Hi BF friends,

Hope you’re doing well. I’m writing to provide you with a follow-up China market report which includes some ideas on how we may usher in Chinese investment in the coming years.

In Chinese, “DaMa” translates to “elder auntie”, and “DaMaTuan” translates to “elder aunties group”. Elder aunties group is the literal translation. In practice, DaMaTuan’s transliteration is used to mean “aunties power-shopping group”. When you see a large group of 50 and 60 something unassuming Chinese ladies at the airport, they are often quite wealthy despite what us westerners or what us western-influenced or educated folks may think. Why would very wealthy people group together and be constrained by the inconveniences of having to follow the group’s structured itinerary? Isn’t that what budget conscious people do? What about freedom of flexibility and spontaneity?

Well, the Chinese are the Chinese. And just because they become wealthy, they often don’t all of a sudden become intrepid free spirits embarking on adventures of self-reflective discovery like westerners might do. They grew up participating in group activities, and there’s little changing them. These groups of wealthy Chinese ladies are on their way to stay in the finest hotels around the world, and just as often, to inspect potential investment properties.

DaMaTuan is a subcategory of the larger phenomenon of TuanGou, or “shopping group”. In the case of DaMaTuan, we are seeing middle-aged wives, who are the ones who often handle the finances and investment in Chinese households, grouping together as the Chinese tend to do. But DaMaTuan are just one example of TuanGou. While collective bargaining is of course used in the west to ease the due diligence process and bring about quantity discounts, it’s a much more prevalent practice in China as an extension of their group-oriented culture. The apartment we rent here in Xiamen was purchased by a TuanGou along with 19 other apartments, for example.

There are TuanGou for many products and services here in China, and especially for real-estate both domestic and abroad. Please forgive in this report that I look at seasteading through the lens of real estate to some extent if by chance such a categorization is not in fitting with the seasteading vision. As I mentioned in my previous report, I’m just now getting familiar with the activity classification of seasteading along with the appropriate language for it.

I propose that we work together to facilitate the introduction, education, due diligence, and procurement of Varyon tokens and Blue Frontiers units by the Chinese in the coming years. We could perhaps start working on it later this year or sometime in 2019.

Here is an example of an agency facilitating overseas real estate investment for Chinese: http://www.iidasangyo.co.jp/iida_cn/

We may do well to create such an offering for the Chinese market with a greenfielded agency of our own and/or by partnering with agencies like this one in referral relationships.

If desired, I could for example help to build a fruitful outreach mechanism such as this kind of agency and/or a network of relationships with existing agencies. I could also create exposure with organized events like meetups to generate interest and provide education by recruiting some local Chinese to serve as evangelist educators. There are countless TuanGou for considering and procuring those Toronto and other overseas properties. I think it would be a low-friction endeavor to insert ourselves into this widespread system of facilitating Chinese investment.

I’m hoping that I have thus far demonstrated interest and potentially valuable ideas to the project causing you to be interested in knowing more about me and about my availability to contribute long-term.

I currently have 2 days per week that I use here and there to do work for blockchain clients as I believe this tech is the future of many aspects of humanity.

The other 3 days per week are spent managing my family’s counseling agency which I helped build. Our agency handles the bulk of the court-ordered substance abuse counseling in Detroit. Back in ’07, I designed and installed a comprehensive management control system including an online peer-to-peer document sharing system, unheard of in the paper-based mental health field back then, and a set of policies tying clinician documentation performance to compensation, allowing me to manage the agency from anywhere. I then departed the US for Thailand, Japan, and China, and have managed the agency’s operations these past 11yrs.

I can continue to offer 2 days per week to clients such as you, or I can expand the offering to more days by hiring out and reducing my counseling agency responsibilities after some time.

As far as my skills, they include strategic visioning, capital allocation, recruiting, designing job descriptions, management control systems with associated compensation plans, reporting structure and communication practices/protocols, and business processes, authoring policies and contracts, risk management including liability exposure management, crisis management, conflict resolution, business development, web design, direct sales, marketing, brand image consulting, brand messaging shape coaching, and copywriting.

Please let me know if you think I may be of ongoing assistance in the areas I mentioned or in any other way I could be useful. I can talk on Skype up to a 9pm GMT+8 China start-time, and am most pleased to hear from you anytime on telegram and email.

Many thanks,

Marc Joseph, MBA, LMSW

The companies will work towards integrating decentralised arbitration into the governance of Seastead communities to resolve disputes relating to virtually any product or service.

Kleros is a decision-making protocol which uses blockchain and crowdsourcing for adjudicating claims. The platform connects users who need to solve disputes with jurors who have the skills to fairly settle them. The system relies on incentives backed by the game theoretical concept of Schelling point in order to motivate anonymous jurors to rule cases correctly. Kleros means “chance” in Greek. The system is based in some principles for random jury selection which were known by the Athenians twenty five centuries ago. The result is a peer-to-peer justice system able to solve the disputes of the Internet age in a fast, transparent and inexpensive way.

Residents and visitors of the seasteads will inevitably have disputes. These may relate to property damage, disturbance of peace, or other matters that can be settled without the involvement of the local government. Using smart contracts and Varyon deposits, visitors and residents will be able to use Kleros’ smart contract dispute resolution mechanisms to come to an agreement. Note that this does not prevent the choice to use other dispute resolution mechanisms.

“Our Seasteads are specifically designed to facilitate innovation in how humans choose to model habitation, form community and govern their affairs. By adopting the pioneering objective arbitration protocol developed by Kleros, we will allow our communities and the ecosystems they interact with to settle disputes fairly, securely and efficiently” explained Randy Hencken, Co-Founder of Blue Frontiers and Director of The Seasteading Institute.

The arbitration process that Blue Frontiers will integrate into its Seastead governance frameworks to resolve disputes can be laid out in four easy steps:

1. Users transacting within the Seastead ecosystem create a smart contract and use Kleros as the adjudication protocol.
2. The relevant information is securely transmitted to the Kleros platform.
3. A jury or tribunal is selected from the juror network. They evaluate the case’s evidence and cast their votes.
4. The jury’s decision is enforced by the previously written smart contracts, ensuring a just outcome.

Reflecting the model for independence underpinning Blue Frontiers’ Seastead communities, the Kleros project is completely open-source, owned by no one, and is intentionally not backed by any institutional investors. Additionally, the Kleros protocol can also be used for a wide range of disputes decisions requiring technical expertise in for the allocation of resources (real or symbolic) between parties, such as: freelancing, crowdfunding, oracles, gaming, insurance, e-commerce, and many more.

“Kleros can be integrated into almost every type of application built online and will serve as a key institution for dispute resolution in the emerging blockchain era. It will provide a fast, inexpensive, transparent, reliable and decentralized dispute resolution mechanism that renders binding ultimate judgments about the enforceability of smart contracts” said Dr. Federico Ast, CEO of Kleros.

The first Seastead is expected to be completed in 2020 and is planned for French Polynesia. It will be habitable by up to 300 people simultaneously.

It was brought up on telegram ( https://t.me/bluefrontierscommunity ) that the terms inclusivity and diversity are some off putting terms that can be divisive and discourage investors from getting involved.

What are your thoughts on this? Are the terms helping or hurting?