Subject: Anarcho-Capitalist NEWS: The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world’s first cryptocurrency cruise ship Wed Sep 08, 2021 8:07 pm
Last year, three cryptocurrency enthusiasts bought a cruise ship. They named it the Satoshi, and dreamed of starting a floating libertarian utopia. It didn’t work out
On the evening of 7 December 2010, in a hushed San Francisco auditorium, former Google engineer Patri Friedman sketched out the future of humanity. The event was hosted by the Thiel Foundation, established four years earlier by the arch-libertarian PayPal founder Peter Thiel to “defend and promote freedom in all its dimensions”. From behind a large lectern, Friedman – grandson of Milton Friedman, one of the most influential free-market economists of the last century – laid out his plan. He wanted to transform how and where we live, to abandon life on land and all our decrepit assumptions about the nature of society. He wanted, quite simply, to start a new city in the middle of the ocean.
Friedman called it seasteading: “Homesteading the high seas,” a phrase borrowed from Wayne Gramlich, a software engineer with whom he’d founded the Seasteading Institute in 2008, helped by a $500,000 donation from Thiel. In a four-minute vision-dump, Friedman explained his rationale. Why, he asked, in one of the most advanced countries in the world, were they still using systems of government from 1787? (“If you drove a car from 1787, it would be a horse,” he pointed out.) Government, he believed, needed an upgrade, like a software update for a phone. “Let’s think of government as an industry, where countries are firms and citizens are customers!” he declared.
The difficulty in starting a new form of government, said Friedman, was simply a lack of space. All the land on Earth was taken. What they needed was a new frontier, and that frontier was the ocean. “Let a thousand nations bloom on the high seas,” he proclaimed, with Maoish zeal. He wanted seasteading experiments to start as soon as possible. Within three to six years, he imagined ships being repurposed as floating medical clinics. Within 10 years, he predicted, small communities would be permanently based on platforms out at sea. In a few decades, he hoped there would be floating cities “with millions of people pioneering different ways of living together”.
Subject: Re: Anarcho-Capitalist NEWS: The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world’s first cryptocurrency cruise ship Fri Sep 10, 2021 8:29 am
Ill-Fated Cryptocurrency Cruise Ship Gets a New Life
Built for the long haul, some cruise ships have more lives than a cat. The latest example is the 1991-launched Regal Princess. She later became the Pacific Dawn, was briefly named the Amy Johnson, was redubbed MS Satoshi, was sold for scrap earlier this year in a failed deal — and is now getting new life as the Ambience, the first ship for the UK’s fledgling Ambassador Cruise Line.
The 1,400-passenger, 660-crew vessel cost $277 million to build and was delivered to Princess Cruises by the Fincantieri shipyard in Italy. From 1991 through 2007, she sailed routes in North America, Australia, and later the Mediterranean and Baltic seas.
In 2007 Regal Princess was transferred to P&O Cruises Australia, underwent major refurbishment, and was reborn as Pacific Dawn, cruising from Australia to South Pacific destinations.
In 2020, as the global pandemic ravaged the cruise industry, it was announced that the ship would be sold to Cruise & Maritime Voyages (CMV) and renamed the Amy Johnson. But CMV’s financial struggles proved too much, and the company went into administration (essentially bankruptcy).
Facing an uncertain future, the ship was sold for just $9.5 million in 2020. The new owners, Ocean Builders Central, were a group of libertarian crypto-coin enthusiasts who planned to anchor the ship off Panama as a floating residence for digital nomads, YouTube influencers, and start-up specialists. They renamed the vessel MS Satoshi, in tribute to Japanese crypto-currency founder Satoshi Nakamoto.
“The MS Satoshi is a business-focused environment where you can relocate your existing business, set up a new global head office, or come and start a new business and be supported in an environment of like-minded entrepreneurs,” Ocean Builders said on its website.
The plan was to auction off the ship’s 777 cabins at prices starting at $25,000, plus monthly fees. When the auction resulted in only a handful of staterooms being sold, Ocean Builders switched gears, saying they would instead rent out the cabins daily, weekly, or monthly.
Then came the news that no insurance company would touch the proposed operation, and the crypto-cruisers threw in the towel, announcing that the once-proud ship would be sold to a scrapyard in India.
In yet another plot twist, that deal fell through because Ocean Builders didn’t realize that according to the Basel Convention, which covers the disposal of hazardous waste, they couldn’t send the ship from a signatory country — Panama — to a non-signatory country — India.
The contract was scrapped — rather than the MS Satoshi — and Ocean Builders was left holding 70,285 gross tons of 30-year-old cruise ship.
But there’s a happy ending to this story, for now at least. When a shipbroker heard about the plight of the former Regal Princess, they thought the old girl might meet the needs of a client looking to launch a new cruise line. A deal was made — reportedly for $12 million — and the Ambience was born.
The buyer was UK-based Ambassador Cruise Line, a new company staffed with several former Cruise & Maritime Voyages executives — the now-deceased line that had nearly purchased the ship a year earlier.
“We thought Ambience a lovely name for a ship,” said Gordon Wilson, Ambassador’s chairman, in an interview with The Guardian. “This is a very elegant ship,” he added. “She looks like a cruise liner; she does not look like a floating block of flats.”
Ambassador promises a traditional cruise experience primarily aimed at the 50-plus market when the Ambience sets sail on her maiden voyage from Tilbury, England to Hamburg, Germany next April.
“Ambassador will deliver distinguished cuisine, fascinating voyages on a classic cruise ship, great entertainment, like-minded guests, and treasured destinations. The company will deliver a seamless, authentic, and enriching cruise experience,” the line promises on its website.
With so many classic cruise ships reduced to scrap metal over the past 18 months, it’s delightful to see this long-time ‘princess’ get yet another new life.
Godspeed to her and all those who sail aboard her.
Subject: Anarcho-Capitalist NEWS: The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world’s first cryptocurrency cruise ship 
Wed Sep 08, 2021 8:07 pm
