Liberty-oriented campers hanging out by the LRN.FM broadcast tent, Day One of Forkfest 2018
Forkfest 2018, the decentralized liberty camping event has started small but strong, kicking off yesterday at Roger’s Campground in the beautiful White Mountains of Lancaster, New Hampshire.
Like the first event last year, this year started slow on Thursday while many are still at work. By my estimates, more are here already this year than were here last year by this time. Not only that, the geographic variety of attendees is more pronounced. This year already has visitors from Lithuania and the United Kingdom as well as a couple from Virginia. Plus many others have indicated they intend to be here no later than Saturday.
What’s happening at Forkfest 2018? Good question! Parties, athletic events, a wedding, a letter-writing event for Ross Ulbricht, a Mesh Networking session, and others have been announced by various attendees. Of course, plenty of socializing and just hanging out by a campfire. There are already a couple of competing calendars that have popped up for attendees to use to promote whatever events they’re involved with. You can find those calendars via the unofficial Forkfest Forum.
Tavern Owner Laura Hardiman Poses with the Anypay App and Cryptocurrency-Loving Forkfest Attendees
If you’re in the area, come on up to Lancaster and join us. There are no tickets to Forkfest (and no organizers or board of directors)! Your only expenses to enjoy your time with other libertarians, voluntarists, and liberty-loving anarchists are your camping costs from Rogers Campground.
Forkfest continues through Monday the 18th and is expected to grow throughout the weekend. Of course, it’s not going to be the size of the fifteen year event that it was spawned from, the Porcupine Freedom Festival (aka Porcfest), which begins on Tuesday the 19th at noon and runs through Sunday the 25th
In addition, we also discussed Forkfest, the active NH Freedom Migration, and the advertising proposal I made this week to get DASH to renew their sponsorship of Free Talk Live, my national talk radio show. Plus, I announced the public beta of a very cool website where you can create printable DASH tips you can leave with servers at restaurants or give to whoever you want to introduce to cryptocurrency! It’s called cryptotip.org and it’s exclusive to DASH at this time. If you love DASH, you should give it a try and feel free to let me know what you think!
Thanks so much to the DASH Force News crew for the opportunity. Here’s the full interview:
Yesterday morning I took a trip to the NH Secretary of State’s office in Concord and was the first candidate from any party to file for the NH Senate District 10 race. It was also my first time in the dozens years I’ve lived here that I’ve been able to actually file as a Libertarian! In 2014 and 2016 I ran as a democrat in the gubernatorial primaries, since at that time it was insanely difficult for the Libertarians to qualify for ballot access. Thankfully, all that changed after the 2016 election, when (probably thanks to the awful Trump and Hillary choices at national) the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire regained full ballot access status on par with the two big parties, for the first time in two decades!
As a result of this change, hopefully you’ll be seeing more Libertarian candidates on the ballot this year than ever. My campaign platform is the same as it was when I ran for governor:
End All Prohibition of Victimless “Crimes”
Secede from the United States
Make Taxes Voluntary
As before, I will not be accepting campaign contributions. This is a decentralized campaign. If you want to support it somehow, that’s up to you. I appreciate your support, in whatever way you choose to express it.
My goal with the campaign, as always, is to give voters the option to choose freedom and communicate the ideas of liberty in any media appearance, debate, or wherever I’m given the opportunity to do so. As a principled voluntarist, I advocate for the Non-Aggression Principle, which means that I believe that aggressive force should not be used against peaceful people. I’ll be explaining that during the campaign and what it means when applied to government, which is an agency with a monopoly on aggressive force. (more…)
Great news! As of 2016’s election, the Libertarian Party of NH regained ballot status equal to the Rs and Ds for the first time in two decades! I’d previously been registered as a Democrat for the purposes of running for office but this year I made the switch to Libertarian, since it was the first time I’ve been able to do that since moving here in 2006.
That’s the short version of the story. There’s more, however. In addition to re-registering to vote as a Libertarian, I also modified the voter registration form to reflect my “state citizen” status and put the Keene City Clerk and Secretary of State of NH offices on notice of that.
What is a “state citizen”, you ask? Good question. Here’s my understanding, which the clerk and S.O.S. didn’t contradict. I present to you the notice I sent to the clerk and S.O.S. and the video of my visit to the clerk’s office to change my voter registration and notice them of my state citizen status, under duress. Below the video, I’ll discuss in more detail.
First, beware that there are a lot of “paytriots” out there who will sell you information purported to get you out of the state system if you just file the right papers in the right order in the right places. It’s all a bunch of crap, from what I can tell. If you try their methods and they don’t work, they’ll just claim you did something wrong. You didn’t study enough, didn’t buy the advanced course, etc. (more…)
New Keene District Court Judge Erin B McIntyre Smacks Down Prosecutor
Keene, NH business owner Christopher Waid received a parking ticket when he was downtown in late 2017 and immediately went to the parking department in the city building to demand his right to a trial. While inside the building, he received a second ticket on his car! He also immediately filed for his trial on that one. The double ticket trial was slated for early April and would involve two of the three Keene parking enforcers, meaning they couldn’t be on the streets victimizing other peaceful motorists if they are sitting in a courtroom! Even if Chris had lost the trials, just keeping the enforcers off the streets for a couple hours is a win on its own.
Chris entered the Keene District Court to face down the charges on April 9th and emerged victorious, with both tickets dismissed by new Keene judge Erin B McIntyre. (Longtime district court judge Edward J Burke is recently semi-retired and is only doing fill-in work.) Chris brilliantly challenged both parking tickets on technicalities. The first ticket was thrown out by McIntyre because the location of the alleged offense was not correct and the second ticket was tossed because parking enforcer Linda Desruisseaux lazily cited the wrong section of city code. Many judges would have simply allowed the prosecutor to amend the tickets upon request but McIntyre wasn’t letting the prosecutor have any slack! The exasperated Keene police prosecutor, Eleanor Moran, upon the second dismissal vowed she’d be filing a motion to reconsider, however she never did, according to court records. Here’s the full trial video:
There are a couple of important lessons here. (more…)
The fifteen-year libertarian camping event in New Hampshire, Porcupine Freedom Festival aka Porcfest has long been renown as a cryptocurrency hotspot. It’s the place where Bitcoin’s early successful investors like Roger Ver, Erik Voorhees,and Charlie Shrem have all come to hang out with the New Hampshire libertarian activists and hundreds of visitors, all considering a move to the Shire for more freedom. One year, Roger Ver (aka “Bitcoin Jesus”) famously gave away dozens of Casascius “physical bitcoins”, which became a collectors item and are now worth significantly more than a bitcoin!
Porcfest, like all growing groups of people eventually had a schism, or “fork” as its called in the cryptocurrency world. Out of that, Forkfest was born in 2017 (under different names). While both are libertarian camping festivals held at Roger’s Campground, Forkfest is a decentralized event, meaning that each attendee decides what to do or create for others to do while at the festival. There are no organizers and no board of directors. Given the name of the event and those planning to attend, it will likely be a very cryptocurrency friendly event as Porcfest is. Last year for instance, crypto point-of-sale provider Anypay‘s founders came and helped throw a rave.
The Olde Bostonian Tavern and Grill
This year, I’m excited to announce that cryptocurrency acceptance has now migrated off the campground and will now be year-round in Lancaster, NH thanks to the new restaurant just down the street from the campground: The Olde Bostonian Tavern and Grill located in the Cabot Inn. The restaurant was created by Rogers Campground’s longtime manager, Laura Hardiman. She was instantly interested in taking cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and DASH due to her exposure to the various libertarian campers she’s met over the years. As of this week, she’s up and running and accepting multiple cryptos including BTC, BCH, ZCH, and DASH with the slick, easy-to-use, NH-based Anypay POS. If you’re planning to attend Forkfest and/or Porcfest, make sure you plan a dinner at The Old Bostonian at 200 Portland St and bring your cryptocurrency wallet. I recommend you pay with DASH and then watch your wallet to see what happens after the payment is sent.
Forkfest 2018 will be held this year from June 14th through 18th and Porcfest is immediately afterwards from the 19th through the 24th. That’s eleven days to give you a taste of what it’s like living around more liberty people than you could possibly know. You already know about the exciting NH Freedom Migration that’s been happening here – this is your chance to really experience it.
Unofficial Forkfest Logo
In other Forkfest news, more self-organizing is happening with two competing calendars springing up. One on Google Calendar, the other on Liberty.menu. There are discussion threads on the unofficial Forkfest forum about the calendars as well as food vendors announcing they plan to attend! Plus, according to one post on the forum, the lon
As we did in 2017, Keene cryptocurrency fans got together yesterday, May 22nd, to celebrate Bitcoin Pizza Day. What is Bitcoin Pizza Day? On May 22nd of 2010, a computer programmer made the first recorded real-life bitcoin purchase – two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin. Today, that 10,000 BTC is worth over $80 Million dollars. A year ago, it was worth $25 Million.
We gathered at Little Zoe’s Take and Bake and ordered several pizzas. However instead of paying with BTC, as we did last year, this time we paid with DASH. Why DASH? Last year during the dramatic spike in fees on the Bitcoin Core network, several local businesses began accepting DASH as an alternative to BTC, to give their customers a choice.
In order to spend cryptocurrency, it’s the buyer who pays the network fee for processing the transaction (this is the opposite of the credit card system, where the merchant takes the fee out of their profit). Given that today fees to send BTC are typically about $0.40 and to send DASH about $0.01, it’s a no-brainer. No one would choose to spend BTC when a better option is available.
That better option is DASH, aka “Digital Cash”, a cryptocurrency that confirms four times faster than BTC and has really taken off at retail locations across southern New Hampshire. It proliferated because NH-based crypto point-of-sale merchant processor Anypay introduced DASH first with its release of their POS software in 2017. In fact, in an interview with Albert, the operator of DiscoverDash.com, a website that shows the physical locations of DASH-accepting businesses across the world, he told me that Keene is number three in the world for real-life DASH acceptance, behind Caracas, Venezuela at number one and Portsmouth, NH at number two!
