The crypto bros crowdfunding a new country

The 'crypto ideology' (for lack of a better phrase) of some who completely believed in the power of crypto to change the world and unshackle the masses from the tyranny of financial regulations. But then all the scams happened (and keep happening), and many commented how its was like they were speed running the last few hundred years of financial markets in realization that many rules/laws were they for good reason.

I don't see this country thing as being any different. More cynically, I see this as a bunch of divas who want to officially be above the law because they feel they are better than that and its only holding back their greatness. They, and they alone, are the only ones smart enough to create utopia.

Human rights are important, for example the right to be heard in conflicts.

Let me explain why I believe that a new form of country will appear: Companies will turn into countries.

Currently large companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and so on, don't "offer" human rights. People however want them to have more responsibility, especially in Europe. This is a changing force already in progress. Perhaps it will turn out that the European Court of Human Rights or a similar institution will do the same thing to Corporate what it already does for many countries.

Of course the ECHR is not working well today, there are many problems, but should we just give up and let Corporate become feudal? At least I propose we should think about what we people need from countries and corporate entities and how to gain these needs.

I guess at some point Europe could enforce corporate entities to give the right to be heard to people, for example.

And that's one step of them turning into countries.

Perhaps you think, a country, that's something with an army. But an army is not really neccessary if there is some other way to control power. Currently, however, the world doesn't seem to have a lot of power as we see with many different wars.

I am a bit pessimistic about the future of humanity, but I still hope that in the long-term we will find a way without raw material power to resolve conflicts, because this is really wasteful and might even lead to our demise.

So instead of policy, these citizens would just have common interests? Idk if he’s bullshitting or actually huffing his own glue

> Then they acquire land, becoming physical “countries” with their own laws. These would exist alongside existing nation states, and eventually, replace them altogether.

Let’s assume for a moment they’re not as stupid as this makes them sound. (Because, good luck getting nation states to let go one inch of territory their people have bled over for hundreds of years.) What are they really after? More tax havens? Free trade zones? Regimes with weaker enforcement against money laundering?

Ultimately private companies can exist only because the state allows it. Just last year we all saw what happens when a private army threatens state power.

No mention of how they're going to pay any potential military, so this is a complete non-starter.

And if they ever do figure out how to pay a potential military, then I'm sure the current actual owners of the land they're on (ie the country whose territory they're in) will quickly want to have a chat with them and disabuse them of that notion.

wow, sounds like someone is taking the back story of Snow Crash a bit too seriously!

I find the idea of new countries fascinating and the constant disparagement of their supporters as “crypto bros” annoying and inappropriate for a supposedly serious news organization like the BBC.

Otherwise, though, I think the obsession with making a new country is slightly off the mark. Labeling yourself as a country puts the target on your back in a way that doesn’t really exist for a global distributed corporation/organization with a specific purpose. Many of these efforts would be better served creating novel forms of corporations that exist within existing states, not trying to found a new state itself. The model should be the Hanseatic League or something similar, not a fully-fledged nation state. Even a private club like SoHo House is probably a better first step.

This whole group of a16z are scared folks who will do anything to keep a seat on the table. One needs to be careful they don't sell state secrets to Saudi. They have no morality or national pride.

It's like Hives in Too Like The Lightning. I do admit I like the idea of having a different set of laws in the same geographical space. There are some things that are like that: accredited investor, etc. And it would be good to broaden the amount of things where you can say "I'm an adult; if I lose, I lose" and then refuse it to people who could not possibly reasonably say that.

> Run by a for-profit company based in Delaware in the United States, Próspera was granted special status under a previous Honduran government to make its own laws. The current president, Xiomara Castro, wants it gone, and has begun stripping it of some of the special privileges it was granted.

That's why it cannot work that way. As soon as a leftist is elected (Xiomara Castro is a leftist), it'll strip away the rights granted by the previous president. Leftists have one religion: the religion of the state. And they accept no competition.

Quite vague on any details about how this would actually be workable, but that might just be the reporter's slant.

Is there some version of this that doesn't sound like a corporate technofascist dystopian anti-fantasy?

The most interesting idea for me was about whether something similar could emerge within already existing states, performing some of their functions but otherwise hybridizing with them. Remote work and starlink and so on open up some geographic possibilities for networked communities.