Free State Project evangelists: Decimating the tentacles of the state one bitcoin at a time
While reporting on a bitcoin conference being held at Disney World, Gawker’s Sam Biddle ran into a couple of Free State Project evangelists. The “anti-statist hyper-libertarians” were in their element. “If anyone disputed the notion that the very concept of government was just one fat obstacle in the way of unobstructed bullion exchange paradise,” Biddle wrote, “they kept quiet:”
At one table stood Mark Edge and Carla Mora from the Free State Project, a campaign to get 20,000 people who hate and fear government to move to New Hampshire and live near each other. Carla, asking me if I were “liberty-minded” (the actual word “libertarian” was rarely heard), touted New Hampshire’s permissive laws about bar closing times.
I wasn’t ready to commit to a new life in a liberty-minded colony, but I was curious what any of this had to do with bitcoin. Orlando was a long way from Manchester.
Edge provided a cheery answer with his radio host’s tenor: “Wide [bitcoin] adoption needs to happen to decimate the state.” Edge always said the word “state” with finger air-quotes. “The state is the most killing-minded thing,” he explained. As a pacifist, he saw bitcoin as his best means to hurt the U.S. government back, by ditching its dollars. […]
Mora still seemed a little put off by my reluctance to move to New Hampshire, but remained enthusiastic about the blockchain: “Bitcoin represents pure freedom,” she beamed. It was something untouched by the “tentacles of the state.”