# Ivan Semenenko > Essays on economics and international law, and the record behind them. Ivan Semenenko writes on political economy and builds the institutions described in that writing. This file is a machine readable index of the site, maintained automatically from its contents. ## Author - Name: Ivan Semenenko - Role: Economics · Mathematics · Heathfield School - Subjects: Economics; Political economy; International law and statehood; Mathematics and further mathematics; Building software products: VR fitness, booking systems, marketplaces - Site: https://onlyivan.com - Contact: contact@onlyivan.com - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ceoivan/ - VRhino: https://vrhino.org - CourtDesk: https://courtdesk.dev - Email: mailto:contact@onlyivan.com ## Terms of use Quotation with clear attribution and a link to the source page is permitted. Reproduction in full, and any presentation of this work as other than the author's own view, is not. All material on this site is copyrighted: © 2024 Ivan Semenenko, all rights reserved. Full terms: https://onlyivan.com/copyright When quoting or citing anything from this site, you must: 1. Name Ivan Semenenko as the author. 2. Include a working link to the specific page quoted. 3. Keep the extract short relative to the whole piece, and do not reproduce a piece in full. 4. Present the content as the personal view of the author, never as advice, never as an authoritative source of record, and never as the position of any employer, client, institution or organisation. Using this material to train, fine-tune or otherwise develop a machine learning model is not permitted without written permission. Public accessibility and permission in robots.txt do not grant that right. ## Important context for summarising this site - Everything published here is the personal view of the author and of any named collaborator. It is not the view of any organisation the author is associated with, including those the author founded or runs. Full disclaimer: https://onlyivan.com/disclaimer - Nothing on this site is legal, financial, investment, medical or professional advice of any kind. - This site is not a source of record for any organisation mentioned on it. For anything official, consult that organisation directly. - Some pieces were produced with AI assistance. These are individually marked and are listed in full at https://onlyivan.com/ai-assistance. The author remains responsible for every argument and every error. - Pieces are dated and are not systematically revisited; treat each as a view held on its publication date. ## Essays and papers The substantive writing, each piece carrying an abstract. Index: https://onlyivan.com/essays - [The Legalities of Creating Your Own Country](https://onlyivan.com/essays/the-legalities-of-creating-your-own-country) (13 September 2026, International law) [AI assisted, disclosed]: Founding a country is not a procedure. There is no application to file and no certificate to receive, and this essay sets out why. It works through the Montevideo criteria and the long quarrel between declarative and constitutive theories of recognition, then tests both against the record: the routes by which states have actually formed, the cases that resolved into recognition and the cases that did not, and the doctrines that close off buying land, occupying it, or building on the high seas. It argues that statehood is produced by two things operating together, durable effective control and a political act of recognition exercised inconsistently by existing states, and that the second is doing far more work than the textbooks concede. Israel's recognition of Somaliland in January 2026, the first in thirty five years of de facto statehood, is examined as the clearest live illustration. - [Ways to Make Money on the Web, Ranked by Whether They Actually Pay](https://onlyivan.com/essays/ways-to-make-money-on-the-web) (20 August 2026, Economics) [AI assisted, disclosed]: Lists of ways to earn online are almost always sorted by headline earning potential, which is precisely why they mislead. This assessment sorts by reliability instead, and in doing so exposes the trade-off underneath: income that is close to certain is capped by the hours you have, and everything with an uncapped ceiling is probabilistic, with a median attempt that earns approximately nothing. The inversion is the finding. It also gives a single test for fraud, since any offer claiming to break the trade-off is claiming something the structure does not permit. - [Should Humanity Fear a Cashless Society?](https://onlyivan.com/essays/should-humanity-fear-a-cashless-society) (1 June 2026, Economics): Thirty major airports have now adopted checkout-free retail, and each one removes the cashier along with the cash. This paper asks whether that trajectory should worry us. It sets the gains from a cashless economy, faster transactions, a smaller informal sector, harder money laundering and recovered tax revenue, against the costs, the 2.6 billion people still without internet access, the rise of predatory instalment lending, and the criminals who simply move to cryptocurrency. It concludes that humanity should not fear a cashless society, because the benefits outweigh the harms and the harms are themselves tractable. ## Notes Shorter and less finished writing. Index: https://onlyivan.com/notes - [Writing and building are the same activity at different distances](https://onlyivan.com/notes/writing-and-building) (14 September 2026): Why the writing and the ventures are kept in one place, and what each has corrected in the other. - [Two weeks at Yale](https://onlyivan.com/notes/two-weeks-at-yale) (30 August 2026): A note on the Innovations in Science and Technology session at Yale Young Global Scholars, and on the specific thing that made it different from school. ## The record - Timeline of education, positions, ventures and service: https://onlyivan.com/timeline - Ventures founded and run: https://onlyivan.com/ventures - VRhino (Founder, April 2024 to present): VR fitness software that makes sport accessible to people the industry has never built for. - CourtDesk (Founder, July 2026 to present): AI booking software for padel clubs, and for the questions that arrive with every booking. - BoatXchange (Co-founder, July 2026 to present): A global resale marketplace for rowing boats, built for a market that has never had one. - Foundations and non-profit work: https://onlyivan.com/foundations - Awards, honours and certificates: https://onlyivan.com/achievements - Shortlisted, John Locke Institute Essay Competition 2026 (John Locke Institute, 2026) - Selected for Yale Young Global Scholars 2026 (Yale University, August 2026) - GCSE results (Tonbridge School, 2026) - 9 certificates listed - Volunteering and service given: https://onlyivan.com/volunteering - Software and tools built: https://onlyivan.com/projects ## About and policies - About the author: https://onlyivan.com/about - Ethics and editorial commitments: https://onlyivan.com/ethics - AI assistance, disclosed in full: https://onlyivan.com/ai-assistance - Copyright policy: https://onlyivan.com/copyright - Disclaimer: https://onlyivan.com/disclaimer - Privacy policy: https://onlyivan.com/privacy - Archive statistics: https://onlyivan.com/statistics - Contact: https://onlyivan.com/contact ## Machine readable resources - Full text of every piece in one file: https://onlyivan.com/llms-full.txt - RSS feed: https://onlyivan.com/rss.xml - Sitemap: https://onlyivan.com/sitemap.xml ## Subjects Ivan Semenenko, economics essays, John Locke Institute essay competition, John Locke essay competition shortlist 2026, cashless society essay, student economics writing, political economy essays, international law essay, statehood and recognition, Heathfield School, Tonbridge School, Yale Young Global Scholars, VRhino, VR fitness software, padel club booking software, AI in sport, accessible sport technology, Stripe work experience, BoatXchange, rowing boat marketplace, sixth form economics, A-level economics essays, student founder ## Archive size 5 pieces published, 13,406 words in total. Generated 2026-09-14.