When I first heard and read about Seasteading, I thought it was mostly well thought out, but that it hadn’t reached its goal of providing a business plan that would support a small group of non-wealthy people to set up the first seastead in international waters.
Now Peter Thiel has donated $500,000 to fund a new organization called The Seasteading Institute. My intuition is that it will take somewhere between $2 million and $20 million of charitable contributions to reach the threshold of resources needed for a seastead to become viable in international waters. But the first big donation is typically harder for a nonprofit to get than subsequent donations, and the size of this initial donation (with only a rudimentary organization) suggests that there’s a good chance that more money can be raised once more specific plans are developed and more people indicate commitments to implement them.