I think there are at least two different questions being subsumed here. One is whether seasteading could ever work in general, and the other is whether it would actually produce something a libertarian like Peter Thiel would ultimately approve of. The first question I take to be the more complicated. David Brin offers up a number of practical difficulties here.
The answer to second question seems less difficult to foresee. Life aboard ship is always a highly communal enterprise and typically a highly hierarchical one. The odds of the end result actually being in line with the initial vision seem rather long.
Patri does not use the ideal of individual liberty much in his descriptions of his plans: he uses the notion of competitive government, that is, increasing competition by increasing the number of sovereign states.
Recently the relatively awesome entrepreneur invested 1.25 million USD into this (seasteading institute website here).
It seems such a wonderful concept, finally somewhere where new forms of government could be tried out. But I'm just wondering how in the world they hope to deal with existing governments since their reaction to any kind of serious alternatives, especially one that either economically or ideologically presented a significant challenge, is bound to not be positive.
I was just wondering what LWer thoughts are on this matter? Also has there been any discussion of seasteading in the past that I've missed? Also I'm wondering if anyone would hazard to perhaps offer a prediction or judge how likley this is to succeed (maybe on predictionbook)?