[stareatgoats]

I'm also interested in this, but I wonder if it will ever come to pass, at least in an absolute sense. Bitcoin doesn't really sit outside the banking system either, it is tolerated by it (for now).

My own (fleeting) thoughts regarding an extraterritorial jurisdiction currently is rather along the lines of a "dual-citizenship" (or triple+?) model, at least in the short to mid term. The "virtual" nation(s) would have to accept the supremacy of a "territorial" state of residence at every juncture. That still might leave a lot of room for "virtual lawmaking", and over time the balance between the two could possibly be shifted in small steps.

[ElevenLathe]

IMO this is all Gibsonian fantasy until somebody finds a way to live extraterritorially or else always practice perfect OpSec, meaning (among other things) that you keep your "extraterritorial" business totally disjunct from your actual personal finances, with no flow of value between them at all. This means you can't invest in the business initially or use the profits for meatspace purchases. At that point, why bother doing it at all?

Remember, if you screw up then Federal agents will come and arrest you if your "extraterritorial" business selling zero-days on the dark web comes to their attention. They don't care if it's a Jersey company whose officers are all Grenadian nationals that you've hired via the blockchain because you live in Tulsa, and they will put you in prison.

[lidangzzz]

Actually you can always be anonymous, just like most of the web3 projects, and the federal government don't know who you are, in US or in Thailand, if and only if you don't sell the tokens on coinbase and withdraw the cash via Wells Fargo

[ElevenLathe]

Right, you can be anonymous, but only if the money you make anonymously is never used to pay your rent. What's the point?

[lidangzzz]

Setup an anonymous company in Cayman Island, Singapore, Hong Kong or Russia might be a good choice I guess

[ElevenLathe]

And then Totally Not A Front Ltd. pays you a paycheck into your legal, real bank account so you can pay your rent? Now you're not anonymous anymore. OK, let the company pay the rent and mail you the keys. There's still a trail for the cops to follow by just...showing up at the apartment and seeing who's there.

Until transactions can cross between crypto and real money anonymously (which is getting harder all the time, and is already effectively impossible at any kind of reasonable price and scale), OpSec requires that you not invest your real money into any such venture, and also never get paid by any such venture. Again, you can still /conduct/ such a venture, but at that point its just an eccentric, high-stakes hobby, since it only happens in an alternate reality where you never need to buy peanut butter or a gallon of gas but can still potentially slip up and anger the feds/cartels/chinese intelligence/whatever. Yes, there are ways to reduce the risk that your "extraterritorial" company is not traced back to you. There is not a way to avoid it completely, and it's a pretty big risk.