Prince Roy (and his wife Joan) are really great people -- the best of the British in WW2, in addition to all the interesting Sealand stuff later. (I probably met them ~5 times -- we (me, Sean Hastings, Jo Hastings, maybe Sameer Parekh?) had tea with them in 1999 and then went forward with the Sealand/HavenCo thing.<p>It didn't really amount to anything in the end (written about a lot online...), but was an interesting experience.<p>I have a lot more faith in either technological solutions (cryptography, cloud computing, threshold cryptosystems, tamper resistant devices, etc.) and in jurisdictional arbitrage of "normal" countries than in any of the "new countries" or even borderline countries (Somalia, Kosovo, South Sudan, etc.), though, for being great places to host stuff. Still seems more likely to succeed than political change in places like the US and EU, though.
(<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01l7w1p" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01l7w1p</a>)<p>This BBC radio programme is fascinating.<p>> <i>In 1966, a former pirate radio broadcaster, Major Paddy Roy Bates, occupied a disused military platform in the North Sea, and moved his family aboard. The next year he declared it to be the sovereign Principality of Sealand, appointing himself Prince Roy, and his wife, a former fashion model, as Princess Joan. Five decades on, the Bates family still occupy the platform, having survived the repeated attempts by the British government to evict them by legal means, and having fought off attempts by rival groups to seize the platform by force. It's a story of coups, counter-coups, guns, petrol bombs, and rival groups of foreign businessmen. Jolyon Jenkins interviews surviving witnesses to tell the story of this real life "Passport to Pimlico".</i>