After squabbling for years over how to fix the growing pains of the world’s first decentralized cryptocurrency, one of the sides in the ongoing Bitcoin Geek War has finally made a bold move. This week, on August 1st, a small number of the “big blockers” performed a “hard fork” and broke away from the main Bitcoin blockchain, creating a new currency, “Bitcoin Cash“. This had the added benefit of giving everyone who already held Bitcoin an equal amount of the new Bitcoin Cash! Ever heard the phrase, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”? Bitcoin’s first fork into two has proven that statement wrong. Read on to learn more about this historic week in Bitcoin.
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.
In Bitcoin, there’s a thing called mining difficulty that is basically designed to increase as more people enter mining and compete to discover scarce Bitcoins. However, should people leave the mining game, the difficulty will decrease. In BCH’s case, when they started their fork, their network was at the same difficulty level as BTC, but with a fraction of the total mining power. That’s why it took six hours for the BCH miners to find their first block! Normally Bitcoin blocks are expected to be found every ten minutes. So, this means BCH transactions were, in the beginning, taking hours to confirm! They are as of this writing, still taking longer than BTC transactions.
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…)
What’s that? You say Bitcoin has not been the front page feature story your local newspaper where you live? You must not live in Keene, New Hampshire – the capitol of real-life business acceptance of the world’s first cryptocurrency!
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
As we have reported here at Free Keene, according to CoinMap, Keene is the number one city in the world for bitcoin-accepting businesses per capita. Obviously not all businesses have the same results, of course. Though the golf course has yet to have a customer with bitcoin, Wilder Auto reports approximately a dozen customers regularly using bitcoin. Bolster, who also is the creator of the Portal Map, reported that he was able to sell ads to some new customers on his yearly map of area businesses, because he is accepting bitcoin as payment! That’s money that otherwise would have been left on the table had Bolster decided against accepting the cryptocurrency. (more…)
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.
Manchester PD was one of 7 gangs to receive a share of $1,304,118 (pages 63 and 124) in grants to conduct “sobriety” checkpoints. One of the checkpoints was conducted this past Thursday, July 20th 10pm through July 21st 2:30am. The checkpoint was located on the westbound lane of Bridge St. Manchester PD records indicate that there were 3 stops on Bridge Street during those hours. There were no arrests, and no citations are listed. No DWI arrests occurred during those hours anywhere in Manchester, according to the gang’s website.
As always, a group of libertarians showed up to warn drivers of the presence of the gang members. Though it seems that the MPD gang did not remove any unsafe activity from the roadways, the libertarians warned several drivers, both those who drove through the checkpoint and those who did not, that their headlights were off. One car was pulled over in the right turning lane turning onto Elm St. This was promptly filmed by several libertarians and the driver seemed to me to be let go without any further violations of their rights beyond the initial kidnapping/death threat.
A “Utility Work Ahead” sign was on the sidewalk next to the right turn lane turning onto Bridge St (towards the checkpoint). There was no visible utility work in the area. The sign was facing away from any traffic that would have seen it. Due to the design of the sign, it was easy to walk behind to walk down the sidewalk with a sign to warn drivers. (These drivers would have seen the blank metal back of the utility work sign.) The only drivers who this sign would realistically been visible to would be a driver driving east on the westbound side of Bridge St.
If you want to be warned of checkpoints in the geographical area occupied by New Hampshire before they happen, you can follow Checkpoint Free New Hampshire on Twitter,Facebook, or send an SMS saying “follow @NoCheckpointsNH” to 40404 to get SMS alerts.
Originally, Keene, New Hampshire was the civil disobedience capitol of the libertarian movement. The new activist zeitgeist across New Hampshire and especially in the activism epicenter of Keene, is around cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and DASH. Spreading cryptocurrency is a great method for helping keep wealth in the community and hopefully enrich it, presuming Bitcoin and the others continue to rise against fiat currency like the US Dollar. Bitcoin has been very good at this over the years.
While some old organizations like some big banks and the governments of the world may feel threatened (every activism has its haters, if it is effective), cryptocurrency is rising worldwide and there’s little the old money people can do about it.
Even better, the real strength in Bitcoin and most of its competitors is that of decentralization. The more people get into decentralized currency, the more power transfers from the government and bankers’ hands to the hands of the people, like you.
To that end, the Shire Free Church entered the Bitcoin vending world in 2014 with a mission of spreading bitcoin and therefore, fostering peace. I believe cryptocurrencies are one of the greatest tools for working towards peace, as every dollar that transfers to bitcoin is one fewer with which governments can go to war with the world, or against their own people.
If you’re a libertarian who loves cryptocurrency. You really need to plan your move to New Hampshire and join the fun. We need your help making sure New Hampshire stays a haven for cryptocurrency users and businesses. To connect with others already here, check out the Shire Forum, which also as areas about cryptocurrency.
How did the new Luc Besson movie “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” compare to the now-two-decades-old film of his, “The Fifth Element“? Both were very funny and action-packed. It would be interesting to ask someone who saw the two movies but Valerian first. With that said, here are my impressions:
Valerian might as well have been played by Keanu Reeves, since the actor is basically channeling him. Actor Dane DeHann will inevitably be compared to Fifth Element’s much-older-than-the-female protagonist Bruce Willis. However, this time it is Valerian’s co-heroine Laureline who feels more like Willis’ “Corben Dallas”, doing both cracking-wise and kicking-ass. Actress Cara Delvingne apparently sang a song for the soundtrack, too, which is always fun. (That happened in a similarly trippy action fest from 2011, “Sucker Punch“, too.)
It has similar pacing, production design, fun dialog, and incredible visuals, just like Fifth Element. However, though the scale is much more grand – Valerian spans planets and thousands of creatures – the movie just doesn’t feel quite as important.
Both films have the process of a character coming to understand the horrors of war. In the Fifth Element, its “Leeloo” who in a heartbreaking scene, experiences it through a super-speed computer history lesson. In Valerian, it’s an entire group of tribal, peaceful characters who explain in a narrative flashback that they, after having their planet exterminated by an unrelated war from space, learned about the self-destructive human race who caused the genocide. It’s the same theme in both films, but Leeloo’s eye-opening scene just felt more important, perhaps because Fifth Element focused on just her individual evolution in that scene.
Leeloo is just more lovable than the tribe in Valerian.
It’s such a powerful paradigm shift for Leeloo that actress Milla Jovovich cries. In Valerian we’re told the same thing about the human race’s penchant for war and hate, but during a flashback about a group of characters, none of whom we really have any attachment to or character development for, so it’s just not as moving. One can still empathize for the tribe’s plight, but by the time the evolution in understanding happens to Leeloo, the viewer is already in love with her character.
In addition to being one of the main protagonists in the Fifth Element, Leeloo is also the title character and essentially the MacGuffin (the object around which the plot centers), all in one. However, as we learn in the film’s climax, the final element is more than just Leeloo – it’s love. Without it, they’d never have saved the world. In Valerian, the MacGuffin is a little creature that can reproduce and multiply whatever you stick in its butt. Besson’s message about love is present however, just in another way. In a movie with more than one self-important government agent character, Laureline is the character who puts love over the law at the climax of the film, in one of the film’s deeper moments. (more…)
The political wins for libertarians in NH just keep coming! Home poker games will become legal in New Hampshire on September 16th! Last week, the new governor, Chris Sununu, signed HB 164 which makes legal:
A poker game held in a private residence so long as the house takes no compensation from the prize pool, no admission fee or seat fee is charged, no one receives any money or anything of value for conducting the game, for allowing the use of his or her residence for the game, or for any other reason except his or her own winnings as a player, the game’s odds do not favor a “house” or any player, there is no house bank, the game is limited to no more than 10 players, and the game is not advertised to the public.
