I have some experience living close-offshore of a larger country for legal related reasons :) (Sealand/HavenCo, around 2000)
I'm glad they picked something relatively inoffensive to governments (visa regulations for people who would otherwise be H1B/O1 or not local at all, supporting local popular high-tech businesses). There has been a lot of talk about offshore drugs and other things which would have been really quickly shut down.
If they're smart, they'll regulate everything ELSE more strictly than the US/California, and just focus on one very PR friendly "one thing" -- the visa/immigration rules, which they'd be 100% in compliance with by being offshore. You absolutely do NOT want to put that at risk by fighting drug laws, environmental laws, underaged sex laws, prostitution laws, etc. all at the same time.
I'd love it if you told your story with respects to sealand. I was fascinated with it when I first heard about it many years ago, especially to learn that the UK govt seemed to have allowed it to exist without shutting them down.
For others reading this who don't know the story my recollection of events is that it goes something like this:
(1) UK builds large offshore firing platforms in the english channel to target german bombers in WW2 then abandons them after the war.
(2) A military family moves to one of the platforms after the war and declares it to be an independant state. The UK government lets them get away with it.
(3) Over the years they remain there and allow others to come and live on the platform. They issue passports etc. At one point they were the base for a pirate radio station. At another point they fended off an armed invasion/attempted coup of the platform.
(4) In the late 90's havenco set up a business on the island. The idea was to provide secure hosting outside the scope of any legal harassment from authorities. The business didn't work out.
(5) A few years ago the platform burned down in a fire.
I'd love to hear accounts from people who have actually been there & seen it for themselves.
In between (1) and (2), the "military family" had experience with fishing in the area, and with pirate radio (from boats, and from other platforms (unambiguously in UK waters).
Pirate radio was big because there was no popular music or commercials on UK public radio at the time; pirate radio was largely killed by removing both of those conditions in the UK by the government, not through regulation. (although they did increasingly ban it)
(4) didn't work out for a combination of internal reasons and the macro implosion of both tech and the bandwidth/colo market (we started working on it in 1998/1999 when stuff was going for $2k/mo; by 2002 it was $150/mo, and our cost basis was high.
Our biggest fundamental problem was not having a payment system option; I wanted to fund an anon ecash development thing out of our first investment, but cofounders vetoed that. This led to really limiting the kind of businesses which could operate "purely offshore"; they all had to incorporate in places like Nevis just to get a bank account, at which point they could just host there (or in Canada, or whatever) for a whole lot less.
5) The platform was basically restored to the mothballed condition it had between the end of pirate radio (early 1970s) and HavenCo (2000) after 2002; there was a fire, which caused damage, but didn't destroy it. It's still there; just irrelevant.
I'm still sort of interested in interesting jurisdictional arbitrage (free trade zones, differences in laws across places, multi-national structures), but I'm much more interested in purely technological solutions to problems (i.e. using crypto, hardware, etc. to solve the same problems as sealand)
I'm glad they picked something relatively inoffensive to governments (visa regulations for people who would otherwise be H1B/O1 or not local at all, supporting local popular high-tech businesses). There has been a lot of talk about offshore drugs and other things which would have been really quickly shut down.
If they're smart, they'll regulate everything ELSE more strictly than the US/California, and just focus on one very PR friendly "one thing" -- the visa/immigration rules, which they'd be 100% in compliance with by being offshore. You absolutely do NOT want to put that at risk by fighting drug laws, environmental laws, underaged sex laws, prostitution laws, etc. all at the same time.