The Seasteading Institute

Well, it’s not quite the Colbert Report, but Boston News Net has a hilarious segment about seasteading:

Continue reading →

Welcome to The Seasteading Institute’s March Newsletter! We had a ton of press coverage this month, have lots of new volunteers, and a number of key projects are moving along.

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[](http://www.seasteading.org/interact/design-contest)

### [Community][]

* [Membership Program][] – This will launch on April 15th (TSI’s 1-year anniversary), along with our 2008 Annual Report. Continue reading →

A new section for the Extended Q&A in the book:

Related to transparency is openness – being public about our existence, goals, and methods.

A number of TSI community members have expressed concern about our policy of operating openly, stating our goal to create new governments on the internet and in public interviews. They worry that it could bring us to the attention of governments before we are ready, allowing them to quash our nascent movement, and suggest that it might be better to keep everything quiet until a large seastead community is operating. Continue reading →

In case you wonder – is this flag of convenience thing real? Will investors really invest in a company in some obscure foreign jurisdiction? This is from the risks section of a 2001 bond offering by Royal Caribbean (which I think was about $1B or so):

> ENFORCEABILITY OF CIVIL LIABILITIES

> **We are a Liberian corporation** and our selling shareholders are foreign corporations or partnerships. Continue reading →

In February 2009, legal research volunteer Jorge & I had lunch with a noted international expert on the Law of the Sea, who we’ll call X. We mainly discussed near-shore medical tourism as the initial business model. Here are my notes from the meeting:

There is a tension between credibility and regulation of flagging states. The ones which will monitor you the least also have the least credibility in the world of international law. Patri & Jorge believe we should follow a laddered approach. Start with whoever will take us – Tuvalu, Marshall Islands, Liberia, Panama. See how it goes. Continue reading →

Patri / Vince meeting, Puerto Rico, Feb 20th, 2009

Discussion of TSI’s engineering strategy, key points. (wish I’d written this up sooner, my notes are a bit cryptic)

Vince’s version of his key points is on [this wiki page](http://wiki.seasteading.org/index.php/User:Vincecate/SeasteadingViews). [Discussion on this forum post](http://seasteading.org/interact/forums/community/general-chat/vinces-seasteading-views). Wayne & I have a number of comments here on Vince’s ideas, as you will see. Continue reading →

I wrote the original mission statement for The Seasteading Institute somewhat hastily while trying to get the corporate entity formed and website going on a tight deadline. Continue reading →

From email correspondence with Michael Schutte, CEO of Brilliant Boats LLC, about the Poseidon Underwater Resort ([mentioned in the book](http://seasteading.org/book_beta/Proposed.html#poseidonundersearesort)): Continue reading →

As TSI grows, we plan to split off blogs by topic, so that people interested in political theory don’t have to read about engineering details, and vice-versa. As the first such forking, I am going to be spinning off the [dynamic geography related posts](http://seasteading.org/stay-in-touch/blog-tags/dynamic-geography) from here to a new blog. It will be about the topic area which contains federalism, seasteading, anarcho-capitalism, Mencius Moldbug, tax competition between nations, and other structural reforms to improve competition between government. Continue reading →

One of our favored business models has been the CoastStead – a business park operating 12nm offshore, just outside territorial waters. Being able to draw from the economy of a first-world country makes it much easier to make money and finance a seastead.

However, our recent legal research has determined that this model may not work with existing international law. While a ship is under the flag jurisdiction beyond 12nm, artificial installations are regulated by the coastal state throughout the EEZ (200nm or more). Continue reading →