tl;dr: In the future, we’ll see countries start online and then become physical entities afterwards.

Why couldn’t a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (a DAO) organize online and collectively decide to buy property somewhere?

The PragueDAO came together to manage a building, but why not form a country?

I had been thinking about this possibility for a while, but my most recent ideation was catalyzed as I listened to the Bankless podcast with Balaji Srinivasan entitled “Crypto Civilization.”

It may sound crazy, but countries are formed with less of a common thread than a shared interest in a cryptonetwork.

Today, we already have networks of individuals coming together around shared interests, whether it is a Facebook or LinkedIn group, Qanon, or Bitcoiners.

We also have serious efforts to find consensus between large numbers of people about the right direction to take, e.g. Taiwan.

What makes crypto different, however, is that we can now put the economics of consensus to work at the same time as the politics of consensus and it’s all recorded in an immutable ledger that EVERYONE can trust.

Said another way, it’s one thing for a group of people to say “hey, let’s go buy a piece of property on the border of Croatia and make a country out of it.”

It’s quite another for people to put their financial resources towards it and commit to the actual purchase in a way that is provable to everyone else.

Today, the latter is possible.

So, I expect that we’ll see Cloud-first entities, such as DAOs that come together for the purpose of purchasing “real world” assets.

First, it may be a building. Then, it may be a satellite. Finally, it may be an entire area of physical land.

With enough of it, that group could then say, “ok, we’re a country and we deserve a seat at the United Nations as a result.”

A hybrid of this effort is already in the works in the form of Liberland (I’m a citizen), which is a stretch of land on the border of Croatia that technically belongs to none of the bordering states because of a few historical accidents.

The group behind Liberland is forming online, selling citizenship and parcels of land, and hopes to eventually reclaim the property as an independent state.

It sounds crazy, but it is possible.

Today, DAOs invest in all kinds of digital products/entities as a kind of virtual investment group, so the functioning is already there.

Tomorrow, they will be cloud-first, physical second, but collectively own real property.

Cloud City may not be sci-fi for much longer.