Hunter – he goes by only one name – is a trusting guy.
He trusts his fellow porcupines, the libertarian-leaning participants in an annual campout hosted in the North Country by the
Free State Project.
For the weeklong
Porcupine Freedom Festival in Lancaster, he left out pitchers of juice, coffee pots and cups 24 hours a day at a busy pedestrian intersection for people to purchase if they get thirsty after a long political debate around the campfire.
He didn’t keep track of how much money he should take in per pot, and offered the drinks on the honor system. He left a QR code for them to scan and move bitcoin into his account as payment. Because what he doesn’t trust, he said, is the federal banking system.
A soft-spoken Army veteran who uses few words, he says he just never got the message that he’s supposed to listen to rules.
And he wasn’t alone. You could buy tortillas, Italian ice, a temporary tattoo – or a real one – using bitcoin, an alternative currency not tracked or monitored by the government.
This was the 11th annual PorcFest, and the second at which Neal Conner of Manchester, a volunteer for the event, has noticed a visible presence of bitcoin payment options. In past years, he’s paid for food, T-shirts, guns, or ammunition from vendors at the event with gold, silver or ammunition.
Bitcoin is different from silver, gold and bullets in one major way: It has no physical existence. It’s an entirely digital currency that lives and moves online. Transactions, when they’re for tangible goods like a cup of Hunter’s coffee, usually involve a buyer scanning a QR code that activates a swap of equivalent bitcoin for the price of the coffee. New bitcoins are “mined” when computers unlock the algorithms to verify each transaction made.
People could use one of four bitcoin ATMs set up at the campsite, which accepted dollars and transferred the equivalent bitcoin into the buyer’s online wallet.
Libertarian PorcFest vendors eager to charge in bitcoin
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