Bitcoin’s Price and Market Cap Over the Last 12 Months
It has been a crazy last year for Bitcoin, for better or for worse. One year ago this month, Bitcoin’s “market cap”, the total global value of all the bitcoins in existence, was at 10 billion dollars. This week, after passing the $6,000 price per bitcoin mark for the first time ever, Bitcoin’s market cap hit 100 billion dollars!
A market cap of $100 billion makes the total value of Bitcoin larger than financial behemoth Goldman Sachs (and others). This is major news and an incredible run up in price over a year. It definitely deserves celebration – bitcoin is truly a phenomenon, overall.
Behind the scenes, however, things have gotten ugly. The bitcoin network has been full of transactions for many months now. That’s resulted in delayed transactions and wildly varying fees on the Bitcoin Core network. Despite Bitcoin’s first-ever schism in August, which resulted in two competing Bitcoin networks, “Bitcoin Core” and “Bitcoin Cash”, infighting within the Bitcoin community continues unabated regarding how bitcoin should scale to the increasing consumer demand.
As was recommended on this blog at the time, everyone who held their bitcoin through the August schism came out on top. Bitcoin Core’s price held steady then went up and Bitcoin Cash created billions of dollars worth of new value in the marketplace in an instant. It was really quite a success. However, Bitcoin Cash was a minor schism compared to what is coming up in November. (more…)
According to Alex Pappas, the author of a petition begging college admins to rescind the policy, the college is threatening students with $100-per-guest fines and “disciplinary action” if they are caught with visitors.
Pappas’ birthday is within the timeframe and he’d been planning on having his family visit. Now because of fears surrounding riots that likely involved students who are no longer at KSC, the simple freedom of association has been stripped away.
Students shouldn’t be surprised, KSC has prospective students sign away all their rights at the beginning of their school career there. If the school security wants to stop and frisk a student, or inspect their dorm room, they can and will. Better hope they don’t see Raised in a government school system for more than a decade prior, many students are used to police searches thanks to the insane “war on drugs” that has been raging against the rights of students in the hallways of government schools at all levels for years.
KSC’s spokesbureaucrat says the policy is for the “safety” of the students. According to the Union Leader story, they will not be rescinding the restriction despite the hundreds of petition signatures.
This year, students have a new tool in their repertoire, should they choose to use it. Cell 411 is a free cell phone app that allows you to send emergency alerts to your friends and family if something bad (like a police or campus security encounter, medical emergency, or whatever) happens to you. It also allows you to easily stream live video of the situation for your friends to see. I highly recommend downloading and getting familiar with it before next weekend.
On Thursday evening, a very large crowd turned out to speak to the city council’s FOP committee on a proposed resolution to make Keene a “sanctuary city”. I’m happy to say that not a single police state xenophobe spoke during the hearing. Every speaker was pro-immigrant. Here’s video of the entire hearing:
Earlier this year, Cheshire County Sheriff Eli Rivera made headlines by announcing his policy to not assist the federal government with immigration enforcement activities targeting peaceful migrants. That made Cheshire county into NH’s only “sanctuary county”.
The resolution is well-intended and everyone in the packed council chambers supported it, but it doesn’t go far enough. First, it allows for Keene police to assist the federal immigration enforcement if they merely have a warrant, which aren’t hard for police to get with rubber-stamp courts. Second, the city’s new manager, Elizabeth Dragon, is claiming the city government can’t tell police what to do, per some state statute. That’s not exactly the whole truth, since the council is able to pass certain ordinances that the police are directed to enforce. While they may not legally be able to tell a police chief what not to enforce, they certainly have the ability to have the city manager fire anti-immigrant police, don’t they? Perhaps there are union protections in place to make that difficult, I don’t know.
MALIC Center Imam Will Coley Speaks to the Committee
According to the Keene Sentinel, new Keene police chief Steven Russo has not specifically commented on the resolution’s proposals, though the group behind the proposal, KIRP, has said they’ve had a positive meeting with him.
At Thursday evening’s FOP meeting, after 100% support from the speakers there and many rounds of applause for those who spoke, the councilors on the committee voted 5-0 to give more time to the issue, specifically asking city staff to meet with KIRP and finalize the language of the proposed resolution.
One of the things you hear before moving to New Hampshire is that, in many cases, the locals are as passionate about peaceful solutions to the world’s problems as the liberty activists are. I found this hard to believe until I actually moved here, but recent events reminded me just how true it is.
My father, Bill Davis, moved up here several months ago not as a part of the great freedom migration, but to be closer to his grand kids. You can imagine my surprise, then, when he came back from his new church excited about an opportunity to help local intravenous drug users via a strategy of harm reduction. I was even more surprised to learn that one of the people representing this organization was a former NHLA endorsed liberty representative to the State House!
The organization that came to my Dad’s church is called the New Hampshire Harm Reduction Coalition, and their plan is a simple one: to hit the streets of some areas known to be afflicted with the opioid crisis to try and help drug users do less harm to themselves. They planned to hand out fliers to interested parties about what to do in the event of an overdose, offer clean needles and filters for their drugs (many users apparently use cigarette filters instead of something cleaner), educate users about the proper use of Naloxone (AKA Narcan), and most of all, show people that they are worthy of care and attention in spite of whatever choices they might be making in their lives. (more…)
I’m happy to announce that in the last two weeks not only did we exceed the goal, but also the total number of contributors increased over 40% to over 130. The repairs and upgrades of the house in question that will become the Masjid al Latiff and Interfaith Community Center are ongoing and being covered by both the Shire Free Church and the MALIC Center together. Due to the additional work required, Will has bumped up the goal of his fundraiser to $15,000. While he’ll certainly accept donations in US Dollars, he’s hoping to finish out the fundraiser with cryptocurrencies and become the first mosque in the world to open with half their budget consisting of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Based on our research, it may be the first publicly known bitcoin-accepting mosque in the world. If you know of another, please post in the comments.
Keene’s Bitcoin Community is Front Page News!
“We don’t want to feed the war machine in any way” – Will Coley
Will explained in an interview for Free Keene, that as a peace-oriented religion, using bitcoin is a great way to avoid feeding the violent federal government, since cryptocurrencies decentralize the power of money into the people’s hands. Current bitcoin donations to the fundraiser have gone towards electronics purchases for running live video from the mosque. Soon, bitcoin will be spent on contractors for upcoming improvements to the property. Will describes Keene as a “bitcoin community” and says that he loves how easy it is to spend bitcoin in Keene. (Keene is the as-yet-undisputed number one city in the world for bitcoin-accepting businesses per capita.)
Thus far in the fundraiser Will has received over one bitcoin and some DASH and ether, totaling around $5,000 in cryptocurrencies. Should you wish to give, the bitcoin donation address is 14eFNWDcAhNeT4HPwd7ps2CcAAz7u68ABP
Stay tuned here to Free Keene for more on the MALIC Center’s upcoming launch. There’s no date set at the moment.
A customer purchased a “Live Free or Die” wood plaque and a “Legalize Gay Marijuana” bumper sticker at the Free State Bitcoin Shoppe in Portsmouth, New Hampshire using an encrypted digital currency called ZCash. The cryptocurrency is the most private money ever created, relying on a complex mathematical principle called a “Zero-Knowledge Proof”. Essentially this customer took some digital cash, locked it in a box with a secret key, and sent the shop the key. There is no discernible trail left. No observer can look up the transaction on the blockchain, not even those who know the sending/receiving addresses. Pretty slick! Here’s what it looked like:
This marks yet another turning point for human freedom. An evolution on the creation of bitcoin, this new cryptocurrency offers features and advantages that bitcoin simply doesn’t. While many are still holding fast to the promises of failing Federal Reserve Notes, others are seeking alternatives and building more reliable systems that make extortion far more difficult. Learn more by following the Free State Bitcoin Shoppe on Twitter and by joining their email list.
After the screening, we gave away one of the few existing DJVCS movie posters to a lucky attendee and then director and star of the movie, Derrick J Freeman and I took a bunch of questions from the audience. We reflected on the last five years, where we are now, and looked to the future of the exciting, growing New Hampshire Freedom Migration.
What a pleasure and an honor it has been to executive produce this movie, working with the amazing talents of Derrick J Freeman and editing pro Beau Davis. I’m especially grateful to all the people who love and share Victimless Crime Spree with their friends and family. The pro-freedom message and spirit of the movie is infectious and fun, despite its ultimately sad ending. It’s an important documentary, and the first to come out of the community of libertarian migrants to the Shire. (In case you haven’t seen it, the second such documentary, also edited by Beau Davis, is “101 Reasons Liberty Lives in New Hampshire“.)
