029 - Jose Birkin: Montelibero, Libertarian Governance & Tokenomics

Timothy Allen talks with Montelibero community member Jose Birkin. This conversation was my first in Montenegro within the Montelibero community. Montelibero is an intentional community of mostly Russian speaking libertarians that appears in our free communities directory.  Myself and Peter Young traveled there last month on a fact finding mission to see what kind of progress is being made in their quest to become 'a role model of liberty in practice in Montenegro'. Due to it’s decentralised nature, there are no spokespeople as such who can speak on behalf of the community as a whole but one individual who goes by the name of Jose Birkin (not his real name of course) stepped up to answer my questions about the ins and outs of running a start-up intentional community such as this. A quick word of warning before you dive in.  For an hour or so we ended up talking quite intensely about the blockchain tokenomics system that the community uses to transact internally, track ownership of land titles and make community decisions etc, and this part of the conversation may become a little tedious for some of you since I was not of the opinion that one needs to use a blockchain in this situation. As a result I did rather labour the point somewhat in order to get the whole thing straight in my head.   Long and short of it is…. whilst I still think that their solution is not necessarily a good long term one, I now understand their reasons why they chose it. Other than that we talk about the history of the community, the pros and cons of building in Montenegro and how the community functions without having any one person in charge. I also get to ask the question “Who will build the roads?”  which is always a pleasure, so look out for that one and look out also in the future for more interviews that I conducted whilst I was there with further residents of Montelibero who have either bought land or property there. Montelibero is an exciting experiment and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and I would like to offer another big thank you to the community who welcomed us with open arms during our time in the country. Enjoy the conversation. TWITTER: Montelibero (English): ⁠⁠https://twitter.com/theMontelibero Montelibero (Russian): https://twitter.com/MonteliberoFSPE Timothy Allen: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/MrTimothyAllen⁠⁠⁠ Free Cities Foundation: ⁠⁠https://twitter.com/freecitiesfound⁠⁠ OTHER LINKS: Montelibero Telegram Chat: ⁠⁠https://t.me/FSPE_Montenegro Montelibero Website: https://montelibero.org/ Free Cities Foundation: ⁠⁠https://free-cities.org/⁠