Friday, November 16, 2012

WordPress Starts Accepting Bitcoin

By, Chris Rossini
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A nice bump for Bitcoin exposure. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world.

From TheVerge:
"WordPress, the popular blogging platform / content management system is expanding its payment options for upgrades like going ad-free. Beginning today, users around the world will be able to pay with Bitcoin — the unregulated, decentralized digital currency built on public-key cryptography. Explaining its decision, the company noted that PayPal currently blocks access from over 60 countries, and that many credit card companies have similar restrictions, whether because of politics, fraud, or other reasons."
For everything you need to know about Bitcoin, make sure to listen to this episode of The Robert Wenzel Show, where Bob has a very interesting conversation with Trace Mayer.

3 comments:

  1. Freedom to choose once again begins its journey on the internet.

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  2. This is important to keep in mind. What Bitcoin represents is a fight against the largest and wealthiest special interests in the world that control the monetary and legal systems. Governments derive their power from ideology. In the fight for freedom violence is not an option because the governments can inflict violence to such a great degree.

    The Internet senses potential massive censorship and is preparing to route around it. We are seeing the market mobilizing and the chess pieces are being put in place. Even better it seems to be arising out of chaos as spontaneous order resulting from coordination without cooperation.

    Remember, ideas can only be overcome by other ideas. Power and force are impotent against ideas. Open source publishing, and WordPress is THE leader in this regards, is the spear-tip when it comes to the delivery mechanism of ideas. The spear-shaft is the monetary system.

    The platform that has allowed the spread of ideas to such a large degree has now embraced Bitcoin. The Wikileaks Banking Blockade demonstrated the current monetary system is used to censor political speech.

    This places any legal authorities in a very precarious position if they attempt to fight Bitcoin because WordPress has reframed the issue from allowing people to buy illegal drugs to empowering people's freedom of speech. Those with a soapbox who can spread ideas are going to increasingly become Bitcoin's defenders because it is the shaft that allows the spear-tip to be forced through inferior ideas. Thus WordPress's veiled threat:

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    With Bitcoin we join a new digital economy that doesn’t leave anyone behind, essentially making financial transactions open source — something WordPress.com is behind 100%. We’re proud to support bloggers from all over the world by providing a Bitcoin option.

    To any regulators it means this: We will fight you with litigation and we have the financial resources to hire attorneys. We have the moral high ground because of our position regarding freedom of speech. We can lay claim to the power of that moral high ground because of our ability to transmit those ideas far and wide. Thus, if you attack us then it will be like attacking freedom of speech.

    Just think: How many millions of bloggers will donate to WordPress if they ask for help defending a Bitcoin related lawsuit? What type of a PR nightmare would that create for the governments? You saw how the market and Internet mobilized against SOPA and PIPA. And who was one of the leaders in that? WordPress.

    The next issue to freedom of speech impediment is domain name seizure. But NameCoin uses crypto-currency technology to decentralize the DNS record system which would make seizing domain names as difficult as seizing bitcoins. To be honest, I am surprised EPJ uses Blogger instead of being self-hosted with WordPress. It would provide a lot more safety as Blogger is known for deactivating blogs for no reason. I came to Mish's blog once, which gets about 50k views per day, and it had been deactivated. Using self-hosting and disinter-mediating from the current financial system greatly raises the cost of censorship.

    And if governments are stupid enough to attempt to litigate against WordPress, assuming there actually is any legal issue with accepting bitcoins, think of how swift, how powerful and how vicious the Internet's reaction would be to their attempt to stifle freedom of speech. And who will probably be on the vanguard as defense counsel? The EFF (so don't be too hard on them; I think their reasons for not accepting Bitcoin are specious).

    So just keep pressing forward. This is a revolution of ideas and minds are being changed one at a time. And those with inferior ideas, like limited freedom of speech and closed source money, are losing position and will be checkmated soon.

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    Replies
    1. Bravo! I hope Bob will put this on the front page!

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