On January 20th, the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted 264-74 to defeat HB552 , a bill that would have allowed the state government to accept payment of taxes and fees in Bitcoin . In 2015, the bill was tabled to be voted on at a later date so it could be further studied.
CoinTelegraph spoke to four of the legislators supporting the measure (and who have been active in pushing for pro-Bitcoin legislation over the years), three of whom served as co-sponsors: Representative Eric Schleien (the bill’s primary sponsor), Representative Keith Ammon, Representative James Spillane, and former Representative George Lambert. Legislators’ introduction to Bitcoin
Rep. Schleien and Rep. Spillane (who accepted BitcoinCT r: 11 donations for his election campaign) first read about Bitcoin online somewhere they couldn’t recall. George Lambert, who is now an avid Bitcoin user, first heard about it at the Porcupine Freedom Festival, an annual festival held in New Hampshire by the Free State Project . “I sold webhosting for Bitcoin when BTC was around $3. So I was getting 5 BTC/ month.” Keith Ammon Rep. Ammon, also an avid user who has been buying Bitcoin since the only way to do so was through an Internet Relay Chat (before the launch of any of the early exchanges), heard about Bitcoin at another Free State Project-sponsored event , the annual Liberty Forum conference , initially through a side discussion about RipplePay, the precursor to the modern Ripple network.
“Back then, RipplePay was a centralized network that basically kept track of IOUs between people. I didn’t get it. Couldn’t understand it. It just seemed too easy to scam the system. So I kept up with some of the other participants in the room, continuing the discussion as we saw each other later at various gatherings. [Mathematics professor […]
