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:
Filter You’re not trying to orange-pill random normies. You’re saying:
“If you live here, you already want to use Bitcoin, and you agree that on-prem, we speak sats only.” That’s a very different problem than “convince my street.”
Local law layer One HOA/co-op/private association = one charter. You can literally write:
leases, dues, reserves, and internal fees are denominated and settled in BTC,
merchants on-site agree to quote and settle in BTC, into binding contracts instead of just vibes.
High-bandwidth coordination Everyone shares walls, elevators, and infrastructure. That makes it much easier to:
standardize Lightning/wallet/PoS setups,
run a shared routing node or liquidity pool,
have a building treasury in BTC,
rapidly coordinate security and upgrades.
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.
From a sovereignty lens, the weak points are very clear:
Supply chains: 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.
Residents’ reality: “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.
Governance drift: Without hard covenants, the trajectory is:
Bitcoin-only → “ok, one exception” → “Bitcoin-friendly building” → “normal building with orange nostalgia.” You’d need supermajority thresholds, transfer restrictions, and explicit language that “on-prem = sats or nothing” is not negotiable without basically dissolving the project.
Attack surface: A very public “BITCOIN-ONLY CITADEL” is a fantastic target for:
thieves,
kidnappers,
lazy journalists,
bored regulators. From a defensive standpoint, you’d want understated branding and very tight physical/opsec norms, not citadel cosplay.
We have BTC-heavy enclaves (Bitcoin Beach/Jungle/etc).
We have Bitcoin-branded real estate and now a Tether skyscraper.
But we do not have a serious attempt at:
pre-filtered residents,
on-prem Bitcoin-only rules enforced by contract,
mixed-use daily life (housing + groceries + clinic + services) in one coherent shell.
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:
Who are the first 30–50 households and 2–3 critical merchants that move in before it’s comfortable?
What asymmetric upside do they get for taking that risk (cheaper rent, equity, lifestyle edge, genuine community, jurisdictional advantage), so this isn’t just martyrdom cosplay?
How do you lock the Bitcoin-only norm in place so it doesn’t evaporate the first time BTC nukes 70% and half the residents panic about their “rent in sats”?
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:
a Sovereign Stack node inside a fiat/synthetic environment,
with Bitcoin not as a payment gimmick, but as the base law of that micro-jurisdiction.
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.