Starting up a new Country? Here are some "Best Practices" you may want to reuse.

I recently came across this post on 1729.com - How to start a new country?

Now you may think this is all baloney - there is no way one can really start a new country barring some fringe cases mentioned in the above article (like starting a country on a sea ship or calling a patch of dirt a micronation). But if you were to take a closer look, there are a few current trends that probably never happened in the past which may make it possible for us to indeed start a new country from scratch:

• People spend a lot of time online in virtual worlds and apps. They build friendships online, live in the virtual world most of the time.
• Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) make it possible to design your new country's currency in a way that meets your specific rules and conditions.
• Online lives are indeed bizarre - people are paying money to women to abuse them online (yes fin-dom is a real thing), two people who met on reddit started a company to be valued $100B in less than a decade, teens addicted to online games end up killing parents who ask them to stop and so on.

So let us for a moment assume that it is indeed possible to set up a new country - a group of like minded driven individuals, while geographically dispersed, end up agreeing on certain rules and behaviors for their new country. They end up spending a lot of time hanging out with each other online, cement their common beliefs and meet in person only when needed. The potential cloud country citizens volunteer to devote time and energy to this cause and commit the acreage of real estate owned by them to the new country. They passionately believe in their new country, its constitution and its currency.

If this were to happen, what are some of the lessons that we have learnt in the past that can help us make this a smooth process and avoid some common pitfalls? There is no point in re-inventing the wheel with a new country when there are past success stories of endeavors of a similar kind. Let us select a few institutions with similar characteristics as the new country we are trying to create - large number of followers, fanatic believers, work mostly decentralized, geographically dispersed, high antipathy for non-believers and high sense of order and organization. These are some entities that come to mind that fulfill this criterion:

• Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)
• Cults with large followings (ex. flat earth society, followers of mystical healers and self proclaimed god-men)
• The Catholic Church
• Bitcoin and cryptocurrency believers - a particularly important one as it is recent, started completely online and has many attributes similar to the new country's working as money and politics are tightly coupled.
  

Note that all of the above have some common, general characteristics, namely:

• They were started by a small group of fanatics who strongly believed in their purpose but most of the general public ridiculed them initially.
• They have been extremely successful despite huge challenges - the Church has billions of followers, Bitcoin is more valuable than the UK Pound, AA has probably the best outcomes among all the other interventions for alcohol de-addiction.
• All of these have some sort of mystical figureheads. Bitcoin had Satoshi, Church had Jesus, AA had Bill Wilson and most cults have a central leader/guru. Incidentally, there is always some "divine" intervention at play here - Jesus was the son of God, Wilson had "experienced a bright flash of light which he felt to be God revealing himself" and Satoshi is thought to be a time traveler who gifted us Bitcoin. Almost all cults are shepherded by god-men who profess to have mystical and divine powers.
• Their initial members were die hard believers and fanatics - these people recruited followers, grew the number of believers and relentlessly pursued the agenda at hand. Examples are St. Peters for the Church, Hal Finney and Nick Szabo for Bitcoin.
• Ceremonies and rituals are used liberally. In Bitcoin, it was the exchange of small amounts of Bitcoin from the evangelizer to the initiator. Bitcoin also used the financial crisis of 2008 for symbolism - a financial messiah to save us from the corruption of the temple by central banking and governments. Additionally, running a full node, ability to carry firearms and carnivorous diet are also rites of passage for Bitcoin believers. The Church also has a host of festivals, rituals and ceremonies. Cults and god-men also have a lot of rituals that are performed and festivals that are celebrated to mark important occasions.
• Set of rules are documented and fanatically upheld. The Bible, The Big Book and Twelve Steps in the case of AA and the Bitcoin white paper are examples of a shared common belief which acts as the guiding light and has to be honored and preserved at all costs.
• Non-believers are trolled and ridiculed. The central tenet is that our way is the best. Whether it's the Bitcoin forks like BCH, central banks and governments and even past supporters (ex. Nassim Taleb), there is no scope for you to take a stand against Bitcoin without getting an army of people up against you. Similar antipathy is demonstrated by Church followers towards other sects, and by one sect against the other in case of god-men.
• Explosive growth in believers means decentralization of working as a single central authority cannot manage everything - so we have local churches, local AA meetup groups and Crypto clubs. Members assemble regularly (online or offline) in these groups and share their thoughts. There is a large degree of autonomy to these local units but they have to follow the overarching theme as outlined above.

There are some other things as initially there was close physical collaboration among followers to cement the belief, people spent a lot of time out of their free will as they felt there was something wrong with the world order and they wanted to change it, and a lot of early followers were impressed by the dedication and commitment of the early adopters and started coming on board.

Assume there is a set of people who believe it's the right time to startup their own cloud based country. Now let us use this playbook and list steps which we can steal from these past successes to indeed make our new cloud based country a real winner.

• Create a real or pseudonymous figurehead. (S)he is the founding father figure of your country. Make sure there is a mystique, sense of divinity and purity of purpose associated with this figurehead. Note that this may not be a single person but even can be a group of people acting as a single entity (for example Satoshi Nakamoto is suspected to be a group of people)
• Frame your constitution. This needs to address the qualifications of the citizens of your country, what laws and beliefs they share, what borders and boundaries they adhere to, what rules are associated with your currency etc. This is your Bible.
• This is the most important part - get a few committed overzealous adherents to your constitution. If your sense of purpose is honorable and worthy, it may be easy to get these. They will be the ones that will determine the success or failure of your country. You don't need too many people - a small group of eight to ten resourceful people may be more than enough.
• Use cryptocurrency and technology to your advantage. A proof of work or proof of stake cryptocurrency specially designed to align the incentives of citizens will be an extremely powerful recruitment mechanism. Technologies used for virtual meetings and collaboration will help you scale your citizen and real estate base without the need for people to travel and meet in person. Using smart contracts for voting, taxation, legal work and doling out of government benefits can be transformative. This also enables potential citizens to observe how transparent and efficient your systems are as compared to their present country.
• Sponsor and crowdfund potential suitable citizens to subsume their individual pieces of territory into your cloud country. This is akin to having the most lucrative immigration policies to attract the best talent across the globe.
• Frame ceremonies, rituals, holidays and festivals for your country that are in line with the belief that was used to form your country and the behaviors you want to inculcate.
• Call out non-believers and people who are against your code of law or Bible. Have a grand celebration when any non-believer converts to your cause.
• Constantly advertise your growth metrics and adoption status. Create "a nationrealestatepop.com site similar to coinmarketcap.com, where the number of cloud country members, the acreage of real estate owned by those members, and the on-chain GDP are tracked in real time. (from 1729's original post)"
• Plan for decentralization from day 1. Since you are starting up a country that will potentially have pockets of citizens located all over the world, you have to set up a system where the local ‘cities’ (aka chapters) have a degree of autonomy but are tightly integrated with the main constitution and belief. Smart use of a combination of technology, blockchains as well as drawing from the 12 steps program of AA can be really useful to empower these pockets.

Of course all of this requires careful thought and dedicated effort. But then, this way of starting up a country may be easier than getting into a war, or having an election or a full scale revolution. Your end goal is to become a member of the United Nations and be recognized as an independent country. Also if you are successful, you would have made a material impact on the world by doing something no one thought was possible!

PS: This post is inspired by the framework laid out in Charlie Munger's The Psychology of Human Misjudgement. This was a fun thought experiment, and I welcome your comments and feedback.