Bitcoin Behind Bars

Dubbed "Bitcoin's First Felon" by the press, Charlie Shrem was locked up this week to complete a two year sentence for his involvement in the Silk Road online black market. Shem landed himself in prison for knowingly selling bitcoins to users of the site, but he says his sentence has done little to take his mind off of his bitcoin obsession.

Shrem was arrested on January 26 in the JFK airport, where he was charged with selling more than one million dollars worth of the digital currency to people he knew were using it to break the law. Shrem admitted to his part in Silk Road and plead guilty to all charges. However he has remained passionate about bitcoin saying, "Bitcoin is my baby. It's my whole life. It's what I was put on this Earth to do."

It seems he will be taking that hobby behind bars— on March 30, the day he reported to the Lewisburg Federal Prison Camp in Pennsylvania, Shrem wrote a

titled "Bitcoin For Prison". In the post he details how bitcoin would be a viable currency system for prisoners, even without an internet connection.

Shrem noted that although part of what makes bitcoin so exciting is the fact that it can be used online, an offline version would prove an interesting experiment and would be a great way to demonstrate how the technology actually works. In the prison version, inmates would keep a physical ledger book that would act as blockchain. All of the transactions recorded there would be available for review by users. Because cans of mackerel tend to be a commonly traded item in prison, Shrem has dubbed his prison currency Mackerelcoin, or MAK.