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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

With enough cooperation from the Government of Belize, this could turn into great marketing for an independently-run "Special Economic Zone", or "charter city". It's a very risky endeavor as you point out, but not without potential.

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The island is only 1.5 acres though. The size is too small to build any significant infrastructure. The island could maybe fit 100 people on it comfortably. I cannot find any reason that someone would want to visit this place for longer than a few hours.

How about to set up a bank account and mailing address?

I'm a big fan of charter cities/SEZs and new city/country projects but I'm more skeptical this is a practical avenue for making money. There are plenty of established jurisdictions to do this (e.g. basically all the former British colonies, a few American states) and the 'infrastructure' of lawyers, accountants, etc. who know how to deal with it are already established. This is the same reason I don't get why people are bullish on e-Residency for Honduras, Liberland, etc. What's the real value prop of incorporating an entity in these places?

With CRS/FATCA infecting almost every country, then that might be the reason?

100 people is about 5m² per person. That's already a crowd. The island is smaller than Times Square. It's 100 times smaller than Vatican City, it's in fact a fifth the size of St Peter's square.

Isn't it 60m2 per person?

49 m² per person, enough for a small house, not 5. If you build a skyscraper (or, more ambitiously, underground) you could have luxury space for hundreds of people. Energy would be a problem, but not as much of a problem as the Belizean government.

    $ units
    Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2019-05-31 
    3460 units, 109 prefixes, 109 nonlinear units

    You have: 1.2 acres
    You want: 
            Definition: 4856.2277 m^2
    You have: 1.2 acres/100 people
    You want: 
            Definition: 48.562277 m^2

Coming soon: Caribbean Walled City

Less useful in the era of high explosive artillery shells, much less high-altitude bombers, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and precision-guided munitions.

I think this has nothing to do with defence and everything to do with Kowloon Walled City that was sort of a no law enclave where everything was built very high and shoulder to shoulder to maximize floor space.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

Oh, I was just thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walled_city, which describes nearly all cities for the past ten thousand years, though less so for the last 5% of that time.

Belize has already let Carnival dredge and basically create their own. Including their own port now too I think?

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