Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

“Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient.”
—Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

 

There are some major changes and activities at the Resilient Ways Foundation that I’d like to share with  everyone who reads L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise.

First, we have opened a new office in Dayton, Ohio. We are now able to work on the negotiations for the several land purchases we are seeking to make here in Ohio without having to travel as far. We’re also building a small Dayton-based network of agorists, entrepreneurs, anarcho-capitalists, and anarchists.

Second, our chief technology officer, Dan Sullivan, has completed the most important white paper of the year. "The Riegel Way" explains not only our work, plans, and crypto-economy use token, but also shows how the work of E.C. Riegel in A New Approach to Freedom pre-saged the developing alternative fintech approach to money. While both Dan’s white paper "The Riegel Way" and Riegel’s own book explain Riegel’s philosophy, Dan gets the job done in far fewer pages.

Third, we have placed a new product offering up to a total of 100,000 Way tokens on our web site. These tokens are customer advances and when the token is fully deployed (in early January 2018) may be used for payments on our web site, at our stores, hotels, conference centres, in our campgrounds, at our hunting lodges, and in all of our theme parks. The 100,000 Ways now available are priced at half-off during the pre-release period. At the end of this year, the price changes to $2 from the current $1. We’ll be using the proceeds to acquire about 10 acres of land in Ohio for our first campground and hunting lodge. We will also use part of these proceeds to create the software systems related to our Way token itself, its token wallet, and its listing on crypto-token exchanges as appropriate.

Fourth, we have attracted a number of really interesting people to our board of advisers. Doug Casey just recently agreed to join, and we’ve issued a press release on that momentous event. Our advisory board is headed by Wendy McElroy; and includes architect Sven Allstrom; marketing experts Zoe & Tif; crypto-economy expert Paul Rosenberg; volunteer, parent, & traveller Justine Cooper; FortGalt.com founder Gabriel Scheare; science fiction and space settlement organiser Greg Barr; Kurt Hanson of Mu Aye Pu; Dennis Feucht of the Pine Ridge community in the jungle of Cayo, Belize, Central America; senior adviser for health Jeff Kanter; Michael Strong, co-founder of Conscious Capitalism; Lexi Sprague, co-founder of Totem; Courtney Smith, world-renowned trader, author, trainer, speaker, and founder of the New Country Foundation; and Marcella, a social media influencer and advocate of individuals and freedom. It is a great group of people.

Fifth, we have put together a line-up of musicians, speakers, and demonstrations for our Resilient Rendezvous on 20 October which will be an online event, livestreamed, and I’m told, good for your enthusiasm. Not yet scheduled, but coming soon, "The Return of the Outlaw Party benefiting Resilient Ways Foundation" should be a rave-like event somewhere in the Greater New York area.

 

Use of Proceeds
You may have already visited our product page on the Way token. If so, you’ll find that we intend to release a further 600,000 of our use tokens beginning in January. These are to be priced at $2 each. No further tokens will be released for another 18 months. Remember, these are use tokens, or coupons for our goods and services. You might liken them, as Dan does in his white paper, to the Amazon gift cards you find at major retailers. You can go buy $100 worth of Amazon gift card, and you, or someone you know, can spend all or most of that amount at Amazon’s web site. Same for iTunes, Google Play store, and about every restaurant chain you’ve ever heard of, as well as the grocery stores and big box stores you know by name.

Here are the things we’ve identified to spend these funds on:

Hosting, virtual servers, domain names, systems	$ 5,000
Software development, coding, bug fixes	35,000
Land acquisition, hunting lodge, campground	49,900
Marketing, miscellaneous, contingencies	10,100
	=====
pre-release token sales total	$100,000
Hocking county land acreage	$150,000
Perry county land	130,000
Improvements, Ohio parcels	200,000
Doniphan county land	300,000
Theme park licensing fees	120,000
Theme park design & construction	175,000
Marketing, miscellaneous, contingencies	125,000
	=====
	$1,200,000

 

As you can see, we have big plans to implrement with these funds. We are not going to be sitting on the funds, nor are we going to move slowly once we have them in hand.

 

Theme Park Concept
For a great many years, I have been a huge admirer of L. Neil Smith’s book The Probability Broach and all the sequels he has written in that milieu. It is my view that it would be a great set of stories to design into a theme park. There would be room for a Paratronics, Ltd, probability "broach" to take visitors from one parallel narrative thread in the multi-verse to another, and lots of opportunity to show responsible people being fully armed in public. Moreover, there are all kinds of fun rides that one might put together with suitable airships, hover cars, and what have you.

Then, you might ask, why Kansas? It turns out that there are about a dozen "constitutional carry" states in the country where you can carry open or concealed, without any permit or licence, as you see fit. Kansas happens to be one of them. We anticipate making use of that legal situation for our work.

Okay, and why Doniphan county? It is very close to two major population areas (Omaha, Nebraska; Kansas City, Missouri) and sufficiently rural and undeveloped that a great deal of work can be done without running into too much "not in my back yard." There are other possibilities, as well.

Naturally, our LaPorte, Colorado won’t have actual mountains in the background, as Kansas only has a few pieces of the Ozark mountain collection of ranges. However, I think we may be able to manage.

Naturally, if our budget for licence lawyers and licence fees isn’t sufficient to attain the approval of L. Neil, then we won’t be using his intellectual properties in our first theme park. On the other hand, if we are able to satisfy him and his advisors that what we’re doing is going to work, and work well, who knows what may be possible?

These are, at this point, the ideas we have on theme parks:

• Silver Dollar City’s approach to Ozark Mountain culture, in Appalachia
• Lewis & Clark experiences, including air rifles
• Probability Broach books and stories

 

We Also Walk Dogs
The Resilient Ways Foundation principals are also developing a new business, General Pet Services. We’ll be launching the web site fairly soon. We are building a white paper that is derivative of Dan’s "The Riegel Way" as a way of illustrating how our work is open source and easily duplicated. General Pet Services will be using its $1.3 million to buy a collection of dog walking and related pet services businesses in major metropolitan areas.

We think, as Robert Heinlein pointed out in his short story "We Also Walk Dogs…" that by providing services for the family pet, we can build a clientele of people who want a variety of other services from weddings to funerals to tutoring to solving intricate physics problems. Conference services, hunting guides, and lessons in fishing and relaxing fit with the Resilient Communities Development Service concepts in theme parks, campgrounds, and hotels.

 

You and Your Fintech Revolution
If you want to build a use token for deployment in the new crypto-currency economy, please let me know. You’ll find that economy is very large and growing. Based on some recent daily transaction volumes, all crypto-currencies currently support between $1 trillion and $3 trillion in annual economic activity. It turns out, only about four or five national economies have more annual economic activity.

Why shouldn’t you issue your own use tokens for whatever goods and services you offer?