Crypto-bro Knife Fight Extravaganza

If you’ve ever wanted to stab a crypto-bro biohacker in the face with a knife, now’s your chance! 

All you have to do is to get yourself down to the island of Roatan off the coast of Honduras by the evening of March 21st and enter yourself in the Central American Electric-Knife Fights Championship and Cyberpunk Rave held in the extremely miniature charter city of Prospera, conveniently located mere minutes away from the Pirates of the Caribbean Zipline and AJ’s Monkeys and Sloths. 

Oh, but before you go ahead and book your flight, I should point out that I might have been a little imprecise in my discussion of face-stabbing above. The electric knives in question aren’t real knives; they’re somewhat underpowered but still ouchy taser-things shaped like knives. So you won’t be stabbing so much as poking. Also, poking in the face is strictly against the rules, so again I apologize for my imprecision. But these pokes can still be quite painful, as you can see in this extremely sweaty video featuring the similar sport of taser knife fighting.

As the event’s web site proclaims

Born in the biohacking underground, electric knife fighting is a point-style combat sport with high voltage sparring knives. Fighters must score points and avoid pain to win cash, prizes, and glory. For over a decade, this heart-pumping, high-adrenaline sport has grown in popularity, attracting fighters internationally. Matches have been held everywhere from high desert biohacker events, San Francisco raves, Caribbean beaches, bars, speakeasies, and the jungles of Central America. 

The site proudly goes on to announce that “electric knife fighting is Infinita City’s official sport and the blockbuster highlight of The Infinite Games.​” 

Which is why, aside from its complete ridiculousness, I’m writing about this event here on Brotopians. Because Infinita City, which is not really a city, is a sort of longevity hacking adjunct to Prospera, which is currently the flagship project, the “blockbuster highlight,” if you will, of the Brotopian movement in the U.S., an attempt to build up a largely tax and regulation free city of 100,000 residents in a special economic zone in Honduras that is at the moment approximately 99,921 residents short of this perhaps overoptimistic goal, as I may have mentioned several times in posts already.

With new residents not exactly pouring in, Prospera seems to have pivoted to holding events for the bitcoin-obsessed, longevity hacking, network-state-loving crowd. In addition to the, er, city’s regular Prospera Weekends, which regularly draw more than seven participants at a time, there is an upcoming retreat for serious crypto-bros (and perhaps even some crypto-sises) called BitChill in April, as well as the annual Free Cities conference in September. 

But right now Prospera is all about Infinita City’s Infinite Games, an apparently heart-pumping two-month event that officially kicked off on Feb 1st and which is scheduled to run through early April. "This is the playground where long-term people play toward eternity with biotech, computation, and science," the event's promo page explains, if "explain" is the right word for it.

Along with the electric knife fighting championship in late March, there are more than a dozen other “events and tournaments” taking place over the next two months, ranging from “bitcoin poker” and “crypto golf” to “speed debates” and what’s called the “Prediction Markets Arena,” which allows you to bet on the outcome of the other events in the Infinite Games. (It’s all very meta.) 

To my mind, the most intriguing of all these games, aside from the aforementioned electric knife fights, is the Longevity Biomarkers Competition, in which, as far as I can figure it, the goal is to age less than any of the other “Longevity Athletes” over the course of the event, as determined by blood testing and “biological age assessments.” 

Presumably anyone who keels over during the Longevity Rave & JoyScore Experiment (a “high-energy social experiment blending music, movement, and community to explore how joy, connection, and embodied experience influence human healthspan”) will be instantly disqualified. Given the event’s “focus on midlife and older participants to capture variation in aging dynamics” you can probably expect the dancing to be somewhat less vigorous than can be seen here. 

In any case, this is how brotopians spend their time while waiting for their imagined techno-utopia to arise here on earth.