Personally, I like seeing actions like this.

Even though the source of his funds may be questionable (FOMO?, robbing from the uninformed?, luck timing the market?), he's not letting his funds sit idle.

It's one man's personal moonshot.

If anybody is going to actively create a mini 21st century society that gets a lot of things right, it's a crazy near-billionaire who bought 67,000 acres of land and invests in a long-term team/plan to make use of it.

I'm very interested to see what happens.

If only there were any previous comparable attempts we could learn from ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_City,_California

There's a solid chance the current attempt will end up as just another failed planned city.

But that's what moonshots are all about.

If it were easy or likely to succeed, it would have been done 10 times already.

Songdo's not doing as well as hoped either: https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/06/sleepy-in-songdo-koreas...

But that's why we iterate and try again... or not "we" so much as bitcoin semi-billionaires.

This is what you get when lucky people think they're geniuses.

I’m sorry but I find it hard to trust the competence of any person who creates a company straight-up called “Blockchains”. Such a money grab. Imagine starting Internet, LLC during the dotcom bubble.

>“This will either be the biggest thing ever, or the most spectacular crash and burn in the history of mankind,” Mr. Berns said.

At least he knows that there's a significant chance that it won't succeed. I'm also glad that somebody is doing something with their cryptocurrency millions, even if that something is as pie in the sky as this.

'“This will either be the biggest thing ever, or the most spectacular crash and burn in the history of mankind,” Mr. Berns said.'

Based on nominative determinism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism - that someone recently referenced in another thread on HN, I think he might already have the answer.

How to become a cryptocurrency millionaire: start off as a crypto currency billionaire and buy a bunch of useless land in the desert.

I can't imagine any land being useless. Even contaminated radioactive land can probably be put to use as a place to store more hazardous waste or weapons testing.

It never ceases to amaze me how dismissive people are of desert land.

This particular land is covered with vegetation, it's not even some barren landscape of endless sand dunes. All he'd need to do is drill wells and build out some PV arrays and it'd already be a place people could easily/affordably build relatively comfortable, albeit simple, lives. Hardly useless.

I'd certainly prefer acres of such desert land over bitcoin of equal value.

Sorry, but most desert land is pretty “useless”. You can’t grow crops, it’s far from metropolitan centers, it’s hot. Unless there is buried oil like in Saudi Arabia, or near a major city (eg Phoenix, Vegas), the land itself is pretty “useless” in a resource extraction sense. Even solar panels need to be relatively close to a substation that can handle it.

That said, the desert can still be beautiful to those the live there, and spiritual to native Americans with history there.

So the desert is interesting and cool, but not necessarily lucrative.

Subtitle tells the whole story:

> A man spent millions on an enormous plot of land near Reno. Now he wants to build a community based on the blockchain technology introduced by Bitcoin.

He could have joined up with the Bitcoin mining group in Wenatchee WA, where they spent millions building custom "mining pods" to house the ASICs.

I'm not sure what that has to do with this person planning a town.

They could have combined their similar goals and pooled their money.

What are their similar goals? This guy is planning a town, those other people were doing crypto currency mining.

> Every resident and employee will have what amounts to an Ethereum address, which they will use to vote on local measures and store their personal data.

Maybe repurpose the pods to hold ETH mining gear?

But you've caught me. I obviously don't know what I'm talking about. Congratulations, CyberDildonics, you've won HN today!

I don't think anyone wins when someone adds nonsense to a thread that then needs to be corrected.

This will be an expensive lesson in water availability.

They'll just use the blockchain.

Hydrocoin, whenever you want water simply open your tap and activate your smartphone app to deposit coins to the local M.U.D. at a varying rate starting at 1 coin / liter. As soon as the block chain completes proof of work your tap will begin to flow. If attempting to get water at a time of high blockchain volatility or transaction demand, please allow 12-48 hours for processing. It is recommended not to use Hydrocoin during hours of peak operation such as mornings or evenings due to expected load related delays.

However, I do like the ideal of literal bucket arbitrage.

This is effectively funded by all the student loans and double mortgages that FOMO drove people to trade real money for virtual commodities at the peak of last year's bubble. I'm calling it. We have reached peak blockchain hysteria. This is "if you build it they will come" on the blockchain.

Judging by the charts, peak blockchain hysteria was around December 2017.

The speculative pricing bubble and the hype around the technology are two different things.

if someone's gonna invest in these idealistic projects, I'd rather see someone invest in tech cooperatives based on block-chain, or just employee cooperatives in general.

This headline screams non-article. I don't know how anyone who is not at least a billionare hopes to make any sweeping changes (let alone a utopia) in any context beyond a couple thousand people.

The article says that he has spent 300 million dollars and bought 67,000 acres of land.

Land isn't automatically useful/valuable. It does need to be developed. If you took the land area of a city, and then went out bush and asked how much it cost for the same area, it would be pretty much peanuts. Yet land prices in cities are orders of magnitude higher.

The land is really only the start, and I'm pretty damn sure you will need an order of magnitude more money than that to develop it into something usable by modern standards.

This is textbook moving goal posts. He has obviously spent plenty of money and didn't spend all that on the land. I'm not if you are really trying to say he spent 300 million on land, but that isn't what the article implies.

Yeah, for a million you could probably get a really nice house for one family, and a good bit saved up so they don't have to worry too much about things. That's a long way from any kind of utopian society... Especially when you're building it from scratch out in a desert.