Keith and stuff
06-12-2014, 01:41 PM
The Free State Project: A Libertarian Testing Ground For Bitcoin, 3D Printers, and Drones
6/12/2014 @ 8:30AM
Kashmir Hill Forbes Staff
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/12/the-free-state-project-a-libertarian-testing-ground-for-bitcoin-3d-printers-and-drones/
This article was just published today and is very long, so I'm only sharing a very small amount of it. Also note, there are several errors in the article, as is to be expected with a long mainstream media article.
https://d3uu04du0cb2p3.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/content_type_images/blogs/soilf14.jpg
The concentration of Free Staters is highest in New Hampshire twice a year, during the group’s two annual gatherings: a Bacchanalian free-market festival called “PorcFest” which is held in the woods in the summertime and an academic-spirited conference called the Liberty Forum, held at a hotel in the wintertime. I was invited to snowy New Hampshire this February to speak at the latter because Free Staters were interested in two things I write about: Bitcoin and corporate privacy practices. I discovered that this isolated group has fully adopted Bitcoin, and that it’s extremely enthusiastic about other “freedom-enhancing” technologies such as 3D-printers and encryption. Everyone I met in the Project owned Bitcoin and was willing to accept it for goods and services. Of the couple thousand people living there, at least seven own 3D-printers. Though the idea originally was to get a critical mass to influence the political process, many in the movement now feel that the freedoms they want may be better realized through technology that routes around the government rather than engaging it directly.
When I arrived at the airport, the organizers had arranged for me to be picked up by a Bitcoin-accepting driver in a winter-assaulted red Prius. I buckled up but my driver, Riaz, simply ignored the car’s annoying, insistent beep that he put his seatbelt on until it finally stopped. New Hampshire is the only state without a mandatory seatbelt law, and the Free Staters will do their best to keep it that way. Riaz had moved from Orlando six months earlier, led to the movement through his support of the libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul. “It’s amazing here, living with all of these people who hold the same beliefs as you,” he says. “We want to push back against bad laws, decriminalize marijuana, push for more liberal gun and knife laws, keep a ban on license plate readers. We want to eliminate regulations, taxes and licenses. Within our community a lot of us ignore that, and so we only work with other Free Staters.” While not all Free Staters are flouting the law, if one is ignoring regulations and taxes, Bitcoin is a good currency to do it in, as there’s no need to set up an account with a bank which entails paperwork and financial monitoring.
Zach and Josh Harvey moved to New Hampshire from Israel in 2011 to join the Free State Project, frustrated by the “bureaucracy and regulation in Tel Aviv.” They decided to start a Bitcoin ATM company called Lamassu that’s now sold hundreds of the machines around the world.
When I got to the Crowne Plaza in Nashua where the Forum was held, I started seeing a significant number of handguns; this group is strongly in support of the Second Amendment. “The first year they came to the hotel we were scared. I saw a guy carrying a baby wearing a machete on one hip and a gun on the other,” said a manicurist in the hotel salon. “We know people can carry guns but hadn’t seen people so openly doing it before.” I also saw my first 3D-printed gun that weekend. A member of the Free State movement, Bill Domenico, printed the second-ever Liberator after Defense Distributed’s Cody Wilson first made it a reality in Texas last year. Domenico, an electrical engineer, has lived in New Hampshire for 30 years
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/kashmirhill/files/2014/06/3D-printed-gun.jpg
When I speak to Wilson months later by phone, he compares the Free State Project in New Hampshire with Silicon Valley; both places have libertarian-leaning techies trying to make disruptive technologies popular. “Silicon Valley is more capitalized and less about practical liberty than the Free State community, which has a better stake in the freedom at the heart of these technologies,” he says. “It’s the hotbed of libertarian activism in the country.”
6/12/2014 @ 8:30AM
Kashmir Hill Forbes Staff
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/12/the-free-state-project-a-libertarian-testing-ground-for-bitcoin-3d-printers-and-drones/
This article was just published today and is very long, so I'm only sharing a very small amount of it. Also note, there are several errors in the article, as is to be expected with a long mainstream media article.
https://d3uu04du0cb2p3.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/content_type_images/blogs/soilf14.jpg
The concentration of Free Staters is highest in New Hampshire twice a year, during the group’s two annual gatherings: a Bacchanalian free-market festival called “PorcFest” which is held in the woods in the summertime and an academic-spirited conference called the Liberty Forum, held at a hotel in the wintertime. I was invited to snowy New Hampshire this February to speak at the latter because Free Staters were interested in two things I write about: Bitcoin and corporate privacy practices. I discovered that this isolated group has fully adopted Bitcoin, and that it’s extremely enthusiastic about other “freedom-enhancing” technologies such as 3D-printers and encryption. Everyone I met in the Project owned Bitcoin and was willing to accept it for goods and services. Of the couple thousand people living there, at least seven own 3D-printers. Though the idea originally was to get a critical mass to influence the political process, many in the movement now feel that the freedoms they want may be better realized through technology that routes around the government rather than engaging it directly.
When I arrived at the airport, the organizers had arranged for me to be picked up by a Bitcoin-accepting driver in a winter-assaulted red Prius. I buckled up but my driver, Riaz, simply ignored the car’s annoying, insistent beep that he put his seatbelt on until it finally stopped. New Hampshire is the only state without a mandatory seatbelt law, and the Free Staters will do their best to keep it that way. Riaz had moved from Orlando six months earlier, led to the movement through his support of the libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul. “It’s amazing here, living with all of these people who hold the same beliefs as you,” he says. “We want to push back against bad laws, decriminalize marijuana, push for more liberal gun and knife laws, keep a ban on license plate readers. We want to eliminate regulations, taxes and licenses. Within our community a lot of us ignore that, and so we only work with other Free Staters.” While not all Free Staters are flouting the law, if one is ignoring regulations and taxes, Bitcoin is a good currency to do it in, as there’s no need to set up an account with a bank which entails paperwork and financial monitoring.
Zach and Josh Harvey moved to New Hampshire from Israel in 2011 to join the Free State Project, frustrated by the “bureaucracy and regulation in Tel Aviv.” They decided to start a Bitcoin ATM company called Lamassu that’s now sold hundreds of the machines around the world.
When I got to the Crowne Plaza in Nashua where the Forum was held, I started seeing a significant number of handguns; this group is strongly in support of the Second Amendment. “The first year they came to the hotel we were scared. I saw a guy carrying a baby wearing a machete on one hip and a gun on the other,” said a manicurist in the hotel salon. “We know people can carry guns but hadn’t seen people so openly doing it before.” I also saw my first 3D-printed gun that weekend. A member of the Free State movement, Bill Domenico, printed the second-ever Liberator after Defense Distributed’s Cody Wilson first made it a reality in Texas last year. Domenico, an electrical engineer, has lived in New Hampshire for 30 years
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/kashmirhill/files/2014/06/3D-printed-gun.jpg
When I speak to Wilson months later by phone, he compares the Free State Project in New Hampshire with Silicon Valley; both places have libertarian-leaning techies trying to make disruptive technologies popular. “Silicon Valley is more capitalized and less about practical liberty than the Free State community, which has a better stake in the freedom at the heart of these technologies,” he says. “It’s the hotbed of libertarian activism in the country.”