The Cursed Maiden Voyage of the MS Satoshi

Speaker 1: This one is set on a boat.

Speaker 2: Wait. Last episode, we were in space, and this time, we're on a boat?

Speaker 1: This time, we're on a boat. I like that.

Speaker 3: Okay. I am currently in International Waters, the location of my future home. International waters where there are no no laws other than the law of the sea. Alright. Time to drop anchor.

Speaker 1: The 245 meter long cruise ship has gone by many different names. When it was first delivered to Princess Cruises in 1991 from the Italian shipyard where it was built, it was the Regal Princess. In 2007, it was refurbished and renamed Pacific Dawn. The plan had been to retire the ship from that company's fleet in 2020 and sell it off to another cruise company to live out its days as the Amy Johnson. Something else happened in 2020 and resulted in a unexpected new owner with a unexpected new name. Do you want to know what was being sold at bargain basement prices in October 2020? Cruise ships. When it was built in 1991, the Pacific Dawn cost 280,000,000 US dollars to manufacture. Thirty years later, the market rates say it should have been selling for about a 100,000,000. In October 2020, it sold for 9 and a half. Woah. Deal. It's a pretty good deal, and someone bought it. A team of three people to be specific. Its new name, the m s Satoshi. Oh, nice.

Speaker 2: It's like a like a mobile crypto grift.

Speaker 1: Dude, you have no idea. For anyone that doesn't know, Satoshi refers to Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous author of the Bitcoin white paper. They named the boat after the creator of crypto. This whole thing is set on a boat, but it's really about two big ideas. The first obviously is crypto, and more broadly the idea of decentralization in cryptography based tech, replacing old tech. Cryptocurrency did it for money, so the wisdom went, what else can you do it for? And the other big idea is the idea of seasteading. The dream of, like, shuffling off the shackles of society and building a new home or nation, homesteading, but out at sea. Seasteading. The forging of new nations not on land, but on the ocean. You've got crypto people trying to start new nations where they can be free to do whatever weird crypto stuff they want, and since land is broadly all being used up, they're gonna go do it on the ocean. In this weird moment, right around 2020, when those two ideas, a new nation at sea and crypto will solve everything, collecting.

Speaker 4: To all those out there who wanna control people's lives through force,

Speaker 3: Here's my big finger to you. You know where you can stick this.

Speaker 1: And a handful of people attempting to start a new crypto centric libertarian nation at sea, off the coast of Panama on a retired cruise ship. So we're gonna discuss the maiden voyage of the MS Satoshi, here on Hacked.

Speaker 2: Man, I I was really hoping it was like a mobile crypto grift, and it, like, floated around the sea, like, trying to sell, like, physical Bitcoins to people.

Speaker 1: Physical Bitcoins. Like, they're minting them down in the hull.

Speaker 2: Exactly. Exactly. They're just like one of those penny pressing machines that you get at, like, Landmarks.

Speaker 1: Sure. Like a like a fair or a pier or something, and you put a penny into it and it smears it out.

Speaker 2: I love that. Exactly. Stamps it into a Bitcoin.

Speaker 1: For sure.

Speaker 2: Like, here you go. $20,000. Wasn't somebody doing that in, like, Central Park in New York? They were, like, going around selling actual physical Bitcoins, being like, can't miss out on this opportunity. Buy a Bitcoin.

Speaker 1: That's and, like, hyphenate Bitcoin or just spell it differently so it's legally distinct. So when people get angry that they don't own a Bitcoin, you're like, well, you didn't buy a Bitcoin. You bought a Bitcoin.

Speaker 2: See, but nobody knows. Nobody owns Bitcoin. Who's gonna sue you? It's unregulated. You can do whatever you want.

Speaker 1: It's on the blockchain, and it's it's, like, literally, like, a a nice chain you wear around your neck, and that we told you it was on the blockchain. Exactly. Buyer beware. Buyer beware. So this is an interesting story. It's about tech and people trying to hack something together, and it's kind of a story, I think, also about hubris, and the idea that we know a lot about crypto. We must be able to hack together a whole new nation.

Speaker 2: Does it have decentralized control and voting?

Speaker 1: Importantly well, you'd think. Right? You'd think that a sort of crypto anarcho cap you'd think that, like, a crypto nation would be very decentralized in its structure, and you would be wrong. I do not broadly agree with the politics that underpin the MS Satoshi. I don't think I'd wanna live in the society that they're trying to create. I think there's, like, foundational problems with the thinking behind projects like this that is irreconcilable with their long term success. It's not for me. But I do love a big crazy swing, and the trouble with most big crazy swings in how we organize society is they tend to be done to people. A lot of people end up having an idea for a new system, tested on them, and when it doesn't work, the people who cooked it up aren't often the ones that have to live with the repercussions. So if I'm being generous about this very weird idea, some folks saying we're gonna go over here and try and do this on our own, and if it fails, we'll have only ourselves to answer to, that is about the best way I can think of to do a thing I don't think you should do. So

Speaker 2: credit where it's due. So tell me about the MS Satoshi. Tell me about why we didn't get an invite to go go aboard. Sounds like a great time.

Speaker 1: I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during its, like, inaugural voyage. I think it would have been really, really interesting. I like being on in the ocean, and I love crazy schemes. So

Speaker 2: And I love beautiful, you know, warm climates, and, like, I feel like being a fly on the wall of the FTX collapse would have been awesome to be there for too.

Speaker 1: We gotta start doing more boots on the ground reporting. But we only hear about these stories after they happen. We need

Speaker 2: to make these things into docudramas and relive them. Go spend a year in in The Caribbean making a film about FTX. That'd be amazing.

Speaker 1: Have you ever heard of seasteading, Scott?

Speaker 2: I have. You have? Have.

Speaker 1: What have you heard about it?

Speaker 2: Well, probably in the current in the current sense, no. But there was, there was an old data center made on a old drilling rig Mhmm. Out at sea. Yeah. This is an old story, and it was like, they tried to make, like, a data island, and it was kind of its own Yeah. World. And they made it into a server farm, and it had its own data. And I can't remember anything else about it, but I remember that, and I assume that is as close to seasteading as anything I've ever thought about. So that's what I know about seasteading.

Speaker 1: I remember that too. Okay. World's most notorious micronation has the secret to protecting your data from the NSA Sealand. Sealand. I hadn't I read so much about this story, and I've totally forgotten about this.

Speaker 2: This is this is all I know about. If this is not seasteading, then I know nothing about seasteading, but I feel like this is the whenever I think about something like seasteading, this is what jumps to mind for me. No. This is bang on. Data havening in the middle of the ocean.

Speaker 1: Yeah. With, like, a tax haven, like, layer smeared on top. Totally.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Because they're their own nation states, so they get to define taxes and laws. Of course.

Speaker 1: Of course. Well, that's a big part of it as we're gonna discuss, I think, right now. Here is a clip of Patry Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman, a much higher profile, libertarian icon. Patry is speaking at a twenty ten event, and he's painting, a picture of his vision of the future, and that future is seasteading.

Speaker 5: So let's take a look. Let's take stock of our societal environment today. We have incredible potential as new technologies open up new possibilities. We could have open source societies drawn from a Wikipedia of rules and social structures. We could organize society as a direct democracy using social networks or we could choose to subscribe to a shiny integrated citizen experience that we renew annually. But our societal environment blocks this potential. Let's consider the evolution of today's dominant species of society that we live in, representative democracy. That evolution took a bloody revolution and an open frontier where the new society could grow up far away from its parents who were not so supportive. But we've run out of frontier. All land is claimed and our revolutions have become increasingly superficial. We're changing individual leaders. We're no longer creating new societies. From a social sense, it's like we're back in the age of the dinosaurs. The world is full of these big blundering country creatures and there's no space, there's no place for new evolutionary leaps to better ways for us to live together. In some ways, the stability is wonderful. These are my children and it's wonderful that they can grow up safe from violence, enjoying new technologies, but we could offer them so much more and I want to. I don't trust eighteenth century societal DNA to handle the problems of the twenty first century. But what can we do? Well, let's learn from this journey and return to where we began, the oceans.

Speaker 2: The nephew of Milton Friedman?

Speaker 1: The grandson of Milton grandson. Patry Friedman. You got it.

Speaker 2: Patry. And we were criticizing democracy as being a something that has lasted hundreds of years as maybe the most adaptable form of democracy that tolerates human behavior. This may be the reason why it's lasted a few hundred years. Last time I checked, the other forms of democracy have a tendency to fail, or other forms of government have a tendency to fail pretty quick.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. They sure do. Listen. I don't wanna put words in Patri's mouth. I don't know if he's criticizing democracy broadly or the specific, structure. There's many ways to do a democracy. You'd have to ask him.

Speaker 2: That's true.

Speaker 1: But he's certainly, I think it's fair to say, talking a pretty big game.

Speaker 2: I read read his read his great grandfather's book, or one of them, anyway. Totally.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Patrick cofounded the Seasteading Institute in 2008 with a half 1,000,000 in seed funding from the last name in our super famous libertarian rich guy bingo card, Peter Thiel.

Speaker 2: Nice.

Speaker 5: So four years ago, I started the Seasteading Institute with venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who took a bet on our mission to open the oceans for human habitation and new societies.

Speaker 1: They imagined that within five years, there would be a sea steading, like, kind of experiments popping up all around the world, and within a decade, there would be permanent communities at sea. He imagined our future as one in which millions would live in these different types of floating cities. If you've ever played the game BioShock, it in no way evokes that

Speaker 2: at all. I'm sure. I was just sitting here being like, wow. I feel like I've lived this life in a digital sense before.

Speaker 1: No. There's no parallels whatsoever. Would you kindly move on?

Speaker 2: K. Wait. Wait. Wait. Digress quick digression here. If we're just gonna take sci fi themes from video games

Speaker 1: Oh god.

Speaker 2: And apply them to raising seed capital like Halo. Halo, great game. We could build a halo in the sky. Yeah. Live on there. Like, they pretty much figured it all out. So we just need to

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 2: Raise some money and create a society living in a spinning halo in the sky.

Speaker 1: I would I'd be more likely to live in the giant sky spinning halo. Well, depends on who's running it. It it remind it's the, you know that there's, like, that tweet and it goes sci fi author. In my book, I invented the torment nexus as a cautionary tale. Tech company. At long last, we have created the torment nexus from the classic sci fi novel, Don't Create the Torment Nexus. I reminded of that tweet a lot throughout this story. Let's discuss our three main characters, Grant Romunt, Ruddiger Koch, and Chad L. Wartowski. Let's start with Grant. The Canadian son of a hairdresser, Romunt launched a early around the same time, called Scissor Boy. That show found a nice audience, and that led him to start a software project for hairdressers called Schedulebox, which was like reception software for hair salons. That did well enough that he was able to basically retire back to Canada in 2016 to a life on the water kayaking on Lake Ontario. Lovely. He discovered that the water was to his liking. One day, on a flight, Grant is sitting next to a guy wearing a t shirt. It says, stop arguing, start seasteading. The shirt belonged to a guy named Joe Quirk, who had co founded the Seasteading Institute with Friedman. And as they flew, they discussed this idea. At this point, seasteading had been pretty unsuccessful. There'd been loose ideas for projects off the coast of California, a swing at a series of these, like, floating structures in French Polynesia, when the people of French Polynesia saw the plan and said, no, and the government pulled out. But Ramon hears the idea, sees this kind of vision of new nations blooming at sea, and says, I kinda wanna try and take a crack at this. Quirk introduces Grant Roma to the other two big characters, an American, kind of crypto tech libertarian type dude named Al Watowsky, and a German engineer who made a ton of money in Bitcoin named Coke. They all got together. They met up. They start to talk about sea steading, and they talk about crypto and tech, and they clearly kick it off. And they say, you know what? Let's do it. Let's start a company, and let's try and make this happen. So they incorporate as ocean builders.

Speaker 2: Such an interesting concept because it's like everything I know about building is that water is like the the antithesis and the the archenemy of any kind of construction. Like, water destroys all. A 100%. So it just seems like such an insane Yeah. Desire to build functional, long lasting spaces. Like, look at even boats. Like, they need to like, owning a boat is, like, one of the most insane things you can do financially because it just requires perpetual maintenance because Oh, for sure. It's pretty much dying the entire time it's in the water. You know? It's like it's like water is bad for everything that you use in construction pretty much. Completely. Concrete, steel, wood, pressure of water and velocity and and power of waves. Like, it just seems Yeah. Seems like building a halo in space. Like, maybe that's

Speaker 1: Elon. Much easier.

Speaker 2: Like, you know, we got we got Peter Thiel building SeaWorlds, and maybe Elon's gonna go halo.

Speaker 1: I hate this. Oh, man. I wanna like these ideas. They're just it's just the exaction is so wanting. No. I completely agree. I, for some dumb reason, sync time. I, like, I put on YouTube videos in the background, when I'm, like, putz around the house of, like, just people like, I like construction YouTube. I don't know why. Smart. I find, like, building structures from, like, dirt up to to a finished thing. I'm like, I find this interesting. I wanna know how this is done. And, like, half of that shit is just waterproofing. It's just water membrane, a layer of water it's so many water membranes. The water is a really antagonistic place to try and build a permanent shelter for a human being. It's hard enough to do on land.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah. And like a water again, even if you do build on land, water is still the archenemy of your building. Yes. Like like, if you have a subtle leak inside of your house that you don't know about, it's like with within a short period of time, your home is garbage. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, it's such an amazing it's such a it's such an amazing, like, velocity of destruction for something so weak.

Speaker 1: Oh, totally.

Speaker 2: Like, look at the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is like what a water drip turns into over the course of a long enough timeline. Completely. And boats

Speaker 1: are our, like, best swing over, like, hundreds of thousands of years of just trying to, like, conquer the water. Boats are our best like attempt at it. Boats aren't really where they started. A big cruise ship nation was not their first collaboration or idea. The three of these guys, they put their own cash on the line, and they come up with this idea, kind of like their first prototype of a seastead, which is a big white eight sided floating platform anchored 12 nautical miles off the Thai coast.

Speaker 3: It's a big cylinder in the middle of the ocean that's kinda hard to miss.

Speaker 2: Be because this is an audio based format, I'm just gonna describe what I'm looking at.

Speaker 1: What are we looking at here, Scott?

Speaker 2: Something shockingly smaller than I was expecting to see. Like, this thing is maybe a 150 square feet. It appears to be you say it was hexagonal?

Speaker 1: Eight sided, so octagonal, I believe.

Speaker 2: Octagonal octagonal, probably aluminum c structure standing on a single support beam with a tiny little sundeck above with a few hammocks. Like, it looks That's pretty accurate. Like the world's worst Airbnb. There doesn't appear to be any windows Nope. In the actual side. I just need to keep going.

Speaker 1: No. No. You you really really drive home how unpleasant a place this looks to live for, say, a couple months.

Speaker 2: Yeah. This looks this looks this looks like a prison where you put, like, a supervillain, and it's like you know? Like, it's something from, like, a sci fi movie, and it's, like, Magneto's in

Speaker 1: the city. Sure. You gotta put him in the middle of the ocean where he'll kill people

Speaker 2: with metal. Exactly.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 1: Well, if it is a prison where you keep a supervillain, El Wortowski and his girlfriend, Nadia Summer Girl, put their money where their mouth is, and they move into this structure in early twenty eighteen.

Speaker 2: Woah. And and so wait. This this person is also wealthy. Correct? And they've chosen to do this even though they have the means to live other other other places.

Speaker 1: I think when you get it in your head that you need to forge a new nation because no one else has figured it out yet, but you probably will for some reason, yeah, it seems, it it it'll push people to do some pretty wild, stuff.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Love the passion. Love the passion.

Speaker 1: A big swing. At first, everything was pretty chill. As chill as living on a big empty drilling platform in the middle of the ocean goes, it was it was going okay Until the Thai government started to really dig into the project and were really not excited by the implications of a so called sovereign nation living in the territorial waters of their very sovereign nation. They warn El Wartowski that this could lead to serious consequences, which would include life in prison or execution. When the Thai navy sent out three ships to, you know, take apart the floating nation home, El Wartowski didn't wanna find out which of those it was gonna be, and they cook it out of there.

Speaker 2: So they so they build this thing in the middle of the ocean. They get tossed up because they've put their sovereign nation into controlled waters of a different sovereign nation

Speaker 1: Is my understanding. Which seems like Yeah.

Speaker 2: Just bad planning. They they bolt before the Thai military missiles this thing out of the out of the ocean, which, you know, fair enough.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. I would I

Speaker 2: also would bolt. There is no I will I will note that given how small this is, there is no helipad. It looks like they had a couple of, like, pontoon dinghy boats, so that was probably their escape. Their grand escape was I I guess the the benefit of it being, like, you know, a 106 square feet is that they probably didn't have enough. They didn't have a lot with them, so they

Speaker 1: probably managed to get

Speaker 2: out of there. I wonder what the Internet was like there. Imagine pretty mediocre.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Imagine not great. I mean, they were vlogging, so I I think they had some kind of coverage.

Speaker 2: Satellites.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Imagine they had some form of satellites. Too far away, I think, for cellular band, but but, so they bolt out of this. They run away, and then they create a boat nation.

Speaker 1: It doesn't slow them down. They they run, but it doesn't slow them down. In 2019, Ramon, Kokona, Wartowski decide we're gonna relocate this company a little somewhere a little friendlier, and they move it to Panama where they felt they had found a government that was willing to support their latest brainchild after the c platform, something called Seapod. Picture like a single unit floating home hoisted about 10 feet above the sea by, like, a central pillar with a tripod style base submerged down in the ocean. If you give it a Google, you'll see the idea. Oh,

Speaker 2: wow. Very sci fi looking.

Speaker 1: Very sci fi looking. The guy behind these very sci fi looking dwellings was a Dutch guy named Koen Oelthius, kind of calls himself an aquatect, an architect who's all about designing stuff for life on the water. If you look at these sea pod renderings you're looking at right now, they've got kind of like, an apple y futurism type thing going on, almost like a big, like, bike helmet popping out of the ocean.

Speaker 2: They're they're quite impressive looking.

Speaker 1: They're pretty cool looking. Like, the renders are very neat.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Like, I could see this odd lady. Like, we're talking about Airbnb potential. Like, this has strong Airbnb potential. They add the other one, the previous one in Thai waters, not so much. But these, I would I would I would cop a couple nights and and boat out here and stay here just for the, like, interest of it.

Speaker 1: Oh, completely. I I get the appeal of this design. I think, Oltheus is by I don't know much about aqua texture. They look pretty cool. They set up a new factory in Linton Bay, a marina in Panama's Northern Coast, and they assemble a crew of about 30 engineers and mechanics, and they start construction of these Seapod prototypes in early twenty twenty. But, as we talked about, water and construction, challenging. It is slow making these things. There is no tested supply chains for aquetecture, there's no best practices, it is exceptionally difficult and expensive by everything I was able to read about it. So, they're working on these pods, and it's slow, and they're worried about being able to scale their capacity in a reasonable timeline, But there'd always been this other idea.

Speaker 5: But there's more. We've talked about the nature of the ocean today. It's it's a unique place. It's a dynamic medium that mixes things, that allows movement, and that makes it perfect for societal evolution. Large ships are literally as big as skyscrapers, yet they move all the all the time with ease, which means that ocean cities can be modular. They can constantly evolve by trading buildings, by splitting, and by combining in a way that's impossible on land. Basically, by having sex.

Speaker 1: This kind of adjacent idea to the sea pods that a fast, easy way to scale one of these island pod communities could be to sort of just tack on a cruise ship. This actually makes a lot of sense to me. You've got the fixed floating pod homes and upholds a giant ship, and the benefit is that you can move the ship, maybe the ship comes and goes, it's a lifeline to land, a bunch of housing and amenities all in one, it's kind of like a town square of an imagined seastead. But you get the sense they're struggling to make the financials of the pods make sense, let alone go buy a cruise ship until some stuff happens to the price of cruise ships.

Speaker 2: Sure. 9,000,000.

Speaker 1: 9 and a half million.

Speaker 2: Way better than 99,000,000.

Speaker 1: By fall twenty twenty, that math had changed. The travel industry had taken a pretty big hit. Cruise lines are going under. Empty vessels are piling up and ports are heading off to the scrap yard, and that's when it dawns on the ocean builders trio, now might be the time to beg a bargain. In October 2020, Ramon Koka Wartowski snagged the former P and O cruise ship, the Pacific Dawn, for, as you said, 9 and a half million dollars, pre pandemic, much more. They give Oltheus the go ahead to start designing, kinda whip up some plans for a version of their nation where the ship plays a starring role in this floating community surrounded by clusters and communities of seapods. Altheus visualized the Satoshi, which they had named it, linking up to man made floating platforms for farming, production, green spaces, versus two big arching circular tunnels running on the water. Which means that from a bird's eye view, the entire community, a ship with these two big sort of arches coming out of it, would resemble a shape. The letter b as in the Bitcoin b symbol.

Speaker 2: Of course.

Speaker 1: Of course. The Panamanian government was seemingly all in for this project. The Ministry of Tourism was banking on the new community being a big tourist draw, part of their sustainable tourism master plan. They did not seem bothered about the idea of a bunch of crypto rich folks setting off, like, setting up an offshore tax free community. The new company named to operate and sell units in this big cruise ship nation boat thing, Viva Vivas, adapted from the Latin phrase, vive ut vivas, meaning live so that you may live.

Speaker 2: I've just been obsessively staring at this ocean builders website looking at these things.

Speaker 1: Isn't it fascinating? Like, it it is it's it's a genuinely interesting, like, scheme to look at.

Speaker 2: I can't help but feel like, if they could actually build these things for reasonable money, they would make very sold out Airbnbs. Like, if you could and, like, pay taxes, like, you don't need to make a new nation state

Speaker 1: on the water. But Exactly.

Speaker 2: You just drop a bunch of these in, like, cool places.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: Like, who who wouldn't wanna stay in one of these? Like, some of these have, like, like, the ones that have, like, the the sea deck down on the water and, like, these beautiful big covered decks, and, like, they're really, like, I don't they just seem like the coolest hotel that doesn't exist yet.

Speaker 1: Floating homes have existed forever. There's situations where they make 100% sense. The idea in 2023 of having very, very fancy versions of that, there would be a huge audience for that. Absolutely. Tacking on a, like, crypto tax free the all of that stuff, that is a separate idea, and it is the intersection of these two ideas, I think, where trouble emerges.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Like, I feel like as of the real proof of concept for this, I I I just in my heart of hearts believes is like an eco hotel on the water. And it's like I feel like that's a that's an easy win. You put 10 or 12 of these things, some decks, maybe like a supporting structure that has, like, a restaurant in it. You, like, boat up and stay there. It just seems like something everybody would wanna do for, like, two or three nights just to, like, go. And it's kinda like the in, like, French Polynesia, you know, the the glass ford bungalows over the water. Sure. Like, it kinda has that that vibe except for, like, a Apple, iPod kinda Sure. Modernist minimal vibe. Just seems like seems like it's a lost opportunity not just to go full Airbnb on this. You know?

Speaker 1: I honestly think that's probably where this is gonna end up. Yeah. Like, this makes sense for hospitality. It doesn't I don't know that I think it makes total sense for forging a new nation. But, like, if this was on booking.com while I was scrolling around and it was in my price point, I would totally stay in one of these. It's neat. Yeah.

Speaker 2: It's cool. Exactly. Like Exactly.

Speaker 1: I enjoy a Reddit ask me anything. I don't know about you, Scott.

Speaker 2: I live for a for a ask me anything.

Speaker 1: El Wortowski decides that is the platform to unveil his grand scheme. He He announces on Reddit, so I'm buying a cruise ship and naming it MS Satoshi, ask me anything. And naturally, that gets a lot of response. Some people, really, really stoked. Some people, kinda trying to get jobs on the boat. Others were skeptical. A lot of people evoking things like Fyre Festival. But generally speaking, at first, there were a lot of seemingly serious inquiries trying to understand the practicalities of what life on board this cruise ship would be like. Where is the power coming from? Gas, Internet, food, water, toiletries? What taxes will she be subject to? And Al Watowsky, to his credit, took on each question. The ship would start off with generator power before quickly transitioning to solar energy. High speed land based Internet would be provided with utility costs initially be included in the fees, but eventually being metered after subsequent system upgrades. And the priorities behind that were clear. Quote, you don't want to have to pay for someone else's mining rig in your cabin. Hinting at the fact that a lot of people are gonna be mining crypto on this thing. On the matter of taxes, he made it clear that any income from ventures outside of Panama wouldn't be subject to any taxation. That's a big part of the draw for this thing. Mhmm. However, as the Reddit AMA goes on, certain practical challenges start to emerge. And you start to see the trouble with forming a libertarian community in a cruise ship. There are no taxes, but you can't have a microwave. Cooking facilities have to be combined to the restaurant due to safety regulations, banning microwaves and personal cabins, but maybe you can have a mini fridge. So he kinda tries to spin these inconveniences positively, mentioning restaurant discounts and the potential of tenants renting parts of the kitchen. Quote, we want entrepreneurs to come up with solutions and try them out. This is your place to try new things, end quote, was kind of his crack at reframing these limitations as an opportunity for innovation. To which one Redditor replied, no microwave but mining rigs. Incoherent scam.

Speaker 2: So it starts to kinda fall apart when it comes down to the the the fact that humans need to reside here, not just mining rigs?

Speaker 1: A little bit. Specifically, when you're kinda selling it as this no tax, no regulation, we're gonna do a crypto community type thing. Turns out there's a lot of regulations and rules.

Speaker 2: We're lawless, but you can't put a microwave in your cabin because that's against the law.

Speaker 1: And there's, like, a 14 page document about how pets work. The marketing campaign for the Sudoshi kicks into high gear, and the plan was to auction off its 777 cabins between November fifth and twenty eighth, while the ship made its way across the Atlantic towards its final home in Panama. This Atlantic journey to Panama is very important for the future of the MS Satoshi. Viva Vivas, which has kind of now become the online sales platform, listed a variety of different options. You could get windowless cabins for $570 a month, ocean view ones for 630, and a and a cabin with a balcony for 720, which I will say is pretty cheap as cruise ships go.

Speaker 2: I was gonna say it's just cheap? Yeah. It's pretty cheap. $700 is, like like, find me an find me another major center that has rent that cheap.

Speaker 1: Just find me a cruise ship

Speaker 2: at one bedroom with a balcony.

Speaker 1: I dug around, and that's, like, typically double that at minimum. Yep.

Speaker 2: Obviously, there's no I've never been on a cruise to state that, but I feel like they're probably in that $5,600 a night range for something nice.

Speaker 1: They're they're not I don't think they're that expensive. I'm sure you could pay that if you wanted to, but I think you can get into it for less than that, but a lot more than this. And, I mean, they they bought it for $9,000,000. It's the middle of the pandemic. It's, you know, it's not a good time to be in the cruise business even if it's, like, a special special fancy anarcho capitalist cruise. It's still cruise during the middle of the pandemic.

Speaker 2: Fair. Fair. Fair.

Speaker 1: Oceanbuilders held a series of video conference calls for prospective buyers. Hundreds of people show up, and Ramunt does all the talking. The whole thing is gonna run on crypto. They were partnering with a platform called coinpayments.net, allowing them to accept various cryptocurrencies throughout the ship for payment, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero. A mathematically inclined person could go crunch the impact on the recent price fluctuations would have had on their investment had all of the profit and all of the money existing on the ship come in the form of Bitcoin post October 2020. I I think they'd be down. The frequently asked questions page concluded with a somewhat surprising question about pet friendly cabins, inadvertently highlighting the challenges of balancing, the individual liberties that are so important to this project with the close quarters of, you know, living on a boat. The response directed a user to a separate document detailing 14 conditions for pet ownership, including a weight limit of 20 pounds, a ban on persistent loud noises, and fines for pet waste thrown overboard. We will forge a new nation at sea, but please don't throw dog shit in it. The grand opening. On November 29, El Wertowski updates the Viva Viva's website saying, we're kicking this thing off January 2021. They had not, importantly, sold enough units at the time of this announcement for this to be economically viable. They were banking on selling them before they get to Panama. Despite this, like, concrete upcoming launch, the uncertainty was too much for a lot of potential buyers. As some folks online saw it, it takes a really particular breed of person to uproot their lives and move onto a deserted cruise ship in Central America with limited information and an unclear future governance model. If this very passionate but niche audience wasn't really biting on the idea at the speed they thought it was gonna, it begged the question, who would and when? Because if it doesn't happen by the time they arrive in Panama, they've got a bit of a problem on their hands. If we go back to the boat, over the three decades of voyaging around on the seas, the Satoshi, formerly the Pacific Dawn, had experienced almost every aspect of life on the ocean, and yet the prospect of being a permanent home to 2,000 cryptocurrency enthusiasts was very new for this boat. Ocean builders had hired Columbia Cruise Services to handle the ship's operations and maintain a minimum crew of about 40 people. Captain Peter Harris, a veteran British cruise captain, was appointed to helm the ship. So he boards the satoshi and he meets Koch, and Captain Harris realizes pretty quickly the magnitude of what they're trying to do, and he kinda describes it as that Koch, though admirable in his ambition and a seemingly kind of he's a respectable guy in person, he didn't seem to have a lot of understanding about the shipping industry and seemed to have an aversion to learning the rules. He kind of viewed the ship as a bit more of a personal yacht than a commercial vessel. The ship needed certificates of seaworthiness, which had expired the day the sail was completed. In an oversight by Ocean Builders, this was not checked before finalizing the deal, which led to the ship being dry docked in Gibraltar for necessary repairs before it could embark on that Atlanta crossing. The journey finally begins, December 3, not long before this thing is supposed to launch. For Harris, it's a weird experience. Sailing a boat like this, this far with only 40 crew members on board instead of the typical 2,000 passengers. The ship had a stockpile of 5,000 bottles of wine and 2,000 bottles of hard liquor left from its previous life, and Harris goes to Coke and says, hey. Can the can the crew drink? Do we charge them? How does that work? And Coke, to his credit, says, no. My crew drinks free. The only restriction was a three drink limit per day to ensure that they had a functioning, conscious crew.

Speaker 2: A function functioning crew?

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Speaker 2: Cliff Hanger. I'm gonna assume You're gonna assume. I'm gonna assume gets repossessed or impounded somehow.

Speaker 1: That's a pretty good guess. That's a pretty good

Speaker 2: guess. Massive massive lawsuits ensue in real sovereign states where maybe offers were made and things were purchased, and that's it. That's that's what I'm gonna assume. Sure.

Speaker 1: Sure. To their credit, it doesn't quite go there. It it doesn't quite get that bad, but it is ironic that this sort of anti regulatory project is ultimately thwarted by regulation. Throughout the voyage, some concerns start to grow. According to Captain Harris, Al Watowsky was under the impression that he could convince the Panamanian authorities to permit the ship to permanently anchor within its jurisdiction and be reclassified as a residential structure instead of a ship. This was how he planned to evade some of the very stringent maritime regulations that would otherwise govern its operation. However, Panama insisted that the ship maintain its maritime status even while anchored off their coast, which starts to raise all these other issues. Practical stuff like wastewater discharge. Despite having a very good waste management system, the ship wasn't allowed to discharge treated water into Panama's waters, meaning that they would have to basically do poop runs into international water all of the time to empty their tanks, which for a permanent kind of housing type thing, not great. Insurance, another huge hurdle. No insurer is willing to provide cover for a floating crypto community thing. Ramon's tasked with that. He explores multiple insurance brokers and providers and just starts to realize that it's there's a lot of regulation in the cruise ship industry for a reason. Mhmm. And it's a pretty bad time to realize that.

Speaker 2: Like democracy, two hundred and fifty years has proven that it's one of those things that lasts over two hundred years of of of of shipping about, three hundred years, four, five hundred years of shipping about the world. Regulations get created for a reason. Who knew?

Speaker 1: Who knew? That's always the thing about these projects is that when you start from we're gonna strip away all this stuff, and that'll fix the problem, it's always shocking how quickly they end up recreating the stuff they had to get rid of.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Just like regulation on the crypto business. Nudge. Nudge.

Speaker 1: So they could have engaged a top notch marine legal team to navigate the loopholes if they'd had more time. But by mid December, the ship is in the middle of the ocean on its way to Panama. The maintenance of the ship, even when it was parked, necessitated a constant crew presence, which meant that this whole thing was costing a ton of money every single day. The sheer size of the boat meant that even when it was parked, it cost like a million bucks a month roughly just to just to have it, which is to say nothing of while it was operating going across the ocean. Fuel, another immense cost. You got 12 k a day. No one in it. It just cost that much to move this thing. Koch's attempt at enhancing fuel efficiency, again, as a non boat engineer, was to propose the installation of a smaller, more efficient engine, which was practically impossible and arguably unsafe because you're cutting a hole large enough into the hull below the water level to remove an engine and put another one in, which radically raises the prospect of, like, sinking the entire thing. Captain Harris frequently found himself having to counsel against this idea. So they're approaching Panama. They're seemingly kind of panicking, they aren't selling the units, it's unclear where they're gonna keep it long term, they're bleeding money. They can't afford to keep it anchored and unoccupied for an indefinite period of time while wrestling with this insurance issue. They had insurance to sail the ship, but their dream wasn't to run a travel company. Their dream was to operate a floating community of freedom loving nerds arranged symbolically in the shape of the Bitcoin b. And there just might not be a good way to pay for it.

Speaker 2: Just the collapse the collapse of dreams.

Speaker 1: The collapse of dreams. Before their dream could set sail, Ramon, Koch, and Owartowsky realized it's probably over.

Speaker 2: Not set sail, anchor, and and never move again.

Speaker 1: Totally. Yeah. Before the dream could permanently park inside of Panama's waters, but far enough out that they could ship out poop, the dream died. They unfortunately figured out that this dream was done mid journey across the Atlantic. The Satoshi was too far into its 5,500 nautical mile voyage to turn back. So left with no choice, the ocean builders decides to sell the ship. The trouble was that all of this, this whole story, this has happened in like a few months. So the pandemic that helped them get that boat real good and cheap, still in full swing. So finding a buyer interested in anything other than dismantling the ship for scrap, really, really tough. And continuing to own it was costing them millions a month. Consequently, December 18, while still at sea, they announced the sale of the Satoshi to a scrap yard in Along India. The Satoshi is once more facing disassembly. Which is sad, I've grown emotionally attached to this boat. Mhmm. The following day, Owartowsky publicly declares the end of the satoshi's journey on the Viva Viva's website. He laments its failure. Ramuntz, in the meantime, informs potential customers of the ship's fate via email, assuring them they're gonna get their money back to his credit. The Satoshi finally reaches Balboa, Panama on December 22, anchoring off the coast of it on Christmas Eve, and Ramunt joins Koch and the crew on board while El Wartowski opted to stay in Panama City. In the midst of this failed venture, Ramunt kind of remembers that he's the part owner of an enormous cruise ship. And deciding to make the best of the situation, he decides to celebrate Christmas aboard the satoshi with the crew. And with the literal master key in hand, he just starts exploring the boat, going wherever he wants, tours the engine room, relaxes on the sundeck, takes solo rides on the big water slides that kind of define the silhouette of the boat. Nice. Nice. Which the captain very Captain Harris very kindly turned them on for Christmas day. They hadn't been running. I thought that was cute. Despite the monumental financial mistakes that let him hear, he got to have a pretty cool Christmas and I appreciate that. And that brings us, finally, to the dismantling. The process of dismantling the Satoshi just turned out to be almost as big a fiasco. After striking a deal with an Indian scrapyard, the ocean builders team discovered something called the Basel Convention, which governs the disposal of hazardous waste at sea, and forbid them from sending the ship from Panama, who is a signatory country of the Basel Convention, to India, a non signatory country, where it would be torn apart kind of outside of the bounds of that law. So, they're shipping the boat one way, they say we're gonna ship it back the other way, they realize that's illegal and they have to cancel that contract, which is where things kind of take a turn for the better for the old Satoshi. Word of the ship's very weird situation reaches a ship broker, realizes his client, Ambassador Cruise Lines, might be interested in picking this boat up. They have this vision of turning it into kind of the flagship of their new fleet. The price was not disclosed, but they put in an offer and they buy the boat. Suggesting that Oceanbuilders sold it for around 12,000,000.

Speaker 2: So they made money. They sold it

Speaker 1: for more than they bought it for, but they'd been Yeah. Operating it for about 1,000,000 a month for several months. So it probably came out in the red.

Speaker 2: So my assumptions, all wrong. All wrong. Didn't get seized. No. And you haven't mentioned a lawsuit yet, and so there hasn't been any major lawsuit. So I was completely off base.

Speaker 1: There had been no major lawsuits. The boat was never seized. A couple of fellas bought a boat to try and turn it into a permanent, kinda crypto tax free community, and realized midway on the ride there it wasn't gonna work, and you turned it and sold it off. So a wild crazy saga with ultimately not too much harm done.

Speaker 2: And and now you're saying it it is an active cruise ship again. So you and I could go on a respective vacation and go to the MS Satoshi.

Speaker 1: Oh, man. I hadn't really considered that you could just book a ticket on this, but they bought it, and they're operating it, and it's sailing around.

Speaker 2: Let's go. Let's do it. I wonder where I wonder where it is in the world. Like, if it's, like, in The Caribbean, if it's in Europe, if it's in

Speaker 1: Well Should we go? I think we do it. I think we I think we take a I mean, again, I really wish we could have been on it during that Atlantic voyage because I think that would have been really, really cool with the three drink minimum and the crew with no one to, like, have to provide service to. I'm like, I I I would have liked to have seen that. But now, I'll go now.

Speaker 2: I'm I'm looking. We can go do a Norwegian Fjord cruise in August. Sick. Three to seven nights?

Speaker 1: Wow. Very reasonable. Very reasonable. Still a good time to go on a cruise.

Speaker 2: For £700, British pounds. Not crazy. Not crazy.

Speaker 1: Not bad.

Speaker 2: Just for just for the LOLs, we could go do it.

Speaker 1: Just for the LOLs. May, another take a trip on the MS Satoshi. So what happens to the Ocean Builders team? El Wartowski says, I'm taking a break, I'm going on going on a sabbatical, but Koch and Romant start start working on sea pods again. They're out of the cruise ship business, but they still like the idea of aqua texture, And, as we have looked up, Sea Pods still a thing today. They're in construction, all of the very nice photos are renders, but they look cool. They say you'll get delivered stuff by drones. Ocean Builders claims it will have the first 100 custom pods either in production or delivered by the end of twenty twenty three, and I have set myself a reminder in my calendar to see if that is true. And then it says that the next rollout of a thousand pods will begin in 2024. Their new product, I don't know if you saw this on the website, is called the green pod. I did. And the revolutionary idea there is that, what if we took a sea pod and we put it on land? Aquatecture, but on land. We're gonna need a new word for that. Which brings us back, to to to the boat that we're apparently gonna be taking a cruise on somewhat soon. In her new home in Montenegro, the Satoshi receives, some much needed updates, and for the fourth time in her three decade history, is given a new name, Ambience. When the newly renamed Ambiance set off on her maiden voyage from Tilbury to Hamburg in April 2022, it offers a much more traditional cruise experience to its passengers. Importantly, Bitcoin was not accepted as currency.

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