Title of talk: Making Bitcoin Physical in the Age of the Cashless Machine State

Description of talk:It’s no secret that banks and state money issuers don’t want you holding their credit in spaces they can’t see and using it in ways they can’t track. Each note circulating outside their digital matrix is a liability—a debt and promise they can no longer uphold.

It’s why US state regulators conspired to discredit Casascius Coins—the first popular attempt at physical bitcoin in 2013. FinCEN’s letter accusing the founder, Mike Caldwell, of running an unlicensed money transmitting business not only forever delegitimized his tamper proof private key sharing model of physical bitcoin, it left a permanent scar on Bitcoin itself. Without a legitimate physical icon representing bitcoin as money, the bitcoin community slowly stopped seeing and using it like cash. Instead it became number go up technology—an invisible undefined asset that you hodl instead of hold.

In this talk we are going to examine the historic fallout of this event to better understand why the state saw minting physical bitcoin as more of a threat than mining digital bitcoin. We will explore why the various attempts to revive the physical private key sharing system have failed to capture the public’s imagination. And lastly, I will share a discovery that has revolutionized the way I and others see bitcoin in the physical world. This discovery, which was hiding in plain sight, has opened the door for anyone anywhere to cash bitcoin into something they can see, hold and exchange without the permission or knowledge of the machine state or any manufacturer.

John is a crypto explainer journalist and founder of The Bitcoin Mint—an open standard for ascribing physical definition to bitcoin on the Bitcoin Blockchain.

Inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s vision of an anarchist society built on mutual aid and free exchange in her book The Dispossessed, he imagined a way for people to exchange bitcoin as material aid—without the surveillance of the state and moneyed interests of central credit issuers. You can see examples of this type of physical bitcoin at TheBitcoinMint.com

This standard not only preserves a way to cash out of the matrix, it gives people a say on the form and function of the money used in their community.

It’s a revolutionary idea that is taking shape in local bitcoin mint meetups where people share art, ideas and physical and digital bitcoin in person. Follow The Bitcoin Mint Press on Substack to join the conversation and learn more!

For more info on John’s work as an explainer journalist, check out his website at johnlukegilbert.com.