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STOREY COUNTY: Huge plot of land in the Nevada desert – larger than nearby Reno – has been the subject of local intrigue since a record-breaking company, Blockchains LLC, bought it $ 170 million in cash this year.
The company's owner, Jeffrey Berns, a lawyer and millionaire in the field of cryptocurrency, put on a helmet and boarded a Polaris all-terrain vehicle last week to tour the vast property. and dispel the mystery a bit.
He imagines a sort of experimental community spread over about 100 square miles, where houses, schools, commercial districts and production studios will be built. The centerpiece of this giant project will be the blockchain, a new database introduced by Bitcoin.
After his driver stopped the Polaris on a desert high plateau, surrounded by blooming rabbits and a herd of wild horses on pasture, Berns, 56, highlighted the highlights of his dream community.
"You see this first mountain range," he said, pointing south. "These mountains are the border of our southern valley. That's where we will build the High Tech Park, "a research campus covering hundreds of acres. It is also planned to create a college and an online games arena.
As strange – even fantastic – as it may seem, Berns ambitions fit perfectly into the idiosyncratic world of crypto-currencies and blockchains.
The blockchain began as a large digital book on which all bitcoin transactions are recorded. Some aficionados have grandiose projects. They think that this could be a new way of regaining power to the institutions they think are calling every time.
Just as Bitcoin made it possible to transfer money without resorting to a bank, blockchain supporters like Berns believe that technology will allow ordinary citizens to control their own data – the engine of the digital economy – without relying on large companies or governments.
There is a fuzzy line between these utopian visions and rapid enrichment schemes. Several cryptocurrency projects have been stopped by the regulators; alleged executioners have been arrested; and a project to turn Puerto Rico into cryptocurrency has been criticized as a mere attempt to take advantage of the island's status as a tax haven.
Berns was attracted to Nevada for its tax benefits, including the absence of income taxes. And the magnitude of its ambitions certainly raises the risk of a boondoggle.
But he is different from his crypto brothers: he spends his own money. Until now, he said, he spent $ 300 million on land, offices, planning and 70 people. And buying 67,000 acres largely underdeveloped is a bit of an old-fashioned, real estate risk.
Nevertheless, Berns said his ambition was not to become a real estate mogul, nor even to become rich – or richer. It promises to yield all the decision-making power of the project and 90% of the dividends it generates to a business structure owned by residents, employees and prospective investors. This structure, which he calls a "distributed collaborative entity", is supposed to work on a blockchain where the property rights and the voting powers of each will be recorded in a digital wallet.
Berns acknowledged that all this went well beyond what the blockchains actually achieved. But that did not discourage him.
"I do not know why," he said about the roar of the Polaris engine. "I come – something in me tells me that's the answer, that if we can have enough people to trust the blockchain, we can begin to change all the systems by which we operate."
Berns has managed to win local elected officials eager for economic development. Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval read a proclamation naming the Blockchains Property Innovation Park at an event last month where Berns sat on a panel with Governor Elon Musk and Tesla's General Manager . The Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada, which has been described as the tallest building in the world, is surrounded by Blockchains terrain. Companies such as Google, Apple and Switch also have properties in the industrial park, surrounded by Berns holdings.
This week, it announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with one of the country's leading utilities, NV Energy, to join projects involving blockchain energy transactions.
Storey County, in Nevada County, has only 4,000 residents and was known until recently for its history of money mining and its modern brothels, which include the city of Nevada. one belonged to a county commissioner.
That same county commissioner, Lance Gilman, bought the land surrounding the brothel and turned it into an industrial park where Tesla and Google are now.
Blockchains has already received preliminary county support for a new city along the Truckee River, with thousands of homes, a school and drone delivery system, and is working closely with the county on a broader master plan.
But for now, Blockchains is an empty lot and a converted office building. According to Berns, the company will begin construction of the property as a whole before the end of 2019 at the earliest, after developing the master plan and having it approved by the county.
Berns has spent most of his professional life in class actions, often against financial corporations. He heard about bitcoin in 2012, but was conquered by another cryptocurrency called Ethereum, which stores more than just transaction data on a blockchain.
At a big sale in 2015, Berns bought Ether, the digital token associated with Ethereum. Thanks to an astronomical rise in Ether's price and well-placed sales last year before its collapse, he became rich enough to finance his dream project.
Ethereum is, according to him, what makes his community more than a gigantic real estate project. Understand why requires more than a little imagination. And faith. Each resident and employee will have an Ethereum address, which they will use to vote on local measures and keep their personal data.
Berns thinks that Ethereum will give people a way to control their identity and data online without the participation of governments or companies.
This is a widely shared view in the blockchain community, but the question of whether any of them can work in the real world is important. Most blockchain companies have failed to gain ground, and the Ethereum and Bitcoin networks have struggled to handle even moderate traffic.
Berns believes that one of the big problems is security. People have been terrible to hold the private keys needed to access a Bitcoin or Ethereum wallet.
He wants to solve this problem with a custom system in which the private keys of users are stored on multiple digital devices, in vaults, so that one device can not access the keys. He has already purchased vaults buried in the Swedish and Swedish mountains and plans to build additional vaults in the Nevada mountains.
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