When I first heard that a bunch of new-age hippy crypto investors were planning to move to
Puerto Rico and literally build their own city, I had a number of reactions.

My first reaction: Uncontrollable, thigh-slapping laughter.

You know that embarrassing pig-snort people do with their nose? That was me. Not because I don’t believe in blockchain, mind you – I’m a cryptocurrency journalist and a firm advocate of the technology. I just thought that this was the latest in a long series of the half-baked ideas in the cryptocurrency space – I’m just barely getting over the Useless Ethereum Token ICO fundraiser receiving over 300 grand simply for being… useless.

However, Puertopia sounded ambitious if nothing else, so I looked into a little more. I learned about the vast amount of resources involved, and I heard who exactly was behind the whole thing. Let’s just say I’m not laughing any more.

The Plan

I’m going to preface this by saying yes, they’re serious, and yes, they might actually have the money to do this. The group, currently consisting of dozens of millionaires and billionaires are considering buying 250,000 acres of land in Puerto Rico to construct “Puertopia”, a city where the only money is cryptocurrency and all digital records are stored on secure, unhackable blockchain technology.

Actually, they’re thinking of changing the name to “Sol” because “Puertopia” in Latin translates to “Eternal Playground for Boys” and some people thought that was… kind of weird.

I have to admit it could be an interesting experiment. A major obstacle faced by this new technology is mainstream adoption, and the crypto-utopia could demonstrate how smoothly things might operate were cryptocurrency and blockchain to be more accepted within our society. As a US territory, Puerto Rico won’t charge the super-wealthy investors any federal or capital gains tax, which members like Reeve Collins of the hugely controversial Tether project admit is a major draw.

However, the tax breaks aren’t the only attraction – these investors also came to capitalize on the natural disaster that befell Puerto Rico last year.
Hurricane Maria devastated the territory and destroyed much of the local infrastructure, leaving locals without power for months, and many still affected.

The disaster resulted in cheap property in need of refurbishment hitting the market as locals were displaced by the storm, and corresponded with a huge increase in the value of cryptocurrencies as well.

CNET news site founder Halsey Minor took advantage of the natural disaster and moved his entire blockchain company to Puerto Rico, referring to the hurricane as “godsend”.

Yeah. No comment.

The plan is a little further along than you might expect – almost one hundred investors have already moved to Puerto Rico to realize this utopian vision of a futuristic blockchain city (and no taxes) and are holed up in San Juan, buying up hotels and other buildings suddenly available to them. They congregate in one hotel called The Monastery, and from there that they plan the future of their community.

It’s interesting that an area with power shortages was chosen for a movement fueled by cryptocurrency, which can be extremely power-consuming – one Bitcoin consumes the same amount of energy as dozens of Puerto Rican homes, many of which are still suffering outages. It all begs the question – what’s the goal here?

Advocates of the movement claim that they are “benevolent capitalists” spreading a movement that’s all about peace and restoration. The millionaires and billionaires descending upon the battered tax haven say they want to help Puerto Rico and improve upon overpriced local infrastructure, with mixed reactions from locals.

While some feel that the movement could bring in new money, others believe that it’s a form of crypto-colonialism, and that the billionaires exclusively using cryptocurrency will be operating in an economic sphere that will rarely interact with or benefit locals. In any case, there’s nothing they can do against the rich and powerful but wait and see what the future brings as more and more elite investors follow the call to set up their companies and funds in crypto utopia.

Who’s behind it all?

Here’s where things get really interesting.
The leader of the Puertopia movement is Brock Pierce, a man whose name I first heard years ago in a documentary called “An Open Secret“. Pierce became a member of the Bitcoin Foundation in 2014, prompting several other members to resign to avoid being associated with him, including prominent community leader Andreas Antonopoulos.

A former child star, Pierce rose from fame to notoriety after his executive role in notable dot-com failure Digital Entertainment Network or “DEN” with Marc Collins Rector as his company partner. DEN was a network targeting a young male demographic and largely featuring young boys in their segments. The company was set to receive $75 million in an IPO in 1999, but the fundraiser was cancelled after the executives were accused of running a child-sex ring, and the company collapsed shortly afterwards as all three executives (Collins- Rector, his underage boyfriend Chad Shackley, and Brock Pierce) fled the country and went into hiding.

The three of them were accused of rape, human trafficking, and coercing young boys with guns and drugs in a civil suit that was awarded to the accusers by default – Brock Pierce and the other defendants were still at large in Europe at the time. They were eventually caught and arrested in Spain during a raid on their shared home, where (according to the LA Times) the police discovered copious amounts of child pornography. Collins-Rector was extradited to the US after spending some time in Spanish jail with Shackley and Pierce, who were released.

Mark Collins-Rector pled guilty to a number of crimes and is now a convicted sex offender.
Having evaded their court case, the other two were never criminally charged and Brock Pierce remained a free man, going on to be sued again in 2007 – this time for fraud.

Back to Puertopia/Sol

Reportedly Pierce is now something of a new age practitioner and a viewed as a spiritual leader by the other Puertopians, described as spending time nestled in trees, kissing the feet of old men in the street, and using crystals in rituals to connect with the earth. He seems to have completely re-invented himself when compared to his image as one of the most notorious figures in cryptocurrency.

Upon news of the project, the public have mostly been interested in the potential technological implications of the new city, and that’s understandable. It’s a fascinating project, and it’s valuable to look at it objectively, removed from the context of the leadership. But that context and that leadership should not be swept under the rug either, especially if these people are really going through with their project. To me it sounds like a collective of elite investors are following an alleged pedophile and fraudster, a court-case- dodging fugitive from justice, to a tax haven devastated by natural disasters to set up what they’ve named in Latin the “Eternal Playground for Boys”

The Eternal Playground for Boys, led by Brock Pierce.

Is this supposed to be some kind of sick joke?
Whether it is or it isn’t it’s an absurd and compelling story, and one I want people to be aware of. You don’t need to be familiar with blockchain to have an opinion on this – are those self-proclaimed benevolent capitalists there to help or harm?

Is it wrong to flock to a ravaged area and buy up all the land, or could it potentially improve local infrastructure in ways that the US government has not? Part of me wants nothing more to do with the whole thing, but I’m sure I’ll be following the story closely despite myself to find out just what the hell those people are going to end up doing over there, way out in the Caribbean “paradise” of Puertopia.

For a more in-depth look at this topic, checkout our podcast on the whole thing below.