The Porcupine Freedom Festival is in its 17th year, and every year brings changes. Sometimes a step forward, sometimes a step back. You can follow along and see for yourself what life is like at this event as I document each day for you.
Here is the first video in the series. Steven and I begin construction on the Dome, the centerpiece and hub of activity within “Energy City.” The mini city encompasses 3 “city blocks,” (campsites) and contains spaces for meeting, eating, moving and dancing, stretching and exercising.
Abby and Ryan provide fresh fruits and vegetables with their tent “Porcupine Produce” right at the entrance to the city. Propane heaters and picnic tables flank the sides. James provides the Bistro lighting and ambiance by illuminating the trees of the city. Steven rocks the dome with heavy beats that can be heard from far and wide. Derrick leads morning yoga under the shade of the big tree by the exercise area, complete with weight bench, free weights, and a barbell. Health, strength, and energy to achieve liberty in our lifetime.
A local business owner walked into the Anypay offices a few weeks ago.
“Would be awesome to take bitcoin at my restaurant. Do you guys… do that?”
Turns out he owns a pizza shop and likes bitcoin. Well isn’t that good timing? Bitcoin Pizza Day right around the corner, and a guy walks in ready to sell me pizzas for bitcoin. It was fate.
He downloaded Anypay, set some addresses, and took a payment.
“Cool! That’s it?”
Yeah, that’s everyone’s reaction the first time they use Anypay.
I asked him if we could bring some friends to his restaurant and use bitcoin. He was like, “Yeah!” So a week later, we went to try it out. Bought some spicy chicken wings and a case of cold Guinness beers to go. Tap, tap, tap. Scan, ding, cha-ching! Easy.
Recently due to the ridiculous and tyrannical COVID crackdown on freedom that we’ve seen globally over the last two months, Murphy’s Taproom in Manchester closed its doors and the area’s longest-running Cryptocurrency Vending Machine (CVM) had to be moved to the other Murphy’s location in Bedford. Now, a month later, the CVM is back at Murphy’s Taproom in downtown Manchester at 494 Elm St as they prepare to reopen on Monday to their regular hours of 11:30am-Midnight, seven-days-a-week!
Originally installed back in 2016, the General Bytes brand CVM has been offering Bitcoin (BTC), DASH, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and most recently Monero (XMR) to the community at competitive rates, with unparalleled privacy. Since then, the area has seen close to a dozen competing CVMs spring up, many of which are severely limited on the amount available to purchase and invasive of users’ privacy.
Given the economic ruin being imposed by the federal and state government gangs, now may be a really good time to start learning about and acquiring cryptocurrency. The CVM in Manchester makes acquiring crypto as simple as putting cash in a vending machine. If you’re new to crypto, install some wallet software like Edge Wallet or Exodus Wallet and drop by Murphy’s Taproom any day to purchase some cryptocurrency.
Last night I tuned into Free Talk Live, and there was a caller sharing his professional commentary as a financial advisor that he believed that we could mark March 12, 2020 as the day that the Federal Reserve officially lost control of the dollar, and by extension, the entire American economy.
As far as I can understand from a laymen’s perspective, the stock market started to tumble because of panic and fears related to the corona virus — specifically, interruptions in “supply chains” because of factories and warehouses and transportation businesses telling workers to stay home. The idea is that some time needs to pass for people to be isolated and prevent the transmission of this deadly virus. After a while passes, and the number of new cases starts to decrease rather than increase, then life can begin to resume as normal. But until then, the economy is shutting down. There is a panic in the market, causing the biggest point drop in Dow history this week.
In response, the Federal Reserve (aka “The Fed”) injected (aka “printed”) $1.5 Trillion dollars into the economy. A trillion is a thousand billions, or put another way, a trillion is a million millions. It’s a lot!! And the market ate it up, rallied for a moment, and then continued its downward spiral. Woops. That wasn’t enough. If that wasn’t enough, then what WILL be enough? Can anything boost the confidence of the market? It seems not. And the only tool left in the Fed’s toolbox is money printing. They are talking about buying stocks now to help save the stock market. Will that work? Is that even a good idea? What if they are just trying to keep a sham economy going, and the jig is up? Uh oh.
So! Listen to this amazing call by Tim Picciott of TheLibertyAdvisor.com — I am not affiliated with Tim in any way other than we met at a conference one time and exchanged pleasantries. I think he’s a cool, smart guy, and his call into FTL was historic, so I ripped it from YouTube and uploaded it here for your enjoyment:
As Bitcoin (BTC) is once again making headlines for crossing the $10,000 price point, the world’s premiere multi-cryptocurrency, real-life payments platform Anypay has announced they are disabling BTC from their system. Based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Anypay’s co-founder Steven Zeiler said in an announcement today that BTC was “worthless for payments”, now that transactions can be easily canceled.
Originally, when Bitcoin (BTC) launched in 2009, and for several years into its life, one of the major selling points that set it apart from other electronic payments like credit cards was that Bitcoin transactions were irreversible. Once the buyer hit send, there was no way for the buyer to undo it. There was no “authority” like a credit card company or bank that the buyer could contact to have them reverse the transaction. Business owners are very familiar with the concept of the dreaded “chargeback”, where a dishonest customer can use the credit card company’s ability to undo transactions to scam a merchant and receive money back AND keep the product. Chargebacks were impossible under Bitcoin (BTC) and this was a major reason why businesses wanted to accept BTC.
However, midway through its first decade, after its anonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared and development was taken over by others who did not share Satoshi’s vision, the newer programmers introduced a “feature” called “Replace By Fee” or RBF. The purported reason for this was to allow a sender – after they’d already sent a transaction – to update the associated fee and help it get through the network faster. However, this also allowed them to cancel the transaction entirely, as long as the transaction had not yet received its first confirmation. This RBF “feature” broke one of the fundamental tenets of the original vision of Bitcoin – irreversible transactions.
Satoshi Nakamoto, Anonymous Creator of Bitcoin
For a while, this cancellation “feature” was only accessible through the “full node” Bitcoin Core software, which meant it was relatively tough to use in a real life payments situation. However, as shown by this video here, now more mobile wallets are incorporating the “feature”, which means that accepting Bitcoin (BTC) at point-of-sale is now highly dangerous and increases the risk of fraud. Hence, Anypay has announced they are no longer going to allow Bitcoin (BTC) payments on their platform.
In a video posted today, Zeiler announces that BTC has been disabled on the Anypay Cash Register app until further notice, as he’s had a “final revelation that it’s worthless for payments”. This, after having seen the new video that shows how easy it is now to commit fraud against real-life payment systems using BTC.
While some BTC-only fanatics will be disappointed by the news, the reality is most people don’t use BTC for payments via Anypay’s platform anyway, given BTC’s ridiculously high fees compared to other, more useful cryptos that were designed for payments like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and DASH or even Bitcoin SV (BSV), which Anypay is now supporting. Plus, when paying with BCH or DASH on Anypay at a real-life business one will usually receive 10% back instantly thanks to Anypay’s “Bitcoin Cash-Back” and “DASH-Back” programs.
I think Anypay has made the right choice here to protect merchants from potential fraud. It’s too bad the Bitcoin (BTC) programmers forced Anypay’s hand, by making BTC less useful over time. Once upon a time Bitcoin was useful for payments, as it was originally intended. Sadly, those days are long gone. Bitcoin (BTC) may still be the king crypto, but if it’s not useful for payments, is it really a currency?
Anypaymap.com shows the most active crypto-accepting businesses in the area.
Big news from the Monadnock Crypto blog! The Keene area now has three additional local businesses that are accepting cryptocurrency for their services. All three are mobile businesses and will travel to their customers and were all added to the local Coinmap in the last month. That brings the already very high concentration of businesses accepting crypto to an all new level, keeping Keene in the top tier of cities globally that are high in crypto-acceptance-per-capita. In fact, both Forbes and Bitcoin.com have called Keene, “Crypto Mecca”.
With her new business, “EuPHOria”, the founding chef of Keene’s “Pho Keene Great”, Isabelle Rose, has struck out on her own and is now regularly meeting customers in Keene with hot Vietnamese food cooked-to-order. Another recent addition is Pure Bliss Clean, a professional cleaning service that handles home and small businesses. Also, Kenzy Dietz of “KD Prestige Detailing” recently won Monadnock Crypto’s radio giveaway contest on 92.7 Bratt FM and decided to set up Anypay Cash Register shortly thereafter. Dietz had already been introduced to cryptocurrency by someone close to her and was elated to be the winner of the $500-worth-of-crypto giveaway. When asked what her reasons were for accepting cryptocurrency at her car detailing business, Dietz said, “Cryptocurrency is the currency of the future, so I am delighted to be a local business that accepts it as payment. Not only is it easy to accept, but it’s a great way to broaden my businesses acceptance of alternatives to paying with just cash, checks, or debit. The future is coming.”
