Re: El Salvador. You should read Matt Levine on finance! His writing is a lot like yours. On his newsletter from 11/22/21 he described at length the "Volcano Bond" that El Salvador is floating for this, which pays off considerably less than a regular bond for El Salvador's government. Okay, but the Volcano bond also comes with exposure to Bitcoin... okay but it looks like this Volcano bond is still worse than a proportionate basket of the regular governmental bond and some bitcoin. So who would buy this?
Bitcoin enthusiasts who love hanging out with a president who has a baseball cap on backwards. So this president gets a healthy premium on a bond for his government (which has a terrible credit rating btw) just by playing into this niche culture.
> El Salvador's homicide rate fell from 52 homicides per 100,000 people in 2018, the highest in the world at the time, to only 3.7 homicides per 100,000 people in January 2020
The quote is from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia's source for the second number is in Spanish, which I can't read - but as written, this is comparing homicides per year with homicides per month.
Assuming homicides are equally likely in all months (probably not true, but whatever), 3.7 homicides per 100k people in January would correspond to 44.4 homicides per 100k people in all of 2020. Still less than 52, but I but less impressive-looking than the other number.
First, setting aside the woolly language, their webpage is awful.
Second, if that genuinely is their notion of a temple, it too is horrible; it's the bare concrete look. If they can't spare any of that ten million to slap a coat of paint on, I'm not interested. They say we have lost sight of beauty, but I see no beauty there.
Third, they possibly *could* sound more like a cult, if they really put their minds to it, but come on:
"There, you can interact with Members and complete Tasks for PRAX to increase your chances of admission to our Membership."
Woo-hoo, initiation into a secret society. What is this, the Georgian era (not Regency, the other Georgian era) and its proliferation of Secret Societies, springing up out of the fin-de-siècle occultism? At least Dion Fortune was entertaining, this just sounds vaguely sinister or at least exploitative. I know the tradition is to put aspirants through a hard time, but first demonstrate that you are worthy to be called 'Masters' before telling me to do work for you. This sounds less like Crowley's Ipsissimus and more like those Gor play-acting groups.
Besides, wasn't there a recent post about one of these types of "we're going to re-imagine and re-invent the world" groups which went badly wrong?
In short, give me colour, heraldry, more concrete proposals and that you're not a bunch of twenty-five year old guys calling yourselves "masters", and I'm more open to conviction.
Huh? How is crypto related to diet and beauty and spirituality? I don't get it. Some of these things seem so bizarre to me because it seems like they live in a totally different world. In their world, rules enforced by governments are the thing they see stopping them from doing what they want but like for most people being able to pay for housing and medicine and food and having money left over to invest in anything is the thing stopping them.
> The use of “atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste” as a warning reads very slightly right-wing to me
They are hard to pin down.
There is a strong purity vibe throughout their prose which I would associate more with the right-wing. There is also a new-age hippyism that I'd associate with the left-wing. Passages like the one you highlighted remind me of some of the arguments fascists made for third-way economics: soulless cities with faceless citizens. Something along the lines of the market being good at getting things done but bad at deciding what those things will be. If you let the markets choose, it'll pick something bland, soulless, and inhuman to pursue in the name of efficiency.
Praxis really gives me that vibe.
I know associating anything with fascism is seen as condemning it, but I don't mean to do so in this post.
correction: search and replace megawatt with kilowatt.
Several Caribbean countries compete hard to attract rich immigrants and investors with their citizenship by investment programs. I've looked deeply into citizenship by investment in Dominica, which would cost $130k to get me a Dominica passport within 6 months to sorta replace my US passport if I renounced US citizenship for tax/political reasons. That would give the right to spend up to 6 months a year in Schengen, plus visa free access to most of the rest of Europe, South America, and Asia. Wikipedia has a convenient map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Dominica_citizens
I think Bukele is genuinely just really enthusiastic about bitcoin and that's the main reason why he's doing this. It's rare for politicians anywhere to do rigorous cost-benefit analyses about policies they like so I won't grade him too harshly relative to other politicians.
But it's not just a boondoggle based on his personal cheerleading for bitcoin. The potentials are way bigger than just a couple of crypto exchanges. It's about attracting crypto-rich retirees, tourists, and businessmen from all over the world. Total crypto marketcap is 2.4 trillion. If the average crypto owner spends 5% of his crypto wealth per year, that's a $120 billion/year pie to fight over. That's a couple orders of magnitude bigger than just FTX and Binance. If Bukele can get hodlers to spend an extra couple billion a year in El Salvador, by building his brand on social media with stunts like this, that's huge. El Salvador's entire GDP is only 24 billion. He doesn't even need to actually build the city. The two billion will be taxed several times as it passes through various hands down the supply chain, and additional economic growth from investments could increase the tax base.
OTOH his proposed construction cost is 300k bitcoins, which is about $15 billion, or two thirds of El Salvador's GDP. Spending two thirds of GDP building a model city seems way too ambitious, if they actually do it. I am not confident it will increase tax revenue enough to cover the interest on $15 billion of debt.
He seems not crazy at all in this interview with the Council of the Americas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPs_eif3Z8Y It sounds like he puts a very high priority on free trade and attracting foreign investment to develop El Salvador. His style of speaking sort of reminds me of Elon Musk (another good option for the dictator book club after he becomes God-Emperor of Mars).
Also, worth mentioning. Bukele seems to act quite quickly with his bitcoin plan. They made BTC legal tender after 3 months of announcing it, then started to build a hospital with gains from BTC (already almost finished!) 1 month after announcing it. ( https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1457919970000658442 )
Seems like a decent plan. Rationalists did something similar on a smaller scale when their online community decided to buy houses on the same street in Berkeley. Unfortunately they haven't become a semi-independent microstate, YET.
Hey Scott, I'm Dryden from Praxis. You made a number of basic mistakes in your description of us. One glaring example: Peter Thiel is not an investor (the investors in our seed round are extremely visible -- pinned on our Twitter account). If you're interested in making edits to improve the accuracy of your post, feel free to reach out.
If Oroville is mostly trying to resist California laws, instead of federal laws, then there are some precedents: the Free and Independent State of Scott (Tennessee) and the Republic of Winston (Alabama). These counties succeeded from their states during the Civil War because they wanted to remain with the Union. I'm not sure that this is a good precedence: both saw violence as a result (although the war might have come through there anyway).
Along with being symbolic, Oroville might be trying to trigger some lawsuits, with the hope that the courts will strike down some or all of the covid restrictions.
I'm skeptical of your description of the Zelaya situation in Honduras, because the Supreme Court *did* let the current right-wing president amend the constitution to run for a second term only six years after the coup against Zelaya for trying the same thing. So the Supreme Court is not really acting in good faith here; it seems right to be suspicious of it.
claim: the founder dropped out of high school to become a professional surfer, then worked for an activist hedge fund and a master plan community developer.
claim: morality is the OS of a civilization and our civilization evidently isn't working because of the high incidence of obesity, mental illness, ennui, and bad remakes of movies.
claim: the solution is to build a community around shared values, but that sort of thing was suppressed after WWII to reduce the risk of nuclear war. Since WWII the memetic powers that be have been trying to maximize trade and interconnectedness between countries to reduce the risk of war, which is totally understandable, but the side effect is that you lose distinctive cultures built around shared values.
claim: building a community online first allows you to get the people and funding first and make it almost a fait accompli before you negotiate with governments for real world territory, so you get better leverage in those negotiations.
In the second episode they interview Sol Brah, who is a 100k-follower bodybuilder on twitter who posts 50 times a day.
I give this a way higher chance of success than Black Hammer.
I'm not too versed on the history of Zionism, but wasn't the creation of Israel not simply because of Judaism but the larger alienation of not only religious Jews, but Jews as an ethnicity as well? Some founders like Ze'ev Jabotinsky were said to be "divorced from Jewish faith and tradition", and he was one of the significant right-wing Zionists too, the left-wing Zionists were famously materialist and formed socialist agrarian communes such as the Kibbutz and the slightly less socialist Moshavs, so in a lot of cases the foundation of Israel isn't very much about religious Judaism (which, is maybe just being too picky about word choice, if you said "Jewish community" I would agree absolutely), and more so just community/autonomy/identity. Really, Judaism at the time was and to a lesser extent is today somewhat hostile to Israel: orthodox Jews were from what I know quite opposed to its conception, as the Torah and their local Jewish practice is the only homeland they need and they should focus on piety and the Halakha... plus I don't think the majority of Jews were very enthusiastic about migrating to an inhospitable desert in an Islamic empire with a violent military tradition. In the modern day Haredi Jews sometimes participate in anti-Zionist stuff since they pertain to the belief that only the Messiah can create the state of Israel (although obviously now like to pick up more common arguments about military violence and anti-Arab discrimination, since, y'know, that's what the hip anti-Zionists do these days). In some ways it's reasonable to consider the creation of Israel a reaction to Judaism, or at the least the negation of Jewish traditions which considered Zionism unacceptable.
That's a bit of a tangent though, I still do think it's quite incorrect to compare charter cities to the creation of Israel. Even if it was conceptualised as dominantly secular and materialist, thinking it was just something new that popped up is silly and I hope no one spoils to them that Jews have always lived in the Old Yishuv and didn't just get super ideologically driven when people wanted to found a new country based on similar principles of governance like charter cities have.
Hey, I was eating bugs before it was cool (or uncool, or whatever). Paprika-fried crickets were quite good; and my friend also let me try some Korean street-food style bugs that tasted pretty interesting. I wouldn't mind having some again, but they're super hard to find.
"Bitcoin miners don’t want a city the shape of a Bitcoin with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo."
I'm pretty sure this is just a typo, but I prefer to think that the Bitcoin-logo-shaped central plaza is going to contain a smaller Bitcoin-logo-shaped central plaza.
Before laughing too loud about present-day attempts at creating model Bitcoin-cities in Latin American countries, remember that there were many attempts to create micro "model cities" and "model societies" within the US between 1800 and 1900. All of them fizzled out. Either because they never got off the ground in the first place, or because they destroyed themselves from within, or because the central (federal) US government could not really tolerate that parts of its territory was not fully under its control.
I expect the same to happen in Honduras and anywhere else that "model cities" might threaten to become successful.
Great article as usual. Do you know the blog 1729 by Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase? He shares some super disruptive ideas about starting new cities and new states, starting with an online community first, land second so you get leverage to negociate.
"It is now possible to start a community, a business or even a currency from your laptop. The next step is to make it possible to create new cities and countries, rather than just inherit them."
I’ve sailed with Finbar, Supreme Commander of the Conch Republic Navy. His stories are incredible enough that someone made a documentary about him. What I picked up about the Key West/Conch Republic situation was actually a little disheartening. Key West followed Florida/USA law, but was being treated like a separate country. The government had roadblocks and searches on vehicles traveling on the highway from key west to Florida, and it hurt key west tourism, but also made key west feel like they weren’t fully American. They jokingly made up a sovereign nation, but it sure seems like a lot of people from that generation are Key West people first, Floridian/American second. It made me realize how little influence individuals have, and how big you have to get before your concerns are addressed at all.
As Honduras sadly shows: we absolutely need to get our own sovereign state to build Utopia. Luckily there is one up for grabs: Nevis! (She says: What?! I said: Nevis!) - As in "St. Kitts and Nevis". Tiny, but sovereign (The Queen is head - but as Barbados showed last week, she can be cancelled.). The best: It is TWO islands. Nevis is the smaller - just 7k registered voters. With the constitutional right to secede from the federation (yep, smallest federation ever), if they want! And they want: Last referendum was just 573 votes short of a 2/3 majority! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Nevis_independence_referendum
They sell their passports, of course (works visa-free for 140 countries). Since 1984. https://www.ciu.gov.kn/ Right now they have an end-of-year sale: 150,000 US-$ for a family of four (my 2 adult kids from first marriage are eligible. So only 569 votes left to go!) And they do have their own regional airport.
And they still seem to have those ol' British sodomite-laws. So save your rainbow-shirts for later. First we take Montenegro, err, Nevis, then we take ... off. Peter, please,10 Million will let us secede! Another 100 and we dominate politics there for good. (Both less, if done smartly). I volunteer for first secretary of defense. (Better check those Kitties - a force of around 0.24 k. Till we take them over -their airport is better.)
The problem with all these new cities is that there are no new frontiers to establish new ways of life. It's a boundary problem. 300 years ago, if you wanted to start a new society, you would just pick up stakes and head west with a bunch of like-minded people, claim a bit of unclaimed territory, and start doing your thing. Today, that's impossible because there *is* no unclaimed territory. That means the best way to establish a new society is through conquest.
This may sound sinister, but "conquest" doesn't have to be violent. It can be be done through political means as well. For example, look how effectively Donald Trump conquered the Republican Party. In the context of setting up a new society, conquest could mean something like the following.
1) Start a religion.
2) Have the followers of your religion all move to one town.
3) Vote their fellow believers into positions of power.
4) Establish a prosperous community that neighboring societies are jealous of.
5) Use your community's success to evangelize your religious beliefs, promising other communities that they can be as successful as you if they just share your values and follow your example.
6) Once you have enough followers in those neighboring communities, vote members of your religion into positions of power.
7) Rinse and repeat.
It doesn't even have to be a religion per se - in this example, "religion" is just shorthand for "an ethical ideology which is very memetically sticky and replicates fast"... which, OK, I guess "religion" would probably be the best word for, even though that word tends to frighten people.
Yes, absolutely. The ability to communicate securely over untrusted networks is essential not only for any kind of e-commerce, but also to thwart the big brother fantasies of three letter agencies, so it is very much a political technology. Key points in the political crypto history would be Zimmermann exporting the source of PGP in print to circumvent US export restrictions, or Facebooks WhatsApp adopting end-to-end encryption in response to the Snowden revelations.
Oh, you are talking about cryptocurrencies, aren't you? I concede the political dimension in of cryptocurrency /transactions/ (such as wikileaks being funded via bitcoin since the financial blockade), but the fact that OnlyFans was ready to give in to pressure from the banking sector instead of saying "if you ban us from using credit cards, our users will just pay with cryptocurrencies" speaks volumes about the lack of practical impact of cryptocurrency transactions.
The main media focus is always on cryptocurrencies as an investment. In some way, the ability to do transactions is necessary and required for investments, but practically, I find it much less interesting. Questions of legitimacy aside, rich people have been hiding their wealth from the state since practically forever. Now they have yet another tool to do that, fueling the cryptocurrency bubble. News at 11.
Re: El Salvador. You should read Matt Levine on finance! His writing is a lot like yours. On his newsletter from 11/22/21 he described at length the "Volcano Bond" that El Salvador is floating for this, which pays off considerably less than a regular bond for El Salvador's government. Okay, but the Volcano bond also comes with exposure to Bitcoin... okay but it looks like this Volcano bond is still worse than a proportionate basket of the regular governmental bond and some bitcoin. So who would buy this?
Bitcoin enthusiasts who love hanging out with a president who has a baseball cap on backwards. So this president gets a healthy premium on a bond for his government (which has a terrible credit rating btw) just by playing into this niche culture.
Sounds like a smart guy to me.
> El Salvador's homicide rate fell from 52 homicides per 100,000 people in 2018, the highest in the world at the time, to only 3.7 homicides per 100,000 people in January 2020
The quote is from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia's source for the second number is in Spanish, which I can't read - but as written, this is comparing homicides per year with homicides per month.
Assuming homicides are equally likely in all months (probably not true, but whatever), 3.7 homicides per 100k people in January would correspond to 44.4 homicides per 100k people in all of 2020. Still less than 52, but I but less impressive-looking than the other number.
Praxis is rubbing me up all the wrong ways.
First, setting aside the woolly language, their webpage is awful.
Second, if that genuinely is their notion of a temple, it too is horrible; it's the bare concrete look. If they can't spare any of that ten million to slap a coat of paint on, I'm not interested. They say we have lost sight of beauty, but I see no beauty there.
Third, they possibly *could* sound more like a cult, if they really put their minds to it, but come on:
"There, you can interact with Members and complete Tasks for PRAX to increase your chances of admission to our Membership."
Woo-hoo, initiation into a secret society. What is this, the Georgian era (not Regency, the other Georgian era) and its proliferation of Secret Societies, springing up out of the fin-de-siècle occultism? At least Dion Fortune was entertaining, this just sounds vaguely sinister or at least exploitative. I know the tradition is to put aspirants through a hard time, but first demonstrate that you are worthy to be called 'Masters' before telling me to do work for you. This sounds less like Crowley's Ipsissimus and more like those Gor play-acting groups.
Besides, wasn't there a recent post about one of these types of "we're going to re-imagine and re-invent the world" groups which went badly wrong?
In short, give me colour, heraldry, more concrete proposals and that you're not a bunch of twenty-five year old guys calling yourselves "masters", and I'm more open to conviction.
Huh? How is crypto related to diet and beauty and spirituality? I don't get it. Some of these things seem so bizarre to me because it seems like they live in a totally different world. In their world, rules enforced by governments are the thing they see stopping them from doing what they want but like for most people being able to pay for housing and medicine and food and having money left over to invest in anything is the thing stopping them.
> The use of “atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste” as a warning reads very slightly right-wing to me
They are hard to pin down.
There is a strong purity vibe throughout their prose which I would associate more with the right-wing. There is also a new-age hippyism that I'd associate with the left-wing. Passages like the one you highlighted remind me of some of the arguments fascists made for third-way economics: soulless cities with faceless citizens. Something along the lines of the market being good at getting things done but bad at deciding what those things will be. If you let the markets choose, it'll pick something bland, soulless, and inhuman to pursue in the name of efficiency.
Praxis really gives me that vibe.
I know associating anything with fascism is seen as condemning it, but I don't mean to do so in this post.
"atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste”
As a gentleman of means, I expect all-natural bug paste.
correction: search and replace megawatt with kilowatt.
Several Caribbean countries compete hard to attract rich immigrants and investors with their citizenship by investment programs. I've looked deeply into citizenship by investment in Dominica, which would cost $130k to get me a Dominica passport within 6 months to sorta replace my US passport if I renounced US citizenship for tax/political reasons. That would give the right to spend up to 6 months a year in Schengen, plus visa free access to most of the rest of Europe, South America, and Asia. Wikipedia has a convenient map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Dominica_citizens
I think Bukele is genuinely just really enthusiastic about bitcoin and that's the main reason why he's doing this. It's rare for politicians anywhere to do rigorous cost-benefit analyses about policies they like so I won't grade him too harshly relative to other politicians.
But it's not just a boondoggle based on his personal cheerleading for bitcoin. The potentials are way bigger than just a couple of crypto exchanges. It's about attracting crypto-rich retirees, tourists, and businessmen from all over the world. Total crypto marketcap is 2.4 trillion. If the average crypto owner spends 5% of his crypto wealth per year, that's a $120 billion/year pie to fight over. That's a couple orders of magnitude bigger than just FTX and Binance. If Bukele can get hodlers to spend an extra couple billion a year in El Salvador, by building his brand on social media with stunts like this, that's huge. El Salvador's entire GDP is only 24 billion. He doesn't even need to actually build the city. The two billion will be taxed several times as it passes through various hands down the supply chain, and additional economic growth from investments could increase the tax base.
OTOH his proposed construction cost is 300k bitcoins, which is about $15 billion, or two thirds of El Salvador's GDP. Spending two thirds of GDP building a model city seems way too ambitious, if they actually do it. I am not confident it will increase tax revenue enough to cover the interest on $15 billion of debt.
He seems not crazy at all in this interview with the Council of the Americas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPs_eif3Z8Y It sounds like he puts a very high priority on free trade and attracting foreign investment to develop El Salvador. His style of speaking sort of reminds me of Elon Musk (another good option for the dictator book club after he becomes God-Emperor of Mars).
Seems like Free Private Cities ( https://www.freeprivatecities.com/en/ ) is helpin El Salvador with Bitcoin City. https://twitter.com/CrisFloresSV/status/1466528655325106182
Also, worth mentioning. Bukele seems to act quite quickly with his bitcoin plan. They made BTC legal tender after 3 months of announcing it, then started to build a hospital with gains from BTC (already almost finished!) 1 month after announcing it. ( https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1457919970000658442 )
I think the Balaji Srinivasan mention refers to this tweet: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1269178671086006273?lang=en
"How to start a new city
- Build a community in the cloud
- Organize economy around remote work
- Enforce laws with smart contracts
- Practice in-person norms of civility
- Simulate architecture in VR
- Eventually, crowdfund territory
- And materialize city into the real world"
Seems like a decent plan. Rationalists did something similar on a smaller scale when their online community decided to buy houses on the same street in Berkeley. Unfortunately they haven't become a semi-independent microstate, YET.
Hey Scott, I'm Dryden from Praxis. You made a number of basic mistakes in your description of us. One glaring example: Peter Thiel is not an investor (the investors in our seed round are extremely visible -- pinned on our Twitter account). If you're interested in making edits to improve the accuracy of your post, feel free to reach out.
If Oroville is mostly trying to resist California laws, instead of federal laws, then there are some precedents: the Free and Independent State of Scott (Tennessee) and the Republic of Winston (Alabama). These counties succeeded from their states during the Civil War because they wanted to remain with the Union. I'm not sure that this is a good precedence: both saw violence as a result (although the war might have come through there anyway).
Along with being symbolic, Oroville might be trying to trigger some lawsuits, with the hope that the courts will strike down some or all of the covid restrictions.
I'm skeptical of your description of the Zelaya situation in Honduras, because the Supreme Court *did* let the current right-wing president amend the constitution to run for a second term only six years after the coup against Zelaya for trying the same thing. So the Supreme Court is not really acting in good faith here; it seems right to be suspicious of it.
https://elpais.com/internacional/2015/04/24/actualidad/1429839601_867027.html
Summary of the first episode of the Praxis podcast (https://open.spotify.com/show/3pNmFlFnobsZ0tBRdIgmZr):
claim: the founder dropped out of high school to become a professional surfer, then worked for an activist hedge fund and a master plan community developer.
claim: morality is the OS of a civilization and our civilization evidently isn't working because of the high incidence of obesity, mental illness, ennui, and bad remakes of movies.
claim: the solution is to build a community around shared values, but that sort of thing was suppressed after WWII to reduce the risk of nuclear war. Since WWII the memetic powers that be have been trying to maximize trade and interconnectedness between countries to reduce the risk of war, which is totally understandable, but the side effect is that you lose distinctive cultures built around shared values.
claim: building a community online first allows you to get the people and funding first and make it almost a fait accompli before you negotiate with governments for real world territory, so you get better leverage in those negotiations.
In the second episode they interview Sol Brah, who is a 100k-follower bodybuilder on twitter who posts 50 times a day.
I give this a way higher chance of success than Black Hammer.
Oroville, Oroville... where have I heard that name?
Oh, right! The Yuba county 5 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCsPV0eiqxg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuba_County_Five) may have been heading there when they disappeared.
I'm not too versed on the history of Zionism, but wasn't the creation of Israel not simply because of Judaism but the larger alienation of not only religious Jews, but Jews as an ethnicity as well? Some founders like Ze'ev Jabotinsky were said to be "divorced from Jewish faith and tradition", and he was one of the significant right-wing Zionists too, the left-wing Zionists were famously materialist and formed socialist agrarian communes such as the Kibbutz and the slightly less socialist Moshavs, so in a lot of cases the foundation of Israel isn't very much about religious Judaism (which, is maybe just being too picky about word choice, if you said "Jewish community" I would agree absolutely), and more so just community/autonomy/identity. Really, Judaism at the time was and to a lesser extent is today somewhat hostile to Israel: orthodox Jews were from what I know quite opposed to its conception, as the Torah and their local Jewish practice is the only homeland they need and they should focus on piety and the Halakha... plus I don't think the majority of Jews were very enthusiastic about migrating to an inhospitable desert in an Islamic empire with a violent military tradition. In the modern day Haredi Jews sometimes participate in anti-Zionist stuff since they pertain to the belief that only the Messiah can create the state of Israel (although obviously now like to pick up more common arguments about military violence and anti-Arab discrimination, since, y'know, that's what the hip anti-Zionists do these days). In some ways it's reasonable to consider the creation of Israel a reaction to Judaism, or at the least the negation of Jewish traditions which considered Zionism unacceptable.
That's a bit of a tangent though, I still do think it's quite incorrect to compare charter cities to the creation of Israel. Even if it was conceptualised as dominantly secular and materialist, thinking it was just something new that popped up is silly and I hope no one spoils to them that Jews have always lived in the Old Yishuv and didn't just get super ideologically driven when people wanted to found a new country based on similar principles of governance like charter cities have.
Hey, I was eating bugs before it was cool (or uncool, or whatever). Paprika-fried crickets were quite good; and my friend also let me try some Korean street-food style bugs that tasted pretty interesting. I wouldn't mind having some again, but they're super hard to find.
"Bitcoin miners don’t want a city the shape of a Bitcoin with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo."
I'm pretty sure this is just a typo, but I prefer to think that the Bitcoin-logo-shaped central plaza is going to contain a smaller Bitcoin-logo-shaped central plaza.
Before laughing too loud about present-day attempts at creating model Bitcoin-cities in Latin American countries, remember that there were many attempts to create micro "model cities" and "model societies" within the US between 1800 and 1900. All of them fizzled out. Either because they never got off the ground in the first place, or because they destroyed themselves from within, or because the central (federal) US government could not really tolerate that parts of its territory was not fully under its control.
I expect the same to happen in Honduras and anywhere else that "model cities" might threaten to become successful.
Should Honduras have written in that in order to evict a ZEDE, Honduras must pay back the taxes collected from the ZEDE?
Great article as usual. Do you know the blog 1729 by Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase? He shares some super disruptive ideas about starting new cities and new states, starting with an online community first, land second so you get leverage to negociate.
"It is now possible to start a community, a business or even a currency from your laptop. The next step is to make it possible to create new cities and countries, rather than just inherit them."
https://1729.com/summary
I’ve sailed with Finbar, Supreme Commander of the Conch Republic Navy. His stories are incredible enough that someone made a documentary about him. What I picked up about the Key West/Conch Republic situation was actually a little disheartening. Key West followed Florida/USA law, but was being treated like a separate country. The government had roadblocks and searches on vehicles traveling on the highway from key west to Florida, and it hurt key west tourism, but also made key west feel like they weren’t fully American. They jokingly made up a sovereign nation, but it sure seems like a lot of people from that generation are Key West people first, Floridian/American second. It made me realize how little influence individuals have, and how big you have to get before your concerns are addressed at all.
As Honduras sadly shows: we absolutely need to get our own sovereign state to build Utopia. Luckily there is one up for grabs: Nevis! (She says: What?! I said: Nevis!) - As in "St. Kitts and Nevis". Tiny, but sovereign (The Queen is head - but as Barbados showed last week, she can be cancelled.). The best: It is TWO islands. Nevis is the smaller - just 7k registered voters. With the constitutional right to secede from the federation (yep, smallest federation ever), if they want! And they want: Last referendum was just 573 votes short of a 2/3 majority! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Nevis_independence_referendum
They sell their passports, of course (works visa-free for 140 countries). Since 1984. https://www.ciu.gov.kn/ Right now they have an end-of-year sale: 150,000 US-$ for a family of four (my 2 adult kids from first marriage are eligible. So only 569 votes left to go!) And they do have their own regional airport.
Drawbacks: As Greg Cochran (see blogroll) will readily point out: It is one of those IQ-barely-80-countries (as is Honduras). Completely unrelated: It is also one of those with an impressive homicide-rate - but that is mainly man-kills-wife. Or rape-murder. Not foreigners (Paraguay!). They re-started hanging now, should help. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1110973/Return-noose-St-Kitts-just-hanged-man-decade-believes-way-beat-violent-crime.html
And they still seem to have those ol' British sodomite-laws. So save your rainbow-shirts for later. First we take Montenegro, err, Nevis, then we take ... off. Peter, please,10 Million will let us secede! Another 100 and we dominate politics there for good. (Both less, if done smartly). I volunteer for first secretary of defense. (Better check those Kitties - a force of around 0.24 k. Till we take them over -their airport is better.)
The problem with all these new cities is that there are no new frontiers to establish new ways of life. It's a boundary problem. 300 years ago, if you wanted to start a new society, you would just pick up stakes and head west with a bunch of like-minded people, claim a bit of unclaimed territory, and start doing your thing. Today, that's impossible because there *is* no unclaimed territory. That means the best way to establish a new society is through conquest.
This may sound sinister, but "conquest" doesn't have to be violent. It can be be done through political means as well. For example, look how effectively Donald Trump conquered the Republican Party. In the context of setting up a new society, conquest could mean something like the following.
1) Start a religion.
2) Have the followers of your religion all move to one town.
3) Vote their fellow believers into positions of power.
4) Establish a prosperous community that neighboring societies are jealous of.
5) Use your community's success to evangelize your religious beliefs, promising other communities that they can be as successful as you if they just share your values and follow your example.
6) Once you have enough followers in those neighboring communities, vote members of your religion into positions of power.
7) Rinse and repeat.
It doesn't even have to be a religion per se - in this example, "religion" is just shorthand for "an ethical ideology which is very memetically sticky and replicates fast"... which, OK, I guess "religion" would probably be the best word for, even though that word tends to frighten people.
(from the Praxis citation)
>>Crypto is a fundamentally political technology
Yes, absolutely. The ability to communicate securely over untrusted networks is essential not only for any kind of e-commerce, but also to thwart the big brother fantasies of three letter agencies, so it is very much a political technology. Key points in the political crypto history would be Zimmermann exporting the source of PGP in print to circumvent US export restrictions, or Facebooks WhatsApp adopting end-to-end encryption in response to the Snowden revelations.
Oh, you are talking about cryptocurrencies, aren't you? I concede the political dimension in of cryptocurrency /transactions/ (such as wikileaks being funded via bitcoin since the financial blockade), but the fact that OnlyFans was ready to give in to pressure from the banking sector instead of saying "if you ban us from using credit cards, our users will just pay with cryptocurrencies" speaks volumes about the lack of practical impact of cryptocurrency transactions.
The main media focus is always on cryptocurrencies as an investment. In some way, the ability to do transactions is necessary and required for investments, but practically, I find it much less interesting. Questions of legitimacy aside, rich people have been hiding their wealth from the state since practically forever. Now they have yet another tool to do that, fueling the cryptocurrency bubble. News at 11.
I get it, the mainstream co-opts whatever terms catches their attention, then changes the meaning beyond recognition. Similar things have happened to the term "hacker" and probably countless others. Still, I can not help but feel sympathetic to Bruce's position here: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/11/crypto-means-cryptography-not-cryptocurrency.html
People aren't aware of just how dictatorial Nayib Bukele really is. Forcing legislative branch at gunpoint to militarize the police.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/16/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-military-alarming-memories?utm_source=pocket_mylist
This clip is particularly enlightening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecAZnjPKa3Y
I do not believe Bitcoin City will ever be built