It’s truly an honor to be attacked. They say you don’t take flak unless you’re over the target. No one should be surprised that there will be vehement opposition when libertarians actually start making an impact as we have done here in New Hampshire. Most libertarians don’t understand what it’s like to be hated, because outside of New Hampshire, the libertarian movement is little more than a sideshow. They have near-zero impact with their political campaigns, and that’s about all they do besides argue on the internet.
Prominent Haters’ Home Foreclosed, Sold Under $48k
Here in the Shire, libertarian activists regularly get mainstream media coverage in newsprint, on TV and radio. Here we matter, despite the online trolls who spend their precious time trying to convince us we don’t. Of course, the fact that they spend such inordinate time on us is evidence against their own claims.
Every now and then a hater will get out from behind their computer monitor and actually make a real life appearance. Sometimes they are memorable and hilarious, like the time Sam Dodson was assaulted by a former coffee-shop owner wielding a coffee cup (both have long since left NH). Sometimes they are threatening and violent. However, very rarely are their efforts sustained for any meaningful amount of time. Every hate group that has risen has also fallen away, however one couple really stood out above all the other haters, Matthew and Jennifer Schmidt. (more…)
Libertarian Colin Gibson was elected to Ward 4 Moderator on November 7th. Colin won 738 to 331. There were 8 write-in votes. Colin is an advocate of crypto currency, police accountability, and agorism. Colin is known by many in the liberty community, and presumably by some in the anti-liberty community. However, there is no indication that he is known by the population at large, and he states that he did not run a campaign. Colin ran against Inbal Rejwan-Day. She was not an incumbent as Woullard Lett was the outgoing moderator according to a phone call to the Manchester City Clerk on November 9th at 1pm.
I do not consider this an achievement of republicanism (more commonly, but less accurately known as democracy). (more…)
Is the Bitcoin geek war finally over, or just getting started?
After months of buildup, fighting, and controversy, the potential forkers of Bitcoin have blinked. Thankfully, they’ve called off their plans to cause a potentially damaging and very contentious schism to the Bitcoin network. Today, several of the “Segwit2X” developers appear to have written an email canceling the much ballyhooed “upgrade” that was attempting to become the “real” bitcoin.
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?
Segwit was implemented by late August via “soft fork”, which means that nodes on the network who don’t update their software are still okay, because soft forks are backwards-compatible. New features added in the fork still support all the old features in the previous software version. The fork that was coming next week and is now supposedly canceled was to be a “hard fork”, which means software prior to the fork would no longer be compatible with the changes made, in this case increasing the block size to two megabytes. In theory this should have doubled the headroom in the network, decreasing fees. However, the plans are now off, after multiple original signers of the “New York Agreement” have backed out. (more…)
New Hampshire’s Committee to Study Cryptocurrency meets for its required 2017 meeting. They question state regulators after the Cryptocurrency Protection Act has been in place for a few months. They ultimately decide to recommend no further actions against or for cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. Here’s the full hearing video:
I explained to the panel that Bitcoin businesses had opened or moved to NH because of the buzz about the cryptocurrency protection act that passed this summer. Regardless of whether the statutory change would have affected those businesses, the publicity surrounding it was good for NH’s image in the crypto-sphere.
Looks like it’ll be a while before New Hampshire has financial freedom across-the-board. When I offhandedly suggested to the panel that all money transmitter regulations should be repealed, they unanimously acted like their rules somehow stop terrorism and drug dealers. Pointing out that South Carolina has no money transmission statutes made zero impact.
It wasn’t the place to take the discussion any further, but it’d be great to see a libertarian state rep introduce such a repeal. South Carolina doesn’t have any more drugs or terrorism than anywhere else.
Corner News’ owner Roberta Mastrogiovanni poses with her store’s brand new Bitcoin Vending Machine!
Big news for Bitcoin fans in Manchester and Keene – we’ve got competition in the bitcoin vending space! As of yesterday, Blackfrog became the first real Bitcoin Vending Machine company to install units in New Hampshire!
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…)
This post was originally made on CopBlock.org. I’m posting it here as well, as who knows what’s going to happen with that site:
Hi, I’m Ian Freeman. I’m one of the original Cop Blockers, which is why I possess badge number five. I’ve been a longtime Cop Blocker, financial supporter and occasional blogger here. Both of Cop Block’s founders, Pete Eyre and Ademo Freeman have lived with me in my home and they are great friends with whom I’ve had some amazing times.
I was alarmed this Summer when Ademo announced that he was putting CopBlock.org up for sale. I wasn’t surprised that he wanted out. Ademo has seen his share of burnout and has suffered greatly in his quest to hold police accountable. Ademo was a trailblazer in police accountability activism and deserves as much of a break as he wants. He’s currently describing himself as a “happily retired activist” and he should be. Our world is better off because Cop Block is in it.
What surprised me about his request to sell the site was the fact that Ademo felt he had to resort to a sale at all. Where were all the Cop Blockers who should have stepped up to take the reins? Ademo had asked the primary contributors to the site about taking over lead roles. Apparently no one stepped up, so Ademo decided to auction the site. When I found this out, I asked around and sure enough, while some people were willing to help, no one wanted to lead. (more…)
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.
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…)
