Will Citadels Have to Be Seasteads?
by Luke Parker | June 21st, 2020 | vol.3
As we bitcoin hodlers become richer, and fiat currencies around the globe fall into hyperinflation, it is easy to come to the conclusion that within our lifetimes some sort of high-walled, fortified citadel may become attractive or even necessary for our families’ safety and comfort.
Long existing as a mere trope of cyberpunk science fiction, citadels, where communities of Bitcoiners can live, work and play together in safety, offer an appealing response to the perfect storm of global fiat collapse that we may be seeing the start of already.
Unfortunately, governments don’t really like it when anyone assembles a fortified compound, a standing army, or anything at all that can defend itself within the confines of their sovereign nation. Our rulers have demonstrated over and over that they do not allow one to exist for long.
If they somehow did allow a citadel to be built, through some kind of political alliance or bribery, the next local government could simply appropriate it when the political winds change. In the very best of circumstances, weak nations hosting a citadel would still come after wealthy citadel citizens to pay for their budget shortfalls by simply passing new tax laws, which will be very popular with everyone not living in the citadel.
Homesteading the moon or Mars is still several decades away, and the harshness of those environments wouldn’t offer a lifestyle that rich people would willingly choose anyway. Therefore, since sovereign nations currently occupy 100% of the usable land on this planet, and have a long history of never selling any sovereign land to individuals, there is currently no realistic way forward for any citadel to be built on land in our lifetimes.
Look no further than the ongoing drama from the Republic of Liberland to see how it plays out when non-sovereigns attempt to make a new nation. Even if you happen to find some unclaimed land, the neighboring countries (in this instance Serbia and Croatia) still won’t let you set up a new sovereign territory on it. Sovereign nations are members of an exclusive club, and they simply aren’t accepting new members unless you roll your tanks onto their lawn and take a spot at the table by force.
Some citadel proponents argue that they could acquire the land during a period of hyperinflation, when the nations are broke and desperate. Unfortunately, a nation’s military is the last thing they will get rid of in times of desperation, and historically, they will use these armies to confiscate every nearby person’s assets in order to keep afloat longer. Civil asset forfeiture is already popular in most nations today, so why not then?
More importantly, even if a failing nation honestly agrees to sell them some land with sovereign rights left intact, there is no way to convince other nations to recognize that sovereignty! Therefore, as long as citadels need to be somewhere that other nations can’t plunder, building new land far out in international waters, a.k.a. seasteading, appears to be the unavoidable future of all citadels.
Seasteads are simply floating platforms that people can live on, anchored far away from the territorial waters of all existing countries.
In their most basic form, they are no more than single homes fixed upon the top of a floating Spar, which is a hollow, vertical column designed to keep the platform steady in waves.
Oil rigs have proven this technology long ago, and small structures based on this design cost no more than a suburban home on land does. For two decades now, far more elaborate designs have been put forward such as modular neighborhoods and whole cities floating on spars. These have yet to materialize due to a lack of funding, however.
Incredibly, seasteads will allow us to try out new and exotic governance models, a plan referred to as “Startup societies”. We can compete with our own versions of government aboard each one and see which systems work and which don’t. Considering that most seasteaders are bitcoin hodlers, a fully anarcho-capitalist citadel for Bitcoiners, perhaps named Citadel21, is sure to be one of the first societies attempted out in the deep water.
Putting aside the engineering and fundraising challenges of building a large, floating seasteading community, the biggest obstacle to building viable seasteads so far has been the same as they would face on land.
The history of seasteading is rife with governments violently destroying them.
In 1967, the trend got off to an explosive start with the sad story of the Republic of Rose Island.
An Italian millionaire named Giorgio Rosa built the largest seastead ever made that year, complete with a restaurant, bar, souvenir shop and post office. He even declared its’ independence, made its official language Esperanto, and offered gambling to tourists!
Rosa placed the platform 11 kilometers off the coast of Rimini, right on the line between Italian and Croatian waters. Sadly, the Italian government declared him a simple tax evader and literally blew up Rose Island with dynamite.
The lesson to be learned from this was not to park your seastead so close to a sovereign country.Even placing it one mile outside of a countries’ territorial waters is not good enough. Just last spring we witnessed the exciting but unfortunate tale of Bitcoiners Chad and Naudia Elwartowski, the first people to live on a floating seastead.
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had and Naudia Elwartowski dancing on their single-family seastead near Phuket, Thailand in early 2019.
The single-bedroom floating home hadn’t even been declared an independent country by anyone, but unfortunately the nearby Thai government sent a warship to destroy it anyway, charge the couple with treason, and threaten them with the death penalty if caught. You can watch a bitcoin-funded documentary of their entire journey from assembly to the destruction of their seastead in this eye-opening series by the seasteading institute.
The Elwartowskis are currently living in exile, working in Panama on a new tri-spar seastead design. Moving the dream forward from this point demands that seasteaders focus on designing platforms that can be self-sustaining while allowing a population to live on the deep ocean, far from any country that could claim it is a threat to their sovereignty. Nonetheless, scaling up from the current prototypes to vast cities in the open ocean is just a matter of time and funding. They will happen, but will they be in time for the hardships that are coming?
To quickly bring these designs to life, it’s up to us Bitcoiners.
Peter Thiel is the largest backer of the Seasteading institute, and other Bitcoiners like the Elwartowskis are common in the movement, which is fully based upon proper anarcho-capitalist, free market philosophy.
The institute’s founder and CEO is Patri Friedman, grandson of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman (who predicted Bitcoin in 1999) and son of famed anarcho-capitalist author David Friedman. Patri is a Bitcoiner and anarcho-capitalist as well, and his passion to get true startup societies launched in the open ocean couldn’t be any stronger. He personally sees the realization of seasteads as the next step in his family’s three-generation journey to bring about a free society.
The foundations we have to build the first Bitcoin citadels on, both metaphorically and nautically, couldn’t be more solid. Now the challenge becomes a race to complete a viable seastead citadel before the approaching financial collapse, or it may be too late for us to immigrate there.
You can do your part by working with or donating to the Seasteading Institute today.
Luke Parker has been a Bitcoin journalist since 2014, writing for several different publications in the space. In 2013 he launched one of the largest Bitcoin merchant directories, Coinosphere, and has been consulting about Bitcoin and OpSec for companies and individuals ever since.