The Balaji Fund, backed by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and other wealthy tech players, aims to fund “Network States” free of overbearing regulations.

More efforts from tech bros to build Rapture.

Interesting quotes:

it had backing from tech heavyweights such as billionaire Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, and venture capitalist** Fred Wilson**, a Coinbase board member who sold his shares in the company for $1.8 billion after it went public in 2021.

“Bitcoin, if it wins, completely changes the world, because it changes the ability of centralized states to do what they’ve been doing,” Srinivisan said in a presentation delivered to a Bitcoin conference in Amsterdam in October.

The Bitcoin-based Network State will be based on “internet values” such as “open source” and “peer-to-peer,” Srinivasan has written.

An utopia run on Bitcoin? What could possibly go wrong?

    • sculd@beehaw.orgOP
      0·
      3 years ago

      Yea, Atlas Shrugged really presented a very naive and simplistic world view that cannot work in real life. The capitalists all fuck off to build a city? Who is going to build them? Right. The workers. The workers that they despise.

  • AnneBonny@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    Srinivasan has floated the car-free Culdesac private community in Tempe and the Peter Thiel-backed Próspera in Honduras as examples of currently-existing proto-Network States.

    “Suppose you found a new startup society like Culdesac on the basis of car-free living…which is an innovation in parallel transportation.

    Is “fuck cars” libertarian?

    • Banzai51@midwest.socialEnglish
      0·
      3 years ago

      Until a Libertarian decides he wants to drive a car. You can’t expect discipline from these assholes.

    • sculd@beehaw.orgOP
      0·
      3 years ago

      Good question. Since “libertarian” in practice always becomes some form of authoritarian state. They just jumped a few steps ahead.

      On the other hand though, car-free city sounds so nice.

    • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
      0·
      3 years ago

      Maybe in a twisted thought process: privatized public transport for the masses, and because the rich have no actual restrictions in reality, I’m sure they can drive a car if they want to.

    • interolivary@beehaw.org
      0·
      3 years ago

      The only libertarian I personally know is anti-LGBT+, just not as rabidly outspoken about it as a “regular” conservative. He’s the sort who’d be happy with gay people being murdered on the streets as long as he doesn’t have to do it himself

      • sculd@beehaw.orgOP
        0·
        3 years ago

        That is my observation as well. When it really comes to personal liberty they don’t really care. Remember that libertarian tech bro like Peter Thiel (who is gay btw) somehow thought the world is “too woke” and continues to fund conservative politicians taking away gay rights.

  • luciole (he/him)@beehaw.org
    0·
    3 years ago

    The basic idea is that the West has declined irrevocably, beginning with what Srinivisan calls the birth of the centralized state that disempowered wealthy industrialists with antitrust laws, securities regulation, central banking, and adversarial journalism. Now, the thinking goes, we’re on the backswing with wealthy individuals reclaiming their power over supposedly corrupt public institutions, and we have the internet and its currency—Bitcoin—to lead us out of the darkness.

    So the billionaire techbros feel powerless (wtf) and are offended by criticism (oof) so they want their own techbro dictatorship with no free press. Also please no peasant to support, only exploit. Got it.

    • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
      0·
      3 years ago

      Libertarians are mostly just neoliberals who are upset they’re not allowed to be more psycopathic.

      Their new utopia will tear itself apart with greed, drugs and sex abuse just like all the old ones.

    • thesmokingman@programming.dev
      0·
      3 years ago

      I pull the same quotes you bolded to rip into that. They’re about to rediscover things like pricing cartels, company script, and child labor. Either they all pool all of their money together and collaborate to take advantage of everything together or they fall apart as they get fucked by each other and start reinventing the same rules we’ve made over the last several centuries. I kinda feel like the latter is more likely given how much ego all these coffin dodgers have and how close pooling resources + working together for the common good is to nasty things like socialism.

  • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    3 years ago

    Of course “libertarian” here is code for “oligarchy”, because they know modern libertarians in the US are aggressively apathetic, will let them get away with anything, and thus form a perfect base to appeal to and dominate.

  • ulkesh@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    Libertarians (n., plural) - Sooo…. Conservatives.

    Perhaps they can take all the asshole Republicans (leaving the reasonable ones…I know, not many left) with them and we can be left with a society that doesn’t suck and is instead filled with leadership that may have opposing viewpoints, but are willing to compromise — like, you know, mature, scientific, educated adults would.

  • Ganbat@lemmyonline.comEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    Ya know what? I hope they do it. That many rich assholes with more ambition than brains in one place? It’ll burn from the inside.

    • explodicle@local106.comEnglish
      0·
      3 years ago

      But part of it is decentralized! Can’t we just slap a blockchain on anything and declare the whole thing immune to coercion? /s

  • ancap shark@lemmy.today
    0·
    3 years ago

    As a libertarian, I don’t trust these billionaires a single bit to do it.

    They are not libertarians, they don’t care about the free market, small local business, regulatory and certification companies, or what else. They are very happy to lobby the government to enforce any anticompetitive practices that will benefit them in the long run. They probably just want a new way to evade taxes, they don’t give two fucks about libertarianism.

    Sadly, tech bros won’t see through it and will hype anything these clowns do.