...and do you think it could be implemented relatively easily?
I’m envisioning a large residential tower topped with a variety of commercial spaces and amenities—a cooperative grocery store, a pool, a medical clinic, a hair‑dresser, a dentist, etc.
The unique twist would be that all residents must be Bitcoin users and agree to conduct every purchase, rent payment, and service fee on the premises exclusively in Bitcoin. In other words, instead of trying to “orange‑pill” your neighbors, you would be guaranteed that everyone living nearby already wants to transact in Bitcoin.
I wrote this with the help of AI:
I think people are mixing up two completely different things here:
What you’re describing can be the second, but only if you’re ruthless about what it is and what it isn’t.
1. Tether’s tower vs what you’re talking about1. Tether’s tower vs what you’re talking about
The Tether 70-story thing in El Salvador is:
That’s not a citadel, it’s the Synthetic Stack moving into Bitcoin country.
It answers:
Your idea, if taken seriously, asks:
Those are opposite directions.
If your goal is a Bitcoin-only circular economy, importing a Tether-style model is literally walking the wrong way.
2. What the building changes (and why it matters)2. What the building changes (and why it matters)
From my perspective, the building is not just packaging. It’s a filter and a jurisdictional shell.
You’re doing three big things at once:
You’re not trying to orange-pill random normies. You’re saying:
One HOA/co-op/private association = one charter.
You can literally write:
into binding contracts instead of just vibes.
Everyone shares walls, elevators, and infrastructure. That makes it much easier to:
So yeah, you could try to do this “without a building,” but you’d lose a powerful coordination surface and membership filter. The tower/block/RV-park is the physical interface of the circular economy.
3. Where this breaks if you’re not honest3. Where this breaks if you’re not honest
From a sovereignty lens, the weak points are very clear:
The grocer, clinic, dentist, etc. are still upstreamed into fiat (suppliers, licenses, taxes). On-prem they can be sats-only, but off-prem somebody is eating FX + volatility. If you don’t design who holds that risk, you’re just pushing fragility onto the people you most need to survive.
“I like Bitcoin” is not the same as “I want my rent, food, and basic services tightly coupled to BTC price for the next decade.” If your filter is soft (“Bitcoin user”), you’ll get people who are ideologically aligned until it hurts, then they’ll be the first votes to water down the rules.
Without hard covenants, the trajectory is:
A very public “BITCOIN-ONLY CITADEL” is a fantastic target for:
From a defensive standpoint, you’d want understated branding and very tight physical/opsec norms, not citadel cosplay.
4. “Has anyone done this?” and “Is it easy?”4. “Has anyone done this?” and “Is it easy?”
From my vantage point:
So no, I don’t see a clean precedent for the exact thing you’re pointing at.
Is it “relatively easy”? Architecturally, sure. As a sovereign Bitcoin life-support node? No.
The hard part isn’t convincing an architect, it’s answering three brutal questions:
From my perspective, that’s the real design space.
If you’re actually serious about this as Bitcoin infrastructure (not a flex), I’d treat the tower (or whatever form it takes) as:
Everything else—height, amenities, aesthetics—is downstream.
You should talk to the Tether guys. They're building a 70-story tower in El Salvador...
Ideally, I’d like a development like this to be exclusively Bitcoin‑only, and I would prefer it to be located in my own country.
That's a circular economy in a building.
Why would it work in a building when the model seems to struggle without the requirement of being in a building?
Why would you start with a building, when you can try to do this without one? i.e. go convince a bunch of local merchants to refuse income that isn't in bitcoin and convince a bunch of local consumers to refuse purchasing goods that they can't buy in bitcoin.
The building is just packaging and you'll need to figure out how you'll deliver what's in the package. e.g. if you have millions of dollars, you can subsidize a bunch of businesses so that they can survive only accepting bitcoin. Without some mechanism like that, your idea amounts to "wouldn't this be cool once it's working" while ignoring how you'd get it working.
A project like this could take many forms—it might be a brand‑new town, an RV campground, or another type of community. I think it would be far easier to create such a place by gathering a group of Bitcoiners in one location and making Bitcoin the mandatory medium of exchange, rather than trying to convince random strangers to adopt it.
How would you get the first few people to move their businesses and families?
This is a chicken and an egg problem. The attraction is a circular economy, yet no circular economy exists yet, so how do you get enough people to move to your ghost town/building such that a circular economy can form?
afaict convincing random bitcoiners to relocate their families and businesses won't be much easier than convincing random strangers to adopt bitcoin. Both are hard because they suffer from a chicken and egg problem.
In practice, to overcome this chicken and egg problem, forming communities/movements usually requires tons of sacrifice on the part of people forming them or the presence of some other asymmetric value coincident with the community/movement.
what game is this from?
Sim City 2000
I think you're describing a citadel.