Border Patrol Agent Salutes Camera at NH Internal Oppressive Checkpoint
On Friday, several Forkfest 2018 attendees drove an hour South of Roger’s Campground to I-93 around Woodstock, NH – the site of the repeating temporary internal Border Patrol immigration checkpoints. Based on activist reports, the checkpoint appeared to have been operating that day from noon until 7pm. As is typical of these checkpoints, they were stopping every car to ask occupants if they are “US Citizens“. They also had a dog they were walking up and down the line of waiting cars.
As it turns out, a car full of people with video cameras wasn’t welcome in their secondary screening area. After one agent orders me to pull into their secondary screening for refusing to answer questions, his commanding officer intervenes before I can even cross over a single lane of traffic, and even apologizes for not wasting more of our time with their invasive screening! In hindsight, I should have told him to apologize to all the cars without camera-toting occupants for wasting everyone’s time with their oppressive police state checkpoint. Here’s the ridiculous video:
No one in the car was planning to answer the agents’ questions, given one has a right to remain silent (that the US Supreme Court has now required be invoked in police encounters). Obedience to tyrants only encourages them. Besides, as someone who believes in liberty, I don’t believe in government borders. Peaceful people should be allowed to enter a free country. Of course, we all know by now the United States is not a free country, and in fact has been dropping on the various international freedom rankings.
Also this weekend, NH Libertarian Party candidate for US Congress NH-2, Justin O’Donnell also traversed the checkpoint while live streaming to facebook. His friend in the passenger seat obediently answered the agent’s inquiry while O’Donnell debated with the agents, ultimately admitting to having been born in Boston, MA. Prior to this, the agent threatened to detain O’Donnell until he answered the question. (more…)
In addition, we also discussed Forkfest, the active NH Freedom Migration, and the advertising proposal I made this week to get DASH to renew their sponsorship of Free Talk Live, my national talk radio show. Plus, I announced the public beta of a very cool website where you can create printable DASH tips you can leave with servers at restaurants or give to whoever you want to introduce to cryptocurrency! It’s called cryptotip.org and it’s exclusive to DASH at this time. If you love DASH, you should give it a try and feel free to let me know what you think!
Thanks so much to the DASH Force News crew for the opportunity. Here’s the full interview:
As we did in 2017, Keene cryptocurrency fans got together yesterday, May 22nd, to celebrate Bitcoin Pizza Day. What is Bitcoin Pizza Day? On May 22nd of 2010, a computer programmer made the first recorded real-life bitcoin purchase – two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin. Today, that 10,000 BTC is worth over $80 Million dollars. A year ago, it was worth $25 Million.
We gathered at Little Zoe’s Take and Bake and ordered several pizzas. However instead of paying with BTC, as we did last year, this time we paid with DASH. Why DASH? Last year during the dramatic spike in fees on the Bitcoin Core network, several local businesses began accepting DASH as an alternative to BTC, to give their customers a choice.
In order to spend cryptocurrency, it’s the buyer who pays the network fee for processing the transaction (this is the opposite of the credit card system, where the merchant takes the fee out of their profit). Given that today fees to send BTC are typically about $0.40 and to send DASH about $0.01, it’s a no-brainer. No one would choose to spend BTC when a better option is available.
That better option is DASH, aka “Digital Cash”, a cryptocurrency that confirms four times faster than BTC and has really taken off at retail locations across southern New Hampshire. It proliferated because NH-based crypto point-of-sale merchant processor Anypay introduced DASH first with its release of their POS software in 2017. In fact, in an interview with Albert, the operator of DiscoverDash.com, a website that shows the physical locations of DASH-accepting businesses across the world, he told me that Keene is number three in the world for real-life DASH acceptance, behind Caracas, Venezuela at number one and Portsmouth, NH at number two!
Lily Tang Williams tells her story of growing up in and eventually leaving China to seek individual freedom, which ultimately led her to Colorado, the Libertarian Party and now to her new home in New Hampshire! This was recorded at the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire‘s 2018 Convention last weekend. Full video from the convention business session will be available on the Free Keene YouTube.
Now that Keene’s original Bitcoin and DASH vending machine has been majorly upgraded to the top-of-the-line General Bytes brand, the Shire Free Church was able to move the popular and rock-solid Lamassu brand Cryptocurrency Vending Machine to a new location in Keene!
I’m excited to announce that Thirsty Owl, directly across Winchester St from Keene State College, immediately stepped up to take the Lamassu. Thirsty Owl, (formerly known as D’s Cafe) offers beer, wine, and liquor along with excellent and affordable food like sandwiches, tacos, burgers, and even breakfast all day. Owner Darren Humphrey began accepting cryptocurrency at the register in 2017, including Bitcoin Core (BTC) and DASH and was excited to host the area’s third public CVM.
Now, two of the area’s three CVM’s are open seven days a week in downtown Keene, with Thirsty Owl extending cryptocurrency availability into the late night in Keene, as it closes at 2am Thursday through Saturday and 11pm Sunday through Wednesday. You can see full location detail, machine info, and hours on the Thirsty Owl’s new Coin Radar entry here.
The cryptocurrency-accepting bar in Keene, Thirsty Owl, now features a CVM!
Thirsty Owl is also the destination for this week’s Keene Crypto Network Meetup group. We’ll be there at 2pm today (Sunday) so if you have questions about cryptocurrency, there’s no better place to go than our meetup. If you can’t make it, we have meetups every eight days.
This also means Keene continues to be the dominant cryptocurrency hotspot in the Northeast United States and one of the top on the planet. Not only do we have a high amount of cryptocurrency-accepting businesses per-capita (more than major cities worldwide), Keene also trounces bigger cities like New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Manchester on CVMs per-capita!
If you’re into cryptocurrency and you aren’t living in New Hampshire, especially the hotspots of Portsmouth and Keene, you’re missing out.
Now, in just the first quarter of 2018, an explosion of competition has hit the Manchester area. Two national Bitcoin Vending Machine operators have entered the NH market and added several machines. One company called Coinsource dropped three BVMs into Manchester back in late January and within a month, a Nevada-based company Coincloud placed a BVM one block north of the original CVM at Murphy’s Taproom in Manch at a vape shop called Vaporamas.
Manchester’s CVM Explosion, as of March 2018
That same company has also placed units in brand new New Hampshire markets, also at vape shops in Nashua and Salem! Finally, New Hampshire’s newest BVM just went online about a week ago in Manchester’s Mall of New Hampshire in the food court. It’s a smart location – people sitting around eating have more time to get curious about the machine and maybe check it out. The operator of the mall unit is the brand new “Simple BTC LLC”.
That’s a total of 13 Cryptocurrency Vending Machines (though the units from Coincloud, Coinsource, and Simple BTC are BTC-only at this time) in and across Southern New Hampshire. Sadly, the Twin Mountain BVM in the North Country closed when the gas station housing it went out of business last year. Compare NH to Massachusetts, where according to the excellent website “Coin ATM Radar” there are 24 CVMs for 6.79 million people, which is one machine for every 283,101 people. In NH it’s 13 CVMs for 1.35 million people, which is one for every 103,846 people. New Hampshire is crushing Massachusetts with more affordable rates at its machines and nearly three times more CVMs-per-capita! NH even beats out NY, CA, and FL ranking at #5 nationwide for CVMs-per-capita, with almost ten machines per one million population (using 2015 numbers and data from Coin ATM Radar). You can see where your state ranks on this spreadsheet. (more…)
