Well well well. The 8th Anniversary of the first-ever cryptocurrency purchase (10,000 Bitcoins for 2 Papa John’s pizzas in Jacksonville, Florida), and digital cash enthusiasts everywhere are celebrating by gathering to eat pizza and and spread their favorite money. Portsmouth, New Hampshire (aka “Bitcoin Village“) was no exception!
Bitcoin Pizza Day 2018 at STREET’Za in Portsmouth
Originally posted to FreeStateBitcoin.com:
I still can’t believe it. I just watched this video by CNN about a New Hampshire man who is able to live his entire life on cryptocurrency. I’ve come close, but he’s got even me beat. Truly an impressive feat. To learn his secret, watch this video:
Amazing, Joël. Brilliantly done. You are welcome at the Free State Bitcoin Shoppe anytime! To level up your crypto game, attend the next Portsmouth Bitcoin Network meet up. Or if you’re super-serious, enroll in the Blockchain Institute of Technology.
Hundred Nights, Downtown Keene, NH
Ever since, I’ve been a supporter of the unique approach that Hundred Nights has taken to helping the homeless. Rather than give them a place to stay every day of the year, Hundred Nights opens for the hundred coldest nights. At 7am, all those staying overnight have to get their stuff and leave for the day. They aren’t completely out in the cold, as Hundred Nights also operates a drop-in center open year-round, where the homeless can work on finding jobs, putting together a resume, or just get warm.
Hundred Nights’ BTC Wallet QR Code is 13rPdujR7Gg2v8pGHEF1UwCAP9gVjb6j8v
Given that the bid was so low, it was decided that a matching 1% of a BTC (worth around $150 at the time) would also be donated to Hundred Nights, rather than just $25. I dropped in to the office of Hundred Nights’ Executive Director Mindy Cambiar and helped walk her through signing up with Coinbase. While I’m not a big fan of Coinbase as a company, they do make it easy for people with bank accounts to acquire cryptocurrency as well as convert it to USD if they need or want, so I still recommend them to newbies. Indeed, within a short time, Hundred Nights was ready to accept cryptocurrency donations and the addresses are up now on their website. Whether you live in the area or not, if you’re a cryptocurrency user, please send them a donation to thank them for embracing the future of money!
As of now, Keene’s independent homeless charity is now accepting cryptocurrency including Bitcoin Core (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH)! Here are the addresses to which you can contribute: (more…)
All Cryptocurrency’s Total Global Value Over $420 Billion!
What a ride! The total market cap of Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies combined passed $420 billion for the first time yesterday! For some perspective, keep in mind that the global market cap passed $100 billion for the first time in early June. It hit $200 billion five months later in early November, then about three weeks later hit $300 billion. It only took ten more days for the total market cap to pass $400 billion.
With some exceptions, overall, the rest of the cryptocurrency prices trend upward when Bitcoin Core (BTC) is going up. Bitcoin Core has been on a meteoric rise, with nearly a 2000% increase in its US dollar value in the last twelve months! Yesterday, BTC eclipsed over $16,000 according to BitcoinAverage.com. Two days prior to that, it was at $12,000.
When will these steady gains come to an end? Hard to say. Many fear a huge crash is coming, but then again cryptocurrency is uncharted territory. Just because there was a big crash in bitcoin in 2013 doesn’t mean anything for what’s happening now. The market was so small then by comparison to today. If you look at the market cap chart above, you can see that “big” crash at the end of 2013 – but it barely registers as a little speed bump, peaking then at around $13 billion, when compared to the monstrous $420 billion of value in all cryptos today.
Corner News’ owner Roberta Mastrogiovanni poses with her store’s brand new Bitcoin Vending Machine!
Obviously, rule number one of investing is don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose. If you’ve got money in cryptocurrency and you’re spooked and want to cash out, go ahead, just don’t cash it all out. Also, consider diversifying into other cryptocurrency besides BTC. That said, rule number one of bitcoin has always been to hold on for the ride. Don’t let the downs get to you. They will come at some point; the only question is how deep the price drop will be and for how long. It’s important to keep perspective – we’re still in the early days of this. Even though bitcoin is coming up on its ninth year of existence, it’s still young compared to all other forms of money that have been with us for centuries. This is new territory and anything can happen.
We’re all subject to our emotions and beliefs. I got spooked and sold some of the Shire Free Church‘s bitcoin for cash prior to the much-feared “Segwit2x” fork of Bitcoin that was supposed to happen in November, but never materialized. That bitcoin would now be worth three times as much USD had we held it. (more…)
Is the Bitcoin geek war finally over, or just getting started?
I wrote a very detailed article explaining what was happening with this potential fork and you can read that here to get caught up. Here’s a brief recap of how we got to where we are:
Bitcoin has been going through some ugly growing pains. Its network is full of transactions. Fees have been skyrocketing as a result. Bitcoin transactions that a few years ago were no more than a few cents are now regularly $3-5 dollars. This has killed Bitcoin’s usefulness for small transactions. After arguing online for years about how to solve the issue technically, a group of dozens of companies and mining pool operators came together in May to propose a compromise called “Segwit2X”. This would implement “Segregated Witness” and then three months later increase the block size to 2 MB from 1 MB. Both of these changes were supposed to increase capacity.
Do you take the road less traveled?
Bitcoin has Forked into Two!
The blockchain is the distributed, decentralized ledger that contains every transaction that has ever occurred on the Bitcoin network. It’s approximately 150 GB in size. Since the hard fork, there are now two “Bitcoin” blockchains competing for market dominance. Both of them have the exact same transactions from the beginning of Bitcoin nearly a decade ago, running until August 1st, 2017, when at just after 2pm Eastern time the first “Bitcoin Cash” block was mined into existence, at greater than 1 MB – in fact, its size was about 4 MB.
Since the original Bitcoin blockchain has a 1 MB limit per block, it was at this point that the one blockchain became two. The supermajority of miners are still mining the original Bitcoin chain, let’s call it “Bitcoin Core” or BTC. However, a small portion of miners have joined the mining of the new “Bitcoin Cash” or BCH. If you thought Bitcoin Core’s growing pains were challenging, take a look at how Bitcoin Cash had to start:
Bitcoin mining doesn’t actually look like this.
Worse still, no one who wanted to sell their newfound BCH was easily able to do so for at least the first couple days of its existence. Due to concerns about certain technical attacks that are possible in the time after a fork, cryptocurrency exchanges were extra cautious before allowing BCH deposits to trading accounts. However, while they weren’t allowing people to deposit BCH, they WERE allowing them to trade it. Huh? How can one trade something on an exchange to which one can’t deposit? Remember, after the fork, the people with BTC in their exchange accounts were given a balance of the same amount of BCH. (Except at the Bitfinex exchange, who screwed over their customers.) So, since trading was happening but no one could deposit, the price of the new BCH trended upward, even reaching as high as $800-$1,000 on some exchanges. (more…)
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