I know the fee seems excessive, but it's based on a cursory estimate of worst-case transaction fees.  Since I would have to refund on a per-address basis, it could end up being a lot of transactions.  Perhaps it could be less, something like 0.2% instead.  I haven't had a chance to make a more realistic estimate.


Yep.  I'm not too thrilled about dealing with shareholders, and I'm certainly not interested in dealing with regulators.  I can justify donations towards a common goal.  I'm not sure I can justify anything like GLBSE or the legal complications of shared ownership.  And I see no point in tracking profits and issuing dividends on a bunch of 5 BTC "investments".  If there are huge profits, those who contribute will be adequately compensated.  If not, oh well.  Don't send your life savings.

Besides, the point isn't for a dozen people to buy an island as an investment.  The point is for the entire Bitcoin community to buy an island because it's awesome.

Never heard of paymany?  Tx fee likely would be 0 or at worst 0.005 BTC per kb.

So, the reason I mentioned "a dozen people" and seasteading and skyscrapers earlier was exactly this.  I'd guess that most people would want that as well.  And a dozen people could do this on a 5 acre island.  And that's great.  But, a thousand people can't.

I'm kind of hoping that the number of Bitcoiners interested in this is closer to a thousand than a dozen.  Because, with a thousand people, we can eventually all have our own islands, or at least our own flats, and an extremely diverse economy.  But with only a dozen people, we can just have something more akin to a sleepy country club.

If, let's say we divide the island up right off-the-bat and parcel it out to a dozen people.  They each invest a bunch of time and resources into their little lot.  And then things slow down and eventually nothing changes.  It will be generations before our island could have a thousand people on it, let alone produce a seastead or a skyscraper.  And those dozen people would live perfectly boring lives, while the rest of the Bitcoin community gets nothing out of it.

But if, instead, we take the island as a blank slate, and say "what would you do with a little lot?" to thirty-thousand people, perhaps a thousand of them would want to live in a skyscraper on an island, rather than build their own house.  Perhaps they would bring with them an untold wealth of skills and resources.  Perhaps they would want to build seasteads for a living, and expand into the oceans.  Then, I'd say, we might have something worth doing.


Believe me, that would just be the beginning.  I have enough land already.  What I don't have enough of is lobster, coconuts and skyscrapers.

Continuing from the last post: I think the best-case scenario for this to succeed is for one or a few extremely trusted bitcoiners, ideally from the bitcoin-otc community and with high ratings, to propose a serious plan. The plan needs to account for the fact that someone has to take on the legal liability of owning the island, as well as the effort of managing it, and thus needs to be compensated in a way that is superproportional to their actual investment.

The plan needs to reconize that someone is going to legally own the island and needs to be entrusted with making the best decisions. Trying to have people "vote" on how the island will be used, is foolish.

Furthermore, it is completely infeasible to try to let all the investors actually use the island for some amout of time. If you want to actually live on the island, you need to actually bid on the island individually, or gather a smaller group of people. In other words, this crowdfunding approach is not a means for people to actually use the island themselves. Unless the island is put up for rent basically as-is, which (BTW) is probably the best way to try to bring in enough money to maintain the property and then eventually flip if the value goes up over time. Note that this scheme would probably allow bitcoiners to rent the island for weeks-long vacations pretty cheaply (albeit at a market rate), which is currently not possible. Anyway, I will leave all the details up to whoever wants to come up with a serious plan.

Also, although I think a new plan is needed, I hope benjamindees is heavily involved, because he deserves credit/reward for the effort he has put in so far, and is possibly the only person who is willing to physically go down their and work on this.

Addendum: While I was writing these posts, benjamindees has made another post where he focuses on things like building a skyscraper on the island. That is an utterly foolish dream that totally misses the point of a remote Carribean island get-away, which is what this is. Please, let's try to be realistic.

Another concern I had was whether a sufficiently very large amount of USD could be liquidated from bitcoins in a sufficiently short amount of time without causing a significant drop in the value of bitcoins in the process. (I mean, think about it, the bid walls I have seen on exchanges are not nearly that large.)

Fortunately, trusted users in #bitcoin-otc have confirmed that it's not a problem.

That's why we need someone who is very well trusted to run this. But yes, it may be best to put a maximum cap on donations, like $500,000. After all, at a certain point, buying the island would just be a dumb investment.

Anyway, if someone proposes a serious plan, I'm sure they can think through this issue much more thoroughly and explain their thinking.

I don't get the concern over repayment transaction fees, because as has been pointed out, you can use multiway transactions. (I am no expert on that, but that is my understanding.)

I highlighted my main points in bold, so you can scroll up and look at them again if you want. All the rest of what I said is supporting/explanatory information.


Well, that's just false, so you might as well get it out of your head that I don't like you. First, there is no reason to draw that inference from what I said; second, I'm new here and don't even know you; and third, I stated that it would be nice to see you given credit and/or rewarded if someone draws up a real plan that treats this as an investment instead of a personal donation to you. (However, your sour grapes are making me question that third thing.)


Your plan is a "central plan" anyway, because you will be in possesion of all donated bitcoins and/or the sole legal owner of the island. It's also not a very good plan.

Good idea for a Bitcoin resort, very preliminary and thus unrealistic plans for implementation.

There must be at least dozens of islands for sale in the Americas at sub $500.000 level. Ebay auction is not really the best way to acquire such property through a joined venture.

A succesful bitcoin resort would not need to be on an island, it is better to think about the purpose first and then decide on the location and required environment. Once a pilot resort is succesfully being built to some country, users on other continents (in the foreseeable future just Americas Europe with sufficient users?) would prefer to build their own.

A couple of years ago there was - maybe still is an aspiring traditional e-payment system, supported by some very wealthy people, that built "pavilions" on several continents and provided club services & access for travelling individuals. I joined it, and it was very inspiring, but I never visited any of their pavillions and considered the whole grandiose thing pretty delusional from a profit perspective. Unfortunately I can't even recall what that payment system was named .

Lots of comments but nobody seems to ask the big questions.  Will Nicaraguan women be dancing for bitcoin to entertain us?  And what do Nicaraguan women look like?