The previous issue began with a description of the drainage work on the road leading to the future Monte Libero settlement. Over the past month, the drainage has been seriously improved. First, at the very beginning of the road, the area near the spring was completely concreted, and the overflow from the basin was routed into a pipe under this concrete platform.

Secondly, further up the road, wherever there is a risk of erosion, even a small drainage ditch has been added. In general, the road definitely won’t wash away now. Please forgive me for highlighting such minor details, but with the treacherous weather here, you learn to appreciate exactly those details.

While filling in the internal roads of the settlement, serious drainage was required in one particular spot. Upon closer inspection, it was discovered that groundwater runs close to the surface in this area, and for now, water is seeping directly onto the road. This means we have solved the water supply problem! Or rather, we’ve found an approach to the solution. Now the plan is to lead this water aside along the road across the entire width of the aquifer and collect it in a storage basin, from where it can then be used. In short, to do roughly the same thing as we did down there where we concreted the platform. For now, of course, it looks unsightly:

And besides water supply and drainage, the settlement will also need sewage. We decided to make one common septic tank, and it is already practically ready; all that’s left is to dig a drainage ditch away from it (is that too much drainage in one post?), and then sewage pipes will need to be laid throughout the settlement.

We invited a surveyor, and with his help, we divided all the land into separate plots, which are intended to be privatized. My plot is roughly in the center of this image, with an area of 202 sq.m. I hope that in some time I will be able to delight you in my Instagram with images from my own personal construction.

But actually, besides these two large pieces of land, we were also sold an exclave as an add-on—a piece slightly smaller than seven hundred square meters, to which we have no way of bringing a road except through the neighbors.

We have finally cleared it of thick brush as well. It turned out that it is even terraced, which will save some money on its development.

With all these chores, I haven’t yet had the chance to mount a few solar panels on the roof of the hut (there is a stupid regulation here forbidding the placement of panels on the ground, intended to limit solar generation strictly to domestic needs) and check whether all this is capable of powering a miner. But we hope to get to this soon.

Of course, activity within the project is not limited to construction. We have gradually formed a team for creating various targeted promotional content. They released a video with an annual report on the entire project,

as well as a separate video in the local dialect describing unconditional basic income.

There is an opinion that libertarians are social Darwinists who would happily watch the weak die off and clear the field. In practice, however, mutual aid is quite developed in our small community, and project participants from the outside world have decided to support those who have already moved, regularly chipping in money, from which an unconditional income is paid weekly to all libertarians who moved to Montenegro as part of the Monte Libero project—simply the contents of the piggy bank are divided equally among everyone. This is roughly how social welfare works under ancap, without any taxes. For now, it comes to about two and a half euros per person per week, meaning about ten a month. This amount could increase if more people want to fill the pot, or decrease if more people move in while contributions remain the same. Overall, it is an interesting experiment, and it is still waiting for its team of sociologists for a correct description.

Another social program within the project is bike rentals. For about a month, a couple stayed with us, who during that time rode and explored the entire area, for which they bought a pair of bikes. Now this transport has been handed over to the project, and it can be borrowed for donations.

Another subtle but important area of activity in the project is the improvement of tokenomics—the cryptocurrency engine on which everything revolves. The financial reporting of the Monte Libero fund is becoming clearer, signing transactions with multi-sig, and most importantly, reading them before signing, is becoming more convenient (which means more mindful participation in fund management), and our IT specialists have big plans for implementing various new features. Thus, a branch of the fund in Liquid—a Bitcoin sidechain—is gradually being polished. For now, all tokenomics run on the Stellar blockchain, which means hardcore Bitcoiners simply won’t join us because alts are “cringe.” If it’s possible to implement the necessary functionality within the toolkit available in the older and more venerable currency, it could potentially add more investors.

Recently, news flickered that the Slovenian visa center in Montenegro has closed for quarantine, and this is worrying because it was the easiest way to get a Schengen visa here in Montenegro. The thing is, we want to take a Monte Libero delegation at the end of April to a large libertarian convention in Prague, however, COVID and bureaucracy are capable of seriously complicating this task. So, not everything is smooth, but it’s okay, we’ll push through.