, but we've been doing it that way for decades if not centuries, so we have the system down and there's no stories about bears or the roads not working or whatever.
> Did you sincerely believe that the parent poster was suggesting bear-overrun as a probable outcome?
Gee, maybe they should have written a comment explaining their point of view that we could then discuss, instead of a quippy, dismissive one-liner! Then, we could be discussing the likely pitfalls of this endeavor instead of circlejerking over a Vox piece.
> If you understood correctly, then your response is an example of the same thing you're complaining about.
Do you not understand the process of abstracting a situation one small step to consider it at a higher level than its surface details? Or are you pretending not to? Which do you think makes you look better?
What, again? Neither of the "Bitcoin island" schemes ever happened. The seasteading people failed to convince anybody that living on an old anchored cruise ship just for a tax break was worth it. The Sea Pod didn't look survivable in a storm.
Red Rock Island in San Francisco Bay [1] is apparently for sale again. It was supposedly sold in 2025, but that deal may have fallen through. Nobody built anything on it. Five acres of rock with cliffs. It's basically a mountain peak sticking out of water. It would take a lot of money and work to do something with it. At least as much as the Eagle's Nest [2], plus the costs of operating on an island. Which means there are about a dozen people in the Bay Area who could afford it.
[1] https://www.latitude38.com/lectronic/red-rock-island-isan-fr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehlsteinhaus
I'm eternally disappointed that none of these libertarian projects even manage to survive long enough to hit the "oops we just reinvented government and taxes" stage.
They don't want to actually create anything for anyone else or the messaging would be different.
It's the same energy of a kid running away from home to the tree house in the yard. All they want is to have all the benefits of society (imagine if they were barred from reentering their home country or traveling anywhere else because Pirate-Monaco-Dubai-island(tm) doesn't have real passports) and not be held responsible for their destructive behavior and impulses.
I would reframe this as the rent-seekers not wanting to create anything for anyone else.
The reason Pirate-Monaco-Dubai-Island isn't productive is because all of the productive land is being squatted by rent-seekers. There is some history that indicates that anarchistic sort of socities can be productive, for example kowloon walled city.
Libertarianism is a spectrum. The majority believe in some form of government, just limited in what it can do to varying degrees. The are also anarchists, yes, but that's not all libertarians.
True, but this is what distinguishes libertarianism from anarchism. Libertarians aren't pursing anarchy, they're pursuing a minimal government and a global environment that makes governments compete on taxes/protections/benefits/etc.
The most extreme form of libertarianism, minarchism, still proposes the existence of a government
Casting seasteading as a tax avoidance strategy because some loud self proclaimed Libertarians were briefly involved is really sad. Some people really are entranced with the idea of living on the seas and building communities there. Given what goes on with cruise ships and aircraft carriers this isn't even a particularly challenging goal. Put down your aggressively critical politics for a moment and let yourself enjoy that others can dream.
Great username. I too wished to live at sea once, but I gotta be honest with you; hang around any of the big submariner/shipwright/offshore groups for long enough and it will shock you how few people with money in those circles are not Andrew Ryan wannabes. As an avid Cousteau and Earle fan all my life, it broke my heart. If you're uber-wealthy, seeking recognition for that success makes enough sense; that recognition typically comes from people who inevitably live on shore someplace. They might commission a big yacht like Gaben or Zuck, but it serves multiple purposes, not the least of which being "hey, look at me!" But there is a particular type of personality for whom keeping to themselves is the height of luxury, and a couple folks of this persuasion are incredibly wealth. These dragons hoard their keep because, philosophically, it is theirs to do with as they please and not anybody else's. For them, the inherent eroticism of the sea calls their name. I swear to God, it happens every time.
Libertarians did make an actual island, Republic of Minerva, but the Australian/western and Polynesian governments were so scared shitless of a tiny island of libertarians that they concocted a story about it being "Tongan fishing lands" (despite the fact being way out of Tongan waters and Tonga basically ~never having mentioned it until some other people decided to put an island there). Then they sent the Tongan Navy to take it by force.
http://www.queenoftheisles.com/HTML/Republic%20of%20Minerva....
Nothing scares a cartel of coercive monopolies extracting rent from trivial administrative work more than competition.
What exactly is the argument for why their credibility should be taken as higher than the Tonga government claims?
Because there clearly could be ulterior motives involved on both sides.
From "might makes right" is Tongan because the Tongans were able to take it. From the perspective of homesteading, owning the fruit of your labor, etc I think you can argue since the Minervans both made the island, homesteaded, "discovered" (didn't exist until they made it), and claimed and were actively using it they have senior property rights (you can argue any of these individually but in summation it's quite weighty over any Tongan claim).
Of course might make right ultimately trumps everything else, it is just interesting that you so often hear that if libertarians want to escape society they shouldn't use force to make others follow their ideals, they should just go off into the woods or their own island or some such. But then when they actually make their own island, actually "society" decides they will just take their shit under the auspices of a military force that will kill them if they defend themselves (although the only homicide on Minerva was one Tongan killing another Tongan).
Right now Fiji and Tonga are fighting over it and in reality neither one actually gives much a shit about the actual property rights to hold the island and as a fiji/tongan dispute suddenly the Navy is not so interested anymore. The Tongan claims were initiated after a conference with Polynesian countries and Australia where the goal was not to preserve some Tongan fishing but to smack down the libertarians using it -- Polynesian claims were never an actual reason for the invasion, only kicking the libertarians off the island.
If you can't defend your land, somebody else will eventually take it. That's kind of why governments were invented in the first place.
If they have literally no credibility worth speaking of… maybe it just doesn’t matter that much?
https://archive.is/gWfRv
This article is about a project called "Destiny" (https://destiny.com), an economic zone to be created in an undeveloped region of Nevis (of St. Kitts & Nevis)
The project goal is to become like Dubai with a 50m dollar investment, which I don't think is an admirable goal btw.
St Kitts & Nevis has had a history of being friendly to crypto and there was an initiative to make bitcoin cash legal tender, although don't think it ever actually happened.
https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/bitcoin-c...
I been to St. Kitts & Nevis. The only thing I can remember is the very stark contrast between the commercialized beaches versus where the locals lived, and the roaming cows everywhere.
Nevis (the baseball) was only boat accessible, and St. Kitts (the bat) is mostly hills of national park.
Vast majority of things must be flown or shipped in. I am hard pressed to see some "techno libertarians" doing techno without Amazon/Temu/Walmart/<insert fav vendor> in 24h drop ship.
>Vast majority of things must be flown or shipped in. I am hard pressed to see some "techno libertarians" doing techno without Amazon/Temu/Walmart/<insert fav vendor> in 24h drop ship.
I think this is an unreasonable bar. All the fertile land in the world has been accounted for. There's no way to accomplish that type of sustainability without conquering existing land or some major technological breakthrough.
I think a fair bar would be economic sustainability. Plenty of countries depend on trade for food, but can make up for it in exports.
I have my doctor on WhatsApp. America is trash and its SOOOOO easy to live without Amazon when you have a fixer / emissary. We have AGI interfaces to everything.
[dead]
Without a proper supply chain 50m is just a fart in the wind.
It's like a Fyre festival but you live there!
A glance at their website shows 25% of the profit being paid out between the government, residents, scholarship funds, etc.
So you're effectively paying US taxes from the get go, before you even get to the point of anything at all going towards basic services.
Bitcoin Cash, legal.
Or
Bitcoin, cash legal.
These projects obviously have limited success. I found it interesting to learn about a couple that were very successful, though.
1) the Republic of Venice from 7th to 18th centuries, basically a merchant-run state controlled by a tight circle of wealthy traders. Its whole setup revolved around safeguarding trade and property and staying clear of the Catholic church and European kings.
2) the Republic of Ragusa from 14th to 19th centuries, in what’s now Dubrovnik, run by a small group of merchant families. Strong focus on open commerce and neutrality, made early advances in public health and infrastructure and had its own privately funded healthcare and insurance, all paid for by trade profits
If you consider them libertarian projects they failed. That's the thing about libertarianism - to succeed it needs to reinvent stuff that it is so opposed to.
Venice and Ragusa (and Genoa) were oligarchic states, had laws, and used force to enforce these laws. Civic liberties were suspended or heavily restricted.
They'll figure out soon enough why people vacation instead of live there
As someone with no plans to live or vacation in the caribbean, I'm curious. Is there a specific notable reason, or is it just a combination of littler things (cost, convenience, politics, weather, etc.)?
I've spend a total of about 2 months in the Carribean. One of those being an entire month straight.
It's the convenience really, and the fact that nobody is in a hurry. Island time is real. You cannot be demanding. You can't really be upset at service. Most people are there to chill out, even if they are doing a job. Life is just slower.
This is good, IMO. But if you are a hedonically adapted/burned out western metropolis dweller, this culture shock could be distressing.
At some point people will also figure out why these people are fleeing.
These are billionaires, pretty sure they will only do 183 days and being on your boat probably counts.
There's nothing wrong with living in the Caribbean. Tons of people live there for a reason. Biggest issue with the Caribbean is the price of property, susceptibility to climate disasters and susceptibility to external political forces which means constant securit threat.
[flagged]
It's amazing this kind of vitriol is tolerated as long as it aids the bashing of libertarians.
Have you spent time in the Carribean and SEA? SEA prices are better, it's safer, people are more honest in most areas, and while food is subjective, IMO SEA has that locked as well.
In 2014 it was Chile, in 2017 it was Honduras, then Colombia and El Salvador in the early 2020s. In Chile and Colombia they were coasting on tax authorities not pursuing them and relying on the cultural cachet of being thought-leading risk takers who were forward-thinking enough to take on a new frontier (remember this is when they started flying south for ayahuasca ceremonies). In the case of Honduras and El Salvador, they were setting up in tax-free zones (which is effectively a transfer of wealth from those outside of the zone to those inside). Notable that the periods of Chilean and Salvadorian history that these “libertarians” tend to celebrate were periods of political repression. I can’t imagine these ventures will be any different.
Remember the scene in Blow when Johnny Depp’s character goes to Columbia to make a withdrawal from the millions he’s been sending to their banks and they are like like “huh, we don’t remember you creating an account here. Good day sir. Please leave.”
A fool and his wealth is soon parted
I just wrote about this https://open.substack.com/pub/greggbarbers/p/the-productive-...
So long and prosper.
https://archive.is/gWfRv
> The Veritas Villages claim to have an education and health-care charity called Help Them Help Themselves.
These people could not be more comically despicable if they tried.
Also one of their "executives" is seemingly a teenager [0]
[0] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6866a3346a2532...
Guess a lot of these guys heard about Little Saint James from the news.
Makes for a target-rich environment, I guess.
This reminds me of New Utopia and Lazarus Long. I think he wanted to build it on an unclaimed seamount in the western Caribbean.
[flagged]
Or, for a more fanciful fate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldSCClzWMxk
[flagged]
> There are no bears in the Caribbean…
Bears were hardly the only problem.
"Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute."
"And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldn’t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn’t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle."
Great stuff! Apologies for the snark before, there weren't many comments and I was miffed that one of the few was so short. I stepped outside my office into the sun right after posting and felt ridiculous. Go outside, people!
Yeah if you take any system and quickly replace it you'll run into issue. My town is so libertarian it doesn't even have public roads and absolutely zero public services, no police officer either, but we've been doing it that way for decades if not centuries, so we have the system down and there's no stories about bears or the roads not working or whatever.
> There are no bears in the Caribbean
Did you sincerely believe that the parent poster was suggesting bear-overrun as a probable outcome?
> but don't let that stop you from making le heckin' reddit quips
If you understood the ironic subtext, then your response is a example of the same trends you're complaining about. Arguably worse.
> Did you sincerely believe that the parent poster was suggesting bear-overrun as a probable outcome?
Gee, maybe they should have written a comment explaining their point of view that we could then discuss, instead of a quippy, dismissive one-liner! Then, we could be discussing the likely pitfalls of this endeavor instead of circlejerking over a Vox piece.
> If you understood correctly, then your response is an example of the same thing you're complaining about.
You reap what you sow.
Do you not understand the process of abstracting a situation one small step to consider it at a higher level than its surface details? Or are you pretending not to? Which do you think makes you look better?
Bears, Sharks, they didn't link to reddit. The result is load-bearing.
Way things are looking, Cuba will soon be on the table for a dime. Right after Trump razes it to get rid of the "undesirables".