bit-nations and sovereign services

okay, since we’re talking about immigration, it makes sense to talk of higher level  libertarian solutions everyone will ignore.

if you don’t know Bitnation yet, be sure to check it out. it’s, quite simply, an free associative nation. deterritorialization taken to extremes.

now, the problem of immigration is a problem of knowing who to trust. in modernity, “institutions advance by substituting for trust”. bit-nations (the one extant, and the many yet to come) do that for societies: you can anonymously associate to a network of mutually reassuring parties.

of course, if you took to Bitnation’s site, you’ll see they are merely the network, not the space. some people within the network supplies it with a few embassies across the world, that can be accessed by their members (for a fee). but this could be made by another service provider, such as a sovcorp. we’ve been talking a quite lot about them lately.

couple these two concepts: a bit-nation makes a deal with a sovcorp, so that the members of such nation can access (for a fee) the sovereign holdings of the sovcorp. rent a city. various bit-nations can hire the services of various sovcorps, creating an effective market for sovereign services. this is almost ancap proper, come to think of it.

this solves the problem of immigration even more easily, as I’m sure you realize.

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a (sensible) libertarian immigration policy

there has been a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth lately, from all camps, on immigration policy. from some quarters, even the slightest approval of aliens is a clear sign of racial treason and insecurity. from others, anything less than total open borders is a serious offence.

i’ll here outline a simple and mostly effective immigration policy that, as usual with simple and mostly effective policies, will be totally ignored:

1. home buyers become citizens, since the nation belongs to proprietors.
2. tenants, employees and invitees remain under supervision of their sponsors (landlords, employers or hosts), until they can afford the equivalency price of houses (and thus citizenship).
3. tourists can come and go (nobody lives forever in a hotel), and eventually they will be pressed in section 1 or 2.

couple this with “only citizens vote”, and 90% of the problems go away immediately.