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Norwegian ‘private city’ claims 100 future residents

The founders of an anarcho-capitalist 'private city' established in Southern Norway claim to have already sold plots to 108 people from 28 countries.

Norwegian 'private city' claims 100 future residents
Tjelland Farm shortly after it was bought in June last year. Photo: Screen grab/YouTube
Liberstad, as the city is named, is selling land at its site near Kristianstad for as little as 75,000 Norwegian Kronor (NOK) $9,400 for 1000m2 and as much as 375,000 NOK ($47,100) for 5,000m2, and accepts payment in 27 different cryptocurrencies, according to its website.
 
It claims to have already found buyers from Norway, Brazil, Sweden and the UK, among other countries, and aims to be ready to hand over the plots by 2020, after which the first residents will be able to move in. 
 
According to the venture’s website, Liberstad aims to be a “a voluntary, profit-based, private enterprise that offers protection of life, freedom and property within a particular area”. 
 
“A private city is not a utopian, constructivist idea,” the website continues. “Instead, it's just a business model where the main elements are already known and are then just transferred to another sector, namely the market for living together.” 
 
“The only thing we demand for Liberstad is that you respect the principle of non-aggression and private property rights.” 
 
The city’s founders, John Holmesland and Sondre Bjellås, bought Tjelland farm, the site of the project, last June and have been posting about their progress on Facebook and on the city's blog, peppering updates with libertarian slogans such as “taxation is theft”. 
 
Holmesland claims to have been inspired by Atlantic Station, a city within a city in Atlanta, Georgia, and aims to eventually set up private police, fire and water services for the city, or invite other private companies to provide them. 
 
When contacted by Norwegian state broadcaster NRK, the founders attacked the organisation for its mandatory license fee. 
 
“As NRK generates its income by using aggression (extortion/threats/theft) against peaceful people, this is an organisation we do not want to cooperate with,” they wrote, according to the broadcaster
 
Kari Henriksen, the Labour party MP representing the local Vest-Agder constituency in the Norwegian parliament, dismissed the duo’s plans. 
 
“It may be that someone comes and settles there, but establishing a state within a state is not realistic,” she told NRK. “They will be dependent on society in many ways.”
 
The project has already developed a following in libertarian circles, getting glowing write-ups on the Bitcoin news sites Bitcoin.com and Cointelegraph, and a mention on the Facebook page of the utopian Seasteading Institute, which aims to establish floating cities outside the control of nation states.  
 
Here's a video the company made, which has been posted on YouTube: 
 
 

Here's a talk by Holmesland on the project. 

 

ENVIRONMENT

Mining bitcoin uses more energy than Denmark: study

Extracting a dollar's worth of cryptocurrency such as bitcoin from the deep Web consumes three times more energy than digging up a dollar's worth of gold, researchers said Monday.

Mining bitcoin uses more energy than Denmark: study
Photo: AP Photo/Kin Cheung, File/Ritzau Scanpix

There are now hundreds of virtual currencies and an unknown number of server farms around the world running around the clock to unearth them, more than half of them in China, according to a recent report from the University of Cambridge.

Mining virtual currencies with a real-world value, in other words, carries a hidden environmental cost that is rarely measured or taken into account.

“We now have an entirely new industry that is consuming more energy per year than many countries,” said Max Krause, a researcher at the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education and lead author of a study in the journal Nature Sustainability.

“In 2018, bitcoin is on track to consume more energy than Denmark,” he told AFP.

Denmark consumed 31.4 billion kilowatt hours in electricity in 2015. As of July 1st of this year, Bitcoin mining used up approximately 30.1 billion kilowatt hours, according to the study.

The highly competitive practice of mining cryptocurrencies requires hundreds, even tens of thousands, of linked computers running intensive calculations in search of the Internet equivalent of precious metals.

New coins are awarded to those who complete calculations first, with the transaction confirmed and entered into the currency's shared public ledger, known as the “blockchain”.

The top 100 cryptocurrencies have a current market value of about $200 billion (175 billion euros), according to the website coinmarketcap.com.

Bitcoin accounts for more than half of that amount.

“We wanted to spread awareness about the potential environmental costs for mining cryptocurrencies,” Krause said.

“Just because you are creating a digital product, that doesn't mean it does not consume a large amount of energy to make it.”

The movies, music and videos that billions of people stream every day all have measurable environmental costs, earlier research has shown.

For the study, Krause and Thabet Tolaymat, an environmental engineer based in the United States, calculated the average energy consumed to create one US dollar's worth of four top virtual currencies — bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and monero — over the 30-month period up to June 2018.

That amount was 17, 7, 7 and 14 million joules, or megajoules (MJ), respectively.

A joule is a unit of energy equivalent to the work required to produce one watt of power for one second.

That is up to three times the energy needed to excavate gold, platinum or copper, they found. Of the metals examined, only aluminium — at 122 MJ per dollar's worth — was more energy intensive.

A complete calculation of the environmental cost of virtual currencies would take into account the banks of computers used to mine them.

“The computers are made with gold and other precious metals,” said Krause.

“They are run aggressively, which means the hardware is destroyed much quicker than you or I would expect for regular use — maybe a year instead of five or ten.”

READ ALSO: Denmark set wind power record in 2017: ministry