Meet BEWP: The Bitcoin-Enabled WIFI Portal
A new project was unveiled during this year’s annual Libertarian event Porcfest in New Hampshire called BEWP, a Bitcoin-Enabled Wi-Fi Portal that serves as a wireless connection through the internal router with a Bitcoin paywall.
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BEWP is a Bitcoin-Enabled Wi-Fi Portal
The Bitcoin-Enabled WIFI Portal (BEWP) was unveiled by Agorist Hosting, the tech firm behind OpenBazaar Hosting, and the Art Game for the Free Ross Ulbricht Campaign. The BEWP is a protocol designed as a router for Raspberry Pi and Linux based mini computers. Users of the service can tether popular Bitcoin wallets for the paywall using services such as CoPay to fund it.
Derrick Slopey, co-founder of Agorist Hosting, stated during the announcement:
Basically, if this router were the only Wi-Fi connection in a given area you could still send bitcoin payments to get past the paywall.
The team at Agorist Hosting says that in order to offset the costs of producing BEWP the firm is currently involved in a crowdfunding campaign via BitcoinStarter.com. After twenty units are sold the product will be offered through the company’s website AgoristHosting.com. When additional units are sold after that point, developers will begin a translation project to add multilingual support and also release the source code on Github.
Agorist Hosting says that “depending on the size of donation, contributors will receive some combination of the software, hardware while advancing BEWP through various phases of development.” Slopey adds:
We plan to finalize and deliver the presale item by September, and will release the code as an open source project on Github once we’ve sold 100-units.
The BEWP software works well Agorist Hosting explains, but more refinement is planned for the future such as mobile phone and other Bitcoin wallet compatibilities. Finalized products will be launched for the presale in September 2016. The BEWP prototype being tested at this year’s Porcupine Freedom Festival has proven they have good coverage at the campground using the product’s service with a “consistent flow of bandwidth.”
Agorist Hosting says it recognizes the global benefits of open source software that provides “easy, portable, and affordable access to the Internet without relying on more traditional means of payment.”
Using Bitcoin helps facilitate the service in a far superior way than typical methods and standard premiums. The company says that early adopters of BEWP will play a significant role in product development and universal accessibility. The limited edition plug-and-play prototype is also available through Purse.io as well. Agorist Hosting explains that this is a community driven project and hopes the Bitcoin community will check out the team’s cryptocurrency enabled Wi-Fi portal.
What do you think about BEWP? Let us know in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Agorist Hosting
