Daniel sent us this one — he wants to know about the seasteading movement and whether anyone has actually pulled it off. And the short answer is no, but the long answer is so much weirder than just no. You've got a rusting cruise ship off Panama, a reef that got invaded by Tonga within three months, and a startup that burned nine million dollars trying to park a boat twelve miles off California. The whole thing is this fascinating train wreck of Silicon Valley ambition meeting ocean law and actual physics.
The thing that still gets me is how much money and brainpower went into this. Patri Friedman — Milton Friedman's grandson — writes this essay in two thousand eight, gets half a million dollars from Peter Thiel to start the Seasteading Institute, and the pitch is genuinely compelling. Build floating platforms in international waters, escape the regulatory state, let a thousand governance models bloom. It's the startup logic applied to countries.
Countries as A-B testing.
And you can see why it captured the Silicon Valley imagination. If you believe software is eating the world, why wouldn't it eat sovereignty too? The Seasteading Institute's framing was basically — governments are legacy systems, let's fork the codebase.
The blockchain of nation-states.
I was going to say the Linux distro of governance, but yes. Three pillars held up the whole thing. One, technological feasibility — can you build a floating platform that works as a community. Two, legal viability — is there actually a regulatory gap in international waters you can exploit. Three, economic sustainability — can you make it pay for itself, probably as a tax haven or special economic zone. The plan was to knock down all three and build the first seastead by, I think, twenty fifteen was the original target.
Here we are in twenty twenty-six and the closest thing we have is — what, a residential cruise ship that costs two to fifteen million dollars per cabin and doesn't offer anything resembling sovereignty?
The MS The World. Launched two thousand two, still sailing. It's impressive — one hundred sixty-five residences, residents vote on the itinerary, there's a grocery store and a gym and a putting green. But it's a ship. It's registered in the Bahamas. Bahamian law applies. You pay taxes wherever you're a citizen. The ship is basically a floating gated community, not a new nation.
A very expensive condo that happens to drift.
That's the best-case scenario for what seasteading could actually deliver. The gap between "floating libertarian utopia" and "timeshare that moves" is the whole story.
Let's dig into the first pillar — can you actually build one of these things? Because that seems like the part where the dream should be easiest to test. Either the platform exists or it doesn't.
And this is where the numbers get brutal. The Seasteading Institute commissioned its own feasibility study in twenty nineteen, looking at what it would cost to build a single platform housing about fifty people. Their own number was thirty to fifty million dollars. For fifty people. That's six hundred thousand to a million dollars per resident, just for the platform, before you've put anything on it.
For context, what did they actually raise?
They ran an Indiegogo campaign in twenty thirteen. Goal was to build a prototype. They raised about one point five million dollars.
They had roughly three percent of what their own study said they needed, for the smallest viable version.
That's just the platform cost. That doesn't include ongoing maintenance, which for any marine structure is enormous. Salt water destroys everything. Offshore oil platforms — which are the closest existing technology to what seasteaders envisioned — cost between five hundred million and a billion dollars each. And those are single-purpose industrial structures, not communities. They don't have schools or farms or waste treatment plants.
The barnacle budget alone.
I mean, unironically yes. The maintenance cost for a semi-submersible platform in open ocean is something like five to ten percent of construction cost annually. On a fifty-million-dollar platform, that's two and a half to five million a year just to keep it from falling apart. Fifty residents would each need to pay fifty to a hundred thousand dollars annually in maintenance fees before they've bought food or paid for electricity or — anything.
The economics don't scale down. But what about scaling up? If a fifty-person platform is thirty to fifty million, what's a thousand-person platform?
The Seasteading Institute's concept was something called ClubStead — essentially a cruise ship that stays in one place. The idea was you'd take something like the MS The World, strip out the engines, anchor it permanently, and call it a seastead. The problem is that cruise ships aren't designed to stay stationary in open ocean for decades. They're designed to move, to dock for maintenance, to avoid bad weather. A stationary ship in international waters is a ship that can't run from a storm.
Storms in the open ocean are not theoretical.
They are extremely not theoretical. The North Pacific in winter will hand you fifty-foot waves. No stationary platform that currently exists can handle that while also functioning as a community where people are raising children and running businesses and, I don't know, having brunch. The engineering problem isn't "can we build a platform that floats" — we can, we've been doing it for a century. The problem is "can we build a floating platform that people want to live on, that's affordable, that can stay in one place in any weather, and that doesn't require a nation-state to subsidize its existence.
The answer to that is no.
The answer is not yet, and maybe not ever at a cost anyone can afford. But the seasteading movement didn't really grapple with this, because the engineering was always treated as the easy part — just a matter of funding and iteration. The hard part was supposed to be the law.
Which brings us to the second pillar. And I want to talk about the Republic of Minerva, because this is my favorite story in the whole seasteading saga, and it happened decades before seasteading was even a word.
Nineteen seventy-two. Michael Oliver, a Nevada real estate developer who'd already tried to start a micronation on an abandoned Pacific island, decides to build his own country from scratch. He finds the Minerva Reefs, two submerged atolls about two hundred fifty miles southwest of Tonga. The reefs are underwater at high tide. So Oliver's team dredges sand from the lagoon, piles it up, builds two artificial islands, and declares the Republic of Minerva.
They literally made land.
They made land. They planted a flag. They minted coins. They wrote a constitution. They sent letters to every country in the Pacific asking for diplomatic recognition. Total cost was about nine million dollars in today's money. And for about three months, the Republic of Minerva existed.
Then Tonga showed up.
Tonga showed up. King Taufa'ahau Tupou the Fourth sent a military expedition, took down the flag, and annexed the reefs. Tonga's claim was basically — these reefs have been part of our traditional fishing grounds for centuries, and you don't get to build a country in our backyard without asking. The international community shrugged and moved on. No country recognized Minerva. No country challenged Tonga's annexation.
The lesson being that "international waters" doesn't mean "unclaimed.
That's the core insight, and it's the one the seasteading movement never really absorbed. The Minerva Reefs are more than two hundred nautical miles from Tonga — they're technically outside Tonga's Exclusive Economic Zone. And it didn't matter. When a country decides that an artificial platform in its neighborhood is a problem, the legal niceties don't protect you.
Let's talk about the legal framework, because this is where I think most people — including me, before I started reading about this — have a complete misunderstanding. The image is that international waters are the Wild West. No laws, no jurisdiction, do what you want.
That image is wrong in almost every particular. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea — UNCLOS — creates this incredibly dense web of rules. There are zones. Territorial waters extend twelve nautical miles from a country's coast. The contiguous zone goes out to twenty-four miles. The Exclusive Economic Zone, the EEZ, goes out to two hundred nautical miles. Within the EEZ, the coastal state has sovereign rights over all natural resources and jurisdiction over artificial islands and marine scientific research.
If you want to be in true international waters, you need to be more than two hundred nautical miles from any coastline.
And here's the kicker. Article Sixty of UNCLOS gives coastal states the exclusive right to authorize and regulate the construction of artificial islands within their EEZ. If you build a seastead within two hundred miles of any country, that country has jurisdiction over you.
If you go beyond two hundred miles?
Then you're on the high seas. But you're not free. Every vessel on the high seas must be registered to a flag state. That country's laws apply to the vessel. If your seastead is flagged to Panama, Panamanian law applies — including labor law, environmental law, criminal law. You can't just declare yourself a new country and expect anyone to care.
There's no flag state that offers "sovereignty light"? No country that says, sure, register with us and do whatever you want?
There isn't. And there's a strong disincentive for any country to create one. If a flag state fails to exercise effective jurisdiction over its vessels, it risks being labeled a flag of convenience with poor regulatory oversight, which creates problems for all its other registered vessels in international ports. Plus, the major maritime nations — the US, China, the EU — have a strong interest in maintaining the current system. They're not going to let new sovereign entities pop up in international waters.
This is where Blueseed comes in, right? The startup that tried to find a legal hack.
Blueseed is the perfect case study in why the legal barriers are actually harder than the engineering ones. The idea was clever. Park a cruise ship twelve nautical miles off the coast of Silicon Valley — so, just outside US territorial waters — and use it as a startup incubator. Foreign entrepreneurs could live and work on the ship without needing US visas. They'd take a twenty-minute ferry to shore for meetings. The ship would be flagged to a country with favorable laws.
They actually raised money for this.
Nine million dollars. Peter Thiel was an investor. They had renderings of this beautiful ship with co-working spaces and cafes. They had hundreds of startups express interest. And then they spent years in regulatory limbo and never launched.
What specifically killed it?
The US Coast Guard made clear that they would enforce US law on any vessel operating within the EEZ. The US Customs and Border Protection said they'd treat the ferry service as an illegal entry point. The State Department wasn't going to let a foreign-flagged vessel operate as a de facto visa bypass twenty miles from San Francisco. There was no single moment where Blueseed was shut down — it just became clear that the legal path didn't exist.
They had the money, they had the demand, they had the ship design — and they couldn't get permission to exist.
That's the pattern. Every seasteading attempt that got far enough to actually interact with governments hit the same wall. The most famous example is the French Polynesia deal. In twenty seventeen, the Seasteading Institute signed a memorandum of understanding with the French Polynesian government to develop a floating city project. They'd found a government willing to host them. They had a location. They had a timeline.
Then it collapsed.
Within a year. The French Polynesian government pulled out in March twenty eighteen. The official reason was political — local opposition, concerns about sovereignty, environmental impact concerns. But the deeper issue was that no government wants to be the first to host what is essentially a competitor for its own authority. French Polynesia is a French overseas collectivity. France was never going to let a floating libertarian enclave set up shop in its territory.
This is the part of the story where the Seasteading Institute basically gave up on sovereignty.
Two thousand twenty, the Institute officially pivoted. They stopped talking about escaping governments and started talking about working with governments. The new framing is floating cities for climate adaptation. Rising sea levels mean coastal populations need somewhere to go. The Institute's argument is that the technology they've been developing — semi-submersible platforms, closed-loop aquaculture, wave energy systems — is exactly what the world needs.
Which is a useful pivot. But it's also a complete abandonment of the original vision.
It's the movement's real legacy. The Busan project in South Korea is the flagship now. Announced in twenty twenty-two, partnership with UN-Habitat, the city of Busan, and Oceanix — which is a floating city design firm, not the Seasteading Institute directly, but there's a lot of personnel overlap. The plan is for a floating neighborhood that can house twelve thousand people, designed to rise with sea levels, fully integrated with the city's existing infrastructure.
It's municipal. It's governed. It's not a seastead in any meaningful sense.
It's a floating extension of an existing city, subject to South Korean law, built with UN oversight, funded by the city government. Expected completion twenty twenty-eight. If you squint, you can see the seasteading DNA in the platform design. But the sovereignty part is completely gone. These are climate resilience projects, not new countries.
There's an irony here that I can't get past. The seasteading movement was founded on the idea that government is the problem — that you need to escape jurisdiction to innovate. And the only thing the movement has actually produced is government partnerships.
The Busan project is literally a UN-Habitat partnership. The exact opposite of escaping international governance.
It's like starting a movement to escape the DMV and ending up as the DMV's preferred vendor.
I want to talk about Ocean Builders, because this is the one case where someone actually put a structure in international waters and lived on it.
This is the Thailand story.
Ocean Builders, a company founded by early Bitcoin adopters, builds a small floating structure — essentially a cabin on a spar buoy — and places it twelve nautical miles off the coast of Phuket, Thailand. They declare it outside Thai jurisdiction. Two people live on it. They call it a seastead.
Thailand's reaction?
The Thai Navy showed up within weeks. Thailand classified the structure as a threat to national security. They arrested the occupants, towed the structure back to shore, and charged the builders with violating Thai sovereignty. The company tried to argue that they were in international waters, but Thailand's position was that the structure was within their EEZ and therefore subject to Thai jurisdiction under UNCLOS Article Sixty.
The one time someone actually built a seastead and put people on it, the nearest country just took it.
No country objected. No country said, wait, Thailand, you can't do that, those people were in international waters. The international community's position on seasteading is basically — if you build it, the nearest country can claim it, and we're not going to stop them.
Which brings us back to Minerva in nineteen seventy-two. The exact same thing happened, fifty years apart, and the outcome was identical.
The technology changed. The law didn't.
I want to zoom out and ask the question that I think is actually more interesting than "did seasteading work" — which is clearly no. What does the failure of seasteading tell us about governance and technology more broadly?
I think it tells us that jurisdiction is stickier than anyone in Silicon Valley wanted to believe. The seasteading thesis was that governance is like software — you can iterate, you can fork, you can build a minimum viable product and scale. But governance isn't software. It's a dense web of treaties, customs, enforcement mechanisms, and power relationships that have been built up over centuries. You can't disrupt that with a clever platform design.
The exit strategy doesn't exist.
The exit strategy doesn't exist. And this is the thing that I think the seasteaders never fully grappled with. Even if you solve the engineering, even if you find a legal loophole, even if you build a thriving community — you're still dependent on the existing system. Where does your food come from? Your medical supplies? Your internet connection? You need to trade with the countries you're trying to escape. And those countries have no incentive to make it easy for you.
The libertarian island problem. You can't be an autarky.
You can't. And the smaller you are, the more dependent you are. A seastead of fifty or a hundred people is completely reliant on external supply chains. It's not a country. It's a very expensive life raft.
Let's talk about what the movement actually produced, because I think it's easy to just mock the whole thing and move on. But there's real technology here.
The semi-submersible platform designs that the Seasteading Institute developed are innovative. The closed-loop aquaculture systems — growing fish and plants in integrated systems that recycle waste — are being deployed in projects around the world. The wave energy research has fed into larger renewable energy efforts. The Maldives floating city project, which broke ground in twenty twenty-two, uses a lot of the same engineering principles.
The Maldives project is interesting because it's the exact opposite of seasteading in philosophy, but it uses seasteading-adjacent technology.
The Maldives floating city is a government project, funded by the Maldivian government, built in partnership with a Dutch architecture firm, designed to house twenty thousand people displaced by rising sea levels. It's a planned extension of the existing capital, Malé. It's fully integrated into the country's legal and economic system. It's not trying to be a new country. It's trying to keep an existing country above water.
That's the pattern. Busan, the Maldives, there's a project in Lagos — all of these are government-led climate adaptation projects. The seasteading movement provided some of the technical groundwork, but the actual implementation is happening through traditional governance structures.
Which is either deeply ironic or completely predictable, depending on your priors.
I want to go back to the cost question, because I think there's a number that really drives home why this never worked. The Seasteading Institute's twenty nineteen study said thirty to fifty million for a fifty-person platform. Offshore oil platforms — which are the closest existing technology — cost five hundred million to a billion. And those don't have schools or hospitals or farms. How do you close that gap?
You don't. Not with current technology. And this is where the economic model falls apart. The seasteading pitch was always that these would be tax havens or special economic zones that would attract businesses and wealthy residents. But to attract those people, you need to offer something they can't get on land. And what you're actually offering is — pay a million dollars to live on a small, unstable platform in the middle of the ocean where you have no legal protections and you're dependent on countries you're trying to avoid.
It's a worse product at a higher price.
It's a worse product at a higher price with existential legal risk. The value proposition doesn't close.
Let's do the misconception roundup, because I think a lot of people still have the wrong idea about what's possible on the ocean.
First one — international waters are lawless. UNCLOS creates a comprehensive legal framework. Every square inch of ocean is covered by some jurisdiction, even if it's just the flag state of whatever vessel you're on. There is no legal vacuum.
Second — seasteading is technologically feasible today. Also false, at least at any scale that matters. You can build a small platform. You cannot build a self-sufficient community that can survive open-ocean conditions at a cost anyone can afford.
Third — the seasteading movement is still active in its original form. It's not. The Seasteading Institute pivoted in twenty twenty. The sovereignty-focused movement is largely defunct. The people who were involved have mostly moved on to climate adaptation work or left the space entirely.
Fourth — you can escape taxation by living on a platform. Flag state laws apply, and most countries tax their citizens on worldwide income regardless of where they live. The US certainly does. You'd need to renounce your citizenship and find a flag state that doesn't tax, and even then you're still paying VAT or sales tax on everything you import.
The only way to actually escape taxation is to be completely self-sufficient and trade with no one, which is impossible on a floating platform.
Where does that leave us? The seasteading dream is dead. But something else is rising in its place, and I think it's actually more interesting.
The governed floating city. Busan, the Maldives, Lagos. These are climate adaptation projects. They're municipal infrastructure. They're not trying to be new countries. They're trying to keep existing countries functional as sea levels rise.
The open question — the one I keep coming back to — is whether climate change will eventually create enough pressure that nations actually cede some sovereignty to floating communities. If the Maldives is mostly underwater in fifty years, and half the population is living on floating platforms, does the governance model change?
I think the answer is probably no — the governance model adapts, but sovereignty doesn't fragment. What we'll see is floating extensions of existing cities, governed by the same municipalities, subject to the same laws. The Maldives floating city isn't a new country. It's a new neighborhood of Malé.
At some scale, doesn't the relationship change? If ten percent of a country's population lives on floating platforms, and those platforms can theoretically be moved, doesn't that create a different kind of political dynamic?
It creates leverage, certainly. But it's leverage within the existing system, not an exit from it. The platforms still need ports, still need supply chains, still need defense. They're not going to declare independence and sail away. That's the seasteading fantasy, and it's still a fantasy.
The future of ocean communities is municipal, not sovereign.
That's the lesson of the last twenty years. The seasteading movement failed because it misunderstood what sovereignty actually is. Sovereignty isn't a flag and a constitution. It's a dense network of relationships — legal, economic, military, diplomatic. You can't build that from scratch on a platform. You can only inherit it or negotiate it with the existing powers.
The existing powers aren't interested in negotiating.
They're interested in floating infrastructure that solves their problems. Climate adaptation, urban expansion, coastal resilience. They'll pay for that. They'll partner on that. They will not partner on a project to make them obsolete.
If someone listening is interested in ocean-based communities — not the libertarian dream, but the actual emerging reality — what should they follow?
The Oceanix and UN-Habitat partnership is the main thing. The Busan prototype is the most advanced project — expected completion twenty twenty-eight, twelve thousand residents, fully integrated with the city. The Maldives floating city is under construction now. There's also a project in Copenhagen — Urban Rigger — that's doing floating student housing, which is smaller scale but actually built and operating.
Student housing is about as far from a libertarian utopia as you can get.
It's deeply practical. That's the thing. The real legacy of seasteading isn't new countries. It's better ways to build on water within the existing system.
Now — Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In nineteen twelve, a Japanese game designer in Hokkaido created a board game called "Kaisen Shogi" — naval chess — that was intended to be played on actual fishing boats during the annual herring runs. The game pieces were magnetized to stick to metal deck plates. It nearly became standard equipment for the Imperial Japanese Navy's northern fleet, but the order was cancelled at the last minute when a naval attaché pointed out that the magnets interfered with compass navigation. The entire production run was melted down for rifle cartridges in nineteen fifteen.
The magnets interfered with the compasses.
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