what is a crypto city?

Sounds a good idea?

Some are still waiting for the idea to materialise:

Waiting out Bukele's 'Bitcoin City' on a Salvadoran beach

El Salvador: The American still waiting for ‘Bitcoin City’ - France 24

Some were sceptical from the beginning:

A golden city on the coast of the tropical Pacific. A metal walkway suspended above a verdant volcano. And a glossy marina that looks like it belongs in Monte Carlo rather than a near failed-state besieged by some of the world’s most violent criminals.

The detailed gilded model released this week of ‘Bitcoin city’ – the first ever dedicated cryptocurrency trading hub, to be built on El Salvador’s western shore and powered by geothermal energy from a volcano – is nothing if not spectacular.

The grandiose project is the brainchild of the troubled Central American nation’s headline-grabbing populist president, Nayib Bukele, arguably now the world’s foremost cryptocurrency evangelist after foisting Bitcoin as legal tender on his largely bewildered compatriots last year. In September, every El Salvadoran citizen was given $30 worth of Bitcoin in a government issued crypto wallet – although many reported that the money mysteriously disappeared from their accounts.

Meanwhile Bukele, a 40-year-old former businessman and marketing executive with a serious Twitter habit and a penchant for wearing baseball caps backwards, has risked the ire of the International Monetary Fund, who say he is taking gratuitously ‘large risks’ with El Salvador’s precarious economy.

With the world’s highest murder rate, ravaged by mara street gangs, cartels funnelling cocaine from the Andes up to the United States, and an annual per capita GDP of just £3,000, you might think that Bukele had more pressing — and realistic — priorities than turning the region of La Union, an impoverished rural backwater on the Pacific Coast where Bitcoin city will be built, into the epicentre of the highly volatile crypto-revolution.

The madness of El Salvador’s Bitcoin city | The Spectator

Here's a further look:

Blockchain City | Crypto Documentary | Blockchain Technology - YouTube

There is a lot of interest, of course, from the tech and finance sectors - but how much of this is hype?

Definition of Bitcoin City | PCMag

Crypto millionaires building their own cities in Central America | MIT Technology Review

New, futuristic 'blockchain cities' are just castles in the air - Blockworks

AI generated art with the terms “solar punk cityscape, smart city, crypto city, network state”

Here’s my working definition, informed by Vitalik’s blog post on Crypto Cities, Balaji’s book The Network State, and my own experience studying and working in urban planning and city government:

A crypto city is an IRL (in real life) city with a government that uses crypto technology to operate and govern.

The word “crypto” in front of “city” doesn’t give any hints about the physical design or master plan of the city in real life. It is not associated with any particular city style like new urbanism or towers in a park, but refers mainly to the operation and governance of a city. In this definition, crypto is not short for cryptocurrency, but cryptography, which is the underlying technology that gives us both blockchains and cryptocurrency.

What is a Crypto City? - by Nicholas Bonard - Crypto Cities

There's even a game:

CryptoCities

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