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#3 - POT: The Cryptocurrency Podcast - Floating Cities and Seasteads with Mitchell Suchner
90 Plays2 years ago
Seasteading is a concept that involves building permanent human habitation in international waters. The idea is to create floating cities that are self-sustaining and can provide a range of benefits, from reducing overcrowding in cities to promoting environmental sustainability.
At the heart of seasteadingt is the idea of creating special economic zones in international waters that are governed by their own regulatory frameworks. These zones would be designed to promote innovation and economic growth, and would be subject to a combination of international law and private contracts.
By creating new living spaces in international waters, seasteading can provide an alternative to traditional urban living that is more sustainable and less crowded. This can help to reduce the strain on existing infrastructure and resources, and can promote a more balanced distribution of wealth and opportunity.
By using renewable energy sources and advanced water purification and waste management systems, seasteads can be designed to be self-sustaining and environmentally friendly. This can help to reduce the impact of human activity on the natural environment, and can promote a more sustainable and resilient way of life.
Seasteads require a platform that can support the weight of a house as well as withstand the forces of wind, waves, and currents. The platform must also be self-sustaining, meaning that it can generate its own power, purify its own water, and dispose of its own waste, which sounds like a lot for a sole inhabitant in the middle of the ocean, but these services can be shared by residents who specialize in a certain area. Maybe you’ll be dealing with the water filtration system while your neighbors takes care of the emergency grid.
Mitchell says that he spent the last 1.5 years engineering the platform on which the Steastead will need to stand on. The Stead team are currently working building the first seastead concept, designed as a sustainable floating house, inspired by the same technology that Oil rigs use to stabiles themselves on sea. Seasteads are raised above the sea level so that the house is perfectly stable even in waters with up to 10 foot waves.
In order to work towards this goal, and help people in developing economies get access to funds that they may otherwise be unable to, Stead uses blockchain technology to create a decentralized lending platform for managing inflatable infrastructure. The platform allows people to raise funds through the sale of Stead tokens, which can then be used to lease time on these structures.
For example, let’s say that someone wants to build a floating house but doesn’t have the funds to do so. They could create a campaign on the Stead platform and describe the project they’re looking to build in to raise the necessary funds. Users can then deposit crypto and receive Stead in return, effectively helping to raise capital for the project. Once the funds are raised and the structure is built, the operator of the floating house would now be required to burn Stead tokens in order to pay back the funding of the project.
Similarly, someone in a developing country who wants to buy a new fishing boat but doesn’t have access to bank loans could use Stead tokens to raise the necessary funds. This would enable them to purchase the boat and then pay a lease by burning tickets in order to keep ownership of the structure.
This podcast is fueled by Aesir, an Algorithmic cryptocurrency Trading Platform that I helped develop over the last 2 years that offers a unique set of features.
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Transcript
Investing in Floating Cities through Crowdfunding
00:00:00
Speaker
or you want to invest in a floating city or a floating resort, or let's say a floating city in international waters, because it's so bite-sized, because we can do this crowdfunding thing, you don't need a government to swoop in and invest a billion dollars like they were talking about in South Korea. Have you heard of NEOM and The Line in Saudi Arabia? I was actually going to bring it up, yeah. I think they're absolutely ridiculous as projects, but the fact that they're happening is just mind blowing.
00:00:37
Speaker
I'm here with Mitchell from Stead. You guys have a cryptocurrency project that's supposed to help people rent and manage inflatable. Jesus. That's supposed to help and manage floating infrastructure, maybe inflatable, but probably not from what I've read. Thanks a lot for joining, man. I mean, if you want inflatable, if you want to use it to
00:01:01
Speaker
Take out a loan to get a better tube to go down the river with them. It's it's fine by me You can do inflatables. It's it's whatever you feel like man Yeah,
Cryptocurrency as the Economic Backbone of Seasteads
00:01:09
Speaker
okay. No that that's sweet. Yeah, so I was we were talking a little bit beforehand and I had a look at the website and everything and it seems like a really cool project, so If you want to take it forward and introduce it, that'd be that'd be fantastic
00:01:24
Speaker
This project started because we wanted to build a floating city where cryptocurrency would be the official currency, kind of a total economic freedom, special economic zone.
00:01:35
Speaker
And you've probably heard of this kind of thing before, like Satoshi Island or Bitcoin Island have been ideas that are thrown around. It's a very similar thing. But specifically, the way that we want to do it is by building floating houses so you can go anywhere in international waters and you can set up the special economic zone there. And that's usually called seasteading. So if I can pull up, can I share my screen?
00:01:58
Speaker
Because I can show you a video of what we have in mind.
Innovative Infrastructure: Arc Pads and Floating Houses
00:02:01
Speaker
I think you should be able to. Because if you watch that video at the top, it kind of gives you a view of like there's boats coming in, they get past the seawall, there's people that get off and they're walking around the city and you've got these, you know, this very cool floating city vibe to it.
00:02:17
Speaker
So basically what these individual square units are is these are called arc pads. And these produce their own electricity, their own fresh water, their own food. They can be used on the underside. You can grow fish, seaweed, oysters. You can grow groupers or milkfish or sea bass or whatever. Right, so they're self-sufficient basically. Right, they're totally self-sufficient.
00:02:43
Speaker
they can, they're designed to handle very large waves over over 10 foot waves, actually. And they can clip together to form these kind of walkable streets. And they have built in electricity grids, water grids, they can share resources between them. So it's like a snap together city like the building with Legos on the water. That's, that's the idea. Right, right. So once we had this, yeah, yeah. So as we came up with this blueprint,
00:03:08
Speaker
And we're actually building the prototype right now here in the Philippines because there's so many islands and there's so much beachfront. That's why we're building it right now. I'm like two miles away from the work site. You're building a floating city.
Building the Prototype: Challenges and Experiences
00:03:20
Speaker
We're just building the first floating house. We're building the first floating house. Actually today, I'm kind of tired and it's late at night because I spent all day on a boat. We went probably about five hours to get to this island that's way, way out of the way. And I talked to the mayor over there.
00:03:36
Speaker
And we were talking to them about possibly building a floating resort to bring tourism to the island. And so that's that's been my whole day. And I get back and I'm covered in salt. It's in my hair. Like when you're out there and you're going through these big waves in this boat, the spray gets in and evaporates and it just leaves little salt crystals in your hair. And you can't get it out even when you wash. Dude, that's wild. That's some really cool stuff you guys are doing. Sounds incredible.
00:04:03
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it is incredible. I love what I do. I love what we do.
STED Tokens: Financing and Ownership Models
00:04:10
Speaker
I understand that a lot of people think they're going to view images and videos of this kind of thing, and they're going to think this is only for rich people. This is super expensive. I could never go to this floating city or buy a house here.
00:04:24
Speaker
What people will do with normal land-based real estate is they'll go to a bank and they'll take out a mortgage, right? Because you don't have $200,000 or $500,000 sitting in your back pocket. You don't just buy a house. You take out a loan.
00:04:36
Speaker
So we asked some banks, would you guys give out a loan for a floating house? And they said, what's a floating house? So we realized that we need this platform. We need this DeFi platform that's going to allow people to raise the funds necessary to build these floating houses. So that's how this started. We started off trying to create an alternative to mortgages.
00:05:00
Speaker
Right. So we created Sted tokens that people can buy time with a Seastead. Technically, you're buying a ticket to be on the Seastead, to be on the floating house. So it acts kind of like a ticket to an event, to a concert. Then the person who wants to own the Seastead has to buy back these tickets to lease time with the Seastead. So I need to lease it for 10 years and then I own it. So going back to the fishermen analogy,
00:05:29
Speaker
If there's a guy who wants a new fishing boat and we raise the funds to build the fishing boat, then he's leasing to own that fishing boat that he's now operating. He doesn't own it yet. He's just operating it for 10 years or 15 years. Once he's leased long enough by buying back and burning those tokens, now he owns the boat. So that's kind of how the whole system works.
00:05:53
Speaker
OK, so he's kind of putting a project out there on the website saying that, hey, I want to build this boat. And then people see the project, and they kind of fund the project as you would crowdfund some kind of like a crowdfunding website. But then the guy, let's say, they get the money, they build the boat, but they don't own the boat. They just operate the boat. And then they have to burn tokens almost as if paying back the people that put the money in.
00:06:22
Speaker
Right, so why would someone fund a certain project as opposed to another one? Is there a difference between a group of people funding a boat or funding an underwater cage? Are there different incentives for different types of projects?
Funding Strategies and Token Management
00:06:40
Speaker
Well, we actually treat them all the same, just like a bank would do with a mortgage. This isn't a mortgage, but it's basically going to say whether this house is in Kentucky or it's in Florida, whether it's a condo or whether it's a single family standalone home, we're just, you know, here's how the fundraising process works and every project is the same. But which one you want to park your money with is totally up to you. You'd rather park your money with the fishing boat or the fish cage or
00:07:07
Speaker
the floating resort, that's up to your individual opinion because you'd be the one participating in that crowdfunding if you're buying a Sted tokens. Right. And are your Sted tokens locked or are you just free to cash them out if you like? Oh, you can sell them on you to swap. You can fling them around wherever you want. It's not locked at all. As soon as you buy the Sted tokens, you can pass them off the next minute. There's no lock up at all and there's no staking for that.
00:07:33
Speaker
Right, I see. Okay, that's cool. So what would happen if the operator is unable to burn more tokens? Like what if they don't have the money? What happens to the asset itself? If they miss a certain amount of time that they were supposed to lease with these tickets, then it's going to assign a penalty to them where they're going to have to make up for it by burning more tickets. So that's what would happen if they miss once.
00:08:00
Speaker
if they miss twice or they miss three times, depending on the individual contract that was signed with that fisherman or that fish farm, then eventually the floating asset is simply repossessed and then it would come under the control of our company and we would have to either run it directly and then we would be the ones actually leasing it or we give it to somebody else and then we say, okay,
00:08:23
Speaker
you're more responsible you're going to be in charge of it now you start leasing it but the asset never goes away it's always there and it's going to continue to be used to be productive right okay yeah makes sense so that's kind of what i expected which is which is which is totally fine and totally fair um that's cool um i wanted to also talk a little bit about uh tokenomics which i noticed you've got on the website and there's a few cool things there so first of all
00:08:48
Speaker
I noticed that the starting price would be $1.10 per token. And then according to the website, the price would increase by about 7.8% or something like that. Is it? Yeah, 7.8% annually. If this token is going to be tradable on the market, how can you ensure this sort of linear, predictable growth of the token's price?
00:09:15
Speaker
That's a very good question. So when we say that the value of the token relative to the floating asset is going up by 7.8%, what we mean is that if today we need to raise $100,000 to build a new fishing boat,
00:09:36
Speaker
A year from now, so what we would do today is we would probably issue, let's just call them a dollar, right? Let's say that they were a dollar, we would issue 100,000 STED tokens to collect $100,000 of capital to build this fishing boat. A year from now, it would be 92,000 STED tokens that we would issue
00:09:55
Speaker
in exchange for that same $100,000. So what's actually happening, we're not saying this is what the price is going to do on Uniswap, for example. We're saying this is the emission rate of the token relative to collateral. So because you get a constantly decreasing rate of emission, you get a constantly decreasing proportion of tokens relative to the collateral that backs the tokens, you would expect to see slightly below, probably around 7.8% increase in price.
00:10:25
Speaker
But it's not an exact fix. It's not a peg like a stablecoin. It's kind of like a soft peg. Right. That makes sense. And that's global and applicable for all projects. It's kind of like your company's internal timeline. So token distribution is reduced by 7.8% on a yearly basis or something like that.
00:10:47
Speaker
Specifically, it's exactly 0.65% every 30 days. So every 30 days, the amount of tokens that you can get to back a specific floating asset is going to go down and down and down. So that's what makes it deflationary relative to the US dollar.
00:11:03
Speaker
Right. That makes sense. Yeah. So, but you could still buy them from a different marketplace and then, um, with, with that still count, if you were just to buy the tokens from a marketplace or they would hold no, no practical value for the person who's looking to, uh, build something. Uh, no, they still hold practical value no matter where you buy them from, because all of the tokens that were, are initially admitted then are being used to, are, are being used to build floating assets.
00:11:32
Speaker
Right. So if they came from our smart contract originally and then someone puts them up on Uniswap, the tokens that you're buying on Uniswap are still tokens that were used in this fundraising process. So they're still collateralized.
00:11:45
Speaker
Right, yeah. Yeah, that's cool. That makes sense.
Navigating Regulations and Legal Challenges
00:11:47
Speaker
I'm guessing there's also a lot of regulatory challenges that you guys have had to go through, like living alone, also the financial side, but the practical aspects of it, building these things, getting approval for this kind of process. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because I think it's quite fascinating.
00:12:08
Speaker
What I will say about that is that some people and some organizations have concerns about cryptocurrencies being considered securities, and especially with smaller projects being considered securities. If Bitcoin or Ethereum were considered security, it wouldn't be such a big deal. But what we have, what STED tokens is,
00:12:28
Speaker
is not a security because it is a ticket that is being used to rent time with an asset. It is not ownership of an asset. It is not an entitlement of a certain portion of profits from that asset and it's not a loan. It's simply a ticket that is being burned to consume a certain amount of time. Again, like a ticket coming to a concert or a ticket to stay in a rental home overnight or
00:12:51
Speaker
something akin to that. So from a regulatory perspective, what this is, is we're actually selling tickets. We're not selling anything that could be misconstrued as a security. And so I think that's a very important detail.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah, no, it is, especially when you've had so much crackdown on cryptocurrency being securities and all that this year. But I mean, the SEC kind of, well, they lost the battle with Ripple, which is great, but they've appealed and they've had their appeal approved, so it will continue on.
00:13:26
Speaker
I'm hoping that we will get some regulatory clarity worldwide in the future so that we're going to not have to deal with this kind of uncertainty, because a lot of projects take so many risks just by existing, because you don't know what's going to happen a few years from now, right? So apart from the financial struggles, which are obviously there, there are uncertainties, are there any kind of regulations to do with the way certain
00:13:55
Speaker
assets are being built or can people ask for funding for any kind of asset? Are there any regulations? Like let's say, oh well, you can't build a boat more than 30 meters or you can't build a, you know, is there any like safety or any checking that what they're trying to build is okay, basically.
00:14:17
Speaker
Right. So there's no restrictions on our end as with Stead on what you can fundraise for. The restriction on what you can build is purely up to you. It's up to your locality. It's up to what you have a license to build, what you're able to build. If you're in New Zealand or you're in the Philippines like I am or you're in America or South America,
00:14:42
Speaker
As long as you're able to build it, then you can fundraise with it using our DeFi platform. And our normal method of going about things is we're going to show contracts or licenses on our website that will say, okay, this is the thing that's being built, this is its serial number or blank spot of where its serial number is going to be, but here's who will assign the serial number.
00:15:06
Speaker
something like that. So you're able to track the asset that was fundraised for so you know where that money went to. But it's kind of up to the individual, it's up to the operators, it's up to the people on that side of the equation to figure out what their regulations are in their area.
00:15:26
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that makes sense. That makes perfect sense. You gotta create a project that complies with the law but not apply additional regulations on top of it and to make it more restrictive than it has to be, and I think that's the way forward.
The Vision for Cryptocurrency-Driven Floating Cities
00:15:42
Speaker
In terms of your guy's vision, because obviously this starts from going back a few minutes ago, you mentioned that the goal is to create floating cities that operate just on cryptocurrency alone. What's the timeline for that and what does the ideal floating city look like and what does it need to have to be self-sufficient and self-contained?
00:16:08
Speaker
Right. And this is one of the two things that really excites me about this. This is my biggest motivation is these long term goals, these long term projects and getting there. The first thing is that we can bring capital into places like the Philippines, South America, maybe even Africa eventually.
00:16:26
Speaker
We can bring capital to people that need it to help small businesses and even medium businesses to grow things that they would not have access to if they were reliant only on the local economy. And that's one of the best things about blockchain technology that it's brought to anyone anywhere. There are people in Venezuela that cannot rely on the local currency. So they have to have their savings in Bitcoin. Maybe they get their paycheck in Bitcoin. Right. And that's a good thing. That's a beautiful thing. And I'm glad that crypto exists because of that reason.
00:16:54
Speaker
So this is a continuation of that. But what it also opens up the door to, like you're saying, is to push forward new projects and new technologies in the same vein as cryptocurrency. So seasteading is the idea of building permanent human habitation
00:17:13
Speaker
in international waters where you can have special economic zones or you can have your own communities that kind of operate with a certain level of autonomy that you can't get on land very easily. And so the steps to get there are... Man, I think I'm writing a book about this right now. There's a lot of steps to get there. I spent a year...
00:17:37
Speaker
Yeah, I spent a year and a half engineering just the platform that the house sits on. And that's not even including like the three lawyers that we have.
00:17:47
Speaker
all the other engineers, the naval architect, the chemists, all these people do with water purification. There's a lot of stuff that goes into this. But the end goal is that we're going to have something called a seastead, called an arc pad, which is just a floating structure that a house sits on top of. It's turnkey, it's self-sustaining. You can buy one.
00:18:09
Speaker
you can put it in a bay near your home and that's your floating house, right? That's your thing. But if you want to buy 10 or you want to buy 20 or you want to invest in a floating city or a floating resort or let's say a floating city in international waters, because it's so bite-sized, because we can do this crowdfunding thing,
00:18:29
Speaker
you don't need a government to swoop in and invest a billion dollars like they were talking about in South Korea or have you have you heard of neom and the line in Saudi Arabia I was I was actually going to bring it up yeah I guess they're absolutely ridiculous as projects but the fact that they're happening is just mind blowing
00:18:48
Speaker
The fact that that line is a real thing. It's a $500 billion investment. It's incredible. I looked into it, and then not only that, but it's so weird. You're literally splitting this ecosystem for 170 kilometers. You're creating this line, and all of the life in that desert that used to travel from this side of the desert to that one, they're not going to be able to anymore.
Critique of Traditional Mega Projects vs. Seasteading
00:19:10
Speaker
It's so weird.
00:19:10
Speaker
And the logistics are a nightmare. They're talking maglev trains and underground. It's nuts. Yeah, I know about it. Right, right, right. I think that individuals, what Wall Street calls retail, just ordinary people, can do a better job than the government, 99.9% of
00:19:31
Speaker
So that whole line, neon thing, that's a big money thing. That's like you were saying, $500 billion to build. Part of it, the line is the most famous one, but part of it is also a floating city that they're building in the Red Sea. It's like halfway on the coast and then halfway in the water if you've seen pictures of that. And we could build that with arc pads, with the things that we spent a year and a half designing. We could build something to house that many people for one 100th of the cost.
00:20:01
Speaker
And not only is it 1,100th of the cost, and it's also producing its own electricity, like I said, its own food, its own freshwater, totally self-sustaining, totally independent, even if you're 100 miles away from the rest of civilization, not only can it do all of that for 1,100th of the cost, but you don't need that $2 million to build the floating city.
00:20:21
Speaker
upfront, you can get $40 from this guy, $400 from that guy, and just slowly crowdfund your way up. So is complicated as building a floating city with a blockchain based economy sounds, it is very much doable. It is not just feasible. It's actually easier than you might think. If I can talk for a second about what, what we're doing short, what we're doing with the arc pad that we're building right now, this prototype floating house.
00:20:49
Speaker
Once we put it in the water, we're going to wrap a net down around the spars. Now the spars are these big concrete columns that the platform sits on. And they have EPS foam in the center. So it's almost hollow. It's like a big concrete column, but it's actually buoyant. It's lighter than water. So it doesn't move. It's static, but on water. Right. So if you get a big wave that comes along, it'll go under the platform because the platform is raised above the waves. So you can be in rough water and you're perfectly still.
00:21:17
Speaker
So that's the beauty of spars. That's what oil rigs are on. It's the same technology, just scaled way down. And so you wrap a net around the spars, you've got a fish cage. So we're actually designing the updated version to have the fish cage integrated in it automatically. And the idea here is that because we've gotten the production cost of these things low enough,
00:21:39
Speaker
And you have, in modern times, very efficient aquaculture systems. Theoretically, you could buy one of these things. You could build a floating city or a floating settlement, let's say, of 10 or 20 floating houses. Even if no one moves in and nobody wants to move 10 miles out of the ocean, it's just too far away from me. 10 miles is a lot, right? No one shows up. The fish that you can produce would pay off the entire investment in less than 10 years.
00:22:08
Speaker
So it's self-sustaining from a financial perspective, even if you don't want to live there yourself, or even if it doesn't take off right away. So it's almost like you've got a home that's got a fish tank below your house, and it's just producing passive income for you. I can live there for rent free, and then my house also makes money for me and makes my own electricity for
Seasteading Benefits: Community, Ecosystems, and Economy
00:22:28
Speaker
me. It's like everything's taken care of, even the financial aspect. I've got a house that pays for me to live in it.
00:22:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's really cool. I bet it needs to have a lot of things to make it work independently. Like you're going to need the salination plant. How does it generate electricity? Is it solar power? Yeah, it's just solar. You can put a bunch of solar panels on this thing between about 17 and 25 solar panels. But let's say you've only got 17. Most solar panels you can get on the market these days come with about a 25-year warranty.
00:22:59
Speaker
So usually when you've got a big solar array, it's not that much maintenance. You can go out and be on your own for two years in the Caribbean, let's say, and you're probably, statistically, you're not going to have to fix your solar array for the next two years. Nothing is likely to break. We've actually made the structure itself, the sea stead, the floating house, to have such ridiculously low maintenance that you should only have to do maintenance on it maybe once every five years.
00:23:26
Speaker
So that also makes it very, very user friendly. And while a desalination machine is, you know, actually a very complicated machine, if you're in a community of 10 people or 100 people or 1000 people, you might not necessarily have one of your own. There might just be some guy that's got a really big one that's taking care of himself and then nine neighbors around him and you're just buying the water from
00:23:50
Speaker
So the more that you have other people, the more that people can specialize in what they do. So it's not like you're running a factory while you're living on a floating house. It's actually probably less maintenance than a land-based home. Yeah, yeah. And it also, I think, the more of these structures you have, the more you move people into the sea, into the ocean, the more, well, the less crowded the cities will become. Like, cities are incredibly busy. I don't think people are supposed to live the way they are right now.
00:24:21
Speaker
London, New York, LA, they're just so full of people. So many people out of T's is a good thing, yeah.
00:24:28
Speaker
Yeah, one of the things we've always been talking about is about 29% of the Earth's surface is land, right? And about 2% of the Earth's surface is city. And more than half the population is, or around half the population is living on that 2%. 71% of the Earth's surface is water. And so even if you're counting like, well, we've got the agricultural lands, we can't move people there, we've got tundras, we can't move people there, so everybody's stuck in the cities. But if you built communities in the ocean,
00:24:59
Speaker
You could spread people out, so it's one tenth of the density that it is currently. And you wouldn't use up even 20% of the available water-based real estate. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. So going back to the technology that goes into it, what are some of the challenges that people will need to go over in order to be able to build their sustainable infrastructures?
00:25:30
Speaker
Uh, do you mean like, like the, the technological challenge or the, how expensive it's going to be or, or what? Not necessarily cost-wise, but like, um, uh, yeah, tech wise, cause we, we've thought, yeah, you gotta have electricity, but then you gotta have, uh, if you have solar, then you gotta have some batteries. If you have batteries, then you gotta make sure that they store a certain capacity, uh, because you don't want to be left, I guess in the middle of the ocean with no electricity at all. Right. Because that wouldn't be too fun, I guess.
00:25:57
Speaker
And you're gonna have some backup systems like generators like some diesel for your like a little boat or something like that. So I think there's there's a lot of those all those little things that you need to kind of have in order to make sure that if anything you can still like get out and get something that you need to do to fix your house.
00:26:19
Speaker
Right. With a lot of solar arrays in Southeast Asia, I know they typically have three battery packs. I forget what type they are. I don't think they're lithium ion. But they'll have three independent batteries, kind of like the Tesla Powerwall that you've seen, but they just sit in the floor. And so what you can actually do is you can build that into the floating platform, or you can just have that in a closet somewhere inside the house.
00:26:44
Speaker
And so right there, usually that's about enough power for 14 hours. So the sun doesn't go down for 14 hours. So you're, you're good to go if you've got three battery packs. So you've got your solar array above, you've got your battery packs below. Like you're saying, it is a good idea to have a diesel generator. Um, our work site, we're building the prototype. We bought a diesel generator last week and it cost us, I think about $1,100. So that's not necessarily a deal breaking cost either. And diesel is not.
00:27:12
Speaker
a huge expense if you're only gonna use it maybe once every couple of weeks if you have, or probably less, just whenever your batteries run out. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It makes sense to have those kind of things. So obviously you guys know a lot about this and are you actively building these or are you actively looking to help people build their own? Do you guys get involved into the process of people building their own? Do you advise at all or anything like that?
00:27:42
Speaker
So what we're doing is we're trying to make a specific design that we can mass produce here in the Philippines because it's very cheap and easy to do so. And there's a lot of people who are very skilled in the marine and shipbuilding industry. And that's again, one of the reasons I came from America to here is to get our base of operations here. There's a lot of experienced naval architects. I think something like 4% of the world ships are built in the Philippines. And actually that's a lot.
00:28:12
Speaker
Right, it is. It's a really big deal. So what we'll do is we'll make all of the parts here. And if somebody wants to put a floating house somewhere in the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean or something like that, we can stuff it all into a shipping container, send the shipping container to the beach,
00:28:32
Speaker
you're standing on where you want to set this up open the box and then it's all plug and play it's just bolts it's just there's no welding there's no difficult construction everything is just you need a wrench and you can put it together yourself
00:28:44
Speaker
Um, and that, you know, that sounds a lot less complicated than building an ordinary house on land. And shockingly it is a lot less complicated because if you learn about, and I know this is a crypto blog, so I don't want to like annoy your viewers, but this is just, you know, it's fascinating. I think it's really cool. I want to, I want to learn more about it. I like it.
00:29:07
Speaker
Okay, so if you look at most fish cages in aquaculture companies, what they have is this HDPE tube. It's like a big plastic tube and it runs in a ring and then they hang the fish net down below that underwater that contains all the fish. Now that's good for coastal areas.
00:29:24
Speaker
When you go into deep water where the waves get bigger and the currents can get a bit stronger, what they'll have is kind of like a big steel cage that's like a giant donut. And then they put the net inside of that. If you can make something like that, where the cage with the spars of this platform, imagine an oil rig going down. Now imagine those spars of the oil rig have connecting rods reinforcing the whole thing.
00:29:50
Speaker
you've basically got a fish cage right there. So surprisingly, if you start from the perspective of I'm going to build a deep sea fish cage, I'm going to build it out of steel or better yet, fiberglass because fiberglass doesn't rust. And so it's going to last 100 years with no maintenance and it's not going to fall apart, unlike steel. Again, this is actually a very low maintenance thing to build and a very simple thing to build. You start with a fish cage and you're halfway there. It's really not as complicated as some people might make it out to be.
00:30:20
Speaker
There was this company, and I think it was somewhere in Europe, and they were saying, we'll build you, it was like a miniature oil rig, kind of like what we were doing. We'll build you your own private island for a billion dollars. And it's like people look at that, and they think that's a reasonable price, but it really does not have to be a very expensive thing. Yeah, a billion, just a billion dollar, guys. We will build it. Yeah, just send it over. We'll get it all sorted for you. Just one billion. Yeah, that's cool.
00:30:48
Speaker
There was so much empty area. Sorry, I'll let you ask me another question. Go ahead. No, no, no. You go ahead. I have a lot of things regarding the project that I want to go through. But I think this is good. OK. Yeah, we'll get back to Stead in just a second. So I'm sorry. Stead is important. But this is my passion, is building the floating cities. When America was being colonized, a lot of land along the coast was just empty.
00:31:16
Speaker
There was nobody living there, right? So you show up, you come in from Europe, you show up, you plant some tobacco crops or whatever, you build a little plot of land and put your little log cabin house and you own a house. And everyone can do this, everyone can show up, they can build their own plot of land and they can live their life how they want to.
00:31:33
Speaker
And that doesn't really exist anymore. But if we look at the ocean as this big empty area that everyone's crowded in the cities, on the land, you look at this as kind of another area where we can have human habitation. We can expand out and occupy this area and make it productive. Not only does it open up this whole new avenue of freedom, this whole new avenue of productivity and independence and bringing back this thing that hasn't really been available to humans in hundreds of years,
00:32:02
Speaker
The interesting thing about building floating structures in the ocean is that if you make them out of the right materials and if you integrate with the natural ecosystems that are out there, they can actually be eco-restorative.
00:32:15
Speaker
An interesting thing is that there are certain coral reefs that you can just tie them to the spars of oil rigs or even to ships if they're not in motion all the time. And they will grow onto the structure. You can have floating coral reefs and big populations of fish and octopus and all these things. And it's like, you know, you think of a city as being really industrial and polluted, but it could actually be the most green or blue thing you've ever seen.
00:32:40
Speaker
Yeah. Isn't that, uh, didn't they used to sink boats on purpose, uh, to have like coral reefs grow around them and then they still do it, right? That's a thing to restore coral reefs. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I thought. That's, that's, that's pretty, that's pretty fascinating. So you could practically help, uh, the ocean rebuild itself in a way. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There's some, you know, cause most of the ocean is empty because it's too deep past about 200 meters of depth.
00:33:08
Speaker
there's not enough sunlight that penetrates for anything to photosynthesize. And because most of the ocean is on average about 4.8 to 5.8 kilometers, that's like the abyssal plane, right? That's kind of the floor of the ocean. If you look at the whole earth, that's the average depth. So there's no seaweed that's going to root down there and then grow all the way up to the top. It just can't do that. So the only thing that's photosynthesizing in most of the ocean is algae's phytoplankton.
00:33:36
Speaker
And it's so dispersed and it can flow around so far that it makes it hard for them to feed. It makes it hard for them to reproduce. So you really need some kind of solid static object. And once you put that in deep water, that becomes the new basis of the ecosystem. So if you look at most of the ocean as a desert, and that is what it is, we can turn the whole thing into a rainforest because you compare coral reefs with rainforest. Coral reefs are more productive. They produce more oxygen. They produce more animal life.
00:34:05
Speaker
produce more of everything. And the only difference between a coral reef and the abyss is just something for a coral to hold on to. So you talk about rebuilding ecosystems. Yeah, this does it. This does everything. It lets you get a house that pays itself off. It lets you build new communities that have freedom and blockchain-based economies and let you start whatever company you want, do whatever you want. And it also builds up the ecosystem.
00:34:35
Speaker
So it's a really great technology that is kind of coming about. And it's not just us either. There's actually two other companies that are working on these technologies. Okay, so floating structures, then they are actively worked on by more than one organization. Do you think they're the future? Yes, I do. I basically dedicated my entire life from this point forward to c-standing.
00:35:04
Speaker
So I, so maybe I'm biased a little bit, but, but yeah, I do. Do you leave on a houseboat? I right past those curtains is the beach. I'm right on the beach, but I don't have a houseboat. Unfortunately.
00:35:19
Speaker
I have a friend that lives on a houseboat. He's in the Netherlands, so he's not in the ocean. He's in one of the canals. And he kind of bought himself this old boat, because it's kind of what you do. You get an older boat house, and then you restore it, and then you just live in it. Right. Yeah, yeah.
00:35:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good way to go. And if you get, it depends on what kind of boat you get. Because if you get one that's in the canals in the Netherlands, I don't know necessarily if he's got a sailboat, but if he's got the right kind of sailboat, he can go all around Europe. And they're really expanding the canal system in Europe as well. But if he's got a sailboat, he can go to America. He can go to, again, it gives you this kind of freedom that you don't have if you live on land, which I think is very cool.
00:36:07
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Almost weird that we've evolved to live on land, if you think about it, considering how much ocean water is there. We just got out of the ocean one day and we're like, okay, it's time to leave the waters.
00:36:19
Speaker
we're yeah we're slowly coming back on there i think i think if if this continues if this trend like see how do you call it seasteading continues um that's gonna happen um way before we actually go and start colonies on mars and maybe that's something to explore before we go to a planet that basically has nothing yet it has like frozen water in in its core or something and then patches of frozen water but there's nothing
00:36:45
Speaker
really there to to build on you just from scratch like terraforming and all that in terraforming is like a science fiction thing anyway like it would be impossible to do with the current technology right yeah i don't know a lot about terraform i like the idea of a moon base or a mars base but i do wonder
00:37:05
Speaker
the people that are living in there, aren't they gonna be really reliant on getting supplies from Earth? Aren't they not gonna be able to produce the things that they need to live on Mars? I have a difficulty seeing it become self-sustaining. That's my biggest problem with it.
00:37:19
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think it can be self-sustaining, nor for a good amount of time. There's this game I was playing, which is actually, it's called Surviving Mars, so that's exactly what it is. It's quite an accurate simulator of how a community would go about creating and establishing cities on Mars. And a lot of the economy is based on you trading with Earth, basically.
00:37:41
Speaker
It's very hard to produce stuff. And that's assuming that that's a game. What do you trade? What do you send back to Earth that there is a value? That's my question. Yeah. Well, you get tourism. So you get people from Earth. You send them to Mars, and then they spend a week on Mars. And then they get, obviously, they pay good money. And then with that money, then you use to kind of buy whatever you need, like water and food.
00:38:10
Speaker
stuff like that for the Martian colony. But I mean, thinking about it, and I've never thought about sea setting, but thinking about it just feels like we should probably do this first before exploring Mars.
00:38:25
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing is when it does get brought up by governments, it's kind of like we're going to build this coastal city. But the gimmick is that it's like it's partly in the water. But I think that there's some crossover between sea standing cryptocurrency in that governments to some degree don't want to lose control. You know what I mean? And if you build a city and it can just drift away, then imagine, you know, imagine like
00:38:54
Speaker
France or imagine Poland builds a city and it's in the Baltic and now all of a sudden it's in the Mediterranean. They have a lot less influence over it all of a sudden. So it'd be more difficult to maintain that control. But the ability for people to act independently and to make their own choices, that's why cryptocurrency is probably the future of money. I think that what's on the blockchain, tokenized assets, tokenized real estate, tokenized boats in this case are floating houses.
00:39:21
Speaker
is that's the way that a financial system ought to be done because the alternative that we've seen is high inflation and in some countries hyperinflation and it just doesn't work when you have a handful of politicians who are just making these you know shot calling and here's how the economy should be they don't necessarily know what they're doing
00:39:40
Speaker
Oh yeah, I completely agree with that, especially when it comes to decisions regarding tech. Regulation always plays catch up with tech and often in the wrong way, because instead of trying to understand it, just trying to figure out how to control it, instead of just trying to understand how Bitcoin can help the economies, like how can we integrate this new thing which has nothing to do with the current monetary system into the existing system, right? It's just... And it doesn't fit.
Autonomous Communities and Self-Governance
00:40:05
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't fit at all. You can try and make it fit, but it won't fit. Yeah. But I like your analogy that that seasteading is kind of like crypto because they're both around based on freedom. Right. And there is not a lot of regulation, I'm guessing. And I don't know about it. Like if I'm talking out of my ass, just let me know. But I'm thinking international waters. There's no real like there's no laws in international waters. There's no like nobody governs these waters. So it's like if you were able to create a
00:40:34
Speaker
some kind of community hundreds of kilometers in deep into the ocean that would be that would be pretty much its own community with its own laws with its own everything right it's like you don't have to say yeah yeah and that's and that's one of the benefits too is one of those rules could be okay now that we're out here in the middle of the ocean
00:40:57
Speaker
The new rule is you don't have to listen to, I don't know if I'm going to get, you know, the SEC is going to come after me and I don't know how angry Gary is going to be here this way. One of the new rules is you don't need to worry about what the SEC says. So now you can make your crypto project and don't worry about anything. And if they're, if they're based in that city, if they're out there in the ocean, you know, then they can do that. That's, it's what the community decides to do. Like how a DAO is a decentralized company, you've got a seastead, it's a decentralized city. It's the whole thing.
00:41:24
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Well, you're going to have Gary Ganso just going on jet skis or something, just trying to hunt down the sea studs. But that's such a cool idea. But going back to the tech itself, what's it built on? What's the what platform is it built on? So we're going to be putting stead on polygon first. And
00:41:48
Speaker
From there, we may put it on other layer 2s, but it's EVM. So it's all written in Solidity. And what we're actually going to be doing when we launch this project is we're going to have a short window where we have a discount period. And you're going to be able to get these tokens, which would normally be $1 or $1.10. They're going to be at a 20% discount temporarily until we sold a certain amount of them.
00:42:13
Speaker
And then immediately all of the tokens following that are back to the normal price. So, you know, if you're interested, if you guys are interested in either seasteading or, you know, parking your money in a collateralized asset, that's not going to follow the dollar on this, this downtrend of inflation in either of the situations, if you guys want to buy some stead tokens, maybe consider buying during that discount period, because we'll, we'll put out notices. If you go on there, you can join our waitlist. We'll, we'll put out notices when those discount periods are going to happen.
00:42:42
Speaker
Okay, sweet man. That's awesome. That's awesome. Thanks a lot for joining. I think I've learned a lot about Seasteading and I think it's been a fascinating conversation, dude. Is there anything else that you would like to add? Well, if you want to follow our Seasteading progress with the Floating Houses, then look up ArcPad on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. We're on all of those. So I can tell you about those right now.
00:43:10
Speaker
The only thing that I, the only thing else I guess I want to say is, you know, I hope that people are interested in some of the ideas that we talked about today. If you guys want to help developing economies and small businesses in these undeveloped areas, or if you are interested in helping to build a floating city and you guys have questions about how all this stuff works, anybody's free to shoot me a message on our social media platforms.
00:43:37
Speaker
Awesome dude, thanks a lot. Thank you. Bye everybody.