The other side? Are you implying it's metaphysical or something? Like the devil?

They're a private bank that is a crony to the government. Actually the govt and the central bank live in a symbiotic relationship so it has power to do things like ruin the economy by raising interest rates despite the real power still coming from government.

It absolutely is. And if you don't think so, it only means that they're smarter than you.

I promise I wouldn't. ;)

A proper name for such a colony really needs to wait until the design is done, but as a preliminary name I'd go for something like Anarchopolis or AnCapistan.

Where to put the first major seastead?

I'm sure there could be smaller floating projects, especially within a country's marinetime border, but the first self-sustaining, deep-water seastead would need to be located far away from all countries (as equally distant from all other countries as possible to stop one from claiming it's the nearest) and in a zone where no serious weather happens.

Here's a map of the last 100 years' hurricane paths:

Clearly we'd want to either live along the equator or in the vast temperate regions to the left & right of South America. I know many would like to live in the more temperate climates further away from the equator.

Of course there are other issues to consider, such as where the Manganese Nodules are found, in the case of the colony existing to mine the seafloor. Here's a map of zones where they exist in vast numbers, just sitting around on the top of the seafloor, waiting to be picked up:

So to the left or right of South America, 1000-4000 miles away from the coast, seems to be the sweet spots. & of course we don't want to be anywhere near an island owned by a large country such as Ascension, Saint Helena, or the Falklands. In my mind that makes the pacific a better bet.

Are there any other criteria I'm not thinking of here? Where would you guys want to put the first deepwater seastead?

Mine would be "Killroy was here," from the 1940's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here

Mine was the same but in the exact opposite order. I can remember watching ANH on the top of my parent's station wagon at the drive-in theatre in 1977. We even had our dogs with us.

And then there was the endless collection of toys. OMG I wonder how many I still have...

How Nostr fits into Seasteading

I was just asked through the old bird app how Nostr is useful or even desirable for Seasteaders. I admit the question caught me off guard, as if it didn't need explaining... Oops. One should always be able to explain a subject from first principles if they are to truly understand it. So this post will attempt to offer a full explanation.

Nostr's reason to exist is all about routing around censorship. It has the goal at least, if not delivers on the promise of, making social media & really all online communication fully decentralized & therefore uncensorable.

Seasteading shares this goal in that we wouldn't need to seastead in the first place if governments cultivated free & uncensorable speech. Sure, the 1st amendment in the USA "guarantees" free speech but in practice what we have is a bunch of propaganda news networks and people being murdered by the state every day for questioning authority.

Ed Snowden showed how little privacy & free speech we actually had first, but then Elon Musk's 'Twitter Files' releases showed in detail exactly how the US government, at least, quashes dissent & how often.

Nostr can serve as a full, uncensorable replacement for all social media websites & apps, as is demonstrated by the proliferation of various Nostr client types we see launching these days. Govts can't possibly ban all the relays from the internet, and we can get much better at hiding them if they try.

Some will argue that the problems with censorship really start at the ISP level, with service providers flagging all the 'submersive' content they can detect before it even makes its' way to corporate servers like social media sites. While technically true, we have encryption, TOR, and VPNs now to hide our content from these guys 99.9% of the time.

A seasteader could therefore VPN into a mainland-based server to do their browsing from, and never even be detected as a seasteader by the many websites he or she visits. Taken together with satellite ISPs like Musk's Starlink service, (https://www.starlink.com) Seasteaders need not compromise on any of our internet needs, from speed to privacy. News on the seastead (Such as if we were under attack) would equally find it's way around the world to our families and mainland supporters.

With colony-wide adoption of the Nostr & Bitcoin networks, seasteaders will never suffer from communications nor monetary restrictions, no matter how belligerent governments become towards our presence.

Congrats, Lyn! What a milestone.

Seasteading Basics

Here on Nostr I expect we'll see a new generation of people interested in Seasteading for the 1st time, most of which will have no idea what resources are out there or what has come before. This thread will serve as a starting point to find these resources.

I have been collecting links & news about seasteading projects since 2010, back when the only place to talk about the subject was a phpbb forum run by the Seasteading Institute at http://seasteading.org. The forum is gone now but the community remains in various places like reddit, youtube, & now here.

The Institute has supported many different projects over the years, all with various levels of funding, purpose, & vision. We've seen many false starts, but now we see a limited amount of commercial success from construction projects like: Ocean Builders: https://oceanbuilders.com & ArkTide: https://www.arktide.org

Of course, those projects exist to solve the engineering problems with seasteading, and are not intended to produce a full-scale colony out in the deep sea any day soon. Many more problems have to be solved for us to make it out there, including governance, (or a stable lack thereof) power generation, (see my OTEC post) funding, & security.

Two separate projects called Freedom Haven (https://freedomhaven.org) and Atlas Island (https://atlasisland.org) are attempts to go further with a real seastead, but haven't made any material progress yet past planning stages. They also have differing visions for how to govern their projects.

One thing that has been done very well in the community so far is education. Specifically, the Seasteading Institute (under the direction of Joe Quirk) produced a series of video Q&As answering all of the beginner questions people have about seasteading. Starting about 6 years ago, these great little videos can be found on their youtube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@seasteading/videos

Some of the most asked questions there:

What about waves?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9QdEN0iS9Q

Why not just live on a Boat?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfTeDe-C8bo

Is Seasteading only for the rich?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyQqehCPzGU

How do we Govern a seastead?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_lcnD0mkPE

What about Pirates?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PLUZ9bzUGY

Where does the Poop go?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd2FCpU5wu8

If you're at all curious about seasteading, I suggest you go to their channel and binge-watch them all. And then be sure to subscribe here in Nostr to /n/seasteading to keep up with the conversation here.

How Bitcoiners Will Be Able to Afford a Large-Scale Seastead

This Nostr post is meant only to be a preliminary discussion point as to how our community will fundraise for what would surely be a multi-billion dollar project one day.

Let us first assume that the price of bitcoin, like Hal Finney originally predicted, is going to $10 million worth of today's value within our lifetimes. Plenty of folks feel this is highly unlikely, so this conversation is not for them yet.

From a $30k bitcoin to a $10m bitcoin is over 333X returns on what we could treat as a high-yield savings account for any funds we were to donate to this cause. 333 TIMES returns, probably within a decade, definitely within 2-3 decades. What better way to come up with the vast amounts of moulah needed to fund a bitcoin-friendly seasteading community?

Let's say we work on a serious proposal with blueprints and all that, and find out that a proper seastead that is self-sufficient, safe, and attractive to bitcoiners with wealth would cost us $5 Billion USD in today's dollars to build. (Totally spitballing here.) I mean really proper, such as having backups for the mining, desal, solar, wind, internet connections, hospital, food farming, mining, hotel, and marina repair shops. Everything we'd need to get a community of 500 or more people into the deep water.

If we wait until more people arrive and the tech is more feasible, that could be in 10, 20, or even 30 more years... But this rise in Bitcoin's price is a 1-time event that is happening in the present.

The last time such a valuable thing (gold) went from worthless to the world's reserve money in the eyes of the world, it took thousands of years! But today the internet is making hypermonetization happen in just a few short decades.

We really need to get started saving in a bitcoin fund soon, so we don't miss those sick 333x gains. $5 billion of today's dollars divided by 333 is only ~$15 million dollars, which is currently only 500 bitcoins. And that's at a $30k BTC, and it also doesn't factor in future growth of BTC after it reaches that value.

So therefore, I propose that we as a community need to save ~500 Bitcoins before it's too late, in order to fund a $5 billion seastead. This is a totally achievable goal, especially since so many bitcoiners are already seasteaders. The more bitcoin's price goes up, however, the more that number of bitcoins in savings needs to go up as well though. We really can't afford to wait!

Yes, this comes with other challenges, such as who we can trust to watch over the private keys and how we determine & execute maturity. It would also bring up the question of how we can incentivize people to do all the work like draw up proper blueprints, research technology and materials, onboard suppliers, find & coordinate the inhabitants, etc.

I'd argue that these problems all need solving no matter what approach we take, and having a large, publicly-auditable pool of bitcoins in our care would smooth these problems out nicely as it grows.

I don't have all the answers, but the problem of who to trust with the private keys seems obvious to me: We minimize the trust in any human, and put together a solid multisignature wallet with something like 10 keys that at least 8 of us would need to sign in order to spend any funds. The key bearers would be split between the folks who care the most about seasteading and the biggest donors. (Joe Quirk & Patri could likely get one each, and if huge coiners like Saylor got involved and donated 100 coins then they'd get one too, etc.) We'd have to get all those keys in place with sound recovery strategies for each and every key before we start loading the wallet with funds, of course.

And just in case this sounds a little too-long-term for some of you impatient folks, (myself included) we can always raise more than 500 Bitcoins. There are liberty lovers out there with literally thousands and thousands of coins and no way to spend them all in their lifetimes. (See: The Pineapple fund) Recruiting these folks to the Seasteading cause could make this an overnight reality.

Anyone have a better idea for fundraising?

Is there a markup guide?

Is there any type of markup code, either HTML or BB, that we can use to beautify our posts here in Satellite.earth?

I've seen a few posts with Pictures displaying in them on Amethyst but not on Satellite.earth. Only link previews show, but there isn't even a way to make some text Bold here as far as I can tell.

Tons of VPN providers accept bitcoin and don't need your details at signup.

After you make a Proton/Tutanota email account, just use that to get your VPN using a Lightning wallet to pay. That leaves zero KYC. (Although your VPN provider technically could find your IP address, but they're not supposed to be logging those.)

Oy, I hope that's a selfie! When did you start generating guys?

Yep, & I stomped that state-lovin' f*cker out long ago. Absolute wanker.

The incredible power of OTEC - & How it works so well with Bitcoin

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-unlocks-ocean-energy

Of all the technologies that get me excited for the future of Seasteading, OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion) really gets my heart pumping. It's a 100-year old tech that generates energy out in the deep sea by sucking up cold water from the deep & using the difference in water temperatures to generate power.

Sadly, this 100-year-old, working technology has never been scaled up all the way to practical usage because who needs tons of energy out in the deep sea? People who also have lots of oil? Yeah, so nobody has ever invested what it takes to make this tech fully viable. The energy is just too stranded.

Both Bitcoiners and Seasteaders have their own important reasons to resurrect this line of research, however. Bitcoiners could not only use the stranded energy that this produces to mine with, but all of that freezing water up pumped up to the surface would be an INCREDIBLE cooling source for our mining rigs!

Meanwhile, seasteaders have quite an opportunity to use this tech as a main source of energy for our daily operations, and such a colony would then become an ideal base of operations for seabed mining of manganese nodules! Bringing up these little lumps of near-precious metals would make any seastead rich beyond our wildest dreams. Check out this video if you're not familiar with the opportunity: https://youtu.be/9Af_XA507Ho

The synergy of a seastead powered by OTEC that both mines bitcoin and the seabed floor is simply incredible, offering the understated income opportunity of the century. At the very least, it's a solid reason for Seasteads to exist, & a cause for people on those seabeds to live in comfort & wealth, not just be a glorified fishing platform.

We bitcoiners even have a head start down this road. OceanBit CEO Nathaniel Harmon (X: @NateHawaii) is working on scaling up an OTEC energy plant in Hawaii and is an outspoken Bitcoiner who realizes that bitcoin's use of stranded energy is key to getting the job done. Read the article about him in Bitcoin Magazine to see how incredible this opportunity really is: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-unlocks-ocean-energy

Thanks mate! I'm most excited about OTEC energy generation for a seastead. We're pretty close to testing that out now and it's power generation gives the miners a major advantage, while at the same time gives the whole community a reason to be out there financially!

I'll be posting a huge post about that tomorrow, so be sure to subscribe to the /n/seasteading thread to stay up to date. Cheers!

https://satellite.earth/n/seasteading/

I wish I could take credit for it but Seasteading has a long history of attempts and near-misses. Mostly resulting in government retaliation. :p

The Seasteading Institute has a series of beginner Q&As you may want to check out here: youtube.com/@seasteading

But very quickly; Storms are very minimal near the equator so most seasteads would anchor in those waters. ONLY international waters would do for this endeavor, or the nearby country will claim your 'land' as their own. (A few years back in Thailand the Thai Navy actually took a seastead as a threat to their sovereignty! Big drama on that story, but that seasteader is here with us, a true bitcoiner & seasteading pioneer) As for seasteading islands, that doesn't work because govts have claimed them all already, even ones just beneath the surface. :(

Be sure to subscribe to /n/seasteading to keep up to date: https://satellite.earth/n/seasteading/

I like that but I wish there was some little note or advert for it somehow... Something like "View this note in the xyz community for the full experience!"

Of course we don't just want to advertise satellite.earth, but instead say that it's formatted for reddit-like nostr clients. Hmm.

Citadel Seasteads — Citadel21

https://www.citadel21.com/citadel-seasteads

This is the article that started it all, a history of Seasteading which leads to exactly why any Citadels in the future will most likely have to be Seasteads.