I recently read an article by Balaji S. Srinivasan on How to start a new country and this article touched on a lot of things I've been thinking about but haven't really put into words. So I hope to share my thoughts on the idea of building a new country.

Online Communities

Since I started my entrepreneurial journey I've been obsessed with the idea of building online communities of people with shared values and similar goals. But where did this obsession come from? Well, I guess it started back in 2012 or soo, I had just been brought back from Texas after spending 2 years going to college there at UNT. I didn't expect to be brought back home but it kinda just happened, I was extremely depressed as all the relationships I had formed and the new people I had connected with were all gone. I had to start again from scratch and I didn't want to do that. I spent most of my days on the internet and I slowly found and connected with the spiritual and mindful community on Twitter. I started meditating regularly and listening to a podcast about mindfulness and spirituality I felt a deep sense of connectedness with the people I met on Twitter as they had shared experiences with me that many people around me did not have. This truly helped me during a dark time in my life and in many ways lead me down the path I am currently on right now.

Being a brand

It seems like I always talk about Senpai but very few people understand the vision I have when trying to build a brand like Senpai. You see I know from experience that the best way to build an online community is to build it around a brand that people can relate to. The brand is the net that helps attract and retain the ideal people you want to keep in your community. I think this step is often overlooked by many but the brand of the community has to be independent of any single person but represent the views of everyone as a collective. My first company and my passion project Senpai is using the concept to build a collective of creative people who are passionate about bringing about positive change in the world using art and technology. This is who the brand seeks to attack and the goal is to build some sort of ecosystem where people in the community can add value to the community as a whole and also to themselves over the course of being a member of the community. This sound very similar to the idea of a Cloud Country

Cloud Countries

And finally we arrive at our preferred method: the cloud country. Our idea is to proceed cloud first, land last. Rather than starting with the physical territory, we start with the digital community. We recruit online for a group of people interested in founding a new virtual social network, a new city, and eventually a new country. We build the embryonic state as an open source project, we organize our internal economy around remote work, we cultivate in-person levels of civility, we simulate architecture in VR, and we create art and literature that reflects our values.

The idea of a cloud country is simply the next step up from building an online community of people with shared values but it relies on a lot of the fundamentals of brand building and communicating the values religiously. With the decentralized access to currencies, tokens, governmental, and defi infrastructure that crypto is giving us access too. The article argues that the same way bitcoin was once taken as a joke until it gained more adopting and reached the trillion dollar market cap. This is the same way Cloud countries would slowly gain adoption and benefit from the network effects of each new member/citizen.

So what does this mean practically?

Well practically, This means you can still be in your present geographically location but you transact and interact within the economy of your cloud country for the most part and might only need to interact with your physically environment to buy goods and services. So how might this be done?

ADA

Well, I love to think based on my research that Cardano is in the best position to achieve all of this in one technology stack. Ada isn't a new player in the crypto space and has been around for a lot of years, but I believe it is the best blockchain that has been built from the group up from running cloud countries and I am heavily invested in learning as much as I can about this platform as the months go by. Just today I watched a video where Charles Hoskinson spoke about the Cardano roadmap and what they plan to achieve over the years and I can say without a doubt that Cardano was created to run entire governments and even “cloud countries”

How might this be built?

I think a lot of work goes into building a community. The members have to feel like they are seen and heard and that they are progressing. If anyone feels they have a better chance of more progress outside the community they would leave. Humans are selfish by natured and the first 1million members of a cloud country would probably be the hardest to obtain. Entire systems and policies would have to be created for all sorts of things like registering a business, getting an account, or even probably getting a passport. Of course, there is the idea of having physical locations, though I don't personally see the point of this as each member would be dispersed in various parts of the world, and getting in physical clusters might just led to unessacry attention and potential violence towards the community. I think having utility physical locations would be important though things like hospitals or an embassy to onboard new members might be required and based on the design of the community there might be a cap on how many people might be members at a time.

This idea isn't far from actualization and has a lot of beta versions of this already in existence. It's now about putting things into a decentralized system that is built on a set of rules and allows people to flock to where they feel they belong to the most. The internet is doing what it does best, connecting us all in ways we never thought was possible and now with blockchain the power truly belongs to the people and they can decide to opt into a better country than the one they currently live in.