New Hampshire’s Longest Running Regular Libertarian Social Meetup
The last couple of weeks have been nuts. We’ve seen authoritarianism rising globally at a rapid clip, using health as the excuse and scaring people into total obedience and isolation. It’s tragic. In New Hampshire and several other states, restaurants and bars have been told they aren’t allowed to serve customers inside their establishments with the exception of take out and delivery. Other businesses are having people work from home and “social distancing” has been put in place as the new normal. In other cases, like California, total lockdowns are now in place. In NH, an “emergency order” was issued by the state governor, Chris Sununu, who – no joke – is actually referred to as “HIS EXCELLENCY” in the order which purportedly bans any gathering of over fifty people.
It’s an outrageous order and contrary to a basic right of humans, which is the right to assemble. It’s also a violation of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In order for many humans to be happy, they need to be around other people. We are a social animal. Now the people calling themselves “the state” or “the government” have decided to threaten everyone with violence if they don’t do as they are told and OBEY – for their own good, of course.
Normally, libertarians are skeptical of the things they are told by government goons, however we’ve seen yet another schism in the movement in the last few weeks over this Coronavirus scare. Apparently if an authoritarian puts on a lab coat then many libertarians will fall under their spell.
I don’t know if Coronavirus is the threat the government and media are making it out to be. I do know this, however:
1. Politicians and bureaucrats lie. There’s no reason to believe they are telling the truth now. There is a long history of governments manufacturing a crisis and spreading fear in order to attain more power. We saw this in a big way prior to Coronavirus in the hysterical paranoia fostered by the state after 9/11. As a result we saw the rise of “Homeland Security” and the further elimination of freedom. The response to Coronavirus is even worse. In some cases like San Francisco people are under total lockdowns. They also use the term “lockdown” in prison.
2. Media benefits when it propagates fear. “If it bleeds, it leads!” News is a business. They have advertisers, so the more people they can get to tune in, the more valuable the ad space. If people are in a state of fear, they are more likely to hang on through that next commercial break. Plus, mainstream news sources depend on government for its press releases and usually incorporate them, verbatim, into their on-air copy. Though in theory their job is to expose political corruption, if they are too good at this, the state agents will not talk to them any longer and then they won’t get “the scoop”, so any critique of government from mainstream media is usually highly limited.
3. Whenever government takes more freedoms, it doesn’t cede that ground back to liberty after the “crisis” has ended.
Keene Bitcoin Meetup
Government gangsters say it and the media propagates it. As a result, people are scared to death of another iteration of the flu that as of this writing, has infected just over 250,000 people globally – according to numbers provided BY THE STATE. Some libertarians believe the governments are downplaying the numbers to keep people calm. Others believe the state agents are inflating the numbers to scare people more. Who knows what the truth is.
I do know this, people are obedient and more than willing to do what they are ordered by people wearing fancy hats, uniforms, and lab coats. They are easily frightened into giving up their freedoms, all for the promise that they’ll be able to continue to suck air.
However, what is the point of living if you can’t make your own choices?
If people across New Hampshire don’t stand up and take back their liberties, then we no longer deserve the “live free or die” slogan. To that end, in spite of Sununu’s order, the longest-running weekly social gathering of libertarians in New Hampshire, “Social Sundays” will continue. Previously held at Local Burger on Main St, it has moved to the Bitcoin Embassy NH located at 661 Marlboro St. in Keene. The new start time is now 5pm. Attend at your own risk and bring your own food and drink. If the event gets to over 51 people a special prize will be awarded. No cops allowed.
For more than half-a-decade, the Shire Free Church has been providing a Cryptocurrency Vending Machine (CVM) in Keene as a service to the community. Eventually expanding to a CVM in Manchester and a second one in Keene, we have had the pleasure of connecting countless people with Bitcoin (BTC) at the lowest rates in the region. A few years after launching in Keene we also began offering buyers a choice of other cryptocurrencies besides BTC – DASH and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the two most-used-at-retail cryptos across New Hampshire.
Now, I’m excited to announce that we’re adding a fourth cryptocurrency to our CVMs located at the Bitcoin Embassy in Keene and Murphy’s Taproom in Manchester – the world’s top privacy coin – Monero!
Started in 2014, Monero (XMR) was immediately different from all of the other “altcoins” competing with the crypto-King-of-the-hill, Bitcoin (BTC). Uniquely at the time, Monero wasn’t a fork of the Bitcoin source code. Monero is instead based on a technology called “Cryptonote”. The Cryptonote white paper describes a major flaw with Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s public ledger, the “blockchain”, allows all Bitcoin transactions to be totally traceable. Despite what some in media and government might claim, Bitcoin is not anonymous and every transaction can be tracked, all the way back to the very first one. Monero’s system solves this problem and introduces true anonymity and fungibility to cryptocurrency – the way it should have been from the start.
Today, there are a myriad of privacy coins out there, but since the supermajority of them were based on Bitcoin, the private features of the other coins are always added on and that means there are still public transaction options in most other privacy coins like Zcash and its variants. With these coins, the user must choose to send a private or public transaction and roughly 90% of Zcash transactions, for instance, are “unshielded”. With Monero there is no choice. All transactions are private.
Cryptocurrency Vending Machine at Bitcoin Embassy NH in Keene
As you might imagine, the government gang does not like this privacy technology one bit. They want to know everything you do with your money, so they can better control you. One of the best things about Bitcoin was that it allowed for the first time a money system to exist completely outside the control of the state. Cryptocurrency is a true competitor to the multi-generational dominance of the central banks’ fiat currencies like the Dollar. However, Bitcoin and most of its crypto-competition still allow the government gangsters to monitor transactions. Monero fixes that. Once you buy Monero, the trail ends.
The Shire Free Church is an interfaith church with a mission to foster peace. Every dollar of value we can help people convert to cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Monero is value the state can no longer steal to commit violence like going to war across the planet, or going to war against the people – like with their insane War on Drugs. Therefore, offering cryptocurrency in return for a donation to the church is a direct method to increase peace. Connecting the community to crypto also allows people to protect their wealth from the ravages of the state cultists and now with the addition of Monero, allows them to completely obscure how much they have and how it’s spent.
Right now with the recent bloodbath in crypto prices during the Coronavirus downturn, Monero and other cryptos are super cheap compared to where they were just a week ago. You may purchase Monero from our CVMs at your own risk, so long as your intention is to use it for peaceful, legal purposes. You can learn more about our Crypto Vending Machines and their locations and hours here.
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:
This week NH 2020 republican candidate for governor, “Nobody” paid another visit to the state house and testified on a couple of bills. One, SB754, would add dental coverage to Medicaid and the other, SB758, was going to be a ban on Kratom. At least, until the bill’s sponsor saw the huge crowd that had turned out to oppose prohibition and put in an amendment to the bill that changed it into a regulation bill instead.
A standing-room-only crowd showed up to the NH state house on Tuesday to testify against a bill that would ban Kratom, SM758, only to discover that at the senator who submitted the bill changed it at the last minute into a bill that would instead regulate Kratom. It was a sneaky move on the senator’s part, as it flipped the energy in the room. Most of the average folks who’d taken time off to come out and speak against the potential prohibition of Kratom were then relieved that it was now a regulatory bill, without understanding that regulations are also bad for freedom and will hurt the industry.
If you’re not familiar, Kratom is a plant in the coffee family that has helped people break additions to opiates and has helped others with pain relief, while for others it helps them with productivity.
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?
