SPEAKERS

Badge Clinic 2022

Each year, HCPP staff develop and distribute electronic badges produced by Monero Devices in Germany. The application supports easy to understand features as well as complex functionality. We are located a few steps from the Bitcoin Cafe while walking toward the stages and bar.

Visit the Badge Clinic to ask advice, get repairs, hack your badge, or experience the historic HCPP badge museum. Bring your own badge or other electronics for a show and tell. We’re excited to meet and hack electronics with you.

Michael Schloh von Bennewitz

Michael Schloh von Bennewitz is a computer scientist specializing in embedded systems and network engineering. He actively contributes to the Opensource development community and teaches security analysis workshops. Speaking at technical events every year, Michael has presented for Black Hat, Nokia, Ubuntu, ARIN, Droidcon, AstriCon,the Mobile World Congress, Dockercon, and the CCC. He currently develops hardware with the Monero Project.

Grafton Clark

Grafton is a technical specialist at SatoshiLabs, utilizing years of blockchain experience and knowledge-gathering to provide customers with expert insight into the world of cryptocurrency. He develops technical guides and manuals for Bitcoin adopters, whilst ensuring that he stays ahead of the game in this ever-changing market. Whilst the sector maybe dynamic, Grafton believes that Bitcoin will always remain an opportunity to protect individuality and freedom.

Future of our civilization: history vs. technology

Did you think that archaeology and artificial intelligence have nothing in common? Well, think again. Parallel Polis has always been based on multidisciplinarity and setting new pillars for recent social structure, and this time, we’re taking it to the next level. With the aid of world-renowned Egyptologist Miroslav Barta, AI expert Filip Dvorak and Martin Leskovjan, co-founder of Paralelní Polis and Ztohoven Art Collective member, we’ll dive into discussing everything from the historical context of technological innovation to civilizational collapse to simulating complexity, to discussing whether such a thing as collapse actually exist, and polemise whether it’s ever possible to have something like a ‘Last Shot’ towards something so mercurial as social evolution and individual agency. Questions from the audience are welcome, so get your grey brain cells ready for some Friday fun.

Miroslav Bárta, Filip Dvořák, Martin Leskovjan

Bitcoin vs Normies in suits

Can bitcoin have a place in society regardless of where politicians and businessmen in suits want to lead it? Run your node and ignore everyone else or go out and preach the dharma of Satoshi to everyone?

Exiledsurfer, Mário Havel, Obi Nwosu, Juraj Bednar, TBD

Lunarpunk & Solarpunk discussion panel

Not everyone sees cryptocurrencies as a powerful liberalising tool that is unparalleled in our society. A tool that erodes the authoritarian paradigm of states and creates a new decentralised paradigm where the state no longer has a place.

Solarpunkers accept the status quo of authoritarian society and believe in its improvement.

Lunarpunkers, on the other hand, recognize the need for a new decentralized paradigm that transcends the entire social order.

What prospects await solar and lunar punk in the near future?

Rachel-Rose O’Leary, Amir Taaki, Pavol Luptak, TBD, TBD

Bitcoin & human rights: How your code can save the world

In this panel, Obi Nwosu will talk with Lydumyla Kozlovska, Fadi Elsalameen, and Jaroslav Likhachevsky about their experience with Bitcoin and how it helped them in their daily life as human rights defenders.

Lydumyla Kozlovska is the Initiator of the establishment of the Open Dialogue Foundation. The organizer of international electoral observation missions and missions to monitor the observance of human rights in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kazakhstan.

Fadi Elsalameen is an advocate for Human rights, democracy, and anti-corruption with a special focus on bitcoin and crypto as a tool for freedom.

Jaroslav Likhachevsky is a co-founder of Digital solidarity/BySol Foundation and director of the IT company Deepdee from Belarus. Bitcoin and USDT stablecoin, in particular, are used to deliver humanitarian aid in Belarus by Belarus civil society and opposition.

Bota Jardemalie, a Harvard Law graduate, is a licensed attorney in the State of New York and a human rights defender from Kazakhstan. For years, she had defended the Kazakh opposition, political activists, human rights defenders and victims of torture. She advocates for Human rights, democracy, and the fight against corruption.

Cryptoanarchist & voluntaryists focused on technology and society hacking. IT security guy, founder of IT security hacking companies (Nethemba, Hacktrophy) & contemporary art (Satori). Co-founder of Bratislava’s and Prague’s hackerspaces (Progressbar & PP). Member of Czech contemporary anti-government artistic group Ztohoven. Responsible for many anti-government & digital privacy projects.

Scott Beibin is an inventor, open source technologist, self-taught engineer, vegan environmental activist, and founder of many projects in the realm of ecologically regenerative systems, horizontal organization, and experiential arts production.

In addition to creating ecologically friendly technologies, he’s the Co-founder of the Evil Twin Booking agency (with Elizabeth-Jane Cole) representing and doing strategy for Pussy Riot, Boots Riley, Glenn Greenwald, Alex, and Allyson Grey, Vandana Shiva, and other public figures. He was the founder of the seminal 1990s DIY hardcore/punk label Bloodlink Records as well as the founder of the touring Lost Film Festival in the 2000s. He currently serves as a technical and strategic advisor for several decentralization tech projects.

His current projects include Mandelbot, Ecotech, Goostruder, Groucho Fractal, AncientScan, Ptelepathetique.

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Mandelbot Ecotech (A design philosophy)

In this talk, inventor Scott Beibin will be sharing the Mandelbot Ecotech philosophy that he developed for ecological machine design that respects human freedom and autonomy.

With a strong influence by DIY Maker cultures such as Solarpunk – one of the main purposes of the project is to provide practical solutions to the negative environmental impact of globalized systems of manufacturing and distribution by utilizing DAOs and other Radical Decentralization based technologies as a way of building community while shifting power back into the hands of everyday people.

Co-Organizer of the FULMO Lightning Hackdays & the Lightning Conference. Maintainer & LeadDev of the RaspiBlitz project. A long-time member of the Berlin Bitcoin Meetup – formerly at Room77.

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RaspiBlitz 1.8.0 – WebUI & further Community Development

We like to show the release of the WebUI for RaspiBlitz v1.8.0 and discuss the future of the Bitcoin & Lightning full node project.

RaspiBlitz is a Bitcoin & Lightning full node focused on open source & community development. With our recent release of version 1.8.0 we introduced the long awaited WebUI to allow setup & management of the node thru a web browser. We like to show the new features and discuss how the community can join the future development for programmers but also non-programmers.

Lea is a co-founder and CEO of Vexl, a mobile app that allows its users to buy and sell bitcoin as it was intended – peer-to-peer and without KYC. She is fascinated with parallel societies. Her inspiration is people who are not afraid to experiment and bring to life the most courageous ideas using the most original ways.

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Vexl: Mobile app for discreet bitcoin trading (Workshop)

Agenda of the workshop:

1. Introduction – Why is it important to buy bitcoin discreetly?
A walk through the real stories of people on their way to buy bitcoin.

2. Implementation details
How did Vexl come to life and what makes it unique?

3. Lessons Learned from Launch
About the success, we did not see coming.

4. Demo (you can join!) and AMA session
Get hands-on experience with the app!

Maxim is a cypherpunk and a thinker designing – and building systems that can tolerate strong adversaries, including government-based. In 2018 together with a group of similar-minded people, he started the project Pandora, which resulted in building privacy-based RGB smart contracts with zero knowledge. This year he will unleash the further development of the ideas from Pandora projects, including those related to personal physical safety and building societies of a new form.

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Game of Drones: making sovereignty great again

The idea of individual sovereignty lies at the core of the foundation of cryptoanarchy. Past years had revealed that sovereignty can’t be purely digital. So while the ideas of cypherpunks are required and stuff like privacy-based technologies are a must-have, we can’t survive and go into the future of the society we’d like to build with just them.

In this talk, we will re-assess how physical security can be built as a part of Citadel’s concept and will unleash our roadmap – as well as the report on the work in progress we are performing. This includes both geographic setup able to resist even potential nuclear war, strong production facilities emphasizing autarchy from the supplier chains – and the links to the privacy tech were building past years (RGB smart contracts based on zero knowledge).

Chief scientist at Aztec network. Co-creator of the widely used PlonK zk-SNARK. Participated in the first production deployment of zero-knowledge proofs at Zcash.

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Zero knowledge proofs – from novice to master

Zero-knowledge proofs have become a central tool for blockchain privacy and scalability. I will give a few examples of such proofs, starting from toy examples requiring no math, and ending with the state-of-the-art zk-SNARK constructions based on elliptic curve pairings. I will aim to have something for everyone in this talk, regardless of their background.

Kai Landre is one of the first Cyborg Musicians in history. His first Cyborg Sense, the Cosmic Sense, captures subatomic particles created by the fall of Cosmic Rays in the atmosphere of the planet, translating them into sound and identifying each one to a musical note, which allows Kai to compose live music with them.

Kai is a member of Cyborg Foundation, founded by Neil Harbisson, focused on projects related to the creation of new senses and perceptions. His Cosmic Sense has been officially presented at Princeton University during the annual Envision Conference.

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Freedom of Perception thanks to Cybernetic Senses

We live in a capitalist society that is constantly sending out inputs that stimulate our senses on a daily basis.
It almost seems like we’ve lost control over our own perception, and we’re slaves of Marketing.

Is there any way out? Can Cybernetic Senses give us the key to pure perception of nature and life?

In this conference, I will develop my theory on how Cybernetic Senses allow us to escape an hyper-stimulated reality and connect with the pureness of the physical realm.

Surgeon and digital health evangelist, founder of the Minister of Health platform, where he is intensively involved in the issue of extending the healthy life expectancy of Czechs. Together with his colleagues, he previously co-founded the uLékaře.cz project. Today, among other things, it helps people to find the shortest way to a doctor and to navigate the often complex healthcare system.

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The last shot for telemedicine in the Czech Republic?!

General expectations of healthcare are far from the needs of users. Meeting them means less proactive innovation and more reactive listening. So what did we expect from telemedicine, and where did we end up? Why are we focusing on health rather than healthcare? Why do we believe that health prevention is vital, including commercial success?

Peter Young is managing director of the Free Cities Foundation: an organization that supports autonomous regions of nation states that are looking to adopt freedom-oriented policies. His talk will explore parallel structures in governance as a pathway to freedom.

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Free Cities: Parallel Societies for Human Freedom

Free Cites are autonomous areas of nation states that are adopting novel policies to support human freedom. Peter Young, managing director of the Free Cities Foundation, describes Free Cities that are being built today in countries such as Honduras, Portugal and Norway and why he believes many more will be developed in the decade to come.

Ryan Lackey discovered the cypherpunks mailing list as a young teenager in the early 1990s, telephoned NSA to order the NCSC Rainbow Series of books, and became a true believer in cryptoanarchy and the power of cryptography to stand up to nation states and other oppressors. He’s worked on projects and companies involving Chaumian digital cash systems, offshore data havens in the North Sea, seasteading, uncensorable hosting technologies, remote attestation based tamperproof cloud computing, and now cryptocurrency insurance infrastructure. He is currently Chief Security Officer of Evertas Insurance and lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

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Technologies For Liberty vs. Technologies For Oppression

Technology itself is a tool, rather than being imbibed with some moral or ethical agency, but certain technologies at certain times swing the balance toward individual liberty rather than collective oppression.

Using examples from history, will discuss what factors influence this, how technologists can use science, engineering, and product design to build technologies in ways which are more likely to support individual liberty, and help save the world.

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How something as mundane as insurance can be a tool for societal good

Insurance is usually thought of as something boring, required by governments, and ideally purchased inexpensively, never actually used, and forgotten about.

In reality, insurance can be a powerful tool to make society better, both by allowing consent-based alternatives to regulation and by transferring risk. We will explain the basics of how insurance works, how it has been a valuable tool for liberty and safety in traditional areas, and how it can enable the crypto future.

Jarrad came to Bitcoin in early 2011 through agorism, counter-economics & crypto-anarchy, seeing that Bitcoin could operate a monetary policy in a hostile environment, he began to view public blockchains as a voluntary social order, one that didn’t depend on a monopoly of violence. From there he participated in early attempts to generalise the bitcoin script to advance institutional libertarianism, ultimately becoming an early contributor to Ethereum. While Jarrad advances privacy technologies through developing an e2e and p2p private messaging client & super app, Status, he realised that privacy technologies are not enough and now is advocating for self-sovereign crypto-networks, the realisation of a latent cypherpunk dream, the crypto-state.

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Cypherpunk Suprajurisdictions against the Nation-State

The sanctions of Tornado Cash have implications for base layer neutrality & open source developers which threatens the utility of crypto. I propose introducing a concept of sovereignty to crypto networks and outline an approach to competing with the State. In Cypherpunk Supra-jurisdictions against the Nation-State, we’ll cover the implications of sanctioning open source technology, touch upon the US Infrastructure Bill & Patriot Act giving rise to the US Super-jurisdiction and contrast that against self-sovereign crypto-networks. We’ll discuss how we’re positioned to leverage these networks and Institutional Economics to create voluntaryist social orders that can achieve a greater legitimacy than the nation-state, yet also offer competitive governing services to under-serviced citizens with access to the net. This talk is a call for a return to our Cypherpunk roots. We can create a civilization of the mind in cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world governments have made before.

Originally a programmer, he is mainly involved in cryptocurrency mining, his startup Invictus Mining has built mining farms on the premises of several power plants and is now building datacenters focused on rendering, machine learning and AI. In addition, he also leads the blockchain project Callisto, creating an ecosystem of products and services for auditing smart contracts.

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Blockchain as a tool to improve democracy

Even though there is no state where democracy would be completely efficient, the fact is that it is the current political system. We can improve it by implementing blockchain “features” within the system and thereby make the whole system better and faster.

There are many issues with the current democratic system, as everyone attending this congress knows. From my perspective, the main issues are:

1. The fact that we choose representatives based on promises and limited facts.
2. If the conditions change and the representatives do not have the necessary skills to solve complex situations like pandemics and wars, for example, we do not currently have any tools at hand to be able to change that.
3. There are major policies that our governments implement that affect the population as a whole. However, the population is not given the option to organize a quick referendum, or they do not care about the policies.

The solution I propose is to use blockchain for voting on the state and even the city level, to make our democracy much more efficient and transparent.

Revolutionary, anarchist, pagan. Counter-economics, Linux, Python. Inspiration from Rojava revolution and historical examples of resistance. Exploring possibilities of alternative structures of people’s economy, market analysis and philosophy. Code is power, power to the people!

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Anonymity as Self Defense

What’s crypto’s line of self-defense against hegemony and centralisation? This talk will analyze privacy projects, macro economy and crypto narratives through the scope of lunarpunk and historical lessons.

Crypto has the potential to help bring about a more decentralized and democratic future. But what happens when our dream of challenging monopoly becomes a reality? Can the crypto space defend against state-level attacks, such as criminalization, assimilation, and the divide-and-conquer barrage? This talk will analyse privacy projects and expose some weaknesses in crypto’s defenses. It will offer some insights on the lunarpunk cycle and its attempt to build parallel infrastructures, culture and reality.

SomberNight (ghost43) is a developer and co-maintainer of the Electrum Bitcoin Wallet

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Challenges of modern Bitcoin light clients

Comparison of the features and tradeoffs of modern Bitcoin and Lightning wallets. Full nodes vs light clients vs custodial solutions.

Some features and tradeoffs made by modern Bitcoin and Lightning wallets are compared.
Inherent limitations of light clients, and limitations of lightning itself are discussed.

Custodial wallets have innate advantages to UX; still we want to compete with them as otherwise there would be almost no point to Bitcoin. Usability and decentralisation are at odds. However, single points of failure and trust in central servers is to be avoided, for reliability, censorship-resistance, security, and privacy concerns.

Custodianship is a spectrum… but what if a project does not want to be custodial *at all*?

Paul Rosenberg is the author of the Free-Man’s Perspective newsletter and the co-founder of Cryptohippie. He is also the author of A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, Production Versus Plunder, and The Breaking Dawn. He is a co-author of The New Age of Intelligence.

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Who Are We Shooting At… And Why?

What, to us, is “winning”? And how do we attain it? We must have a clear and coherent vision of victory, and an effective path to it. Strategy, philosophy and passion must rise together. Make no small plans.

If we are to take winning seriously, we must examine it seriously. More than that, we must engage ourselves in it, effectively and efficiently. We have more ability and more opportunity than we’ve understood: We are, in the most important ways, better than our opponents. An open door stands before us; we must recognize it and use it.

A passionate advocate for public internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing universal access to all knowledge. He is the Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, one of the largest libraries in the world. Soon after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied artificial intelligence, Kahle helped found Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker. In 1989, Kahle created the internet’s first publishing system, Wide Area Information Server, later selling it to AOL. In 1996, he co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the web, and sold it to Amazon in 1999. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 99+ unique petabytes of data–the books, web pages, music, television, and software of our cultural heritage–and works with more than 950 libraries and university partners to create a digital library that is accessible to all.

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Publishers v. Internet Archive – The Last Shot Of Libraries?

In 2020, the Internet Archive was sued by four of the world’s largest publishers, who claim that our book lending program violates their copyrights, even though we have never made any money from lending books. The Internet Archive is being sued for doing what libraries have always done – lending books. Our digital book lending service is based on the widespread library practice called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). The publishers suing us demand that we destroy 1.4 million digital books and pay fines of close to $20 million.

What’s at stake is the ability of all libraries to survive and even flourish in the digital era. Publishers are trying to end libraries’ ownership of their own collections. Instead, they want to rent digital books to libraries, like Netflix rents movies. They want to control our cultural commons for their own commercial benefit. Digital ownership leads to a game where there can be many vendors, many buyers, many authors, many libraries, preservation, and innovation. It’s a game with many winners.

Filip Dvorak is a Czech-American AI research scientist and entrepreneur focused on automated decision making and learning across continuous and symbolic domains. He has received his Ph.D. in AI at Charles University in Prague.

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Composite Artificial Intelligence – Bridging Intelligent Automation, Symbolic Reasoning, and Machine Learning

We establish the foundations of Composite Artificial Intelligence through symbolic reasoning and machine learning, and show how it can be applied for building intelligent automation systems solving practical real-world problems.

Automation, as the implementation of processes to perform activities towards a goal without human assistance, has been a key contributor to the evolution of humanity during the last 25 hundred years, saving us time, and resources, and opening playgrounds outside of human physical capabilities. Advances in operations research and symbolic reasoning powered by the proliferation of micro-electronics surpassed human decision making capabilities, replacing with ease human planners and schedulers. The last two decades also showed us how machine learning excels in the continuous problem spaces, providing predictive capabilities across enormous datasets. As intelligent automation systems grow and evolve to encompass combinations of discrete (symbolic) and continuous problems, their complexity increases exponentially, making building such systems difficult with a linear software engineering force. In this talk, we show how the Composite AI allows can address a wide range of real-world problems.

As part of the forming Bitcoin community, Amir became an early Bitcoin developer, author of the BIP process, and the Libbitcoin implementation. With contributions to many free and open-source projects, he collaborated with Cody Wilson on launching Darkwallet and laid the foundations for OpenBazaar. Later, he spent nearly 2 years in the Rojava revolution, first for nearly 4 months fighting in the YPG and then working for the administration on economic projects. Today, Amir is focused on the DarkFi project, a network bringing anonymity to decentralized finance, and is still working towards building an agonistic revolutionary hacker movement.

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DarkFi Early Ecosystem Intro (Workshop)

Bring your laptop and lets install our p2p chat, tasks, wiki and zk compiler. We will install the tools and show how to use them. You need to be able to use the terminal.

As a contributor to the archaic Bitcoin Foundation, exiledsurfer has been a community builder in the ecosystem for quite some time. He is a privacy, transparency & decentralization CryptoRealist, and co-founder of Parallele Polis in Vienna.

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Coercion and Compliance in Cryptocommunities

What happens in cryptocommunities when members bow to the state’s monopoly on regulatory violence to become compliant in order to achieve mass adoption? How does having “skin in the game” conflict with Cryptoanarchist ideals, and what form does this take in our public discourse?

Obi Nwosu is the CEO of Fedi and a full-time Bitcoin advocate. Fedi, Inc. is a global Bitcoin adoption technology company. Fedi’s main product, the Fedi mobile app, is designed to support billions of humans using Bitcoin securely, privately, and scalably. Obi continues to support initiatives that advance the Bitcoin ecosystem and make owning and using Bitcoin easy for everyone. He is a board member for ₿trust, a not-for-profit organization originally conceived by Jack Dorsey and Jay-Z to fund the location, education, and remuneration of Bitcoin developers in the global south, starting with Africa. His passion for Bitcoin began as the CEO and co-founder of the UK Bitcoin-only Exchange Coinfloor, which he ran for nearly 8 years until it was sold in late 2021.

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A panel discussion with human rights defenders and their personal experience with the loss of privacy and bitcoin

In this panel, Obi will talk with Lydumyla Kozlovska, Fadi Elsalameen, and Jaroslav Likhachevsky about their experience with Bitcoin and how it helped them in their daily life as human rights defenders.

Lydumyla Kozlovska is the Initiator of the establishment of the Open Dialogue Foundation. The organizer of international electoral observation missions and missions to monitor the observance of human rights in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kazakhstan.

Fadi Elsalameen is an advocate for Human rights, democracy, and anti-corruption with a special focus on bitcoin and crypto as a tool for freedom.

Jaroslav Likhachevsky is a co-founder of Digital solidarity/BySol Foundation and director of the IT company Deepdee from Belarus. Bitcoin and USDT stablecoin, in particular, are used to deliver humanitarian aid in Belarus by Belarus civil society and opposition.

Gregor is active in the Ethereum and decentralized storage space since 2015, started the Fair data society initiative, currently serving as Swarm Foundation’s director.

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No (digital) self without privacy

In the digital age, everything in the physical world has its representation in the digital world, including ourselves. What happens to our digital self without privacy? The talk explores the notion of the digital self, the future ahead, and how decentralization can help.

The talk will first present some views on the digital self and the extended mind from a cognitive science perspective. Building on this, questions will be raised about the digital self and how our personal data is part of our extended mind. In addition, questions will be raised about what happens to our autonomy when digital twins are created by others or when our extended mind becomes autonomous, i.e., what the digital does to our sense of self. In this context, it is argued that privacy is essential as a protection against the hacking of our minds – not only for surveillance reasons but also as a protection against the dopamine economy. The talk concludes with some ways that decentralization can work for individuals – or are we as developers sometimes just paving the road to hell with good intentions?

Stellar Magnet has been in the DAO ecosystem since 2017, contributing to communities such as MolochDAO, AssangeDAO, BrightID, and Space Decentral. Currently, she is catalyzing Black Sky, an emerging DAO (TAO) on a mission to minimize dystopia and maximize harmony with the cosmos.

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Transformative Autonomous Organizations: A new DAO subclass

The Transformative Autonomous Organization (TAO) is a DAO subclass and includes six foundational elements: autonomous adaptivity (α), anonymous functioning (φ), labor dissolution (δ), synergetic coexistence (χ), cosmic stewardship (σ), and autarkic experimentation (ε).

TAOs are lunarpunk, with their anonymous core. And a TAOist is an organization rocket scientist. TAOists help contribute to advancing the TAO model in order to reach escape velocity in relation to cooperation, freedom, and minimizing dystopia. They create TAOs and contribute research and ideas toward advancing the six elements.

This talk will introduce the concept of TAOs and the six elements, will make a case for why we need more organization rocket scientists, and why transforming the organization is key to transforming society.

Max Hampshire is the Developer Relations Officer for Nym, and has previously worked as a DAO smart contract engineer, writer, and artist. He has a background in philosophy.

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Using and building on Nym: application and network level privacy for developers and cypherpunks

Nym offers two core technologies for network and application-level metadata privacy. This talk will cover the current state of using the network with different applications such as chat apps and wallets, the architecture of these technologies, and how developers can build on Nym.

The chances of a state adversary turning against you is higher than ever for a growing percentage of the global population. Nym aims to solve this problem for everyone.

The talk will give an overview of the architecture of Nym and the parts of the stack that it protects: metadata obfuscation and sender anonymity at the network level, and privacy-preserving access credentials called Coconut at the app level.

This talk will show how users can use Nym to privacy-enhance standard desktop applications such as Telegram and Signal, as well as Monero, Bitcoin, and Ethereum wallets via either the Beta application NymConnect, or manually with our socks5 proxy client.

Finally, we invite developers to start building apps utilizing the powerful privacy protections offered by Nym, such as anonymous email and crypto transaction broadcasting. And invite developers to apply for grants via our Shipyard grants program!

The crypto wars continue. Join us.

Alexandra is a cypherpunk, founder & host of the Advance Tech Podcast, Alexandra interviews founders, leaders, and developers from around the globe. She has a solid understanding of emerging technologies including Bitcoin, and synthetic intelligence/machine learning (AI).

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Strength In Numbers

We live in a world where our data is monetized, privacy is an afterthought, and many feel rudderless in the chaos. How do we rebuild a broken world?

Somewhere between burning it all down and full compliance lies a path to a better world. This talk will explore how we find strength, through connection: friendship, ideas & ideals, aligned groups, work, creativity, and community.

How do you realize your mission and begin to build it out? The author’s first two talks: Death of the Old Guard and Rebuild, given in 2020, explored why we put in the effort, and why now. This talk provides insight into how we do this.

Don’t fight the world as it is, build a better one. Watch this talk to find out how.

Seth is a privacy educator who hosts the “Opt Out” podcast. He also contributes to the Monero project, a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency.

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Monero and the struggle for financial privacy

How we fight back with digital privacy tools like Monero as a shot back at “them”, and how financial privacy (and thus autonomy) are key to broader personal autonomy and human rights.

Paul’s research interests are related to the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum, but increasingly oriented toward the latter. Paul arguea cryptocurrencies are best understood as forms of cultural expression with associated micro-economies. To this end, he focuses on the creativity of cryptocultures. His research is qualitative in orientation. Paul is influenced primarily by the theories of social imaginaries (Taylor) and the commons (Ostrom). He is interested in how these occur within the polycentric forms of governance (Polanyi) characteristic of cryptocurrency cultures.

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The Realpolitik of the Ethereum Ecosystem

What is the social, cultural, and political endgame of the Ethereum project? In this paper, I discuss the various answers on offer among the emergent social, cultural, and political factions within Ethereum: cypherpunks, experimental liberals, solarpunks, lunarpunks.

The non-technical endgame of Ethereum is clear: to be a decentralised World Computer. We have, therefore, an answer to the question “What is Ethereum?” But, curiously, we lack an answer to the question “What is Ethereum for?” What is the social, cultural, and political endgame of the Ethereum project? In this talk, I discuss the various answers on offer among the emergent social, cultural, and political factions within Ethereum: cypherpunks, experimental liberals, solarpunks, and lunarpunks. I try to discover a meta-narrative that unites them and find among them a common commitment to agorist practice.

The assistant professor at the University of Žilina, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. Editor of the information and analytical website about energy – energiaweb.sk.

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Will the last shot be even digital? Energy as a tool of oppression, even renewable ones

You can decentralise yourself with renewable energy sources, but you need still allowance from them. And many renewables are anyhow visible. But how to use their narratives for more freedom in physical world. How not to even give them a chance to fire the last shot.

Along with finance, energy is one of the most necessary commodities. And like with finance, it’s actually an invisible commodity that few people understand. It has been a highly centralised commodity since the beginning of the 20th century. And several, especially more totalitarian, regimes use energy to suppress non-compliant communities. But even in EU countries, which otherwise talk about green and renewable energy, decentralised electricity production has not completely won. Can renewable energies be used centrally and to reduce freedom? And on the other hand, can RES be used to defend one’s independence?

Matthias Tarasiewicz is a developer, consultant, research designer and project coordinator. He is an enthusiast for immutable and unstoppable code and an Open Source evangelist. Focus areas: Open Source Hardware, Web3, privacy and decentralization. Director of the RIAT Institute and CSO of RIAT Labs.

Radim is the attorney-at-law and proud implementer of parallel polis ideas. In 2017, he co-founded Blockchain Legal, the first and only Czech law firm with comprehensive expertise in the crypto industry and blockchain solutions. He actively participated in Paralelní Polis in Prague, in 2019 also as the core member in charge of the Institute of Cryptoanarchy.

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Mr. Bayraktar, Mrs. HIMARS & St. Javelin: Who will be who in EU Crypto Regulation War?

This year European Union finally approved a set of legislation headed by the most famous MiCA (Regulation on Markets in Crypto Assets). It will provide complex regulatory framework for crypto assets for the first time since the invention of Bitcoin. Its aim is crystal-clear: Make the crypto industry heavily regulated financial sector.

Facing the new reality, all crypto-providers will have to choose their side: Either they will comply, get a license and will follow set code of conduct, or will be penalized and black-listed on the EU market. Moreover, licensed crypto-providers themselves will be strongly incentivized not to cooperate with anyone who will not comply. Any chances for anonymous cryptocurrencies, peer-to-peer marketplaces, self-hosted wallets..? Maybe, but not for free. They will have to fight for their existence and independence the same way as internet itself did.

As always in regulatory efforts, we can be pretty sure, the last shot is coming. Is it going to be a shot in the air by regulators trying to hide from the fact they failed and given up? Or rather a mercy shot in the back of the head of the free crypto space?

In my lecture, I will try to outline possible development of the expected “war” between regulated and non-regulated crypto spaces. For better visualisation, I will also use the recent weapon-memes from current Russian – Ukrainian war and look for equivalents here.

Daniela is a Bitcoin developer working mainly on wallets – she is now dedicated full time to BDK, a library for seamlessly building highly-customizable Bitcoin wallets, while in the past she spent time working on Blockstream Green, BraiinsOS, Stratum V2, revaultd, and revault-gui.

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Life is short, Bitcoin is forever

What would happen to your coins if you were to die in the next three hours? Would they be lost forever? Would your relatives be able to recover them?Descriptors, timelocks, taproot. 0% custodians.

# The premise

We don’t like custodians. Not your keys, not your coins.

# The problem

Self custody of Bitcoin is hard. Making sure that your relatives can access your coin after your death, but can’t steal them before your death, is even harder.

# The solution

…You’ll have to listen to my talk to find out. Sorry, no spoilers!

Cryptoanarchist for 20 years. Privacy extremist and crypto absolutist. Founder of anarplex.net, co-founder of TAZ0, and co-host of Cypherpunk Bitstream Podcast. Author: Second Realm –

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Shuffle the Chessboard

Unsorted musings about the world in 2030: Geoeconomics, war, and new alliances.

This year was a wake-up call for 10% of the world population. Nobody is safe anymore! Let’s make a bit of sense of what is going on, and add a little bit more chaos to the future. We’re going to look at new allegiances, unrestricted warfare, geoeconomics, and why things matter that we don’t care about.

Mário is a hacker and researcher focused on making the crypto ecosystem more efficient and anonymous. As a member of Paralelní Polis, co-founder of Bordel Hackerspace, and the driving force behind Pizza Day Prague, Mário educates about tools of cryptoanarchy in local communities with a focus on onboarding via Lightning and p2p exchange. He is a vast enjoyer of FOSS, parallel economy, and trolling bitcoiners.

Jindřich is a Senior Cyber Threat Researcher working for Trend Micro. Also, a security data scientist known as 4n6strider.

The main focus of his research is the domain of cognitive warfare, (cyber) espionage, and advanced persistent threats and manipulators.

In his work, he often analyses huge piles of data to deduce the Ontology of the security issue to enable the machines to detect the threat in scale.

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Counter inteligence: Defending against the cognitive warfare

The talk will be brief overview of cognitive threats we are facing these days. Methods for detection and measurement will be disclosed. With help of ML it is possible not only detect the manipulation but also monitor the perpetrator and produce the antidote!

We all have brains, that ingest and process everything we see and hear regardless we want to. This fact is abused in what is now called the cognitive warfare. Aim of this talk is to present the most often routes to our brains, used by so called “Advanced persistent manipulators” and the ideas how to measure the “psy ops” in digital world.

Paul is a serial entrepreneur, economist and web3 engineer on a mission to build public utility networks. A profound passion for pharmaceutical innovation led him to found Molecule, a networked marketplace that enables the distributed R&D and funding of new chemical intellectual property.

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The decentralised science movement hands-on: how IP-NFTs and biotech DAOs are democratising medicine and scientific progress

Humanity faces a crisis of innovation. Our best academic and scientific minds are forced to operate in a century-old system. The DeSci movement aims to put power back into the hands of people and enable self-sovereign science. Today, biotech DAOs like VitaDAO, LabDAO, or PsyDAO are redefining how research is done and IP democratised through permissionless data and legal protocols like Molecule. Over the past year, multiple research projects at universities and laboratories were funded directly through web3 communities of scientists, patients, and geeks.

This talk will explore the DeSci movement ethos and vision, the problems in modern academia and the biotech industry, and how web3 could fundamentally fix these. We will deep dive into the technical architecture of an IP-NFT as a composable asset, as well as the governance and organisational frameworks that these DAOs and their members are using to own and develop real-world IP.

Rachel-Rose O’Leary is a core dev at lunarpunk layer 1, DarkFi. She is also co-editor of the philosophy journal Agorism in the 21st Century. As a writer she has published in egirlcapital, CoinDesk, Defiant, Wired and elsewhere under anonymous accounts. She believes privacy is necessary for communities to define their own destinies.

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Lunarpunk and Anonymous DAOs

Lunarpunk is an applied science-fiction. It combines speculative techniques with anonymous engineering to generate new worlds. This talk consists of a Lunarpunk manifesto followed by the announcement of two revolutionary DarkFi primitives.

Juraj Bednár is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Progressbar, Paralelná Polis, and Hacktrophy. He wrote several books, his latest one being “Cryptocurrencies – hack your way to a better life”. He creates on-line courses and content about privacy, crypto and entrepreneurship.

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Bitcoin’s last shot: The peer to peer economy

The meaning of words is distorted. “Inflation”, “unhosted wallets”, “virtual assets”. And also, Bitcoin – represented by account balances in centralized custodians. What are the different forms of Bitcoin, what are their features and what will be it’s last shot?

Philip R. Zimmermann is the creator of Pretty Good Privacy, an email encryption software package. Originally designed as a human rights tool, PGP was published for free on the Internet in 1991. This made Zimmermann the target of a three-year criminal investigation, because the government held that US export restrictions for cryptographic software were violated when PGP spread worldwide. Despite the lack of funding, the lack of any paid staff, the lack of a company to stand behind it, and despite government persecution, PGP nonetheless became the most widely used email encryption software in the world. After the government dropped its case in early 1996, Zimmermann founded PGP Inc. That company was acquired by Network Associates Inc (NAI) in 1997. In 2002 PGP was acquired from NAI by a new company called PGP Corporation, where Zimmermann served as special advisor and consultant until its acquisition by Symantec in 2010. Since 2004, his focus has been on secure telephony for the Internet, developing the ZRTP protocol and creating products that use it, including Silent Phone and Zfone. Zimmermann is Co-founder of Silent Circle, a provider of secure communications services.

Before founding PGP Inc, Zimmermann was a software engineer with more than 20 years of experience, specializing in cryptography and data security, data communications, and real-time embedded systems. His interest in the political side of cryptography grew out of his background in military policy issues.

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Recently democratic governments have been pushing back against end-to-end encryption, motivated by law enforcement considerations. But this harms national security interests, especially in the current geopolitical context.

Janine is a privacy researcher and investigative journalist focused on Bitcoin and (counter)surveillance. Author of “This Month in Bitcoin Privacy newsletter, a board member of Open Sats, and committee member for the CryptoCurrency Cerification Consortium (C4).

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Blockchain Surveillance, Cyber Mercenaries, and Intelligence

A peek into the overlap between blockchain analysis companies, private spyware firms, and government intelligence agencies.

This presentation will explore the corner of our industry that is occupied by so-called blockchain analysis companies, who (dis)claim many guises: analysts, scientists, artists, crime-fighting detectives, and spies. Where is the line between analysis and surveillance? What is their relationship with existing techniques, infrastructure, and norms shared with private hacking and spyware businesses, as well as nation-state intelligence apparati? And what could we do about it? 

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Can Tech Serve Humanity?

Given that so many of the serious problems facing us today were created by past technologies, is it possible to create tech that overall helps, rather than harms? This talk explores this important question.

“Tech is good.” “Tech is bad.” “Tech is neutral.” Whatever tech is, it changes our world. It helps. It hurts. It connects us. It isolates us. It changes our environment. It helps some more than others. Creating tech is an inherent part of being human. It isn’t going away. Given the incentives inherent in our economies, the nature of governments for increasing their power, and the nature of corporations to put profits over essentially anything else, along with the need for individuals to earn enough money to eat and have shelter — is it even possible to create technologies that serve humanity and support the environment that supports life? If so, can these technologies help create a future where we do much more good than harm? How do we begin to wade through these questions? In my decades of playing with and making a living from a wide variety of fields in tech, I’ve come up with a few of my own ideas. Perhaps they can be of some inspiration for others.

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DarkFi – The Coming Storm

Defining a new paradigm in anonymous ecosystems with free software and anonymous engineering. 

The talk will be an overview of what is happening in the world regarding crackdowns against crypto, how incompetence and having no ideology leads to broken systems, and how with free software we can be vigilant against oppressors and regain our privacy, sovereignty, and anonymity.

Miroslav Barta is a Czech archaeologist and egyptologist, author of the seven laws theory explaining how all civilisations develop through time, rise, peak, collapse, and transform.

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Seven Laws of Civilisations

The seven laws specify the nature of the so-called collapse, leap-wise development in time, the Heraclitus law, the importance of the elites, leadership and social contract, the determining role of technologies, resources and available energy to sustain or to boost complexity and finally the law of adaptation to changing environment.

elsirion is a Crypto-Anarchist and aspiring Cypherpunk developing mostly on Rust and researching cryptography and distributed systems with the goal of making Bitcoin more private and accessible at the same time. He is interested in everything that enhances personal freedom.

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Setting up a community bank with Fedimint (Workshop)

Fedimint is a new way to onboard communities to Bitcoin. The protocol provides cheap, fast and private-by-default transactions and is interoperable with Lightning.

Any group of at least 4 people can form a Fedimint federation and become the federation’s Guardians. The Guardians run the Fedimint server software and by doing so ensure the correct functioning of the system and the safety of user funds. Even if single Guardians (up to a certain threshold) go offline or become malicious the system keeps functioning correctly.

In the workshop we will help you set up Fedimint federations on a local Bitcoin regtest network and demonstrate how funds can be transferred between them. Once Fedimint becomes more stable you will be able to use that knowledge to run Fedimints in your own community or tribe.

**Please bring a laptop with Linux installed to follow along. Having Nix installed is also useful.**

Founder of the world’s first Decentralized Autonomous University: Bittopia University. An advocate for decentralization, P2P economies, privacy, and bottom-up strategies. Specialized in product development & innovation pathways. Over 10 years of experience as a product engineer and designer. Netexplo UNESCO Grand Prix award winner, Amin Rafiee, a regular speaker at Bitcoin and decentralization conferences throughout Europe, including The UNESCO House in Paris, The European Commission in Brussels, The Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialogue, The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Paralelni Polis in Prague, as well as other locations throughout America and Australia.

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Knowledge is Currency (Talk)

Using distributed networks to create a solutions for the growing number of victims produced by the cancel culture and institutionalized education. Furthermore, learn about my story of escaping communist Australia, and my observation of the local rebilion groups.

Since the dawn of time, we have been searching for answers, questioning our origins, purpose, and destiny. The Gutenberg press enabled people to share knowledge through books, bypassing institutions (middleman), while the Internet freed the flow of information across the planet, giving us access to lost archives and stories that were otherwise inaccessible.

Now we are faced with several new challenges, the cancel culture posining our world, limiting expressions and thoughts, and the decaying education system which has turned into indoctornation.

The traditional educational system is better aligned with selling knowledge by indebting students and creating specialized workers, thus limiting their choices in life, than it is with the notion of empowering people so that they can free themselves from compartmentalized learning and financial slavery.

This talk will cover the power of decentralized education.​​​