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The Final Straw Radio


The Final Straw is a weekly anarchist and anti-authoritarian radio show bringing you voices and ideas from struggle around the world. We’ve been broadcasting from occupied Tsalagi land in Southern Appalachia (Asheville, NC). We also frequently feature commentary (serious and humorous) by anarchist prisoner, Sean Swain.  More archives going back to 2010 can be found at our website.

Dec 13, 2017

This week, Bursts was joined by Pat Boyle, a collective member at Unicorn Riot (more about them later in this post), radical independent media project.  We chatted about crypto-currency, Bitcoin in particular, technologies and strategies involved in the implementation of crypto-currency, recent comings to light of increased wealth coming via Bitcoin into the hands of far right racists and ecological impacts of crypto-mining.

As to the far right, we referenced an article from IdaVox and one from Mic.com, as well as the twitterbot @NeoNaziWallets that can be visited to track transactions with the bitcoin wallets of well-known white supremacists.

Chicago Mercantile Exchange trading of Bitcoin was brought up a few times, and it was just introduced to the Private, or secondary, Market of the NASDAQ.

An example of an interesting use of cryptocurrency ongoing against the prison industrial complex is the BailBloc project that is shared between the Bronx Freedom Fund and The New Inquiry.

Some great Unicorn Riot content that Pat & company have been releasing this year (an incomplete list):

  • Black Snake Killaz, full length documentary about resistance to the #DAPL;
  • Coverage from Greece & the G20 in Hamburg, Germany;
  • on the ground in Charlottesville, VA for Unite The Right;
    the processing of TONS of documentation of the UTR organizing on the (leaked) Discord chat platform;

Our interview last year with Unicorn Riot's Pat Boyle and Wendy Parker; their appearance on Delete Your Account talking about their coverage of the Alt-Right.

track heard: Traffic by Babyland from their 1992 album, You Suck Crap.