CIA Factbook : The Most Serene Republic

Introduction: Founded cca 2014ⁱ, the Republicⁱⁱ is a terrorist organisation with explicit anti-statal and anti-democratic goals.ⁱⁱⁱ. Due to its very brief history to date as well as its (perhaps deliberately) vague nature, there isn't much that can be definitively said about its activity to date.^iv

Location: The Republic does not have any definite territory in any conventional sense. It claims all territories, not merely on planet Earth but in general ; and it disputes any territorial claims of any other entities, as well as any claims to sovereignity of any other entities. From the other side, no state is known to recognize the Republic, nor is it obvious that such would be meaningfully possible from either side.

People and Society: Neither exonyms nor endonyms have been established through practice. The ethnic make-up is not well known, but a coarse estimate would be North American 46%, Romanian 23%, Russian 15%, French 8%, Slovak 7% (on the basis of Lordship make-up). English is commonly spoken ; Spanish, Russian, Romanian, French and Italian are widely understood ; some Chinese, Korean, Czech/Slovak and others may be rarely encountered. Various strands of neoprotestant Christianity, contemporary religions^v as well as atheism and agnosticism are well represented (no official survey was ever conducted). The Republic appears to be considering introducing its own Church as well. The population count is not known^vi, but estimated in excess of 100, with no obvious upper bound.^vii. There is no way to evaluate the dependency rate in the Republic. The median age is about 30, with insufficient data to distinguish male from female. The population growth rate is difficult to evaluate correctly, but appears to be in excess of 50% in 2015 (mostly but not entirely due to migration). The mortality was 0 in 2015, in absolute terms.^viii The republic is vastly urban (90% est.). The Republic makes no allowance in its budget for health expenditure of any kind, nor does it seem ideologically amenable to the notion. There is no known disease among the citizenry ; the prevalence of obesity (adult and infant) is 0, and it is also not obvious the Republic would accept obese citizens. The education expenditure is significant, but due to the peculiarities of Republican budgeting, unknowable (much in the manner defense expenses work in the United States).

Government: While the Republic is evidently governed, the manner in which this government works is not documented nor well understood.^ix There are no administrative divisions, nor any visible effort to govern territorially. There is no date of independence as such - the Republic was born sovereign. There is no explicitly given national holiday, no written constitution, and in spite of intricate legal disputes being apparently settled in the Republican forum, no explicit legal system per se. There is no citizenship by birth and no citizenship by descent ; the residency requirement for citizenship is variously stated at six months, one year or eighteen months, but evidently familiarity with the Republic's historical record (known locally as "the log" or "the logs") is the prevailing criterion for admission. Dual citizenship is not recognized, principally because the Republic knows of no other power one might be a citizen of. There is no suffrage per se, some form of internal communication is in use but its nature is unclear. There are no specified branches of government, other than the Lordship list, a nominal list of unclear origin or responsibilities. There are no political parties as such. While dissension commonly occurs and political positions are recognizable in the discourse, disputes are commonly settled by agreement, on technical grounds, and the same political positions are not commonly argued by the same people - a strange practice which doesn't seem to be socially stigmatized, neither in theory (as it is in the United States) nor in practice, with the exception that socialism (broadly defined as "attempting to resolve the problems of the individual through the group") is. The Republic is party to no international organisation and has no accredited diplomatic representation. There is no clearly defined flag or other national symbols.

Economy: The republic is extremely wealthy, with estimates placing the per-capita wealth over a million US dollars. The republic is moderately productive, with GDP estimated^x in excess of 5`084.47 BTC in 2015 (no less than 30k USD per capita). A strong individualist ethos and actual private property^xi synergize to produce the strongest growth economy in the history of the world, without exception. Should these strengths be maintained over a longer interval, it is doubtless that the Republic will prevail over any and all possible competitors in all fields. The Republic has minor agriculture (principally vegetables), a small industrial sector (CNC milling, computer hardware, some light industry) and an extremely developed services sector - its production in terms of software dwarves that of most nations. The Republic has no debts, public or private ; the republic has a significant rate of inflation^xii. Nothing is known about central bank discount rate, prime lending rate, or the Republic's banking generally. The stock of narrow money stood at ~7.5 bn USD on year's end, with no estimation available for the broader stock. The Republic trades little with the outside world, and there's no requirement of reporting any trade. Consequently, its trade balance is unknown, but suspected to be positive.

Communication: The Republic is rumoured to be either developing or already in possession of uninterdictable, undecryptable communications. The area of communications is regarded as a key priority and consequently solid data is impossible to obtain.

Note: Exactly as is the case with the original^xiii, this entry is pure, unadulterated crap, a sort of Alexa-irl. Nevertheless, if you're not one of us but one of them this crap is your mandatory, universal diet. So dig in!

1. While the titulature was previously attached to a number of European states throughout history (best known among which, the Republic of Venice, 697 - 1797), all of which currently extinct (with perhaps the exception of the Republic of San Marino as an informal style), continuity with these is altogether dubious and not commonly claimed.

   The earliest reference to the phrase (used as a label for a clearly pre-existing group) is a vague article published in February 2014. It does not make the link explicitly. The alternate style "La Serenissima" was used in August of the same year as an implicit reference to the same entity. [↩]

2. Also "TMSR", "tmsr", "B,TMSR~", "La Serenissima". [↩]
3. It is altogether unclear the Republic supports such basic, 1700s-era conveniences of the civilised world as universal franchise. Matters long settled everywhere else (such as for instace through the concordat of Worms, 1122, or the peace of Westphalia, 1648) are deemed open by the Republic, which does not recognize national claims to territorial sovereignity along with most other modern devices. [↩]
4. For example :
   • It is certain that the Republic is undertaking, on its public budget, the continued development of the Bitcoin client (one of plurious entities to make this claim, none of which recognize the others as a matter of course) ; as well as routinely issuing both legislation and legal rulings (both of which of unclear applicability), yet without any charter, any elected bodies or for that matter any obvious case of elections.
   • It is dubious whether proeminent participants ("Lords of the Republic" in local parlance) were involved in a costly exploit of the US backed Ethereum network (claimed as such - profanity warning).
   • The unnerving happenstance of Bitcoin being denominated as the attacker's currency of choice makes the recent leak of the complete archives of the Department of Defense's National Intelligence Directorate similarily suspect.

   [↩]

5. Discordian Church of Eris, The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster [↩]
6. Nor would it be possible to ever know it, given the noncoercive nature of the Republic. [↩]
7. It is not currently clear what (if anything) are the qualifications for citizenship. [↩]
8. The first case of death in the Republic occured in January 2016, and on the basis of this statistical data, the hockey stick pattern indicates only female republicans are mortal. [↩]
9. Common wisdom proposing that such an arrangement is untenable does not seem to hold any sway. [↩]
10. Due to the elusive nature of the Republic, these estimates are known lower bounds, while the true values could easily exceed them by a degree of magnitude, perhaps even two. [↩]
11. The Republic is the only known entity that recognizes private property as such. [↩]
12. Baked into its currency, the inflation rate was ~15% throughout 2015 (down from ~25% in 2013). The inflation rate is expected to diminish constantly from this point forward for the remainder of history. [↩]
13. Speaking of which : the US government won't release budget data for its unintelligent agencies. Nevertheless, we have the data anyway, and we thus know that of the ~15bn USD CIA wastes in any given year, about 0.13% or ~20 mn USD are related to so-called research, as well as production and dissemination of its so-called factbook. Given that it covers ~200 countries, we can infer that in US terms the value of this entry is somewhere around 100`000 USD. Given that it's taken me about an hour to put together, that puts the value of my time at 100k USD per hour, which is remarkably close to reality. [↩]