Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cardano Are Turning It Around Today. Here’s Why – The Motley Fool

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What happened

Today's been a rather rocky one in the world of cryptocurrencies. Despite a significant sell-off yesterday in most top tokens, there's been a solid rebound across all 10 of the largest tokens by market capitalization this afternoon.

As of 4:20 p.m. ET, Bitcoin(BTC 2.05%), Ethereum(ETH 0.66%), and Cardano(ADA -0.44%) erased all of this morning's losses and then some, increasing 2.9%, 1.9%, and 1%, respectively, over the past 24 hours.

There were a number of catalysts responsible for this move.

Image source: Getty Images.

Perhaps the most important catalyst for all three of these top-10 tokens is being provided via a bullish macro environment. Bitcoin and its large-cap peers have surged in this afternoon's session, following their equity counterparts higher as risk-on sentiment builds in today's market. Generally strong earnings from key companies reporting this week have provided the view that the economic outlook may have grown too bearish in April. Being among the riskiest assets on the market, cryptocurrencies are following tech stocks and other risk assets higher today.

Positive derivatives action, an airdrop and DAO announcement from an Ethereum Layer-2 network, and an upgrade to Cardano's block size (by 10%) also helped these tokens surge higher this afternoon.

There's certainly a lot going on with each of these projects at a token-specific level. The ecosystems behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cardano are each massive. And as these ecosystems grow and evolve, investors can find new and exciting reasons to invest in these long-term growth assets.

That said, this macro environment appears to be driving most of the market-related swings in the crypto world. While today's late price action has provided a reprieve for investors, it's unclear if this rally can be maintained. Accordingly, investors are likely to remain on edge for some time, until signs of a true bull market materialize again.

Cryptocurrencies have been a great place to stay invested over the past decade. That said, these assets have been historically much more volatile than any other asset since inception. Accordingly, investors looking to play the long game in this sector may want to take some time away from reading daily charts and following the price action on these tokens too closely. Mental health is important.

Today's price action is indicative of the kinds of dramatic moves to the upside and downside that can happen within the span of a given trading day. While these tokens sank deep into the red this morning, investors did appear ready to buy the dip in the afternoon session, giving hope to investors worried about a lack of buyers in this difficult market.

Moving forward, I'm expecting much more of the same, in terms of volatility.

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Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cardano Are Turning It Around Today. Here's Why - The Motley Fool

Adversarial Thinking And Ways To Attack Bitcoin – Bitcoin Magazine

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Bitcoin 2022, hosted in Miami, Florida, on April 6-9, featured a panel titled Preventing Attacks on Bitcoin with three Bitcoin Core developers: Luke Dashjr, Bryan Bishop and Jameson Lopp (substituting for Peter Todd). The panel was moderated by Shinobi.

The panelists discuss technical and social attack vectors, primarily in the development process of Bitcoin Core, that could hinder or wholly derail Bitcoins sole mission as immutable money. The purpose for openly brainstorming attack vectors is to formulate appropriate defense measures and, as Sun Tzus The Art of War strategizes:

Do not trust that the enemy isnt coming. Trust your readiness to meet him. Do not trust that the enemy wont attack. Rely only on your ability to pick a place that the enemy cant attack.

The following is a summary of said panel with a quick overview of the Bitcoin Core development process.

The Bitcoin Core developers work through a development process to offer the Bitcoin protocol bug patches, software optimizations and enhanced features; they then publish these updates following community consensus via Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs). To successfully engineer an attack against the development process, on either a technical or social level, would potentially impede (sometimes critical) protocol updates and instill distrust between developers.

To clarify, Bitcoin Core is a free and open-source software implementation of a Bitcoin full node, referred to as a client. Although misleading in name, Bitcoin Core does not have centralized or core control over the Bitcoin network, but rather serves as just one possible client that people are free to use at their discretion. As well, the Bitcoin protocol consensus rules require that all Bitcoin full nodes and economic participants unfailingly enforce those rules when considering the validity of a block.

Additionally, Bitcoin Core updates are not downloaded automatically but rather manually, as automatic software updates provide an attack vector for a mischievous actor to compromise all the nodes and miners in a single stroke.

The Bitcoin Core team of developers do not pedestal a single leader or spokesperson thus distancing the client and development process from personal character exploitation due to faults all earthly leaders inherently possess. For example, narcissistic leaders can be weakened by creating unrest within their fan base, or short-tempered leaders can behave irrationally when provoked with insults. To overturn an upstart movement, one must cleverly dispose of its leader or fracture their following.

Yet without a single leader, how do independent Bitcoin Core developers come to agreement on complex design choices or emergency bug fixes? The aforementioned BIPs are used in the Bitcoin Core development process to implement features or information to the Bitcoin protocol, but BIPs also work to standardize the communication of new ideas, as diagrammatically depicted below and as described in BIP 1:

How can we throw a wrench into this process? Despite introducing some formality via BIP 1 into an otherwise unstructured network, there presents an opportunity for malicious or simply misguided actors to subvert the development process through both technical and social means. Recognizing this wrench however is often only possible in hindsight making certain attack vectors especially difficult to detect and avoid. If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a deviant developer hell-bent on pushing their self-serving agenda at Bitcoins expense.

In practice, actual BIP implementations are not as neat as a workflow diagram and the above explanation has been abridged. However, we can begin to theorize nefarious methods to subvert the decentralized development process.

Note: The term consensus is an ambiguous word used to imply several different things beyond the rules of Bitcoin. Typically used to indicate everyone basically agrees on a decision while, in reality, there are more accurate, distinct words that work to better define the varying levels of agreement on a decision than the catch-all term consensus. For simplicitys sake, this article refers to near-unanimous and general agreement as achieving consensus.

The Bitcoin network deployed in 2009 with several critical bugs and oversights that could have resulted in serious technical attack vectors, but those publicly-known vulnerabilities were remedied long ago. Generally speaking, these bugs and oversights are hard to find as there is nothing in the code that is obtrusively or painfully obvious. A dedicated open-source development community voluntarily contributing to the codebase has worked incessantly to improve the protocols integrity over the past decade and then some. By understanding past vulnerabilities and their solutions, we can remain vigilant in mitigating future flaws and provide a basis for generating worst-case scenarios to search for potential defense mechanisms.

Certainly the most notable social attack on the Bitcoin community and development process occurred in 2015 when two well-respected and veteran Bitcoin developers at that time, Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, created and promoted a new, incompatible Bitcoin client labeled Bitcoin XT. Bitcoin XT proposed increasing the possible transactions per block, known as the blocksize, as a means of competing with conventional payment systems such as MasterCard or Visa. By adopting this incompatible version of Bitcoin, users would effectively hardfork, or make valid, previously invalid blocks and transactions which ultimately forces everyone to upgrade their clients similarly else risking network stability and replay attacks.

Bitcoins creator, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, had long since stepped away from Bitcoin when this controversial project was announced and the community was left to decipher Satoshis comments for guidance as though they were sacred writ. Bitcoin XT failed to gain consensus as it naively proposed increasing the maximum blocksize and its proponents sought to subvert user consensus through closed-door, developer-miner-corporation collusion. Without getting into every minute detail of the infamous blocksize war and spawning an entire book, we can plainly observe from the intensive two-year squabble the critical function of full nodes (users) coordinating to enforce new rules without support from miners via user-activated softforks (UASF).

Had Bitcoin fallen into the big block trap, network decentralization and Bitcoins apolitical nature would have suffered accordingly. To understand the ramifications of changing a seemingly simple variable, that being the blocksize limit, requires not only understanding the technical impact on the codebase integrity, but also hidden consequences inviting additional attack vectors against the nascent network ecosystem. One can extend this line of thinking toward todays asinine suggestions of shifting Bitcoin to proof-of-stake in lieu of proof-of-work. Even though the solution to the blocksize war was resolved technically through a UASF, the social drama that ensued required non-technical solutions of simply remaining firm and not budging on a detrimental software implementation, no matter the corporate or celebrity developer backing.

Dashjr contends an attack on the Bitcoin Core development process occurred just last year: the Speedy Trial activation method of the much-anticipated Taproot softfork upgrade (BIP 343). The Speedy Trial logic works to activate a BIP implementation without the risk of an undesirable chain split by means of either quickly succeeding or quickly failing to activate within a three-month timeframe. Once the work to build Taproot was finalized, the developers could not come to general agreement on the activation method and essentially ignored the crucial step of first receiving undoubtable community consensus.

Although Taproot successfully activated and the subsequent features provided were unquestionably beneficial for users, its activation method was perceived as controversial and posed potential vectors of attack while setting poor precedence for future BIP activations. The Speedy Trial activation mechanism was seen as an attack on the Bitcoin Core development process because some developers stepped away from the perceived community consensus while refusing to consider BIP 8 as an activation method, otherwise known as the Lets see what happens proposal, in the deployment of Taproot.

The Speedy Trial method was antithetical to the blocksize war outcome, where the feud concluded that users coordinating near-unanimous agreement should control the network consensus rules and not the miners. With Speedy Trial and without BIP 8, the decision to activate (or not activate by just not signaling when it's deployed) entirely depended on the miners regardless of user consensus. The arguably reckless Speedy Trial deployment method went against perceived community consensus and, to mitigate this in future, would potentially require coordination of a UASF with enough viable adoption beyond a few concerned people in the corner of a room to counter a BIPs activation.

The panelists at Preventing Attacks On Bitcoin considered how to assess these historical attacks and avoid similar attacks in future. The attackers pushing for Bitcoin XT or Speedy Trial may not have had malicious intent with their proposals, yet clearly their methods conflicted with certain principles which a portion of the community adamantly defends that is, the users have the sole right to approve or veto changes to the consensus rules. In hindsight, the attackers simply did not follow the same principles of Bitcoin that the community did, which resulted in those attacks becoming a subjectively interpretive war of what was best for Bitcoin.

The aforementioned Bitcoin XT and Speedy Trial scenarios convey the methods in which Bitcoin Cores development process could be made controversial, emphasizing the necessity to approach all BIP implementations cautiously and thoughtfully. In the following sections, the panelists theorize additional plausible attack vectors.

Bishops interests in the development process include deterministic builds and build signing which can be leveraged to prevent certain attack vectors on Bitcoin users, namely attacks that seek to fool the user into believing they have downloaded a bona fide Bitcoin Core client.

Anyone who is a user of a Bitcoin client must download it from somewhere on the spam-ridden internet. If the webpage hosting the download file is compromised or intercepted during download, then the file itself may have been maliciously modified. How can that user prove the version they downloaded is indeed the intended Bitcoin client?

The common method to provide non-repudiation of a software build, or proof of the integrity and origin of the data, is with digital signatures. Digital signatures, the tamper-proof wax seals electronic and mathematically-inclined cousin, are a standard element of most cryptographic protocols using asymmetric (public and private) keys to enable authentication between two strangers but wait! This does not guarantee signature authenticity. Ultimately, authentication without confidence in the keys used to verify the signature is pointless as the recipient must be assured the verification key truly belongs to the sender.

There is then another sly attack vector if the verification software itself is compromised. A clever criminal claiming to be someone who they are not, but having to also prove their claim through a digital signature, could plant the compromised key-verifying software for the unsuspecting user to download and consequently be presented with a false result of authentication. The compromised software contains a very subtle bug that, at a quick glance of the code, would manipulate the user into reasoning the verification software yielded an accurate result.

While deterministic builds do not solve authentication of digital signature possession, it does work to reduce the trust required in a single source or claim to the software a user has downloaded. Deterministic builds work to protect the software implementation against a couple rogue developers or a compromised developers keys during the development process. This protection is achieved through cryptographic hashes of the software that developers digitally sign as the software is built during each step of the build process effectively ensuring that the final software binary files are the same as the binary files that the honest developers built and therefore hasnt been compromised in any form or fashion.

Altogether, with deterministic builds and build signing, one can basically trace trust in the software from the binaries to the source code to the git commits made by various developers and identify what changes were introduced by whom. The legitimacy of the software can then be further investigated through techniques like web of trust where users can arbitrate whether or not the keys being verified are authentic and they are operating the intended Bitcoin client. Therefore, without taking advantage of deterministic builds and build signing, the user is susceptible to a myriad of attack vectors.

One such example: if a user downloads a Bitcoin client through HTTP in lieu of HTTPS with a public Wi-Fi connection, perhaps at a foreign coffee shop or hotel, while not verifying the build signing, then attackers could very well intercept the users download connection and replace the download file with a villainous version of Bitcoin that may steal coins, spy on users, or perform other harmful functions.

Bishop finds that a fun part of the software building process is maintaining consistent development environment variables which work to eliminate any sources of non-determinism. Non-deterministic sources could result in undesirable variabilities of the build signing due to the naturally open environment developers are building on. A variability, like differing operating systems between individual developers, generates an entirely different hash at the end of the development process. Ideally, removing all sources of variability in the build environment would improve deterministic builds and subsequently improve trust in their integrity.

Lopp, channeling his inner Sun Tzu, devises a particularly devious method of dividing and manipulating Bitcoin Core la nefarious developer(s) sowing discontent throughout the community and GitHub repositories. If a respected developer were to convey extreme irritation and anger towards any and all protocol improvements, patches or changes, then the growing general consensus will be one of fear towards touching the protocol. This freezing of the development process is known as ossification and would make continued protocol improvements practically impossible.

Perhaps achieving ossification is ultimately beneficial for the protocol since this would imply Bitcoins widespread established dominance, yet Lopp argues just the opposite in that ossification is an exploitable attack vector rather than an effective defense. While ossification works to defend against detrimental changes to the Bitcoin protocol, such as Bitcoin XT, it could also work to prevent beneficial or necessary updates that provide increased peer-to-peer privacy and more robust codebase improvements.

The attack vector Lopp describes would be extremely difficult to assess on the spot whether an active confrontation in the development process is an attack on the protocol or a legitimately constructive disagreement. This speaks to the previous point where, in hindsight, the attack is much more visible after the fact. Without possessing total omniscience of each developers true intent, the development process would be stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Defense against technical attacks, like the above-mentioned early bugs and oversights, are relatively straightforward and logical in their solution. When introducing the erratic, human element, however, we begin playing a dangerous game with far less predictability. Socially-engineered attacks are often packaged with fuzzy solutions and will likely have to be dealt with as they come. A targeted memetic or mainstream narrative attack can be entirely inconspicuous and determining a defense against them is largely a gray area.

Warfare is the philosophy of deception. Arguably, the most logical attack vector for would-be adversaries might be to incite social discontent and meme warfare. Lopp explains that deliberately forcing ossification is the perfect attack because many users would consider it a defense.

The continued prevalence of Craig Wright, an individual claiming to be the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, and his cryptographic antics plus judicial intimidation of Bitcoin Core developers represents a direct attack on the Bitcoin Core development process. Despite the mounting evidence that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, he continues to wreak havoc by racking up millions of dollars in legal fees and effectively outbidding the defense because of the astronomical costs financial and personal that Craig Wright imposes on volunteer developers and contributors via Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP suits). Recall the clever criminal claiming to be someone who they are not, but having to also prove their claim through a digital signature; this exact scenario played out but, due to the abstruse nature of asymmetric cryptography, has been ineffective in convincing the judicial system.

Consequently, Bitcoin Core developers should adopt anonymous contribution methods or risk being targeted by an expensive and burdensome litigation process. These methods of anonymity ultimately depend on the individuals privacy practices, perhaps such as avoiding Bitcoin 2022 and conferences entirely to maintain anonymity. Yet litigation against a supposedly anonymous individual could still be possible if there is an IRL name or personally-identifying element tied to that developers pseudonym. However, the need for contributing privately is itself a present and future burden on developers and their families.

Eventually, if these judicial attacks on Bitcoin Core contributors persist or Jack Dorseys Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund runs dry, developers will be pushed out of the space and further escalate protocol ossification since burning money in unending litigation is not very attractive; a death by a thousand cuts, as Shinobi eloquently summarized it.

If Bitcoin is expected to survive and thrive not just in this century, but for many centuries and so on, then careful steps must be taken in formulating defense mechanisms against expected and unexpected attacks on Bitcoin Core as well as the Bitcoin ecosystem. You cant have a multi-generational wealth vehicle if it becomes worthless before you die.

While the panelists held differing views on whether attacking Bitcoin users is equivalent to attacking the Bitcoin protocol, there continue to exist vectors of attack on the users, like the aforementioned fraudulent digital signatures and the ongoing Craig Wright legal saga. Other vectors include poor wallet build practices or malicious mainstream narratives brainwashing users that could be significantly detrimental to certain principles of Bitcoin we find paramount.

In spite of advancements in Bitcoin private key management, known as wallets, there remains the possibility of bad actors intentionally building wallets that do not follow the latest nor ideal security practices available to them. For instance, there are still wallet implementations that use a single address to send and receive bitcoin thus exposing any privacy users may have.

As well, although not necessarily intentional but rather a result of its limitations, any kind of light wallet (one that does not also operate as a full node itself) requires a connection to a full node in order to communicate transactions. Light wallets, particularly popular for casual users, pose the duality of a simple, easy-to-use interface, but also present gaps in security ripe for attack vectors. Users of these wallets are susceptible to their transaction communications being intercepted by potentially nefarious actors. A straightforward solution but impractical for some to this vector would be to forego using light wallets in favor of full node wallets.

Shinobi envisions alternative attack vectors stemming from plain disinformation campaigns against Bitcoin and then quickly spiraling into government lobbying for legal action and heavy regulations. One such obvious disinformation campaign is the unfounded notion that proof-of-stake is a viable alternative to proof-of-work. If all jurisdictions, primarily those with readily cheap and abundant energy infrastructure, fell in a domino-effect of power grabbing desperation to curb stomp Bitcoin through outright banishment of bitcoin mining, perhaps enforced via inspecting unique energy grid power modulations that can identify bitcoin mining rigs, then relocating all the existing hash power off-grid would prove quite challenging.

The process of replacing and procuring the necessary scales of energy off-grid particularly in secret is no easy task. As an example, solar panels and wind turbines remain far too restrictive to act as an equivalent substitute and fully shoulder a network-wide transition to off-grid bitcoin mining due to solar and winds inherent variable and intermittent power generation. Dashjr proposed a potential solution by deviating from the current proof-of-work standard only if the situation were dire enough. If the blockchain were halted from some unimaginable political dictation or the hashing algorithm (SHA256) used to secure Bitcoin were broken, then coming together to find a solution may be possible and would be beneficial for all network participants.

This proposal of modifying proof-of-work as we know it is itself a case-in-point for the unexpected attacks that could occur on Bitcoin and the inevitably controversial decisions through the Bitcoin Core development process that would follow given such a dire scenario.

Continuing down the path of hypothetical situations that would require time-sensitive BIP implementations, perhaps the worst-case scenario imaginable would be if the SHA256, RIPEMD-160, or ECDSA mechanisms were undoubtedly compromised but even then, the question remains of what would be viable alternatives? Lopp jokes in saying a quantum-proof algorithm will make everybody happy, but this cheeky response will likely become reality at some point in the far future, necessitating unsavory hard fork discussions around practical defense mechanisms against quantum computing exploiting asymmetric cryptography.

Bitcoin is an apolitical money and peaceful protest against the incumbent and corrupt monetary regime. Because of the nature of the opponent Bitcoin is facing, i.e., the U.S. dollar, an unrelenting barrage of technical and social attacks against Bitcoin is likely to occur, if not already under way. Bishop relates Bitcoins entirely voluntary community, who is steadfastly defending Bitcoin at the ready, to that of a self-developed immune system that could be Bitcoins greatest defensive and offensive mechanism.

In summary, Bitcoin is by no means invincible. Without actively considering all potential attack vectors and seeking respective solutions, the always-waiting adversaries could find weaknesses in the code or in the community itself. Whether the attack be from colluding parties, counterfeit Bitcoin software, deliberate ossification, targeted attacks through the judicial system or some unknown future disaster scenario, Bitcoiners must work together and unite to seal any gaps that could be the beginning of the end for Bitcoin.

The aim of this panel is not to instill in the audience doom nor gloom, but rather to prescribe a proper dose of reality with the very possible attacks Bitcoin development and the network could encounter moving forward. Ignoring this would be incredibly detrimental to the overall security of Bitcoin if we decide to live in blissful ignorance of these attack vectors. Should history have anything to teach us, it would be that all existing and previous monetary regimes outside of Bitcoin have succumbed to the fallibility of human institutions. Lets work to not have Bitcoin experience a similar fate.

Humans are rationally driven by monetary incentives which has enabled the open source, pseudo anonymous, monetary nature of Bitcoin to harness a large, skilled group of hackers with opportunity for a reward of the scarce currency that is bitcoin. The discovery and exploitation of flaws that could compromise Bitcoin would paradoxically diminish the attackers newfound wealth thereby, in theory, monetarily encouraging hackers to continually support the Bitcoin network and responsibly report bugs and exploits.

Despite discussions of ways to attack the Bitcoin Core development process and the wider ecosystem with little readily-available solutions of how to exactly ascertain and prevent these attacks, Bishop ended the panel with a poignant statement that spoke to the greatest incentive of all: money. He remarked, Bitcoin is the greatest bug bounty program of all time good luck.

This is a guest post by Okada. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC, Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

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Adversarial Thinking And Ways To Attack Bitcoin - Bitcoin Magazine

Weighing The Options Of Bitcoin Private Key Management – Bitcoin Magazine

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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. Its 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, theres just you.

This is the most difficult hurdle to overcome in terms of taking custody of your own bitcoin, and it is both a mental and practical hurdle. The space is awash with different ideas of best practices, how-to guides, opinions on the best device to use, and new users are bombarded from all directions with this information when they arrive here. The simple reality though, is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to how to store your bitcoin. There are some things that are more widely applicable to people than other things, there are solutions that are better suited for larger or smaller amounts, there are some solutions that make no sense or make perfect sense depending on your living situation. But there is no one best practice for managing your private keys that applies to everyone equally. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably not someone you should be listening to in regards to advice on the subject.

There are all kinds of ways to manage your keys, but things have come a long way since Bitcoin was first created. The original Bitcoin client generated single stand-alone keys backed up in a password-protected digital file and every time you received new coins you would have to make a new backup or risk losing that money; each new receive address was a newly-generated key totally unrelated to the other ones, and not contained in the last backup you made. Nowadays we have mnemonic seeds and deterministic wallets to allow a user to make a single backup and not have to worry about renewing that every time they receive new funds.

However, there is a lot more to safely managing keys than just the form your backup takes.

One of the first things people will run into in regards to key management advice is the contention of whether or not to use a single-signature wallet or a multisig wallet. Both camps tend to take an extremist view that they are the one-size-fits-all solution for your average user, and tend to bombastically advise only using one or the other, its automatically more security! But as I said above, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to key management. Every individual person is in their own personal situation, and that needs to be considered above all else before deciding how to go about things.

Lets look at some of the benefits of a singlesig wallet before we go into multisig. First, the entire wallet requires only retaining a copy of your mnemonic seed in order to be recoverable. Every single Bitcoin address that you send money to can be deterministically generated again on another device. The seed is literally the only thing that you need to recover all of your coins. Another benefit is the cost of spending. When sending coins using a single signature on the blockchain, they take up less blockspace and thus cost less in fees because only a single signature is required in the witness data of the transaction. In terms of inheritance situations, single-signature also has the benefit of being a simple thing (the mnemonic seed) that can be left for your friends and family. As long as they have a simple-to-use and secure device to import it into, its pretty easy to handle with some basic guidance. What is the obvious major downside? A single point of failure. If your mnemonic or keys are compromised, thats all she wrote. That is all that is required for a malicious actor to steal your coins, and there is no undoing that once it is done. No support line to call, no chargebacks. Theyre gone for good.

What are the upsides of a multisig wallet? There is no single point of failure; you are unable to spend coins in a multisig wallet without access to multiple sets of private keys. This allows the geographic distribution of mnemonic seeds to increase the cost of gaining access to enough key sets in order to steal someones bitcoin. It also opens the door to letting other people take possession of one set of keys in the multisig aside from the actual owner, or distributing the keys amongst a group of people so that no one individual owns'' them from the point of view of having enough keys to spend them on their own. This is how companies like Casa or Unchained Capital are able to offer services that to some degree do hold users hands, offering them a safety net in the form of a recovery key held by the service to safeguard the user against losing some (although not all) of the keys they possess in the multisig. What are some of the downsides of multisig? The necessity to safeguard all of the master public keys involved in the wallet. When you use a singlesig, all you need is the mnemonic seed to recover it. But because a multisig wallet uses all of the public keys from every mnemonic seed involved, you have to back them up as well. The problem here is that if you lose a mnemonic seed involved in the multisig, and dont have a separate backup of the matching public key, you have no way to recover it, and without that public key you cannot regenerate the multisig address to find your funds on chain, and therefore have lost access to those funds. Multisig (at least until MuSig schemes using Schnorr/Taproot are adopted) are also more expensive to spend on chain than a singlesig, so sending your money anywhere is more expensive than with a singlesig address.

So lets look at an imaginary Bitcoiner: they live alone in an apartment, they do not get along well with their family, their friends are not the most responsible people, and they are sitting around contemplating how to set up their key management solution. Some person attempting to be helpful on Twitter advises they set up a multisig wallet with Specter or Blue Wallet. How does multisig help this person? They have no place to store keys aside from their apartment, so they are going to be keeping all the keys in one place. This prevents any benefits of spreading multisig keys around to be redundant against loss or theft, and comes with the cost of more expensive transactions on chain. As well, even though not the most likely scenario because all the seeds are stored together, they risk losing funds if they misplace or damage one seed and do not maintain public key backups. It adds no meaningful security, increases the cost of spending their bitcoin, and adds additional ways for them to lose access to their money. What might make sense for such a person is utilizing a multisig service where the provider holds a key for them to assist in recovery. If using a 2-of-3, they can keep two seeds at their apartment, the provider has one, and leave a single seed with untrusted family or irresponsible friends knowing that the single seed is not enough for them to spend the funds. They can even leave that one seed with multiple people in case someone loses or destroys their copy, so they can still recover funds if they were to lose access to both of their seeds kept at home.

Lets look at another imaginary Bitcoiner: someone with their own house, as well as a cabin somewhere in the wilderness they own as a vacation home. Maybe theyre a senior software engineer, or a lawyer, someone who has their own locked office in their workplace. They have many different places under a reasonable amount of their own control. In this case it makes sense for this person to utilize a multisig setup with noone involved but themselves. They can generate a 2-of-3 wallet, leave one seed at home, one seed at their cabin, and one seed at their office (obviously leaving a copy of all three public keys with each seed backup). This provides them with geographic redundancy protecting them against both loss of funds and theft because they actually have access to multiple safe locations where they can store key material, unlike the first hypothetical Bitcoiner above.

Both of these scenarios should clearly demonstrate the strengths and drawbacks of both methods depending on a person's individual circumstances. Using multisig because "it's more secure!" is not always a sensible choice for everyone. Even if it does make sense, it doesn't necessarily make sense to use it in the same way as someone else would. Before making a decision between a single key and multisig key set up, you should think long and hard about your own living circumstances and what makes sense for you.

Passphrases are also something billed as a catch-all solution to security. The reality is a lot more complicated and nuanced than that. Assume for the purposes of this discussion that you have had your mnemonic seed compromised (a passphrase is just like any internet password in that scenario from a simplistic point of view). It only adds as much security as there is entropy in the passphrase. If you used a secure passphrase, obviously this can be a good amount of added security, but this comes with the trade-off that the more secure your passphrase is the harder it will be to memorize. The core purpose of a passphrase is to have something you remember, and not physically stored anywhere, so the use of a passphrase becomes a balancing act of adding security but not creating too great a risk of forgetting it. If you don't remember your passphrase, you lose access to your funds.

This write-up on Coldbits website gives a good breakdown of the entropy of different styles of passphrases, from using BIP-39 mnemonic words, to other word lists, to alphanumeric passwords. The article defines different classes of attackers based on the resources at their disposal: a single laptop, a few GPUs, a specialized ASIC for passphrase cracking, and a large supercluster of passphrase ASICs. For each class of attacker they rate on average the time it would take to brute force a passphrase based on its length and what resources an attacker has. This is something that everyone using a passphrase should consider when selecting one. Unless you approach the same entropy as a mnemonic seed itself, a passphrase is just a temporary shield to allow you to move your funds to a new seed before the attacker can bruteforce your passphrase, and if you approach the same entropy as a mnemonic seed you are heavily raising the risk of forgetting the passphrase and losing access to your funds.

The last point on seed phrases is memorizing versus writing down and storing somewhere. If memorizing a seed it might be prudent to temporarily write it down until you are confident you have it memorized, and then destroy the written copy. If you do wind up making a permanent physical copy of it, then in my opinion the best thing to do is treat it like a multisig setup. Your mnemonic and passphrase each constitute two "keys" in a "multisig" at that point, and storing both of them in the same place is a bad security risk. The major benefit of a passphrase is adding "something you know" to "something you have" (your mnemonic). If you deviate from this use of a passphrase by writing it down, keep that in mind and plan accordingly to keep them separate and not easy to find together.

This is a key point to consider in any wallet set up; hardware wallets generally provide physical security to make extracting your keys from the device very expensive, and any software wallet that is safe to use will be storing your keys encrypted when the wallet is not open and in use. However, all of these protections are moot if you just leave a mnemonic seed sitting around on a desk. Physical security of a mnemonic seed is of the utmost importance, whether that comes from a safe, or hiding it in some place that is not somewhere a thief or attacker will look is something for you to consider based on your situation. But it should not be somewhere easily accessible by anyone but you. A safe that is difficult to remove or break into would be a good place, or somewhere that is not immediately obvious, like writing it inside a book across many pages or under a loose floorboard (don't take these examples literally per se, but the idea is that somewhere a thief is not going to think to look for something valuable).

If you wind up storing a mnemonic somewhere other than your own home, I cannot stress this enough, do not do so without a decently strong passphrase and preferably with some kind of tamperproof bag or setup so that you can periodically verify the seed is still there and has not been tampered with by anyone else since your last check. Personally I think that strong physical security or obfuscation (hiding) is the way to go in your own residence, but if you do have a need to store elsewhere due to security or disaster risks, I would advise storing it with someone you trust regardless of any tamperproof measures or passphrases you have in place (security deposit boxes are a horrible idea for singlesig addresses).

One last thing to consider if this happens to be a situation you might find yourself in, is how do you destroy a metal seed backup? Imagine you are leaving the country and never coming back, yet you have a word seed stamped with letter presses or etched in. You can't bring that through customs. You also don't want to leave it sitting around where it can be found when you leave if you plan on continuing to use it. If this is a scenario you see in your future potentially, it might make sense to use tile-based seed backups if you want to keep steel ones for durability purposes, otherwise you are going to have to migrate all of your funds to a new seed before or after leaving. This could be a time-consuming and complex thing if you have funds segregated among different passphrases, or have managed your UTXOs to keep them isolated, because you will have to move funds bit by bit without connecting them to maintain that privacy and isolation.

Managing your own keys is the core of what makes Bitcoin special, but it is also a big responsibility. It's like going for a hike out in the wilderness. There are many different paths you can take; some are arduous and grueling, uphill the whole way, while some are nice easy paths, and some have obstacles in the way. You can even walk completely off the trails if you so choose, but that comes with the risk of getting lost. When you go out in the elements, there is no one you can depend on but yourself. The level of preparation and understanding needed is not going to be the same for everyone, and you shouldn't let yourself fall into the trap of thinking that is the case.

This is a guest post by Shinobi. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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Weighing The Options Of Bitcoin Private Key Management - Bitcoin Magazine

Report: Cambodia Reaffirms Stance Against Unsanctioned Crypto-Related Activities Regulation Bitcoin News – Bitcoin News

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Cambodian authorities have reportedly said that no cryptocurrency company has been issued a business license yet, and that conducting cryptocurrency-related activities in the country is still illegal.

The Cambodian government has not greenlighted the issuing or use of any cryptocurrency in the country, a report has said. The report, which cites a document recently released by the Ministry of Finance and Economics, said it is still illegal to create, distribute, or trade cryptocurrencies in Cambodia.

According to a China News Service report, while the ministry does concede that the fintech industry is growing rapidly, it nonetheless reiterated that the long-standing ban on crypto trading remains in force. As previously reported by Bitcoin.com News, Cambodian authorities announced in 2018 that the circulation or trading of cryptocurrencies without a license was illegal.

At the time, authorities warned that crypto activities had the potential to cause risks to the public and society. The volatility of crypto assets as well as their lack of backing by an underlying asset are some of the risks mentioned in the May 11, 2018 statement. Lack of consumer protection, cybercrime, and loss of funds due to hacking are the other risks that were mentioned in the statement.

In a new statement jointly issued with the National Bank of Cambodia, the Securities Commission, and the National Police Agency, the Finance ministry reiterated that no cryptocurrency company has been issued a business license.

Meanwhile, the China News Service report revealed that Cambodia is currently drafting its fintech development policy which, according to the finance ministry, ensures the country fully benefits from the development of this emerging technology while minimizing the associated risks.

What are your thoughts on this story? Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

Terence Zimwara is a Zimbabwe award-winning journalist, author and writer. He has written extensively about the economic troubles of some African countries as well as how digital currencies can provide Africans with an escape route.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

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Report: Cambodia Reaffirms Stance Against Unsanctioned Crypto-Related Activities Regulation Bitcoin News - Bitcoin News

Twitter to Begin Cryptocurrency Payouts for Creators. This Week’s Top Bitcoin and Crypto News – CNET

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Welcome to Nonfungible Tidbits, a weekly roundup of news in crypto, NFTs and their related realms.

Our lead story this week is Twitter signing on as the first company to use Stripe's new cryptocurrency payments feature. The social network plans to give creators -- people who monetize their video, art and music directly through their relationships with the audience -- the option of getting paid in a stablecoin.

We'll also cover Coinbase launching a beta version of its NFT marketplace, New York lawmakers considering a moratorium on fossil-fuel powered cryptocurrency mining in the state, and a strange cyberattack on a DeFi protocol in which the hacker left the stolen cryptocurrency behind.

Online payment processor Stripe said on Friday that it'll allow businesses to pay their customers in cryptocurrencies. The first business that's signed on for this feature is social media giant Twitter, which currently uses Stripe to pay creators. Right now the cryptocurrency that'll be used for the payout is a stablecoin called USDCoin, or USDC. The value of the USDC stablecoin is pegged to the US dollar, which makes the value less volatile than that of other cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin.

Twitter will draw on Stripe's cryptocurrency payments feature by offering it as an option to creators who sell premium content to their followers, such as those who receive earnings from Twitter's paid Ticketed Spaces and Super Follows features. Creators can opt to have their payout sent to a digital wallet.

Read CNET's full story on Stripe's cryptocurrency payment roll out here.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase on Wednesday released the beta version of a feature that'll allow users to buy and sell NFTs on its platform. Coinbase calls the new feature "a Web3 social marketplace for NFTs," which sounds like the exchange may include social media elements in the feature. Right now the beta version only lets people view Ethereum-based NFTs on Coinbase.

Read CNET's full story on the launch of Coinbase's NFT marketplace here.

A cryptocurrency mining rig.

A battle over how and if cryptocurrency mining should be allowed to operate is heating up in New York, according to a Wall Street Journal report. New York lawmakers are considering measures that would place a two-year moratorium on reactivating old fossil-fuel power plants in the state for the purpose of cryptocurrency mining.

Cryptocurrency mining operations areincredibly energy-intensive, so electricity is a big part of miners' overhead. Buying enough electricity to mine cryptocurrency is expensive, and crypto miners need uninterruptedaccess to poweraround the clock. So miners are usingold power plantsas a cheap source of electricity for their operations.

The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index estimates that the bitcoin network's energy usage is a little less than the energy used by the entire country of Egypt. Greenpeace and other organizations are currently engaged in a campaign to change the way the bitcoin network works to reduce the networks' carbon footprint.

In an odd turn of events, a hacker stole $1 million in crypto from a decentralized finance protocol called Zeed, then failed to get it out. Generally speaking, DeFi protocols are code sets that run on blockchains and facilitate various financial transactions and transfers using cryptocurrencies. Business Insider India called the hack similar to robbing a bank and then forgetting the bags of money. The publication also noted that almost 97% of all cryptocurrency stolen this year has come from hacks and exploitations of DeFi protocols.

Thanks for reading. We'll be back with plenty more next week. In the meantime, check out this story from CNET's Daniel Van Boom about how an Apple iCloud exploit caused a cryptocurrency trader to lose more than $650K.

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Twitter to Begin Cryptocurrency Payouts for Creators. This Week's Top Bitcoin and Crypto News - CNET

WW3 threat as Putin’s mouthpiece warns of ‘no mercy’ in war ‘against Europe and world’ – Express

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Vladimir Solovyov, known as Putin's "mouthpiece", has threatened Europe and NATO countries of an impending war as he said Russia's war is entering "a new stage".

The prominent Russian state TV presenter said there "will be no mercy" during his ranting speech.

Solovyov questioned whether NATO countries will have enough weapons left to defend themselves once Russia's invasion of Ukraine ends.

The ranting propagandist, who was sanctioned by the EU for his close ties to the Russian leader, warned that Moscow will be "grinding up NATO's war machine as well as its citizens".

On the state-owned Russian television channel Russia 1, Solovyov said: "I believe the special military operation is entering a new stage.

"Ukrainians alone are no longer enough. Now they're talking about NATO countries supplying de-facto their own weapons. We'll see not only NATO's weapons being drawn into this but also their operators.

"De-facto, we're starting to wage war against NATO countries. We'll be grinding up NATO's war machine as well as citizens of NATO countries."

He added: "When this operation concludes, NATO will have to ask itself: Do we have what we need to defend ourselves? Do we have the people to defend ourselves?

"And there will be no mercy. There will be no mercy. Not only Ukraine will have been denazified, the war against Europe and the world is developing a more specific outline which means we'll have to act differently and to act much more harshly."

READ MORE:Rublev discloses Wimbledon phone call with Russian players after ban

The presenter's troubling comments come just weeks after arsonists targetted his villa in Lake Como, and activists poured red paint into his swimming pool at another of his luxury properties and scrawled "killer" on the wall.

Russia recently announced its plans to take over the south of Ukraine and the whole of the Donbas region.

Rustam Minnekayev, the deputy commander of Russia's military, said Putin's army plans to forge a corridor between Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which Russia annexed in 2014, and the Donbas in eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainian fighters left in Mariupol, that Russia claims to have seized, are holed up at Azovstal industrial facility which Putin has ordered to be blockaded, condemning the soldiers and civilians inside to their deaths.

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Mr Minnekayev said should Russia's forces seize southern Ukraine, it would improve the army's access to Moldova's pro-Russian breakaway region of Transdniestria.

Transdniestria borders Ukraine, causing Kyiv to fear the area could be used as a launching pad for new attacks from Russian troops.

Ukraine's Defence Ministry has denounced Russia's plans to seize full control of Donbas and southern Ukraine, calling it "imperialism".

The ministry wrote on Twitter that Russia had "acknowledged that the goal of the 'second phase' of the war is not victory over the mythical Nazis, but simply the occupation of eastern and southern Ukraine. Imperialism as it is".

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WW3 threat as Putin's mouthpiece warns of 'no mercy' in war 'against Europe and world' - Express

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Jared Polis: The Most Libertarian Governor in America? – Reason

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Colorado's Jared Polis might be the most libertarian governor in America, at a time when his big-state Democratic colleagues are getting exposed as hypocrites while presiding over historic population declines or getting kicked out of office for sexual harassment and sending COVID infected patients back to nursing homes and then lying about it. I'm not sure that Polis' 2014 claim in the pages of Reason that "libertarians should vote for Democratic candidates" because they're "more supportive of individual liberty and freedom" has held up, but he's certainly leading by example.

The 46-year-old governor is presiding over one of the fastest-growing states in the country and a place that has one of the lowest death rates during the pandemic. He pushed back against members of his own party to remove mask mandates, and he consistently argued that public health decisions should be made at as local a level as possible. Last fall, at a conference held by the conservative Steamboat Institute, he declared that the state income tax rate "should be zero" and has supported ballot initiatives that reduced the rate. Polis has embraced occupational licensing reform and was an outspoken defender of bitcoin back in 2014 when Sen. Joe Manchin (DW.Va.) called on then-head of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen to ban it.

The openly gay, married father of two recently signed a free-range parenting bill that effectively relegalizes the sort of Colorado childhood he recalls as the son of two ex-hippie parents: "Just because a kid is playing alone outside, it doesn't mean they're in danger," Polis said at the signing ceremony. "It will help decrease false reports sowe can focus on the serious and the real instances of child abuse."

As conservative states pass laws strictly limiting abortions, he signed legislation guaranteeing a woman's right to choose. The founder of two charter schools, he is an outspoken advocate for school choice, saying earlier this year that "public school choice is an asset to improve all public schools." A former tech entrepreneur and five-term congressman, Polis is steadfast against limiting speech rights or treating social media platforms as utilities that can't moderate content or bounce users for transgressing terms of service.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Reason, Polis talks about trying to govern from the middle, takes shots at President Joe Biden's moves on free trade and immigration, and repeats his argument that libertarians should vote for Democrats. Up for re-election in the fall and a heavy favorite to win a second term, Polis also discusses his political ambitions as a rising star in a party that is expected to get blown out in the midterm elections.

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Jared Polis: The Most Libertarian Governor in America? - Reason

What’s Conservative About the New Conservatism? – The Dispatch

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Dear Capitolisters,

As Ive mentioned here before, I hail from the right side of the libertarian spectrum and have long worked with conservatives, center-right media, and Republican politicians on various policy issues.Back then, wed surely disagree on specific line itemsIraq or the drug war, for examplebut we always shared a core belief in certain fundamental principles about government, public policy, and life.These principles, not necessarily shared by the left (for better or worse), ensured that wed remain close allies in the political arena, regardless of our disagreements on discrete issues. (I even recall one time scoffing at a former colleagues liberaltarian project in the early 2000s, because the left and libertarians had far more fundamental disagreements about natural rights, limited government, the rule of law, and related issues.)

As readers of The Dispatch are surely aware, this fusionist alliance has, in recent years, frayed, with many self-identified conservatives today accusing us libertarians of not only being turtleneck-wearing, election-losing chart jockeys but actually causing many of the rights (and Americas) problems.But I think the Florida-Disney sagaparticularly many mainstream conservatives reactions theretomay take the schism to a whole new (and bad) level and reveal in the process that, if this is the new conservatism its not very conservative at all.

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What's Conservative About the New Conservatism? - The Dispatch

OPINION: Progressives are hypocritical in defending Disney – Sarasota Herald-Tribune

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Jake Hoffman| Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Imagine a corporation granted power over the government to decide its own environmental policy, develop roads and buildings at itsdiscretion, build itsown public services, hire itsown police force, harness itsown energy sources andpay less taxes to do all of this.

This is the libertarian fever dream that Walt Disney World has enjoyed in Florida since 1967. Its the kind of extreme private ownership that would make Ayn Rand tell you to dial it back a bit. Yet today we find Florida Democrats and Democratsacross the country lambasting Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans for dissolvingthe Reedy Creek District, which provides Disney with its own city and basically gives it aself-regulating government.

More: OPINION: The media missed the real story of CPAC 2022

While I generally view myself as a libertarian whoadvocates for deregulation and less government interference in private business, I can only sit back and chuckle over the fact that, first and foremost, the Disney anarcho-capitalist experiment clearly worked.

Florida gave a giant corporation free rein and Disney turned it into the happiest place on Earth; itcreated the most jobs in Florida for decades and was responsible fortens of billions of dollars in economic impact to the state each year. On top of all that, Disney's public transit system is probably the best in the country.

That said, however, Florida has not afforded every corporation the same special treatment that it has given Disney. So what we really have here is crony capitalism at its finest, and it is high time to take back the reins and stop picking winners and losers you know, the very thing that small-government Republicans should have been doing all along.

Of course, I would love to create a special district around my house so that I couldappoint myself president and self-govern my businesses.But thats not the world we live in, so until everyone gets the same autonomy that Disney enjoyed for 50-plus years, dissolving Reedy Creek is a justified move on principle alone.

Yet that reality still hasn't prevented progressives frombending over backwardto become huge advocates for Disney, a cult-like beneficiary of slave labor that has ignored Uyghur genocide in China and is no stranger to beingculturally insensitive.

In fact, there are Democrats across the country pleading for Disney to come to their state! For example, Colorado'sDemocratic Gov, Jared Polis is openly recruitingDisney to relocate to Colorado, and declaring that his state doesn't "meddle in the affairs (of private business)."

First off, that notion is a total lie, unless you adopt the anarcho-capitalist view that Disney should be its own government.But more importantly, is this going to be the hot take from Democrats? That they want to let corporations self-govern? That they want corporations to get special taxing districts and to get to decide their own environmental policies?

The reality is the left is just engaging in its usual virtue-signaling, but this time its not even making an attempt to beideologically consistent. Or maybe its just that in theliberal hierarchy of needs, teaching kindergartners about sexuality, gender identityand personal pronouns is now at the top of the pyramid instead of loudly demandingmore corporate taxation and more central government control.

Ihave so many questions that I'dlove for liberalsto answer, and here are some of them:

What would Disney need to do to lose itsspecial privileges?

What happens if Disney starts to teach Christianity in its childrens programming?

Do you have any idea how many bills Disney has lobbied for or against over the years and how much power it holdsin Tallahassee?

If youre a politician whowants to enable Disney by incentivizing it to come to your state, are you ready to cede power to Disney's CEO and the woke mob that now runs thecompany's public policy decisions?

If youre able todo all of themental gymnastics it takes to genuinely support Disney for getting involved in a culturewar piece of legislation while simultaneously condemning Republicans for removing Disney's special district, then youreally need to get your political philosophy straightened out.

Ifor one think that the more you remove corporate influences on our lawmakers, the better outcomes we will get overall. I believe that we should deregulate businesses as much as possible. Ibelieve thatthe state has a responsibility toprotect people and property. And I believe that our public schools should not be reassigning the genders of first-graders behind the backs of their parents.

All of these beliefs are beliefs I held before this Disney fiasco, and they are beliefs I will continue to hold when this controversy finally fades away.So atleast I know where I stand on the political spectrum, unlike the overly emotional progressives who are now rushing to defend Disney while abandoning any sense of intellectual integrity.

Then again, I suspect that many on the outraged left are actuallyjust coming downwith a new variant of Trump Derangement Syndrome the virulent strain that's also known as DeSantis Derangement Syndrome.

Dont worry: I have no desire to force those who are stricken with DeSantis Derangement Syndrometo take a vaccine shot to treat it. But at the very least, the liberals now feelingtheeffects of this condition should be actively exploring alternative sources of information to counter all of the sickeningmisinformation they'regetting on the Reedy Creek issue.

Jake Hoffmanis executive director of the Tampa Bay Young Republicans. He is a Republican Party candidate in Hillsborough County for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives.

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OPINION: Progressives are hypocritical in defending Disney - Sarasota Herald-Tribune

At least Rutledge and her opponents showed up | Steve Brawner – SWTImes

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Steve Brawner| Special to the Times Record

Give credit to Attorney General Leslie Rutledge where credit is due: She showed up.

Rutledge participated in one of a series of debates held April 21 by the Arkansas Press Association for four of the states contested constitutional offices. Hers, for lieutenant governor, was the most meaningful of the debates because she, the frontrunner, was there.

Rutledge is the frontrunner because of her statewide office and name recognition, her Rutledge Report and other public service announcements, and her overwhelming fundraising advantage stemming from her aborted run for governor.

A candidate in her position might find a reason to skip the lieutenant governor debate, which was not broadcast.

Two of the other clear frontrunners skipped their debates: Sarah Huckabee Sanders in the governors race and Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin in the attorney generals race. Sanders, the overwhelming favorite, is not making herself available to reporters much, so its not surprising she wouldnt appear in a room full of them. Shes raised more than $14 million, so she doesnt need any media coverage. Sen. John Boozman also recently said he would not debate his three Republican primary opponents.

In the 2020 elections, Sen. Tom Cotton skipped the debates sponsored by Arkansas PBS. These are tame, controlled affairs where the candidates dont question each other, but Cotton didnt think it was worth his time and/or the risk. His libertarian opponent, Ricky Harrington, had the stage to himself. Harrington is running for governor this year.

But there was Rutledge sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with her seven opponents. The Republicans are Surgeon General Greg Bledsoe; former Republican Party Chairman Doyle Webb; state Sen. Jason Rapert, R-Conway; Washington County Judge Joseph Wood; and Attorney Chris Bequette. The non-Republicans are Democrat Kelly Krout and Libertarian Frank Gilbert.

The eight are vying for an office that does little. The lieutenant governor presides over the Senate when its in session and becomes governor when the elected governor dies, leaves office or cant serve. Thats pretty much it.

These days, campaigns are based largely on party labels, ads, and endorsements by ideological interest groups and politicians. Theyre highly scripted affairs where candidates relentlessly try to stay on message.

In a debate, its just them on a stage, where they might go off message. They might say something embarrassing. They might say what they really think and get in trouble with their base or with what few undecided voters are left.

Debates are political theater, and they probably dont tell us much about how a candidate would actually govern. But they do give candidates a chance to state their case why they should be elected in a less scripted environment. They also let them say why an opponent shouldnt be elected, and to do it like a real man or real woman: Face-to-face instead of hiding behind an anonymous narrator in a 30-second attack ad funded by other people.

Its unclear what debates will look like in the future. Recently, the Republican National Committee voted to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, the bipartisan entity that organizes the ones featuring Republicans and Democrats (and Ross Perot in 1992). The RNC says the CPD is biased.

Were a long way from the fall of 2024, so who knows what will happen between now and then. Regardless, its an unfortunate decision because it further chips away trust in our elections.

And that trust has been eroded a lot lately. Between denying election results, claiming the whole system is rigged, and impeaching presidents regularly, were less and less willing to accept the will of the voters and less inclined to believe in the democratic process if our side doesnt win.

And thats kind of scary. If you say the whole process is illegitimate, it makes it easier to justify trying to overturn an election. It could happen. There was an attempt to do it a year-and-a-half ago. Soon someone might actually succeed. Eventually wed stop having real elections at all, like a lot of countries.

I guess Ive strayed a bit from the lieutenant governors debate, so lets return to it. Kudos to Rutledge, and also to Bledsoe, Webb, Rapert, Wood, Bequette, Krout and Gilbert, along with the participants in the other debates.

They showed up.

Steve Brawner is a freelance journalist and syndicated columnist. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com or follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.

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At least Rutledge and her opponents showed up | Steve Brawner - SWTImes

Meet the Republican Candidates for State Auditor and Treasurer – Nebraska Public Media | News

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Age: 68

Occupation: Nebraska Lieutenant Governor since 2013

Political party: Republican

Mike Foley was the state auditor for two terms then ran for governor in 2014, lost to Pete Ricketts, and was appointed by Ricketts as his running mate to become the current lieutenant governor. Foley couldve run for governor again, but he said he decided to run for auditor because of his skills and interests.

"I enjoyed my work as state auditor when I previously held that position. I was a very aggressive state auditor, worked very hard to expose waste, fraud inefficiency in government operations and root that out of the system," he said.

Foley intends to focus on the largest agency in state government, the Department of Health and Human Services, if elected. He said hes in the best position to be state auditor because he understands the complexities of state government and has worked there for 22 years, including six years in the Legislature.

"I look forward to returning to that [auditor's] office where I can do some more good work for the people of Nebraska, to protect their hard earned tax dollars from being wasted," he said.

Optometrist Katrina Tomsen of Upland is also running for the seat unopposed with the libertarian party.

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Meet the Republican Candidates for State Auditor and Treasurer - Nebraska Public Media | News

DeSantis Beat DisneyThen the Mob Wanted More – The Dispatch

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What, pray tell, had roused freedom from its slumber?

The Supreme Courts Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, which ruled that corporations have First Amendment rights. I thought then, like most conservatives, that the court was correct. Unlike many these days, I still do. The New York Times Co. has every right to argue for its preferred policies, and so does Koch Industries.

Its difficult to exaggerate how committed the right once was to this principle and how much it appalled the left. Masterpiece Cakeshop, we conservatives contended, had every right not to be compelled to make gay wedding cakes because of the owners religious beliefs. Hobby Lobby had a First Amendment right to defy provisions of the Affordable Care Act that violated its religious freedom. We won both arguments at the Supreme Court.

That era is now officially over.

Florida recently passed the Parental Rights in Education bill (tendentiously called the Dont Say Gay law by detractors). The Walt Disney Company, under CEO Bob Chapek, tried to stay out of the controversy. But a pincer movement of internal and external political pressure forced the company to publicly oppose the bill.

Worse, a video of a Disney meeting at which executives boasted of their not at all secret agenda to incorporate gay and transgender themes into Disney content was leaked at the worst possible moment. The very online right was already in a full-blown moral panic about pedophilia, basically holding that anyone who opposed the bill was either a groomer or groomer friendly. (Once a term for adults who manipulate underage children for sexual abuse, groomer suddenly meant dissenters from a moral crusade.)

Against the broader backdrop of the populist fatalism of the Trump era, which holds that conservatives never win when they play by the rules, it was something of a perfect storm.

Florida Republicans, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, voted to strip Walt Disney World of its special status under something called the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Crafted by Republicans in 1967, the improvement district deal exempted Disney World from zoning and tax laws in exchange for Disney transforming a massive amount of swampy land into the Magic Kingdom and running it without taxpayer money. Economically and politically, it was win-win for both Disney and Floridauntil last week, when a remarkable number of politicians suddenly embraced a purist libertarian opposition to such public-private partnerships of which there are more than 1,000 in Florida.

Of course, Orlando International Airport and Daytona International Speedway, with similar exemptions, will be fine, because the libertarian arguments are entirely pretextual. This was about punishing Disney. Floridas lieutenant governor even admits that if Disney simply changed its politics, everything could go back to normal. Oh, is that all?

The view on the right is that DeSantis is a courageous brawler, beating back a behemoth of woke capitalism. Its certainly true that DeSantis comes out a winner on the national stage as he contemplates a presidential run in 2024.

I will also concede that DeSantis supporters have a point. If corporations will let themselves be bullied out of their lanes by the left, they shouldnt be surprised if they invite retaliation from the right. As problematic as I find this whole spectacle, it would be a good thing if corporations thought twice about picking sides in the culture war. As Michael Jordan once said, Republicans buy sneakers too.

But whether the costs outweigh the benefits is unknowable, particularly in a climate in which what constitutes winning is redefined on the fly by Twitter mobs. After all, as National Reviews Charlie Cooke notes, DeSantis had already won: Disney took its shot at the Florida parental rights bill, and even though all of its sponsors were recipients of Disneys political contributions, Disney lost. But the rights equivalent of Twitter-addicted woke activists wanted a pound of Mouse flesh.

Privately, some defenders say the Reedy Creek Improvement District rescission, which doesnt go into effect until next year, will never happen. Saner heads will prevail, opting not to shift massive burdens onto county governments and taxpayers (this would explain why Disney has largely stayed mum). But that theory assumes DeSantis is the mobs master, not its servant.

And even ifa big ifcorporate America takes the right lessons here, theres no chance activists on the left or right will, at least for the foreseeable future. When you reward mobs, you get more mobs.

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DeSantis Beat DisneyThen the Mob Wanted More - The Dispatch

Jonah Goldberg: The right-wing mob gets its pound of Mouse flesh from Disney — or does it? – Los Angeles Times

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Freedom is awaking from its coma today because of a huge, huge, huge Supreme Court decision huge, Rush Limbaugh declared in 2010. I cannot tell you how big this is.

What, pray tell, had roused freedom from its slumber?

The Supreme Courts Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision, which ruled that corporations have 1st Amendment rights. I thought then, like most conservatives, that the court was correct. Unlike many these days, I still do. The New York Times Inc. has every right to argue for its preferred policies, and so does Koch Inc.

Its difficult to exaggerate how committed the right once was to this principle and how much it appalled the left. Masterpiece Cakeshop, we conservatives contended, had every right not to be compelled to make gay wedding cakes because of the owners religious beliefs. Hobby Lobby had a 1st Amendment right to defy provisions of the Affordable Care Act that violated its religious freedom. We won both arguments at the Supreme Court.

That era is now officially over.

Florida recently passed the Parental Rights in Education bill (tendentiously called the Dont Say Gay law by detractors). The Disney Co., under Chief Executive Bob Chapek, tried to stay out of the controversy. But a pincer movement of internal and external political pressure forced the company to publicly oppose the bill.

Worse, a video of a Disney meeting at which executives boasted of their not at all secret agenda to incorporate gay and transgender themes into Disney content was leaked at the worst possible moment. The very online right was already in a full-blown moral panic about pedophilia, basically holding that anyone who opposed the bill was either a groomer or groomer friendly. (Once a term for adults who manipulate underage children for sexual abuse, groomer suddenly meant dissenters from a moral crusade.)

Against the broader backdrop of the populist fatalism of the Trump era, which holds that conservatives never win when they play by the rules, it was something of a perfect storm.

Florida Republicans, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, voted to strip Disney World of its special status under something called the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Crafted by Republicans in 1968, the improvement district deal exempted Disney World from zoning and tax laws in exchange for Disney transforming a massive amount of swampy land into the Magic Kingdom and running it without taxpayer money. Economically and politically, it was win-win for both Disney and Florida until last week, when a remarkable number of politicians suddenly embraced a purist libertarian opposition to such public-private partnerships of which there are over a thousand in Florida.

Of course, Orlando International Airport and Daytona International Speedway, with similar exemptions, will be fine, because the libertarian arguments are entirely pretextual. This was about punishing Disney. Floridas lieutenant governor even admits that if Disney simply changed its politics, everything could go back to normal. Oh, is that all?

The view on the right is that DeSantis is a courageous brawler, beating back a behemoth of woke capitalism. Its certainly true that DeSantis comes out a winner on the national stage as he contemplates a presidential run in 2024.

I will also concede that DeSantis supporters have a point. If corporations will let themselves be bullied out of their lanes by the left, they shouldnt be surprised if they invite retaliation from the right. As problematic as I find this whole spectacle, it would be a good thing if corporations thought twice about picking sides in the culture war. As Michael Jordan once said, Republicans buy sneakers too.

But whether the costs outweigh the benefits is unknowable, particularly in a climate in which what constitutes winning is redefined on-the-fly by Twitter mobs. After all, as National Reviews Charlie Cooke notes, DeSantis had already won: Disney took its shot at the Florida parental rights bill, and even though all of its sponsors were recipients of Disneys political contributions, Disney lost. But the rights equivalent of Twitter-addicted woke activists wanted a pound of Mouse flesh.

Privately, some defenders say the Reedy Creek Improvement District recission, which doesnt go into effect until next year, will never happen. Saner heads will prevail, opting not to shift massive burdens onto county governments and taxpayers (this would explain why Disney has largely stayed mum). But that theory assumes DeSantis is the mobs master, not its servant.

And even if a big if corporate America takes the right lessons here, theres no chance activists on the left or right will, at least for the foreseeable future. When you reward mobs, you get more mobs.

@JonahDispatch

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Jonah Goldberg: The right-wing mob gets its pound of Mouse flesh from Disney -- or does it? - Los Angeles Times

Early Voting Starts Thursday: Here’s Where to Go in Orange County – Chapelboro.com

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Thursday marks the beginning of early voting during North Carolinas 2022 primary election cycle. The delayed timeline from redistricting lawsuits created a unique timeline and some voters may be returning to cast their ballots in-person for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Heres what you need to know about early voting before casting your ballot in Orange County.

This early voting period, there are five polling places in Orange County: Orange Works at Hillsborough Commons, Carrboro Town Hall Complex, Chapel of the Cross, Efland Ruritan Club and Seymour Senior Center. The Orange County Board of Elections office will not be an early voting site.

(Via Orange County Board of Elections)

Early voting runs from April 28 through May 14. Weekday early voting is open 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. On Sunday, May 1 the precincts will be open from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m., and Saturday, May 7 and Saturday, May 14 voting will be open 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. There is no early voting Saturday, April 30 or Sunday, May 8.

Some Chapel Hill voters may vote in Chatham or Durham counties. To learn more about early voting in Chatham County, click here. To learn more about early voting in Durham County, click here.

On Election Day, Tuesday May 17, polling places are open 6:30 a.m. until 7:30 p.m. During Election Day voters must vote at their assigned precinct.

Voters can register to vote at an early voting location. Voters must be a resident of North Carolina and their respective county for at least 30 days prior to the election. Additionally, voters who turn 18 years old by the general election can vote during the primary.

North Carolina has semi-closed primaries. This means unaffiliated voters may choose a Democrat, Republican or Libertarian ballot. Voters registered as Democrat, Republican or Libertarian will receive the ballot matching their voter registration.

Voters will see non-partisan races, like the Carrboro Town Council special election and Orange County Schools Board of Education, on their ballot regardless of political affiliation.

Voters can check their registration, see their assigned polling place, and view a sample ballothere.

All voters must have registered to vote at their current address in the county by Friday, April 22 in order to cast their ballots on Election Day.

A photo ID is not required for voting in North Carolina this election cycle.

Here are some select races Orange and Chatham county voters will see in their ballots. Candidates are listed in alphabetical order by first name and parties in alphabetical order. Incumbents in local races have their names bolded.

To see a sample ballot for the 2022 primary elections, visit this North Carolina Board of Elections web page.

North Carolinas primary election day is set for Tuesday, May 17, with early voting starting on Thursday, April 28.

For more election coverage and candidate introductions, visit ChapelborosLocal Election Coverage page.

Chapelboro.comdoes not charge subscription fees. You can support local journalism and our mission to serve the community.Contribute today every single dollar matters.

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Early Voting Starts Thursday: Here's Where to Go in Orange County - Chapelboro.com

Milei gets 12000 people to attend class on inflation in Mendoza – MercoPress

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Monday, April 25th 2022 - 20:55 UTC Argentina's peso is not even good as fertilizer, Milei explained

Argentine Libertarian Deputy Javier Milei Sunday insisted on dollarizing the country's economy during a rally in Mendoza where he also vowed that such would be his first step if elected President in 2023.

Milei also said the Argentine peso was the currency of the caste, because it loses its purchasing power every minute due to inflation, causing additional trouble to the working class.

The economist Milei's views are not matched by those of many of his colleagues who have rejected dollarizing and warned of the negative consequences such a move would have.

We have to get rid of the peso garbage, which is not even good for fertilizer, Milei said at Mendoza's O'Higgins Park while giving a masterclass attended by over 12,000 people.

That bunch of thieves said that the peso is to have sovereignty. You talk about sovereignty when you want the people to be slaves, Milei warned after reviewing the history of inflation and income redistribution policies.

Milei also explained he would start by moving from fractional banking to an anti-corruption system with Simons banking to then develop a dollarization strategy.

The only ones who will lose with these measures are the corrupt politicians of the caste, Milei promised.

We do not need a lender of last resort with Simons banking. Politicians, stop lying to the people, stop putting fear in them, he said.

Milei also said he believed the country was rich in lack of opportunities, due to the filthy political caste we have, which expels our children, which led to increasing migration. To reverse that trend, Milei insisted the only solution is to go back to the ideas of freedom and get the State out of the way.

The Libertarian Deputy also referred to his colleagues as econochantas (bogus experts) who are functional to the caste and who exist on both sides of the 'crack'.

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Milei gets 12000 people to attend class on inflation in Mendoza - MercoPress

From Vaccines to Banks, NH Sees Misguided Efforts To Restrict Freedom in the Name of Liberty – NH Journal

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While the talk is about free markets and private propertyand it is more respectable than it was a few decades ago to defend near-complete laissez-fairethe bulk of the intellectual community almost automatically favors any expansion of government power so long as it is advertised as a way to protect individuals from big bad corporations, relieve poverty, protect the environment, or promote equality.

Milton Friedman, introduction to The Road to Serfdom 50th-anniversary edition, 1994

Originally published at Josiah Barlett Center for Public Policy

The right-of-center movement in the United States is shifting toward statism in a way even many of its self-proclaimed liberty activists dont realize.

Responding to relentless left-wing provocation, people on the right think theyre defending liberty by using the state to block or punish private-sector actions they dislike. Instead, theyre expanding state control over private behavior.

The Live free or die state is not immune to this shift. Here, lawmakers who believe themselves to be righteous champions of liberty are trying to extend state control over private contracts and decisions.

To pick one example, considerHouse Bill 1210, relative to exemptions from vaccine mandates. The bill requires any employer that receives any public funds, including grants or contracts, to allow a right of conscience exemption from vaccination.

Framed as a defense of individual liberty, the bill actually would reduce liberty.

If enacted, it would weaken the right of free individuals to associate only with others who accept their dedication to fighting infectious diseases through vaccination.

Vaccination status is not an immutable characteristic like race or sex. It is a choice, and not a purely individualistic one. It can have profound, even life or death, consequences for others.

Were the bill to pass, health care facilities such as nursing homes and hospitals would be required by law to hire employees who refuse to vaccinate themselves against any and all infectious diseases. The bill covers all vaccines, not just those for COVID-19.

The bill restricts freedom of association in the name of bodily integrity. But someone who refuses to vaccinate is making a choice to give up bodily integrity.

A virus is a foreign living organism that invades a body and uses it as a host. Viruses cannot replicate by themselves. They infect host cells and use them for reproduction, usually killing them in the process. Vaccines are designed to protect cells against invasion and destruction by alien organisms. Their purpose is to preserve bodily integrity.

Viruses arent libertarian. Theyll infect anyone they can. People have a right to choose to associate with others who agree to vaccinate. This bill would violate that right in pursuit of a non-existent right to join a group without agreeing to its terms.

Conservatives can easily see that it would be a violation of individual rights for the state to require religious employers or ideological organizations to hire anyone regardless of their beliefs. This bill violates the freedom of association in a similar way.

Should HB 1210 become law, a cancer patient would be unable to seek medical care in New Hampshire in a facility with a fully vaccinated staff. Thats not protecting peoples rights. Its forcing people to associate with others who might be a danger to themselves.

The libertarian saying that your rights end where my nose begins applies here. Going unvaccinated (or not) is not a lifestyle choice like getting tattooed or piercing ones nose. It can have a direct, potentially catastrophic effect on others. And others have a right to protect themselves against that through their associations.

LikeHouse Bill 1469, which seeks to restrict the free association rights of all New Hampshire businesses under the guise of regulating banks, HB 1210 would expand the power of the state to regulate economic transactions in new ways.

Supporters of such market interventions honestly think they are taking steps to protect individuals. But theyre mistaken. Unwittingly, they are moving to empower collectivism and weaken the liberty of the individual.

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From Vaccines to Banks, NH Sees Misguided Efforts To Restrict Freedom in the Name of Liberty - NH Journal

Who is running for Georgia Senate in the 2022 primary? – Savannah Morning News

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Longtime lawmaker Lester Jackson is leaving the Senate, setting up a four-candidate race to succeed him

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on the lingering effects of 2020 election

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger talks about how the results of the 2020 election and lawsuits have lingered in state politics ever since.

Savannah Morning News

Around the Georgia Capitol, the Savannah senators are among the most familiar faces in the building.

Lester Jackson (D-District 2) has served in the Georgia General Assembly for 24 years and previously chaired the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus. Ben Watson (R-District 2) joined the Legislature in 2011 and chairs one of the Senates highest-profile committees, Health and Human Services.

Georgia Senate: After 24 years, Lester Jackson completes his final session as a state representative

The 2022 election will introduce at least two new faces to the ranks of Savannah-area members.

Watson is likely to return, but Jackson isnt running for re-election to his Senate seat, choosing instead to mount a statewide campaign for Georgia Labor commissioner. Additionally, the 2021 redistricting session added a third Senate district, District 4, to Chatham County.

Georgia Senate map surprise: Chatham adds third Senate post as part of redistricting

Two Democrats are challenging Watson while four candidates - two Democrats, two Republicans - are running for Jacksons open seat. Republican Billy Hickman, who resides in Statesboro, is running unopposed in District 4 and will represent a swath of West Chatham residents.

That primary will be held on May 24, with early voting beginning May 2.

Heres a look at the candidates for the local Georgia Senate posts.

Story continues below

Savannah-area election races

U.S. House, District 1

Georgia General Assembly, House races

Georgia General Assembly, Senate races

Georgia voting laws, what you need to know

Jones serves as the chairman of the Chatham Democratic Committee and previously sat on the Chatham County Commission. He mounted an unsuccessful campaign for Chatham Commission chairman in 2020, losing to Chester Ellis.

Niquette previously ran for the Georgia House in 2020, mounting an unsuccessful challenge for the seat held by Rep. Ron Stephens. He is campaigning on updating technology in public schools, protecting the environment, expanding Medicaid and criminal justice reform.

A physician and the brother-in-law of former U.S. Congressman Jack Kingston, Watson served two terms in the Georgia House before being elected to the Georgia Senate. He has championed health care reform throughout his political career.

Mallow joined the Georgia House in 2021 after winning a 2020 election runoff by 19 votes. A district executive with the Boy Scouts of America, Mallow is a champion for Georgias youth and also advocates for health care reform and improving mental health services

Scott is a district manager for Advance Auto Parts and a ministry leader with Overcoming by Faith church. He ran unsuccessfully for a Chatham County Commission post in the 2020 election.

Yasger is a U.S. Army veteran and member of the Georgia Army National Guard. His platform includes many Libertarian-leaning views, such as decriminalization of marijuana. He ran for U.S. House in 2020, finishing third in the Republican primary.

Young switched parties to run for the Senate post after a failed bid to win a Georgia House seat in 2020 and 2021 elections. He is a military veteran and a retired vending machine business owner.

A Statesboro accountant, Hickman joined the Georgia General Assembly in 2020 by winning the seat long held by Georgia political Icon Jack Hill. Hickman said he feels a strong connection to Chatham County, as his wife is a native of Bloomingdale.

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Who is running for Georgia Senate in the 2022 primary? - Savannah Morning News

How Cannabis Is Shaping the Midterm Elections and the Campaign Trail – Green Entrepreneur

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The 2022 midterm elections are rapidly approaching and there is a lot on the line this November. Democrats may have come into 2021 with a majority, but the last year and a half has included a series of unfortunate events for the party and weak approval ratings of the President. This has left the republican party confident and optimistic going into the election cycle.

There are a lot of important issues at play in this election. The ever-looming and evolving COVID-19 pandemic and how it continues to be handled is huge on voters minds. The current astronomical gas prices, inflation and the economy in general are also a top priority.

While these issues can have major impacts on the daily lives of many Americans, they are not the only issues voters care about. Marijuana legalization continues to be a major political issue, and for many voters it is currently a top priority this election season. In fact,according to a recentpoll, the majority of democratic voters think passing a bill to legalize marijuana is an important or top priority.

RELATED:What Do Republicans Need In Cannabis Legalization Bill To Support It?

There areseveral statesthat may have marijuana ballot-measures in November. Maryland, Missouri, Ohio and South Dakota are just a few states where an important vote will appear on the ballot, which means marijuana legalization will likely play an even larger role in these states elections.

Being a democratic politician no longer guarantees the support of cannabis enthusiasts. Many voters are looking for real action, and soon. Democrats, starting with President Biden, must lead on cannabis policy or risk ceding the very real voter enthusiasm it inspires to more libertarian voices,according toFortune. Time is running out for Democrats to make a strong stand on cannabis legalization before Republicans eventually do so on their own.

It is not only democrats who are interested in marijuana legalization.The latest Galluppolldata suggests that 2 in every 3 Americans support the legalization of marijuana. These record high numbers further show that marijuana is not a partisan issue. Any politician who takes a strong stance against marijuana, or one who drags their feet in the legalization process, risks being ousted from their role if their district resides in a competitive area.

RELATED:More Red States Are Going Wild For Weed

Conservatives have noticed this inaction, and,according to Forbes, some Republicans are starting to take action of their own that could eventually lead to them reaping the political rewards that will come from legalization from a Democratic party that has every opportunity to own this issue.

Take South Carolina Republican Representative Nancy Mace, for example. She recently introduceda republican-authoredbillto legalize cannabis at a federal level. Rep. Mace is up for reelection this year. It appears as though in most states, regardless of your political party, supporting cannabis legalization, at least in some form, is looking like a more promising route to victory than campaigning to continue its prohibition.

What this means for the future of marijuana legalization remains unclear, but the growing public support of marijuana is certainly starting to shape the way politicians approach the issue on the campaign trail.

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How Cannabis Is Shaping the Midterm Elections and the Campaign Trail - Green Entrepreneur

Steve Baker MP: ‘I’m sick of the Cabinet sitting there fat, dumb and happy’ – The Telegraph

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Some of Bakers views are well outside the mainstream. He believes, for example, that central banks are complicit in state-managed economic growth that amounts to monetary socialism and should be disbanded. As he describes how the global monetary system is basically a big confidence trick.

He thinks the cost of living crisis is likely to lead to a crunch debate about fiscal and monetary policy. High inflation plus rising interest rates is really going to add up to misery for millions of people. And the answer to it is, of course, free markets, strong property rights, sound money and low taxes. And the Conservative partys gonna have to rediscover its capacity to deliver those things, he says.

I believe were heading for a bond market storm as a result of inflation rising and the Bank of England raising interest rates. Boris Johnson will face a choice between dramatically slashing spending or changing the Banks mandate.

In 2020, the former chancellor Sajid Javid and the former treasury minister Lord ONeill, in what Baker describes as an obviously co-ordinated way, called for the Bank of Englands inflation target to be scrapped in favour of nominal gross domestic product targeting. Baker is worried this idea will be adopted in order to keep the quantitative easing taps on.

You can keep debasing the currency with money printing up to the point at which people start worrying youre never going to stop, which is when the currency collapses. If the Prime Minister and the Treasury are daft enough to change over to a monetary system that allows money creation into an environment of higher inflation, we could destroy the currency. Thats what is on the table.

At his Parliamentary assessment board Baker had to write an essay on why he was a Conservative. Hed just read Friedrich Hayeks essay Why I am Not a Conservative. I basically just regurgitated it onto the page. And they said to me: Thats one of the best essays weve ever read!

Indeed, he voted Liberal Democrat in his first general election and only became a Eurosceptic after the 2007 Lisbon Treaty, which he describes as a mortal sin. As a Christian, he has no issues with shared sovereignty and as a classical liberal, hes all in favour of free movement of goods and people. For him, Brexit is first and foremost a question of democratic accountability.

I always understood that there would be downsides and difficulties to leaving the EU. Much as I hate customs paperwork, much as I hate having to have rows about SPS [sanitary and phytosanitary] measures [on food imports] in Northern Ireland and all the rest of it, those rows are worth having in order to maintain the principle that the public get the government they vote for.

It is that principle that drove him to become one of the of the so-called Spartans the 28 Tory MPs who voted against Mays Brexit deal on three occasions. But his refusal to compromise doesnt mean he isnt reflective. I am filled with regret and lament that our country has ended up so bruised and divided. I didnt like either [referendum] campaign very much. I particularly didnt like the [Leave] bus [emblazoned with the promise to spend the 350m sent to Brussels each week on the NHS] and I said so during the campaign, which was controversial. People seem to have forgotten that.

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Steve Baker MP: 'I'm sick of the Cabinet sitting there fat, dumb and happy' - The Telegraph

Solutions in the spotlight at 14th Congressional District debate – Northwest Georgia News

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Solutions in the spotlight at 14th Congressional District debate - Northwest Georgia News