The founder of the very first decentralised transborder state, polar explorer Sergey Solovyev discusses the changes that distributed technologies are bringing to the world we live in.
The idea of creating a decentralised transborder state was conceived back in the days when the blockchain technology was yet to be invented. The years spent by Sergey Solovyev in extremely challenging expeditions with his multinational teams proved to the adventurer that every community united by a common goal was always building its own “legal system”. That prompted him to think that every expedition was to a certain extent a quasi-state:
“It is not easy to build relationships with the external environment when people in your expedition are citizens of different countries and belong to different jurisdictions,” Solovyev explained when speaking to CoinFox during the Moscow Bitcoin Conference. “So, we decided to create our own itinerant state with its own jurisdiction that would suit us all and can coexist with any other one.”
Still, from the very beginning, the project was far more ambitious than the creation of a separate legal space for polar explorers.
“If you are not satisfied with particular features of some state, be it the US, or Russia, or any other, there is very little you can do about it, with hundreds of millions of people out there. You can hardly change the system… But you can create a different reality. And if we manage to make it better, other people will come to us saying ‘We’d like to take part. Your reality is much more exciting!’”
The alternative reality nurtured by Solovyev and his fellows materialised in the form of the transborder state Polarex (Russian: Арктида). According to the explorer, what unites its citizens is not their nationality, religion or the place they live in, but rather the way they think. The traveller believes that his brainchild reflects global trends:
“This is a common tendency, for the state is only a fiction created by the humanity on a certain stage of its development. The fiction did its job and made life easier, increased its dynamics… But for the state to exist, there must be people representing it.”
The founding fathers of Polarex decided quite early that their country will by no means be restricted to any territory. But it is only now when bitcoin and blockchain technologies have emerged that the dream, at last, came true:
“The state in its traditional form can confront anything within itself, but cannot confront whatever is outside. You can ban bitcoin and blockchain within Russia, but it is impossible to ban it as a technology… Whereas you can block particular web pages on the Internet, nowadays we see a different Internet emerging based on distributed network… It cannot be “banned”. To stop it, you’ll have to shut down all computers, all network nods; but there is no such prohibitive legal entity that can do that!”
According to Solovyev, no staff is needed to run Polarex state machine and manage its documentation, since everything is done by smart contracts via blockchain.
The state has gained the attention of numerous enthusiasts from all over the world — “from Belgium to China” — but the driving force of Polarex is still the team of explorers who have been part of a long-lasting UNESCO World Expedition project led by Sergey Solovyev. This autumn the team is planning to move on with a three-month journey during which they are going to use no money other than cryptocurrencies.
Bloomberg observer Matt Miller has already tried to live 12 days using only bitcoins and carefully documented his experience in short entertaining videos. Whether the challenge accepted by the team will become a success, read at CoinFox later this year.
Maria Rudina
