In between (1) and (2), the "military family" had experience with fishing in the area, and with pirate radio (from boats, and from other platforms (unambiguously in UK waters).
Pirate radio was big because there was no popular music or commercials on UK public radio at the time; pirate radio was largely killed by removing both of those conditions in the UK by the government, not through regulation. (although they did increasingly ban it)
(4) didn't work out for a combination of internal reasons and the macro implosion of both tech and the bandwidth/colo market (we started working on it in 1998/1999 when stuff was going for $2k/mo; by 2002 it was $150/mo, and our cost basis was high.
Our biggest fundamental problem was not having a payment system option; I wanted to fund an anon ecash development thing out of our first investment, but cofounders vetoed that. This led to really limiting the kind of businesses which could operate "purely offshore"; they all had to incorporate in places like Nevis just to get a bank account, at which point they could just host there (or in Canada, or whatever) for a whole lot less.
5) The platform was basically restored to the mothballed condition it had between the end of pirate radio (early 1970s) and HavenCo (2000) after 2002; there was a fire, which caused damage, but didn't destroy it. It's still there; just irrelevant.
I'm still sort of interested in interesting jurisdictional arbitrage (free trade zones, differences in laws across places, multi-national structures), but I'm much more interested in purely technological solutions to problems (i.e. using crypto, hardware, etc. to solve the same problems as sealand)
Pirate radio was big because there was no popular music or commercials on UK public radio at the time; pirate radio was largely killed by removing both of those conditions in the UK by the government, not through regulation. (although they did increasingly ban it)
(4) didn't work out for a combination of internal reasons and the macro implosion of both tech and the bandwidth/colo market (we started working on it in 1998/1999 when stuff was going for $2k/mo; by 2002 it was $150/mo, and our cost basis was high.
Our biggest fundamental problem was not having a payment system option; I wanted to fund an anon ecash development thing out of our first investment, but cofounders vetoed that. This led to really limiting the kind of businesses which could operate "purely offshore"; they all had to incorporate in places like Nevis just to get a bank account, at which point they could just host there (or in Canada, or whatever) for a whole lot less.
5) The platform was basically restored to the mothballed condition it had between the end of pirate radio (early 1970s) and HavenCo (2000) after 2002; there was a fire, which caused damage, but didn't destroy it. It's still there; just irrelevant.
I'm still sort of interested in interesting jurisdictional arbitrage (free trade zones, differences in laws across places, multi-national structures), but I'm much more interested in purely technological solutions to problems (i.e. using crypto, hardware, etc. to solve the same problems as sealand)