Crackdown sinks plans by ‘seasteaders’ to create

Bitcoin investor’s offshore home towed over concerns couple intended to establish sovereign state

To all those out there who want to control people’s lives through force, here’s my big finger to you,” Chad Elwartowski declared in a Youtube video this year. The “finger” in question was a tall black column floating off the coast of Thailand.

Mr Elwartowski, a former bitcoin investor who says he made enough money to retire at the age of 45, lived in a fibreglass pod on this platform, a breakthrough for the so-called seastead movement whose ultimate goal is to create a floating independent nation state in international waters.

But last month, the Thai navy towed the structure ashore, voicing concerns that Mr Elwartowski and his partner Supranee Thepdet planned to set up a sovereign state in what the government said was its territory. The pair have not yet been formally charged with violating the country’s sovereignty but could face

the death penalty if convicted. Thailand’s attorney-general has appointed officials to lead an investigation.

With Mr Elwartowski and his partner now out of sight, the utopian dreams of seasteaders appear to have run aground.

“The minute we saw the accusation we got out of there and went into hiding,” Mr Elwartowski told the Financial Times in a phone interview.

Rüdiger Koch, the legal owner of the sea-home and the engineer behind the $250,000 project, has fled Thailand although he has not been charged.

The Thai case has raised questions about national security and prompted criticism of the seasteading movement, whose backers include billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel.

“They don’t contribute to any common good, tax or land development based . . . They are simply designed to enable wealthy people to have a place in the sun, and water,” said Peter Newman, professor of sustainability at Australia’s Curtin University. He added that the practice needs to be regulated “or else it will be doing more damage than good”.

But Joe Quirk, president of the San Francisco-based Seasteading Institute, an organisation founded in 2008 by Mr Thiel and Patri Friedman, grandson of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, says the case for building a floating nationstate is clear.

Governments are inflexible and slow, he says, and excessive and outdated regulation hampers progress. And — in a suggestion that has laid the cause open to criticism — if a facility is built in international waters, seasteaders do not have to pay taxes to other nation states. “If [the seastead] is recognised as a new country there is no obligation to pay taxes to countries that are far away,” he said.

“Seasteading is a way to apply evolution to governance itself,” he added, with people choosing to join or leave societies simply by moving their mobile home.