Lucky Green wrote:

Sealand, about which I wrote about on this list before, was an example that should be studied by the offshore advocates. Based in an old oilrig housing platform,

Victorian sea-fort, AFAIR.

some unlucky investors attempted to establish their own country. They began issuing stamps and passports for their "country". As any reasonable person should have expected, nobody would move their mail and nobody recognized their passports.

Which wasn't the point; the majority of those they sold were just for fun, not serious attempts at being recognized. However, I noticed a newspaper article over Christmas about a woman who's selling professional-looking passports in the names of countries which no longer exist or changed names; the intention, presumably, being that immigration officials won't realise that the passports aren't real.

They went bankrupt.

I'd be interested to know where you got your information from, because both Strauss ('How to start your own country') and the Micronations Web page tell different stories; that Sealand was set up mostly for fun by a couple of guys who made a lot of money from pirate radio and it lasted at least fifteen years. Of course this doesn't detract from the main point, which is that you won't get away with offshore data-havens unless you are able to defend them against invaders; Strauss claims Sealand was invaded by some German businessmen at one point, and any such data-haven will soon be visited by cops or warships. Mark