Billionaire Bunkers Won't Work

They'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes.

Sam Bankman-Fried, who presided over the $30 billion collapse of the FTX crypto-fraud, apparently wanted to buy a south pacific nation to create a doomsday bunker in case society collapses.

This won’t work. You are only a billionaire because the laws of society defend your wealth. When civilization collapses into anarchy, those laws disappear. Sure, you can hire a company of mercenaries to defend your position at the top — but what’s to stop the mercenary leader from just ousting you and taking your place?

Putin is already experiencing this. He’s not the absolute dictator of Russia. His military is so hapless because for decades he’s kept it too weak to challenge him as leader. He was almost deposed recently by the competent mercenaries he hired to help invade Ukraine. He struggles to keep the public, the oligarchs, the military, the intelligence units, at odds with each other so nobody deposes him.

It’s the weird irony of the crypto-bros. They are on one hand preaching a new world order of crypto-anarchy, but their position on top of the food chain is entirely dependent on the “archy” — the system of laws that prevents others from simply stealing all their wealth.

The blockchain won’t save you. No matter how secure your crypto wallet, somebody with a gun will simply tie you to a chair and torture you until you give up all your secrets and empty your wallet. The only thing stopping them is the police.

Consider ProtonMail, the encrypted/anonymous email service that activists use. The company is based in Switzerland because of the fine line between archy and anarchy. Switzerland has enough laws that nobody will hold a gun to their head and force them to disclose secrets, but enough guaranteed freedoms that law enforcement or the NSA likewise can’t likewise steal their secrets.

Consider if ProtonMail were based in Russia instead. Putin would be demanding they hand over anything related to Russian dissidents. Consider if they were based in Panama instead. The local police wouldn’t bother you, but you’d have the NSA breaking in installing backdoors into your server hardware. Or maybe you go to a failed state like Somalia or Sudan, in that case, they’d simply come and steal the servers to melt down and sell the recycled metal.

Anarchy is hard to maintain because there’s nothing stopping somebody from taking charge.

I experienced this when visiting the Occupy Wall Street in NYC. Anarchists took over the park. I was sitting in the quietest spot, at a table, typing up a blogpost. Organizers came over and asked, then threatened, me to move because they wanted to setup for a later event at the spot. Even though the park was open to everyone, owned by the nearby property company, they considered themselves now in “control”, and anybody not complying with their demands was now an enemy of the state, deserving to be punished.

Order often emerges from chaos. A lot of systems are self-governing, homeostatic. A lot of the Internet works this way. Things like “network neutrality” don’t need to be regulated because it’s self-regulating. Indeed, such “network neutrality” hasn’t ever been the law, and the problems activists claim would happen, haven’t.

Some things aren’t self-regulating. We see that with the boom/bust ponzi schemes with cryptocurrencies and NFTs. And that’s when they are truly decentralized. Hidden behind all this is the fact that almost all of it has centralized control. That’s why scams like FTX happen.

I’m a huge fan of cryptocurrency and smart contracts. The “archy” of the police being able to see every financial transaction is a problem. In the US, the FBI has access (without a warrant) to every bank transfer and credit card purchase. They deliberately refuse to make cash available in any unit larger to $100, and have the right to confiscate your cash if you carry more than a few thousand dollars on you.

The point is that there is a tension here — and Sam Bankman-Fried is on the wrong side. His wealth came from defrauding the system, and then relied upon the system to maintain it.

When the revolution comes, he’ll be up against the wall. There’s just no reason for anybody to follow him. As civilization is crashing, how is he going to pay the pilot to fly his private jet to the bunker? What’s he going to have in the bunker? Cryptocurrency isn’t going to help, because presumably the Internet has crashed. It would have to be stacks of gold. But of course, everyone that transported that gold is going to know of its existence and will come to steal it. Who is going to defend it? Not mercs — they’ll just steal it. Maybe automated defenses? But they require maintenance, and in any case, will have vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Just release a bunch of rats, and then cats, onto the islands, and the automated turrets will soon run out of bullets as the turrets try to shoot all the living things.

What value does Bankman-Fried have after society collapses? He’s not a charismatic type that inspires loyalty. No matter how select his circle of friends, as soon as there is a disagreement about who is going to wash the dishes or unclog the waste disposal system, he’ll be deposed.

As a hacker, I have a certain sympathy for post-apocalyptic fiction, stories about how once the old order collapses, that we can finally be free of its constraints. But when you walk through the problems, it just doesn’t work. Too much law-and-order is a problem, but so is too little. So many of the good things we take for granted come from order: like clean water, sewers, roads, people stopping at stoplights, people not showing up at your house and robbing you at gunpoint. The post-apocalyptic fiction conveniently leave out the important bits, like how your lazy neighbor comes in the night to steal the radishes from your garden.

I have a rural property that’s nominally off-the-grid, sufficient on solar panel, battery, well water, septic field, endless supply of firewood, lake teaming with catfish, a garden, and a Starlink uplink to the Internet that includes cell phone service. But the surrounding area is full of families with neer-do-well kids happy to live in an old school bus on their parents property. When society collapses, I’d better have stocked up on a lot of ammo to defend my garden.

One of the classic ethics problems in post-apocalyptic fiction is that after the end, only the complete bastards will survive. In the mad scramble for the last tins of canned food, only those willing to be vile will survive. No good person is going to end up being in control of the bunker.

Sam Bankman-Fried is a useless toad in the society we have now. There’s no bunker that will shelter him in the collapse of civilization. His best strategy is to find some merc leader, stick them in command, and hope do IT work maintaining the hardware for scraps of food.