Bitcoin Embassy New Hampshire, which recently launched inside Route 101 Local Goods at 661 Marlboro Street in Keene, is not the first Bitcoin Embassy in the United States, but it is the second one! The first was opened earlier this year in Atlanta. There are others in various parts of the world but Bitcoin Embassy New Hampshire is the only one in the Northeast part of North America.
The Bitcoin Embassy will be a place for learning, with “Bitcoin 101” classes already available, teaching the basics of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Classes are pay-what-you-can-afford, which means if you can’t afford to pay, you can still attend for free. Drop in to take a tour at 661 Marlboro St in Keene and sign up for a class, or visit online at BitNH.me.
The 2018 General Election is approaching in less than 2 weeks. Per state law, the Libertarian Party candidate for Governor, Jilletta Jarvis, needs at least 4% for the Libertarian Party to retain ballot access. This will be difficult since Jarvis and the Libertarian candidates for Congress haves been excluded from the upcoming Granite State Debates hosted by WMUR and the Union Leader. I encourage everyone who wants to keep NH tri-partisan to vote Libertarian in the upcoming election! Governor: Jilletta Jarvis Congress: Justin O’Donnell State Senate: Ian Freeman State House Cheshire 7: Robert J Call State House Cheshire 16: Darryl W Perry Sheriff: AriaDiMezzo Baker Treasurer: Kenneth Kelly III Register of Deeds: Darlene Lester Register of Probate: Jacqueline Mason (write-in)
Any Bitcoin conference can have big names in the industry come speak, but only this conference could have this panel. As longtime readers here know, New Hampshire is a special place due to our global lead in real-life cryptocurrency acceptance. The reason is because of the concentration of libertarian crypto activists we have here that are doing the boots-on-the-ground work to make amazing thing happen here, thanks to the ongoing NH Freedom Migration.
For my expert activist panelists I selected Chris Rietmann of the new Bitcoin Embassy New Hampshire, and my fellow Free Keene bloggers Darryl W Perry and Derrick J Freeman, so we had activists representing both of NH’s crypto hotspots, Keene and Portsmouth. The guys did an amazing panel and I think it gives an excellent taste of what it’s like to be here in Crypto Mecca. You can watch the full hour-long panel here:
Yesterday evening I was invited along with other Libertarian candidates Darryl W Perry and Jilletta Jarvis to Monadnock Developmental Services for a presentation to political candidates about the frustrations that families with children who have developmental disabilities have with state “assistance” programs. Multiple family members presented their difficult stories to a couple dozen state reps and candidates for office.
If you want, compassionate solutions to healthcare issues that don’t rely on institutionalized violence, you really need to listen to the first hour of last night’s Free Talk Live to find out why Libertarianism and the non-aggression principle is the best way to help our neighbors in need. Here’s the archive:
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by the editorial board of the Keene Sentinel. We covered a variety of issues that I was able to speak on from a principled voluntarist perspective. It was a very good interview and in addition to a lengthy article about it, they also posted the full hour-long video to their youtube:
However, I’m not the only one they interviewed. They first sat down with Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Jilletta Jarvis. Here’s their video of Jilletta’s interview and the accompanying article. After having interviewed us both, they astutely inquired of me regarding the vast differences between Jarvis’ positions and mine, since she is more of a small government libertarian while I’m a total voluntarist who believes all human interaction should be consensual.
RT America contacted me Friday and asked for a quick comment on behalf of Cop Block regarding this week’s mass page takedown by Facebook. The takedown affected the facebook pages of major police accountability and pro-liberty sites including the Free Thought Project, the Anti-Media, Cop Block and others. I explained that Facebook is their property and they can do as they wish with it. Police accountability activists and other libertarians should be building alternative platforms rather than relying on those provided by political corporate behemoths like Facebook and Twitter. Here’s the segment that aired on RT America yesterday:
The good news is, such a platform already exists in the form of Mastodon, which is a decentralized, federated competitor to Twitter. Unlike Facebook and Twitter which are centralized platforms controlled by corporations, a Mastodon server can be run by anyone and worldwide there are thousands of Mastodon servers. Each server admin decides the rules for their server, including which other Mastodon servers to connect to – this is what it means when Mastodon is described as “federated”. Its decentralized, federated structure is why Mastodon is much more censorship resistant than the centralized, corporate platforms.
Cop Block’s new Mastodon!
I recommend you create an account on your preferred Mastodon instance. If you’re pro-liberty, then you should try out Liberdon, which launched this summer and houses various libertarians and voluntarists. I just made a CopBlock account there today, which you can follow here.
Facebook’s blog post explaining their takedowns basically admitted they were upset that pages like Cop Block were getting people to leave Facebook and visit their respective websites, meaning potential revenue for the sites in question and potentially less revenue for Facebook. Facebook doesn’t want you to leave Facebook. Whether there were political motivations behind the takedowns is more speculative, but it certainly reeks of it. Regardless of their reasons, perhaps you should consider leaving Facebook entirely and helping build the decentralized alternatives. It’s up to you.
NH’s top cop has resigned over physical abuse of son – Photo from Valley News’ Jennifer Hauck
Enfield police chief Richard Crate, until recently was the longtime president of the New Hampshire Association of Chiefs of Police. He was a regular figure at state house hearings to decriminalize medical and recreational cannabis. Crate publicly opposed those proposals every step of the way – on behalf of police chiefs across New Hampshire. Here’s some of his testimony on cannabis decrim where he predicted a “wave of devastation”. Needless to say, now a full year since decrim – said devastation hasn’t occurred.
Now it looks like Crate should have take up the habit of consuming cannabis. Maybe a joint at the end of his work day would have helped him calm down and deal with his anger issues that appear to have led him to attacking his own son. Crate resigned earlier this year to avoid prosecution by the state’s attorney general’s office, agreeing that he’ll undergo counseling, apologize to his son, and not seek recertification as a police officer, according to the Union Leader.