Bitcoin Takes Porcfest 2012

BitcoinBitinstant.com‘s Erik Voorhees (also a Free State Project mover to the Seacoast) blogs about his experience at Porcfest 2012:

PorcFest (short for Porcupine Freedom Festival) is a week-long camping extravaganza put on each year by The Free State Project, an ambitious organization trying to move 20,000 liberty activists to the state of New Hampshire. PorcFest takes place on a large campground with hot showers, bathrooms, roads, meeting halls, and even a manicured grass field. It is camping-lite, but it makes a perfect environment for over a thousand liberty lovers to converge, drink, smoke, talk, laugh, argue, and show off their new semi-auto pistol accessories.

As a long-time member of the Free State Project, I moved to New Hampshire in early 2011 and have now been to three PorcFests. This one was the best, as you can imagine, because this was the first time Bitcoin had any significant presence. And wow, what a presence it had!

Attending with me were Roger Ver and Charlie Shrem of BitInstant, as well as Ira Miller (developer of such staples as FeedZeBirds, Coinapult, and Paysius). Roger’s wonderful Japanese fiancée Ayaka graced us with her presence as well and helped us curtail our Bitcoin banter down from “every waking minute” to the more reasonable “nearly every waking minute.” I invited them all to PorcFest, not to be nice, but in fact to help me run my vendor booth – Bernanke’s Bitcoin Exchange.

Bernanke’s Bitcoin Exchange was actually the primary sponsor of “Agora Valley” – the large swath of the campground dedicated to vendors and merchants selling food, apparel, subversive literature, massages, large scary knives, and cute little woven Eric Cartman hats. The exchange was afforded the honor of primary sponsor after Roger donated a pleasant sum of coins to the Free State Project, with the caveat that they must accept Bitcoin for PorcFest registration. Dozens of people thus registered for PorcFest with Bitcoin (myself included), and this set the tone for the whole event. “Bitcoin accepted here” should’ve been the subheading on this year’s program.

For our part, Bernanke’s Bitcoin Exchange was a fully-functional trade and educational hub, buying and selling Bitcoin for fiat with a spread of 3%, hooking up new people with Bitcoin Spinner and Blockchain.info’s App on their phones, and educating the masses on proper wallet safety. We had three laptops and a tablet tethered to a Verizon Mifi hotspot. MtGoxLive was on screen, as was the WebGL globe, and Blockchain.info’s scrolling list of live transactions. We would occasionally blast the BitInstant theme song (It’s Yo’ Money Why Wait?) from my car stereo parked behind us. This always made Charlie very excited.

All of this was happening in the middle of the woods in one of the most rural parts of New Hampshire, with rolling mountains encircling us and birds singing just as they do in Disney movies. There was at least one moment when I was sitting back in my chair, with a beer in my hand and another two in my tummy, thinking “well, butterfly knives and unlicensed hair stylists are cool, but we’re actually reconstructing an entire financial system from right here on our laptop with a $50 Verizon Mifi.” Indeed, we just plugged the largest libertarian camping festival of the year into the global high-tech Bitcoin forex network, and the government hadn’t a clue what was going on.

As we met Free Staters and proselytized Bitcoin at every opportunity, we also went shopping. Our discovery was that at least half the vendors were accepting Bitcoin at the outset of the event, though many of them still didn’t understand how to use them. The main food vendor selling everything from hamburgers to greek wraps to bacon wrapped in bacon had a Bit-Pay QR payment card on the table. “Do you accept Bitcoin,” I asked him the first time before seeing the card, “Hell yes I do! Just scan this and pay,” he responded. Because of him and other food vendors, I paid for 80% of my food at PorcFest with Bitcoin, and the 20% with USD was mostly the result of my phone dying (admittedly, it was dying because I was using it to show so many people how to use Bitcoin).

Of course, Bitcoin was not yet ubiquitous. We’d often ask passing campers, “hey, have you heard of Bitcoin” and our favorite response of the week was a young woman who immediately responded, “Yeah, but fuck that shit!” My guess is she got Zhou Tonged and was still bitter… leverage is a bitch.

One food vendor, elegantly named “Feed Your Gullet,” was operated by a few men whose desire to feed and please their customers was only matched by their trashiness in carrying out this task. Their marketing strategy consisted of three pillars – a megaphone spouting obscenities, a chainsaw run any time of day to get attention, and a hand-painted sign showing a forklift shoveling a pile of food into a grotesque gaping-mawed human head. Roger kindly asked them if they accepting Bitcoin, and received in turn a long-winded hallucinogen-induced story of the universe. It made no sense whatsoever. I wondered if, to those unfamiliar with Bitcoin, our conveyance of the technology sounds similarly preposterous.

Beyond the vendors, a significant amount of our time was spent discussing how and why Bitcoin works to those unfamiliar with it. People were quite receptive, especially when we touched on aspects of Bitcoin’s anonymity and its invulnerability to government diktat. A few people said it was the coolest thing they’d ever heard of. I can only hope that perhaps they’ll research further and become valued new members of our growing community, for that was precisely my reaction over a year ago when I first encountered the coin.

On Thursday, we held a formal panel discussion in “The Queen’s Tent” which received one of the best panel turnouts of the week – over 80 people showed up with many standing around in the back, and almost all of them asking very good questions. Still though, there’s always too much focus on the mining. I told them, “just as you shouldn’t describe methods by which metal is extracted from the earth to those who are learning the virtues of gold as money, you should similarly avoid discussion of Bitcoin mining unless you wish to become an expert in that specific industry.” While mining and technical details caught the audience up a bit, they burst into applause after a mention of the Federal Reserve’s impotence when confronted with Bitcoin, and really, that’s the far more important subject.

Ironically, Bitcoin was starting to become so useful at PorcFest that it was already outcompeting the other alternative currencies – namely silver and copper rounds and “dime cards” (real silver dimes encased in a laminated wallet card). These other alternative currencies, while superior to USD as a form of money, are simply not scalable nor practical in today’s modern economy. Silver rounds may be beautiful, but how does one transact across distance and in all the many denominations of needed for purchasing goods and services? Bitcoin, alternatively, is sent instantly anywhere in any denomination – precious metals just can’t match this. As much as I’m an advocate of gold and silver, there’s no doubt in my mind which money the market will increasingly choose.

Friday night arrived, and Roger was invited to join the hosts of Free Talk Live who were broadcasting their nationally-syndicated show from the campground. They discussed primarily how prevalent Bitcoin was at PorcFest – where only a year ago it was barely known, now it was a staple. Roger described how he uses Bitcoins in his own business (MemoryDealers.com) to pay suppliers in China – many of whom are actually starting to prefer payment in BTC, and it’s not hard to understand why.

Roger’s FTL Interview Episode: http://soundcloud.com/freetalklive/ftl2012-06-22/download

Since there can never be enough discussion of Bitcoin, I was invited as a guest on the same radio show the following night. My topic was the Bitcoin Card with some additional mention of how gambling is given new life by Bitcoin. The hosts brought up the fact that Bitcoin is “only a virtual money,” to which I responded, “Yes it is, just like all the money that you’re using now. When you log in to your online bank account, you’re seeing digital money there. Bitcoin is no different than that, except that, whereas dollars can be printed at whim, Bitcoins cannot, so you tell me which one’s actually virtual.” And it’s true, right? Both dollars and Bitcoins are purely digital – any physical cash you hold is just a representative token – but only one of the two currencies can be created out of thin air.

Erik’s FTL Interview Episode: http://soundcloud.com/freetalklive/ftl2012-06-23/download

When the week was over, we packed up our campsite and dismantled the Bernanke Bitcoin Exchange. We had sold roughly $2,500 worth of BTC, plus another few hundred worth of Casascius Coins (these were hugely popular). We’d had in-depth conversations with dozens of people, and installed wallet apps on every phone we came across. Bitcoin detractors were rare, but were quickly countered and put to shame with proper economic and monetary argumentation (we get lots of practice at this on the forums).

The exchange was a hit, and it was very fulfilling to see libertarians’ eyes light up when they realized the potential of this system. We’ll be back next year, and fully expect at least 9 of 10 vendors to be accepting BTC. As real as I know Bitcoin to be, it still seems abstract and intangible when one only encounters it on the internet. To be with flesh and blood humans, transacting for physical goods, in a remote corner of New Hampshire’s beautiful wilderness… well, that lent a certain “meatspace cred” that we can’t wait to replicate all over the world. To a large extent, Free Staters and Bitcoiners share a common purpose, and to be sure, the Free State was a little more free this year.

-Erik

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