Ever since the "decentralised borderless voluntary nation” Bitnation was founded in July 2014, a slowly growing raft of startups and organisations have been attempting to seize cryptocurrencies as an opportunity to build entirely new nations from the ground up. Whether it be the landlocked Liberland or the seaborne Floating Island Project, they've taken cryptocurrencies and blockchains as the basis for a new way of organising how people live, interact and work. And even if they've approached the same fundamental task from varying angles, they all regard the decentralisation of crypto as a potential liberator from the top-down control of central …

By now, few would argue that the technology behind Bitcoin isn’t groundbreaking. Now that blockchain technology is shifting from a fringe phenomenon to being studied by traditional finance and governments, it is gaining more and more momentum and interest from VCs, financial experts and traders. But while this tech has come a long way in such a short time, some of its proposed potential applications are pretty unconventional. Currency aside, listed below are six of some of the most interesting and perhaps revolutionary use-cases for the blockchain. Streamium’s Pay-as-you-go Streamium.io is an app that allows users to stream videos live, …

More than half a year ago, I became the first citizen on the blockchain, which was the second pilot project of Bitcoin 2.0 platform Bitnation. It was invented by Chris Ellis from World Crypto Network and Bitnation founder Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, who I met at a meetup last October. Citizen of the blockchain With a group of people from the meetup that could confirm my existence in time and space, we documented it with photos, signed it with PGP keys, time-stamped and hashed it, and put it on the blockchain. The PGP encryption and the blockchain make the ID secure. …

1. Bitnation’s Core Dev Team Resigns Ahead of Crowdsale Ian DeMartino reported Monday, and spoke with, the three members of the Bitnation team who resigned from the project over what they perceived to be mismanagement. “Three main members of the BitNation team have resigned: The aforementioned Nathan Wosnack, Bitnation's former Chief Communications Officer, Matt Mckibbin the former Chief Marketing Officer and David Mondrus, who was serving as an advisor and we are told was under consideration for Chief Technology Officer. “Among their concerns is that there is no multi-signature account set up, no corporation set up in any country and …

When people speak of “taking on the state,” it’s usually in the context of resistance to a rule or to some kind of display of force. Bitnation is taking on the state in a much different way: It’s trying to compete head-on by offering the same basic benefits a modern nation-state would, but Bitnation’s primary technology is a blockchain rather than a border. Participation in Bitnation’s revenue-generating activity is also voluntary (unlike paying taxes, for example), and that revenue-generation is about to get started in October. On Monday, Bitnation announced on its blog that it would be holding a crowdsale …