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A Cryptocurrency Millionaire Wants to Build a Utopia in Nevada (nytimes.com)
chiefcrash shares a report from The New York Times about a man who wants to build a community based on the blockchain technology introduced by Bitcoin: An enormous plot of land in the Nevada desert -- bigger than nearby Reno -- has been the subject of local intrigue since a company with no history, Blockchains L.L.C., bought it for $170 million in cash this year. The man who owns the company, a lawyer and cryptocurrency millionaire named Jeffrey Berns, put on a helmet and climbed into a Polaris off-road vehicle last week to give a tour of the sprawling property and dispel a bit of the mystery. He imagines a sort of experimental community spread over about a hundred square miles, where houses, schools, commercial districts and production studios will be built. The centerpiece of this giant project will be the blockchain, a new kind of database that was introduced by Bitcoin.
So far, he said, he has spent $300 million on the land, offices, planning and a staff of 70 people. And buying 67,000 largely undeveloped acres is a bit of old-fashioned, real estate risk-taking. Still, Mr. Berns said his ambition was not to be a real estate magnate or even to get rich -- or richer. He is promising to give away all decision-making power for the project and 90 percent of any dividends it generates to a corporate structure that will be held by residents, employees and future investors. That structure, which he calls a "distributed collaborative entity," is supposed to operate on a blockchain where everyone's ownership rights and voting powers will be recorded in a digital wallet. "In a keynote spectacle at Devcon4 in Prague, Berns announced some of their plans for the future, as well as some of their recent activities, such as buying two nuclear bomb shelters, a mountain fortress in Switzerland, and a bank," adds Slashdot reader chiefcrash.
So far, he said, he has spent $300 million on the land, offices, planning and a staff of 70 people. And buying 67,000 largely undeveloped acres is a bit of old-fashioned, real estate risk-taking. Still, Mr. Berns said his ambition was not to be a real estate magnate or even to get rich -- or richer. He is promising to give away all decision-making power for the project and 90 percent of any dividends it generates to a corporate structure that will be held by residents, employees and future investors. That structure, which he calls a "distributed collaborative entity," is supposed to operate on a blockchain where everyone's ownership rights and voting powers will be recorded in a digital wallet. "In a keynote spectacle at Devcon4 in Prague, Berns announced some of their plans for the future, as well as some of their recent activities, such as buying two nuclear bomb shelters, a mountain fortress in Switzerland, and a bank," adds Slashdot reader chiefcrash.
He allows himself a lot of freedom of thinking.
good luck trying this without real money, oh wait, he is using real money
they call it "Las Vegas"
Or are they going to use the energy paid for by the people of Nevada?
Clearly this will need a hyperloop infrastructure under the complex and to Reno.
where he is going to get the water from. With 67,000 acres of desert seems l;ike there is plenty of room. But with out water in large volumes I am not sure how this gets done.
;)
Just my 2 cents
Jonestown in Nevada? The setting is different but the Kool-Aid is the same.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
wants to build a community based on the blockchain technology
So... in other words, a community where every single transaction is tracked and remembered forever?
Sounds more like a dystopia to me.
Ever heard of California City, California? That's the same idea, but in California. Lots are quite affordable, and also entirely plentiful. And you don't even have to live in Nevada. Guess what? Nobody wants to live in the desert unless there's some kind of natural feature there which makes it make sense.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...even if you disagree with him. He is putting his money where his mouth is and trying something new.
Yes he is a very wealthy man who can afford to squander a big chunk of his resources. There are very many people who could well afford to expend a small portion of their resources and try nothing.
There are easily ten of thousands of "serious" socialists who spin yarns about their beautiful ideas, ideas that a couple hundred of them could try to put into practice by pooling their resources and building a new kind of community on the embers of some rural town whose heyday is long past. But they do not try.
This man is trying.
Well, You know the rest.....
Caution: Contents under pressure
This comic is a dispatch from the future of this city.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
After all, that's how he made his money?
gee, what could possibly go wrong?
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Every attempt to built a Utopia turns out to be a Hell.
These for example :-
https://listverse.com/2016/05/...
In Atlas Shrugged (which I presume is the inspiration for this exercise), Midas Mulligan's valley (later known as Galt's Gulch) was located near Oured, Colorado. It had local hot springs for water, wheat farms and fruit tree orchards, and also a perpetual motion machine to make electricity and a hologram projector to keep it hidden from outsiders. I suppose solar power is available in the desert, but man cannot live by blockchain alone.
if it was based on cash - well you can't eat cash,
but it's based on blockchain - virtual cash - well you can't eat virtual cash either
fecking air heads - go out in the desert and fecking die.
(hmmm - sorry - that's not very nice)
Go well
I can see a WACO style ending to this.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Here's a short clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PFk9wO2BU0
https://twitter.com/dril/statu...
"me and a bunch of stupid assholes are going to start a community in the middle of the desert to either die or prove a very important point"
and also a perpetual motion machine to make electricity and a hologram projector to keep it hidden from outsiders.
Sounds a bit like Wakanda.
I am a Statistician. One false move and you are a Statistic
Been there. In and across. Carve out the lake Tahoe part of Nevada. The rest is a desert shit-hole fit only for a Trotsky-slut DemoRat bread + water barb-wire gulag. So much for paradise. EOF.
Soon to become much much poorer. Bright candle and all that.
Why people try to reinvent the wheel I'll never understand. What you are talking about is near impossible to pull off so to not build on the back of a successful project when it exists is beyond me.
I just remembered I saw that awful movie because of your comment.
Fuck you.
#DeleteFacebook
Not this shit again...a super-rich dude envisions his idea of Utopia and everything goes great...that is, until the humans show up.
And then it starts....petty greed, disputes, minor conflicts breeding simmering revenge, jealousy, vying for power, undue influence, bribery, power plays, pervy sexual urges, and a host of other human traits come into play, and before you know it someone's handing you a cup of Kool-Aid.
Yeah, this whole "come live in my Utopia compound" thing never seems to end well. For example: Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians, The Hale-Bopp nutters (Heaven's Gate), David Berg and the Children of God, Aum Shinrikyo, Scientology, etc etc.
(I know, it was actually "Flavor Aid" but you get my point.)
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
We who live in the US western desert or semi-desert can see this as a scam immediately.
Somehow, the water needed in that enormous development will magically appear in abundance. Sorry, no. Even Las Vegas has reformed itself and now uses a fraction of the water it used to, even with the silly casino fountains. This guy is a con man of the first order.
Blockchain more likely laundering.drug.money.chain
Cost of land per acre in Nevada, at the link you gave: $1,000.
Everybody knows it's impossible to build a utopia in a place like Nevada.
Try the veal.
I'll find my own way out.
If this is some sort of scam, or if he is an overly idealistic true believer.
Didn't the Bhagwan try something similar?
Is Mr. Berns going to start a Nuclear Power plant too?
"Wants to Build a Utopia " = " wants to build a community based on the blockchain technology"
????
Step 4: Profit!
Also:
Mr. Berns said his ambition was not ...... to get rich
Sure thing.... Mr. Burns.
Yeah those atlas shrugged movies were another level of bad.
We already have half a dozen communities built around database models. Over there is SQLtopia, where they worship dark gods like IBM and Oracle. Across the river is the communuty built up around Datalog, where cannibalism is already pretty rampant.
You should have paid attention to the trailers. That would have tipped you off that it was full of black people. People not bothered by this enjoyed it
I'm only a cryptocurrency thuosandaire because I spent most of my initial $50 early on. If I were a gambling man I could have put $1000 in and sold for several million by now. That isn't so much a strategy for creating wealth as it is a strategy for hoping you got lucky and didn't just piss away $1000 on a stupid idea. If you all remember BTC went up pretty quickly then fell hard before climbing back up, i sort of lost interest when my $50 became around $8, then bought some stuff when it climb back up.
(I made quite a bit in the housing market, seems far less risky to me. And I have a lot more control over the parameters)
I didn't care one way or the other that most actors were black, that was a given because the story was about Black Panther.
What pissed me off was the "magic tech sand" bullshit, which is similar to the last few versions of Iron Man's suit and the last Transformer movies.
#DeleteFacebook
This sounds like a neat idea in theory but in practice it's unlikely to work.
I can applaud the idea of a utopian society, except it's a thousand times easier to try and create one within our own society, well-integrated into the systems that are needed, than it is to completely DIY it from the ground up. The area in Nevada he's purchased is pretty miserable in any season. Hot and dry, very cold at night. The only advantage to living there is you don't need much deodorant because the environment is so hostile, not even bacteria do well.
What bothers me about this is the general mentality of wanting to separate oneself from society.. as if once you're away from all the influences you disagree with, you think you can create something better? In theory that sounds great, but in reality, you quickly find there's a very good reason society is the way it is, and one reason is because people don't work hard enough to make it better and instead would rather take their ball and go someplace else.
I think you have to pick one.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
But the Fallout we deserve...
Did you catch the keynote? They apparently have a Tupac-style hologram....