Topic: ANNOUNCEMENT: Stop getting trolled by taxes, it's time to put an end to Tax Day (Read 3494 times)

Good idea on different types of platforms depending upon industry. Plastic is not good for the ocean due to the saltwater but that could change with technology.

There does seem to be a lot of algae science that people bring up. Looks like some great potential.

I will be presenting a capsule type of design to the Seasteading Institute in about a month. The building materials for the smallest living unit (dorm room sized) should be under $2,000 which could get the price between $10-$20k for a finished unit. With the price coming down over time with mass production.

I'm not sure about the technical aspects, I just have my doubts. I mean lets say it lasts 200 years with no maintenance before the rebar rusts and the concrete crumbles. That would be very good right?
Ok we build a seastead there so far so good.

Now imagine all of America or all of France disappearing and having to be rebuilt every 200 years. I'm guess that would be devastating economically speaking to our little seastead.

I'll hand you that 1 seastead is better than none if only as a testing ground.


Just remember that people had been building planes 500-1000 years before the Wright brothers, they didn't succeed or start anything because they were the first. They succeeded and the airplane industry was made because they had the newly invented gasoline engine. In other words they had "hyper-diamond".

Anyway I'll give you an idea of my own: Not all areas need the same carrying capacity/stiffness.
If you want large areas you can split them up:
1. Industry/residential: Heavy carrying platforms - like your rebar concrete designs.
2. Gardens, parks, markets and other low weight human accessible ares: Thick sheets of plastic. Due to low load almost no robustness or carrying ability is needed and plastic material creep/breakage will not be major issue. I would suggest multiple linked disc type platforms of this type.
3. Farming: Specialized plants or algae put on basically bubble wrap. Spool bubble wrap into ocean. Spool the other end back and harvest crops. Large area can be utilized easily from a small central heavy platform like this. You could even replace the bubble wrap with tangled seaweed to avoid the need for plastic. Infuse with nutrients in spooling area at night. Nutrients come from sea bottom via sand pump or residential trash. (Seaweed could be fed to cows)

I would also look into capsule hotel designs for the residential areas. It might make it much easier to afford for the poor.

Its all good, I did make it... didn't think Google had ever crawled it though, I guess it is on there somewhere. The only other place I've uploaded it to was a private forum run by CoinHoarder,  which doesn't exist anymore, but the animation had red eyes.
Regardless, if animations are ever allowed again, I'm sure it will be everywhere. Until then, I can try to remain unique  

what the deuce?!

i found it on google but kudos if your the one who made it!
too bad i cant have the rolling eyes too tho.. should enter my time machine to upload it as a gif when it was still possible.. annnd buy bitcoins. ^^

The announcement implied that something big was going to happen for bitcoin on April 15th, which was a little misleading.
At this point, its an interesting start-up project based on a unique mix between a pay-to-join forum & kickstarter..... and yes, its based on Bitcoin.

IMHO You may have the task of getting whales to accept this forum & concept before others with lower coins join in. If it were me, I'd want to see quicker mass adoption with the site and I'm not sure you can have that without smaller bitcoin holders jumping on board. I don't see this site being appealing to smaller bitcoin holders unless they see all of the whales flocking to the site, and then they may just follow them over to be where the money is. I may be wrong but I also don't foresee whales flocking to join the site without the mass adoption... and so, I'm not as optimistic, as much as I want to see a successful bitcoin project right now, I'm not sure this will be the one.

If the idea is mainly to create a private forum for whales/high bitcoin holders, this is heading down the right path but its still a tough sell unless Elwar has a lot of friends on standby ready to start investing in the BitPools community?   

All that said, any effort that supports Bitcoin in general should be attempted and I commend Elwar for putting in the work to get a site like this running and I wish you & BitPools the best!  



and for the record, hdbuck, there is only one Stewie.....
<-----and he has moving eyes         but I'm humbled you enjoy the design so much.      

While this is a much larger project than we are working on, we are using this type of design on a smaller scale:


Concrete is brittle, that is why rebar is used, I have built some floating prototypes with concrete with no support and you are right, they fall apart after a few weeks. And concrete actually hardens more when in the water under constant pressure. There are many examples of concrete structures in the ocean. Some WWII structures are still standing.

Here is a very detailed engineering report done addressing most of the engineering challenges:
http://seasteading.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/DeltaSync-Final-Concept-Report.pdf

Personally I will be submitting a design that will get the costs down less than $10k for a small living environment (about dorm room sized). The Seasteading Institute ( http://www.seasteading.org ) is doing a design contest in June which should result in some great concepts.

I agree that being in a harbor under the laws of another country are certainly not ideal. But what we have right now are zero seasteads. This will be the first one. The Wright Brothers' first airplane had terrible food service, the bathrooms were quite uncomfortable and the in flight movie selection was pretty much non-existant. But they had to start somewhere.

Where your taxes go: http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/14/the-surprising-truth-behind-tax-day-where-your-taxes-go/

Okay so I like some of the ideas and I hadn't thought of locating on top of existing cables. The rest I knew about or had thought about myself.

However it all falls apart with your platform solution - its basically just another housing project in an existing city/harbor/bay under existing laws.
Are prices even going to be radically lower? Probably not by much - even factoring in the high city real estate prices much will be eaten by the platform costs.

Another architecturally edgy building for the rich - with luck maybe middle class city folk, but not really much "homesteading" or "sea" in it.


Floating concrete at sea won't work, it will crumble very fast. I know this because it has been done before at D-day WWII; they floated over temporary giant hollow concrete blocks and used them as floating landing harbors.
Concrete is very strong... and very brittle, it can't flex in the sea and so it breaks and crumbles.

You also can't just link many platforms, the links would be under immense stress and would either break or need maintenance.

Maybe you could build a static platform at some low depth ocean location maybe even get lucky and find such a location overlapping with cables and international trade - you "only" need some 1 billion dollars + luck to get that going I think

For real seasteading to work you would need some kind of ultra strong and flexible rustfree material that is also very cheap to build your floating areas from. Sign me up when hyper-diamond is invented.

EDIT: And again after spending all those millions you end with a relatively small area even if it works.
If you spent a similar amount of money on a small army and a plot of land you could have a REAL nation regardless of what local authorities wanted - with cheap ground that doesn't need maintenance and area to do a range of activities.
No matter what though starting a nation from scratch costs at least a billion or two with luck I would guess.

congrats on the launch.  i hope people give it a try and a good user base forms as its obvious that the snr ratio there should be much better than here..  i figured this is what you were announcing :-)  thanks for that pm way back

The seastead sounds remarkably similar to the floating community proposed by the Marinecoin dev.

Taxes are not voluntary. The idea of a voluntary tax is a self-contradictory term.

Voluntary is donation.

Tax is forced.

If there is an agreement among a group that they will all pay a certain amount, it is a voluntary agreement. Those who come along later need to decide if they want to take part in the agreement that is already set up, or not.

While I agree with some posters that the idea of using someone's wealth as a parameter to establish the "weight" of their voice is flawed and counterproductive, I can see how it can be useful for some applications. Furthermore, I think this is the key sentence in the OP:


In this case the OP proposes a forum in which you can post only if you prove you hold a certain amount of coins - that's the "commonality" the users of that board will share. I think we can have many more use cases in which users could prove a certain fact (not necessarily wealth) in a decentralized and trustless way thanks to blockchain technology.

A silly example: open source developers could prove in an accurate, trustless, counterfeit-proof and decentralized way that they have committed a certain number of lines of code to a certain set of projects.

Another example: users of certain products could prove ownership of such products thanks to data embedded in the blockchain, and so on...

TL;DR: Elwar's solution seems very interesting to me in a broad sense and from a technological standpoint, even if I dislike the idea that someone's wealth should be used to establish the "weight" of their voice.

Yes, I have an updated release that is pending. I locked down the site this past few months so good that I locked myself out yesterday when I went to put in the update. So I have been working with the hosting service to restore access.

I have no problem with taxes whatsoever, so long as they're not enforced with violence. Kidnapping and caging non-violent innocent citizens for tax violations sounds an awful lot like debtor's prison to me, which is supposed to be illegal here in the USA.
When you don't pay taxes, "your" (read: their) government sends Men of Violence to collect. That's the moment I treat the government and their men as enemies.

 "Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy."
-Proudhon

Good, but the site might needs some more work as it falling apart (the top quoter keep disappearing and the content not resizing with the window) both under Chrome and Firefox.

The project seems interesting. However its strengths do not lie in preventing forum trolling, because holding some bitcent is not a serious hurdle for a determined troll. On the other hand, needing to proof ownership of Bitcoin might turn off people, because of the added effort to join and privacy issues.

The strength of this project is - provided that it can draw in enough users - that it might be the first successful Bitcoin-crowdfunding platform, because Bitcoin users will be concentrated in one community and have already shown some financial commitment.

I don't know if it will work, but I wish you the very best for your venture!

ya.ya.yo!

Ok, while many solutions are discussed ad nauseum among seasteaders and no one solution is the best I will address what you listed:

We're not talking about a boat here, we're talking about platforms (around 50 to 100 meters wide) that can interlock and expand to a city sized seastead.
The popular consensus has been that it should be built out of concrete. This will last hundreds if not thousands of years. One of our experts has built similar structures and there are many working examples of floating concrete platforms (one even has a landing strip on it).

Cost is certainly a factor. You could buy something in middle of the US but the first million dollars that your community brings in will get the attention of the government.
Our initial estimates on cost using concrete are fairly comparable to oceanfront real estate. As the platform can float and be located anywhere we are looking at affluent harbors where real estate prices are in the millions. That makes our housing options very competitive giving a good return on investment.

The seastead will be far more than 20 people. The investment group has planned to build at least 6 businesses into the initial structure with one business actually being the building of more seasteads. It will likely be a tourist destination which will provide plenty of monetary inflow.

The initial seastead will not be remote. But we have certainly discussed such a thing down the line. The seastead community will need to be large enough to warrant such a move which comes with several costs such as breakwaters, mooring and several other factors including establishing a trade route. The popular opinion being that we should position it within an established trade route and take advantage of that as a hub.

Waves and saltwater are the constant issue being addressed when it comes to engineering. Like I said, the initial one will be in a harbor because we will be focusing first on engineering and a viable business model. Breakwaters and designs to minimize wave impact are a constant discussion.

It is our hope that a medical facility will be one of the main businesses providing medical tourism. People are willing to fly to foreign countries for lower cost medical treatments due to a lot less red tape and more freedom. Medical advances will likely thrive on a seastead.

Entertainment will be abundant. Swimming, fishing, SCUBA, nightclubs, concerts, boating, jet skis, you name it.

There will likely be different political structures for each seastead. Initially we will be under the laws of whichever nation we fly our flag under and whichever nation's harbor we are docked in will have limited jurisdiction, there are many legal issues that have been discussed when it comes to nation laws and distance from land. When it comes to seasteads outside of the EEZ, each seastead will have to come up with the societal structure that they like best. And with multiple of these, we can essentially have government startups. Some will succeed, others will fail. When you can float your house away to another seastead, there will be competition to keep people.

While we will not be settling in in heavily pirate populated areas, there will be no shortage of guns owned by seasteaders.

Just like with trade routes, ideally we would set up in a place where we can become an Internet hub with underwater cables. As most telecom people can tell you. It is not the cost of the fiber that is expensive but the cost of laying the cable (government fees, regulations, lobbying, etc). There can also be satellite which is more expensive and not good for real time streaming but will be good for redundancy. In a harbor we will likely do a microwave type of setup, wifi and underwater cable.

Power will be abundant with the power of the sea. OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion), wind, wave power, solar, hydrogen producing algae, etc. Many people suggest selling electricity to the host nation but I think we could use any excess electricity for cheap mining operations.

Yes, solar panels are usually rated for 20 years. It would be unwise to pay for anything that does not give a return on the investment over its lifetime. But the price has come down quite a bit on those.

Housing will likely not be your typical square house with slanted roof. Most likely dome shaped or containerized housing units (CHUs, which they use in Iraq/Afghanistan) or some other design. OTEC provides fresh water and air conditioning as a bi-product, using the cool water from lower depths will make housing very comfortable.

Like I said, there are many solutions so the ones I listed are just cherry picking from several discussions. We have the expertise and our builder does not see any issues in getting the initial platform built once the design is in place and the investment is finalized. That is what we are working on now.

I am dedicated to making this happen. I have already left the US and have downsized my lifestyle so that I can pick up and go at any moment. I will definitely be one of the first ones living on the seastead so I have made sure to have my input when it comes to design so that it will be a liveable environment with everything for daily living addressed.

I'm not saying you can't get on a boat, I'm saying it might be difficult to have what most people consider a normal life there and even if you can you'll probably end up paying more for it than otherwise needed.

If you have a solution to all those things I wouldn't mind hearing them or seeing links. If you just really really want to wish away the problems and daydream I'll leave you to it.

Before you say you know what I have not thought of, I have been involved in the seasteading community for almost a decade.

We will have a seastead, we have a path forward. It will happen.

Everything you listed has been addressed long ago (other than the every woman being crazy thing).

I used to be into seasteading. Let me tell you there are a million things you haven't thought of.

If you really want to do it then buy an island:
http://www.privateislandsonline.com/islands/alligator-caye-parcel
http://www.privateislandsonline.com/islands/coral-island2

It still won't work, but its cheaper than a boat for far more area and unlike a boat it will not need brutal amounts of maintenance.

Things you haven't thought of:
Maintenance - Boats rust, even glasfiber boats need to be taken up once a year and painted etc..
Cost - Land is pretty cheap even in urban areas compared to a boat. Large boats costs millions. Remote areas of land where you could do whatever can be gotten for very little.
Jobs - What will people do? Even if we assume that our liberal ideas would create a 100 times better economy its pretty hard building an economy with 20 people on a boat/remote island.
Supplies - Remote as you are almost everything will have to be flown or shipped out to you adding even more cost/making you need a second ship/plane.
Seasickness.
How to get to the doctor.
Entertainment in a small area.
All the politics - Anarchy hur hur is great and all, but who decides where the boat goes or what to invest in. What is the political framework for dealing with a guy raping his daughter or is that fine? I'm guess there's a thing or two there you haven't considered in your dreams of blue waters and escaping the state.
Guns you need guns for pirates.
Internet - You won't have it that far out, not fast anyway. Wifi bridges can shoot 20km if you're static at the coast, but it's something to consider.
Power - How do you make it? You can't afford something big and efficient/the boat can't hold it so you would have to use a diesel generator and solar panels and shop each month for expensive fuel.
Also solar panels break/degrade after 10-20 years and give relatively little power in the meantime.
Housing - Can you build a house? Plumbing? Wires? Insulation? AC?
Women - Even if you have one she will go mental on you after a month at sea, most women will anyway.

Trust me I wanted to do this myself.
Do what I do now: Use crypto to hide WITHIN the existing states. Why should I run from my own country? I will take it back.

(Nifty idea with the BTC to speak thing.)