by Ian | Nov 1, 2017 |
Corner News’ owner Roberta Mastrogiovanni poses with her store’s brand new Bitcoin Vending Machine!
As one of the admins of the existing non-profit Shire Free Church-run Bitcoin Vending Machines in Keene and Manchester, I’m super-excited about the competition. Why? Simple. The goal of the Church’s bitcoin outreach project is to get bitcoin into more people’s hands. The new company in town (which also operates more than 20 bitcoin BVMs across Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland) is making bitcoin even more accessible in New Hampshire than it was before!
While we’ve had a Bitcoin Vending Machine at Route 101 Local Goods in Keene for years, it’s only been available Tue-Sun. Therefore bitcoin was not available in Keene on Mondays, or after Route 101 Local Goods closes at 6pm each day (5p Sundays). Now that the Blackfrog BVM is online at Corner News, bitcoin’s availability in Keene expands to all seven days a week and late into the night, as Corner News is open until 10pm Mon-Thu, until 11pm Fri and Sat and 9pm on Sundays. Corner News is located at 67 Main St. and is a Keene landmark, established over 100 years ago. It was also the first brick-and-mortar business in Keene to accept bitcoin, way back in 2013!
Corner News’ owner, Roberta Mastrogiovanni, who recently was able to pay for her hotel stay during a vacation with her bitcoin, when asked why she’d decided to host the new BVM told me, “Corner News has been accepting bitcoin for several years without any problem, in fact we have seen a huge gain in the last year, so when asked whether we would consider renting out a small square foot of our store for a Bitcoin ATM we thought why not, especially since the coins can be spent right in store…just seemed like a good addition.” (more…)
by Ian | Oct 21, 2017 |
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.
It’s not-so-civil.
The reason why the fighting is at a fever pitch now is because the BIG schism has still yet to come. The historic split of Bitcoin Cash in August was a relatively small one. Only about 3% of the mining power behind Bitcoin Core initially got behind Bitcoin Cash and though there’s a strong argument that Bitcoin Cash is the Bitcoin that is most true to its anonymous creator’s vision, the market doesn’t seem to agree. The price of one Bitcoin Cash is near all-time lows at about $320, or about 5% of the price of one Bitcoin Core, which is over $6,000 at the time of this writing.
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…)
by Ian | Aug 30, 2017 |
Quiz Results from NH Cannafest, Day 1&2
This weekend Darryl W Perry and I manned a Libertarian Party of NH outreach booth at the first-ever NH Cannabis Freedom Festival and it went extremely well! Over the course of three days at the festival, we found that over 67% of attendees were Libertarian or on the borderline, according to the “World’s Smallest Political Quiz“.
When I lived in Florida, I used to do these “Operation Politically Homeless” booths at various events including gun shows, the county fair, and gay & lesbian pridefests. One thing I’ve noticed here in New Hampshire is that people are generally more receptive and open to new ideas. I’ve done this outreach and outreach of other sorts, like Jury Nullification both here in NH and down in FL and it’s just easier here.
In New Hampshire, a supermajority of people will accept a flier in front of a courthouse or in a crowd at an event or in this case, stop for a few minutes, take the 10-question “Worlds Smallest Political Quiz” and learn where they are at on the political spectrum. In Florida, people are much colder to those conducting outreach, in my experience.
Here are the results from the 2017 NH Cannabis Freedom Festival:
22 of 38 who took the quiz on day one were Libertarian or borderline – over 57%
72 of 110 through day two were Libertarian or borderline – over 65%
87 of 129 through day three were Libertarian or borderline – over 67%!
Free Talk Live’s hosts Ian and Darryl interview festival organizer Rick Naya.
If you missed our three radio shows that we recorded from the event, here are the archives: Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Kudos to Rick Naya and his awesome crew for putting on a great first-year event. Thanks also to all the great folks who came out. The attendees were super-cool and all of them were grateful for the opportunity we provided them to learn more about their libertarian (or not) political views. It was a blast and I hope that we’ll be back again for 2018. Watch this blog for any announcements.
by Ian | Aug 5, 2017 |
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…)
by Ian | Jul 29, 2017 |
Front Page, Above-the-Fold, Twice!
About one month ago, the Monadnock Shopper News featured Bitcoin and the regional businesses that accept it on their front page, above-the-fold! Not to be outdone, the Keene Sentinel’s business section had a massive article in today’s paper that was not only the front page feature but was also promoted above-the-fold in the headline of the front page of the century-plus old newspaper. You can read it online here at the Keene Sentinel’s site. (Here’s a PDF of the piece.)
Reporter Paul Cuno-Booth did a thorough job interviewing various owners of the local bitcoin-accepting businesses about their reasons for backing the amazing decentralized currency, including Monadnock Makerspace founder Johnny Bolster, area computer tech Michael Gordon, Bob Maibusch of Pine Springs Golf Course, Ken Urbanski of Kirby’s Q, and Steve Wilder of Wilder Automotive. Cuno-Booth also focuses on the Shire Free Church’s media outreach along with our local meetup group for Bitcoiners and other cryptocurrency users and newbies, the Monadnock Decentralized Currency Network.
Monadnock Decentralized Currency Network Meetup at Rick’s Ice Cream
by Darryl W. Perry | Jul 24, 2017 |
Before the 2017 Legislative Session began, Liberty Lobby LLC CEO Darryl W Perry began identifying bills of interest. This was initially done based solely on the titles of the Legislative Service Requests (LSRs), which are made public shortly after being filed. The text of the LSRs are then made available once the wording is finalized and has a signature from the sponsor. Not every LSR gets a bill number; a Representative or Senator can ask to withdraw the LSR. This often happens if there are multiple LSRs on the same topic with the same objective, or if the sponsor learns there is little chance of passage.
Of the LSRs marked as “of interest” by Liberty Lobby LLC, 39 were withdrawn before the text became available. Another 3 were withdrawn after the bill text became available, but before being assigned to a committee. Once committee hearing began in January, bills could not be withdrawn. However, the sponsor of SB82 (relative to labeling for maple syrup) requested the bill be deemed “Inexpedient to Legislate,” and the public hearing lasted less than one minute.
Click here to read the full recap of the 2017 Legislative Session.
