3

  Puerto Maldonado in Peru's Madre de Dios province feels like a frontier town. Dusty streets, ramshackle buildings, new construction and the hustle and bustle of people who want to make it. Tourists are bussed through the town to the many ecotourism companies that bring people from all over the world to experience the Amazon. Puerto Maldonado is perched on the bank of the Tambopata River, a tributary to the Amazon. The Tambopata River received some fame in ecotourism circles when the clay-licking macaws were featured on the cover of the January 1994 National Geographic issue. The industry has boomed ever since. Typically, tourists are quickly moved to boats on the Tambopata and make their way to private lodges for the ecotourism operations. Some of these are partnerships with local indigenous groups, while others are outright owners of private land on the banks of the river. Walking through the streets of Puerto Maldonado, you'll see streets with that frontier feel … and you...

  Bitcoin key management is probably one of the scariest aspects of interacting with your money for a new user with any sizable amount of value. It’s also one of the most important aspects. One of the core aspects of bitcoin that truly differentiates it from the forms of digital value that preceded it historically is the ability to control and custody your own funds, to not have to depend on some central authority or record keeper to maintain possession of and retain the ability to transfer or spend it. Without the ability to hold your own private keys, it would not be possible to truly use bitcoin in a self-sovereign way without third parties. This opens up a door of massive potential and possibilities, but also a door to massive responsibility and risk. As has commonly been reiterated many times over the years, there is no Bitcoin customer support. There is no help desk to call, no one to hold your hand and undo mistakes you might make, there’s just you. This is the most difficul...

  Fort Worth will vote on a bill intended to strengthen the bitcoin mining industry of Texas tomorrow. The Texas Blockchain Council is set to donate three bitcoin miners to the City Council. The donation will signal the start of a 6-month trial period in which the City Council of Fort Worth will begin mining bitcoin. Fort Worth, Texas is set to vote on a bill that encourages bitcoin mining technology and sees the City Council receive three bitcoin miners donated from the Texas Blockchain Council, per a report from MSN. The bill seeks to position Fort Worth as “crypto-friendly" and "welcoming to the industry." The city also aims to lure in "businesses contributing to the development of this evolving technology,” according to the report. The three bitcoin miners being donated are valued at $2,100 each and will be given to the City Council completely free for a six-month pilot period. The machines being donated were not specified in the report, but should the pilot pro...

  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine took most of the world by surprise; it should not have. It is the logical and material result of a war of ideas that has been waged by a small group of Russian intellectuals and political leaders over the past several decades — a war which the West has ignored at its own peril. Fortunately, Europe and America already have a response to this attack doing its work in the world: Bitcoin. It is in our best interests to embrace the Bitcoin monetary network as a new social institution that instantiates liberal values in open-source software. For too long, the West has ignored the political theory — indeed, the political theology — behind Vladimir Putin’s particular brand of Russian nationalism. Putin subscribes to an ideology elaborated over the past several decades by Aleksandr Dugin, a philosopher who argues that Russian collective identity needs to assert its supremacy on the world stage in the form of a Greater Russia, which must in turn become the poli...

  Riding on Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” protests, Republican Senator Ted Cruz triumphantly took to the stage to embrace Bitcoin in a recent, highly publicized CPAC event. In a typically pro-Republican tirade, Cruz blasted his political opponents from Justin Trudeau and Elizabeth Warren to the Chinese Communist Party for opposing Bitcoin because of a desire to control the financial freedom and civil liberties of people. Of course, the Canadian trucker story played conveniently to Cruz’s right-wing leanings. The Freedom Convoy protests united around a common opposition to the Liberal Trudeau government’s vaccine mandates. It was also heavily associated with right-wing political figures such as Tamara Lich, a member of the far-right Maverick Party. The political pressure proved too much for many, even leading private crowdsourcing platform GoFundMe to cancel a fundraiser after it raised over $10 million for the truckers. BITCOIN IS APOLITICAL The only problem with Cruz’s anti-leftist sp...

  Contrary to some predictions, Bitcoin is quickly becoming an accepted means of conducting transactions. Major companies like online retailer Overstock.com and mobile provider AT&T already allow customers to pay in bitcoin. And the list of businesses accepting bitcoin keeps growing every day. On a basic level, this trend proves that bitcoin isn’t a useless virtual currency as critics love to claim, but it also represents something more fundamental: Bitcoin’s potential to replace legacy payment processing systems like Visa and MasterCard. Perhaps this may sound far-fetched, but there are plenty of advantages that Bitcoin offers both consumers and merchants. And if you know anything about the creative destruction inherent in capitalist societies, Bitcoin replacing credit cards is only a matter of time. Let’s look at the anatomy of credit cards and Bitcoin payments before highlighting the differences between both of them. HOW DO CREDIT CARD PAYMENTS WORK? When you pay for a produ...

  We've talked about Chaumian Mints in this rag before in the past, specifically MiniMint (built on the FediMint protocol), and expressed how bullish we are on the concept and the benefits it could bring Bitcoiners in terms of privacy and scalability. Well, we meet here in this dark corner of the internet again to reiterate our bullishness on the project and to provide you freaks with an update from the people working on the protocol. Above is a timestamped YouTube video that begins with a keynote speech from Obi Nwosu describing why he believes that FediMint can provide the Bitcoin open source ecosystem with the missing third pillar of the decentralized stack: custody. The Bitcoin base layer provides an open source, distributed, censorship resistant, store of value settlement layer. The Lightning Network provides a second layer, distributed, censorship resistant payments layer. FediMint, if successful, could provide the stack with an open source, distributed, censorship resistant ...

  Ubersmith, subscription management for cloud-based services, announced BitPay integration enabling bitcoin payments. Ubersmith services over 100 companies across six different continents, and offers a variety of highly-customizable software and hardware solutions. The integration of BitPay allowing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as payment shows a deviation from their parent company, Constellation Software Incorporated, who just last year stated Bitcoin has “scalability issues.” Ubersmith, a leading service provider in subscription management for cloud-based platforms, announced an integration with BitPay, one of the world's leading providers of bitcoin and other cryptocurrency payment processing. “With the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies, we want to provide our users with this option in addition to other currencies we support,” said Kurt Daniel, CEO of Ubersmith, in the announcement. “As leaders in delivering a recurring and usage-based billing system, we are pleased ...

  Marco Santori and Cynthia Lummis had a fireside chat at the Bitcoin 2022 conference to discuss evolving legislation on Bitcoin that Lummis has been working on. Lummis was joined by Marco Santori, a digital asset scholar among lawyers and serves as chief legal officer for Kraken, a cryptocurrency exchange. Lummis also shared perspective on how politicians view the potential of a Federal Reserve central bank digital currency (CBDC). During Bitcoin 2022, U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis offered details on a bipartisan bill, The Responsible Financial Innovation Act, that she hopes will establish favorable Bitcoin regulation during a fireside chat with Marco Santori, the chief legal officer of Kraken. "It's truly a legislative framework that we hope will provide the sandbox for innovation to occur but also put some regulatory parameters, so you all know the rules of the road," Lummis explained. "It includes privacy components, consumer protection components, taxation compone...

  The bitcoin market truly never stops. Day in and day out, Bitcoin transactions are occuring, miners are mining and nodes are validating. The mere physical persistence of Bitcoin on this level represents the truly decentralized nature of the entire network; as the technology is operable by anyone with a computer, so it shall operate unceasingly. While it may be overseen as a small aspect of the network, the 24/7 activity is actually an integral part of what makes Bitcoin usable. The market is global; it doesn’t operate on North American time, it doesn’t close on Sundays or on holidays unobserved and one never has to ask, “Is Bitcoin down?” With this in mind, a panel assembled at Bitcoin 2022 discussed “Markets That Never Sleep.” The panel consisted of industry players who have experienced the ins and outs of trading, investing in and operating the exchanges of the bitcoin market. Director at Bitcoin Magazine Christian Keroles moderated the conversation and was joined by Kanav Kari...