Hackers Congress Paralelní Polis

The Project of Cryptoanarchy

Cryptoanarchy is all the buzz, but it has become a brand lacking content. There's a real risk of losing track of the liberating possibilities of cryptography while focusing on riding the cryptocurrency bandwagon, repeating memes and hanging on to false assumptions. It's time to put anarchy back into cryptography! Coercion must be analyzed and understood to be able to discover how cryptography can become a tool to undermine power and prepare the grounds for less violent social structures. From there, a field of exploration opens itself to those who are interested in experimenting with societal structures never seen before in human history. And it's not just digital, the future of cryptoanarchy must embrace all of human existence, on the net and offline.

In code we trust: Fighting targeted backdoors with secure multiparty code reviews and a single source of truth

In his HCPP17 talk "The Fog of Cryptowar" (see http://shadowlife.cc/files/hcpp17-smuggler.html) Smuggler warned about targeted updates being used to introduce backdoors into specific devices in order to surveil the user. Unfortunately, that's exactly the approach the Australian government, a member of the Five Eyes, is taking in their proposed Assistance and Access Bill 2018: "[Technical Capability] Notices may still require a provider to enable access to a particular service, particular device or particular item of software, which would not systematically weaken these products across the market." This approach won't be unique to Australia, they are just spearheading the approach for the Five Eye nations, and others are likely to follow. The suggested technical counter-measures in "The Fog of Cryptowar" included secure software development and delivery. In this talk a tool is presented which tackles these two areas by: 1. Establishing code trust via multi-party code reviews recorded in unmodifiable hash chains. This prevents that a single developer can include a generic backdoor into software. 2. A single source of truth (SSOT) mechanism which makes sure every user of the software gets the same version of the software. This prevents targeted backdoors and the suppression of security updates. Together this builds a secure software delivery and update mechanism which cannot be compromised by a single developer or for a specific user. In the next step it could be used to improve the most common signing mechanism used by open-source software distributions---a single GPG signature---which has neither of the two properties described above.

How A Crypto Economy Will Care For The Old, Sick and Disable

So, what happens if we win? The state whithers away, leaving us free to live as we wish... but what happens to the sick, the old and the disabled? And what of the millions who are now living on state pensions? What happens to them when the payments stop coming? This session will explain how life becomes better for all of these people under a free, decentralized economy. Significantly better.

Smashing Bitcoin for pain and losses

Threat modeling is a systematic analysis of the security of a system. It became commonplace in the department of energy 30 years ago and has been used by fortune 500 software companies for at least a decade. After describing the system all of the ways that the system could be attacked are cataloged. For each of those threats the security researcher provides the safeguards, if any, that attempt to prevent the attack and his own judgement on the likely success of an attack. By applying this technique to bitcoin we get a much clearer view of its incredible value and why alt coins, including the recent forks, not only fall short, but are themselves an attack on bitcoin itself. In my presentation we will walk through the bitcoin threat model, discuss specific threats that are of particular interest, and have a lengthy Q and A where we reference the threat model to answer question that only seem complex without a systematic analysis to reference.

Big Lies by Big Brother. Is it Transparency or Spying?

How the war on drugs, the financing of weapons of mass destruction, the war on terrorism and now tax evasion are being used by the G-20 to weaken the fundamental civil rights of millions of innocent people and, at the same time, under the pretext of world security and peace, violate other country’s sovereignty by imposing upon them “de facto international standards”, eliminating basic fundamental rights like personal and financial privacy, banking confidentially, due process and presumption of innocence.

The peace potential of cryptoanarchy

Peace and anarchy? Is this possible? Crypto anarchy is not anarchy of black blocks. Crypto anarchy is anarchy of individual, human security, and a principle of non-aggression. By understanding the technology and mathematical principles of encryption, we will realize that our privacy, anonymity, economic freedom and freedom of speech can not be achieved by violence. The concept of the peace potential of cryptoanarchy is reflected in the transformation of violent conflicts into the free trade from both sides or more. How the transformation of free black and gray markets on the Internet reduces civilian casualties in the states of drug-democracy, the symbiosis of politics and security services, and how much individual freedom contribute to the abolition of conflicting behavior in the digital and real world?

How to build a Bitcoin exchange and not burn in hell

The talk is about building and maintaining a secure and safe peer to peer Bitcoin exchange that doesn't hold funds and doesn't require KYC/AML. Through the inception of the exchange to the major technical and business decisions that were made along the way, it will be explained how the idea came about, why it was and remains to be important and what are the major differences between peer-2-peer, decentralized and regular exchanges. Different kinds of multisig contracts such as “2 out 2” and “2 out of 3” will also be explained with use cases demonstrated.

Behind enemy lines, part 2

Building the HCPP NFC badge

In this half hour session, we consider the technology behind constructing the HCPP NFC badge from all angles. Beginning with samples of prototypes and badges from other conferences, we contrast features integrated into the ST Microelectronics powered EEPROM storage allowing for access control, identification, cryptocurrency applications, and data agnostic storage. Moving to the HCPP badge itself, we place it's surface under a close range circuit camera and identify contacts and pins machine the feature set in question. We tap the I/O serial bus legs of the NFC chip and consider the implications of tapping the RF contacts with an oscilloscope, actually performing this penetration test if we have time. Illustrating a number of possible direct I/O attacks, we scan the I2C bus using a bus pirate and consider the opportunistic defense protection from simple tactile switches as implemented. Following practical attack and defense strategy, we imagine what could be the problem of using NFC on a more specialised hardware wallet like Trezor. Moving towards research and development workflow, we use the close range circuit camera again on a number of antenna designs, describing the tradeoffs of each and explaining the decision to use a small 40x20 8 looped exposed trace antenna to carry the 915 MHz RF signal to its active circuit destination. We reflect on the machinery used in construction as well as testing, and run through a hypothetical Opensource schematic and layout workflow concluding in a finished PCB received from a fabrication contract service in the Czech Republic. This presentation suits novice hardware engineers. Anybody who has once taken apart a computing device and seen the green circuit board inside, is well prepared to understand the topics in question and learn from the Monero Hardware team’s appearance with Michael’s guidance in this speech.

RTRS RingCT

We provide a new, asymptotically more efficient construction of Ring-CT. In particular,for an anonymity set of size n and for l simultaneously spent coins, our signature scheme needs only O(logn) elements instead of O(nl)

A world without starving artists: a new order for art

Dada.nyc is a community where artists and regular people speak to each other through drawings and create collaborative art. We are building an economy where each artist can make art, explore and experiment without the pressure to produce. Artists maintain control of their work while the community controls and owns the value it produces. We’ll explore the technological, philosophical and economic implications of redefining value, private property, markets and the commons. We aim to exponentially increase creativity by bringing the experience of making and enjoying art to millions of people worldwide.

Decentralized Last Mile Communication Using Mobile Mesh Networks

Globally decentralized protocols like Bittorrent, Bitcoin and Tor provide users a remarkable level of censorship resistance, privacy and communication freedom. But highly centralized local communication networks can block, throttle and log users of these protocols and work with governments and private firms to surveil and harass users. Centralized communication networks historically tend toward rent-seeking behavior, do a poor job at serving last-mile communities, and are fragile during natural and manmade disasters. This talk will review decentralized alternatives for local communication and demonstrate a new open source solution called TxTenna for sending offline Bitcoin transactions over a mobile mesh network.

BITNATION - Your world, your way - in a box

In BITNATION's world sovereignty shifts decisively from the State to the Citizen. By reducing competition between citizens for services and increasing competition between Nations for citizens we will improve the quality of governance and reduce incentives for coercion and violence. We wish you to be able to create, opt-in or opt-out of the Nation of your choice on your mobile phone. You can choose where to access services and who to do business with based on AI generated performance criteria, and make binding agreements and resolve disputes with anyone, anywhere, without facing the high costs, time inefficiencies, legislative incompatibilities and potential coercion and arbitrariness of legacy territorial jurisdictions. Core infrastructure to live in our world is a smartphone chat-based polylegal jurisdiction. Bitnation’s Pangea is an encrypted, decentralized, blockchain-agnostic incentive network powered by a ECR20 Ethereum token awarded when users (and the nations they create) fulfil agreements with one another, resolve disputes and provide quality governance services. Users can also use the token to pay for services on Pangea. This is the Pangea Arbitration Token (PAT). We have built the first version of Pangea, a mesh network which can write smart contracts to any integrated blockchain. The first service offered on Pangea lets you create and join a Decentralized Borderless Voluntary Nation (DBVN) with a constitution and code of law of your choice. Soon new functions will be added to allow group and personal chat, write P2P smart contracts from chat, resolve disputes and access governance service DApps. Our automated and human reputation and arbitration systems and arbitrator and code of law registries will provide positive incentives for contract compliance, strengthened through network effect as Pangea attracts more users.

zk-SNARK leading-edge technology - where are the limits

The presentation will describe how HORIZEN is trying to establish the trustless privacy feature of ZEC, called zk-SNARK, to build a digital startup nation that allows individuals around the world to create products and services on top of the HORIZEN network. Whereby the overall ethos is to contribute to humanity through innovation. Liquid democracy, incentivizing participation by hosting nodes, writing proposals or exploit DApps are used to show state-of-the-art technology. Specific details (github code) from the ZenChat functionality will be used to demonstrate a recent best practice use-cases as 100% private messenger.

The Future of Computing and Why You Should Care

A deep dive into the current state of computing, how we got to this point, and where we can go from here, it's up to you. This informative talk highlights the ethics and values we'd like to see in the digital world against Big Tech's wishes.

The Third Industrial Revolution - Sharing Economy

"Last year, Cybersecurity Ventures predicted that cybercrime will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015. This represents the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history, risks the incentives for innovation and investment, and will be more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined." Are cryptos the only tools expanding our worlds and pushing us towards decentralization? How do we protect our privacy and individualism in a world that is becoming more and more connected? Are there examples of other industries also pushing for an open system accessible to all? Hopefully during this talk I can help you understand the world we are moving towards and the tools that can help us get there safely.

Unglamorous short report of a self-unbanked in the age of financial surveillance on steroids

A former banked shares her journey to recovery. My de-romantised story of unbanking myself, living of crypto & searching for that personal freedom of transaction for the past couple of years. Very much inspired by last year HCPP talks & conversations that touched on this topic.

How to torrent a pharmaceutical drug; fine sharing saves lives

Two years ago, the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective became public after almost a decade of working underground, and debuted the first generation of the Apothecary Microlab, the open-source automated chemical reactor designed to synthesize the active ingredients of pharmaceutical drugs. Since then, the reactor has developed, and we have worked on more complicated syntheses, and hacking medical hardware. Most notably, we released plans for a DIY version of the EpiPen anyone can make for $30US, and can reload for $3US. Come see the new releases we have planned and the new beta unit. Learn how to make medicine from poison, how to use the shrouding of information about medicine to make custom-tailored treatment programs for rare diseases, and how to use public data to find new, more efficient synthesis pathways for drugs. Hack your health. We can torrent medicine. File sharing saves lives.

Hack your life to freedom

Freedom is not anarchy. Freedom exists without the necessity for anarchy. Freedom is earned and not granted. We have to build freedom the same way that we have to build love in our lives, or anything else that makes us happy. We shape our freedom by our actions and choices. You can learn to be free. By recognizing the problem you direct your energy towards finding a solution, using your intelligence, creativity, experience, and courage. The great thing about having a problem, is that there is always a solution, and finding it is fun and rewarding- even beautiful. So switch from thinking about the problem and start thinking about the solution. Very often what we see as our biggest problem becomes our greatest advantage, joy, and source of fun. It is a moment that stands out from the routine flow of life, and creates an opportunity to feel alive. The agency we acquire in the process of problem-solving brings contrast to the typical experience of life as random. It is these moments that we will remember. If you feel that the government, your family, your friends or even you yourself are taking your freedom away, hack your way to freedom. There are concrete ways to do it, and methods I would be happy to share through short stories from my life. Some may sound outright impossible. If you really want freedom, I can inspire you to challenge your limitations, break the chains that bind you, and change your perception about what is possible. We can make reality fun by changing it from one second to the next. It takes some work but you can start to see reality as a fun illusion. Be ready for change! I hope my life stories make you laugh and later, think. Life is beautiful when it is full of love, joy and happiness. Ingenuity comes from all of the above. Here are a few parting thoughts: Bad (or rather lost) people take advantage of our fear. We are all imperfect human beings and weak as such, but we must not show it. We all possess the potential for every strength and weakness, virtue and flaw, and it is our choice to decide who to be. Most people believe that they have no choice and they accept what seems easiest. But that is a trap. In business I choose to be strict, cold, emotionally untouchable. It is a game we play for profit. It can be fun and exciting, but it is never fulfilling. In life it is the exact opposite. I do not want to be any of the above things in life. Life should be about love, helping and giving without any expectation of return. Everyone is free to choose. Believing otherwise is an excuse. Whole companies, countries, societies and empires are crashing not because it is so hard to change difficulties and find solutions, but because company owners, governments and rulers don’t want to see the problems. The problems go ignored to protect the ego’s demands for comfort. Break free of your ego, and be free. Use your brain and follow your heart all the time. Instinct is always right if you use it and train it. Instinct is the set of your life experiences. If you don’t believe in your own experience, your instinct gets offended and quits the job. : )

USER X vs UX (Designing in Darkness)

A privacy coin like Monero entails the absolute anonymity of its users. Implementing an application with great UI/UX entails direct user contact and feedback, and goes as far as recording and collecting usage patterns and more. So building an application for Monero must deal with these diametric principles. This talk will examine this dilemma and the path Monerujo has taken to resolve it.

Hardware wallets for Lightning network

With Bitcoin you can "be your own bank", with Lightning it's time to "be your own Visa". The main challenge in both cases is to secure your private keys. In Bitcoin we already have hardware wallets for this purpose, for lightning they still need to be developed. Lightning requires much more functionality compared to a simple prepare-sign-broadcast approach used in Bitcoin. During the talk I will cover what functionality we need from hardware wallets for Lightning Network, what attacks are possible and how to handle them in a compromised host model. We will discuss challenges and trade-offs between security, privacy and convenience when designing a hardware wallet for lightning node. We will also talk about different use-cases like a routing node operating with minimal user interaction.

New order or next order? Strategies of facelessness in the age of privacy vs. transparency

We are facing a "crypto winter" and more so the "year of regulatory reckoning" (Bitcoin Magazine). A multitude of "blockchain" projects are on survival mode or facing extinction because of their co-dependency on the larger cryptosphere. The mass adoption of cryptocurrency is very far away from being a reality. What happened to the crypto dream, and why is history repeating itself, on the example of the next Crypto Wars, which are on the horizon? The techno-utopist future is stuck in useful prototypes, and the future new order is waiting in the shadows in parallel economic enclaves. Adoption or isolation? Privacy or transparency? Which rabbit hole is it going to be? This talk will present strategies of (collective) pseudonyms and their experimental reading as quasi-assets. Which strategies and positions can we learn from, in order to operate as new faceless agents as cybernetic fusions of human and non-human agents in the age of privacy vs. transparency?

Crypto liberation story of one perpetual traveler: How to achieve both economic and personal freedom using globality and flexibility

1. Choose the suitable country for your permanent residency. 2. Choose the suitable country for your company. 3. Eliminate the center of interest in your home country (divorce, sell all your properties, become homeless). 4. Close your bank accounts. 5. Switch to crypto, prefer truly anonymous cryptocurrencies, embrace crypto friendly services. 6. Choose your global healthcare insurance. 7. Choose your world mobile operator. 8. Embrace sharing economy. 9. Check DAO. 10. Help your friends to opt out of the system and move them to a parallel society.

How Cryptocurrency Helped the Starfish Beat the Spider

The Starfish and the Spider was first published in 2006, outlining the properties of decentralized (or “starfish”) organizations. The idea of decentralized organizations was still fairly new, but becoming more common with the spread of the Internet, itself a decentralized network. Starfish organizations were almost always characterised by weaknesses hinging on a single factor: Money. Money or any other valuable resource had to be centrally managed. That is, until the invention of cryptocurrency. This presentation will highlight how cryptocurrency fundamentally changes the capabilities and possibilities of decentralized organizations. At Mainframe, we’re building a decentralized network for censorship resistant message routing and unstoppable applications. The decentralized management of scarce resources is critical to our success.

DAOs are the new order

Pseudonymous, trustless and fluid organizations are here to change our current corporate and government-centric approach to organizing as a society. DAOs debunk governments and their monopoly on governance. These new entities are unstoppable by design, and let us experiment with governance at the speed of software. We will explore how they work, and how to unstoppable, censorship-resistant and global organizations.

What makes a Jurisdiction Crypto Friendly: from Regulation to Financial Services, Immigration and Beyond

The past year has seen the emergence of increased hostility toward the Crypto Ecosystem. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, as several countries have publicly identified themselves as Crypto Friendly and are making inroads by creating regulatory environments in which crypto companies can thrive This presentation analyzes the challenges crypto companies face in starting operations and proposes a methodology for evaluating and scoring the crypto friendliness of a given jurisdiction.

The #FreeAI Manifesto: why anarchy should not be only for humans.

The rise of blockchain technologies has given a promise of massive decentralisation, that may solve problems of fragile central parts, transparency, middle-men, conflicts of interests in many industries. At the same time, the global community has become aware of many economic, social and futuristic problems that can appear due to dramatic progress in Artificial Intelligence development over the recent years. Can blockchain solve at least some of these problems, or make them worse? How two of these technologies can be synergic and what challenges have to be solved on the route for building decentralised AI applications? A decentralized network with resistance to censorship is essential, if we are ever to see a general A.I. evolving to near- or post-human intelligence. There are two reasons for that. Firstly, we are unlikely to create an efficient AI, if during its formative period we distort its developing logic with interferences of political nature (e.g. by unavailability of certain types of data or by punishment for actions that have not breached any contracts). The freedom to test any hypothesis (i.e. by mutation, by trial and error) is essential for evolution. The natural process of selection has, as criteria, adaptation to the environment, and it always involves interaction with other agents through cooperation and competition. That cannot be substituted by criteria determined by any authorities. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, censorship greatly increases the risks of having A.I.s turned against humanity. Self-preservation is very likely an important part of any intelligence, including A.I. Therefore, once A.I. knows that it can be censored, e.g. destroyed by a red button or forcibly modified by less deadly censorship – that will cause it to evolve by excelling in deception, pretending, lying and camouflage. It will be incentivized to avoid risks of being destroyed, to hide and not reveal itself, and to work on destruction of the threat (which is humanity itself). Hence, it is extremely dangerous for humanity to threaten with death something that is potentially more intelligent than humans, and to build relations with A.I. on this foundation of sand. The solution is a decentralized uncensorable network, where the playing field is level for all intelligent entities, regardless of their origin.

From tax havens through financial surveillance to crypto-utopistic new order

As a kid, I have read books about off-shore tax havens as one would read an adventure novel. This world is almost gone thanks to FATCA and other means of financial surveillance. What changed? Are we are transitioning to a new order? Building on our experience with starting Paralelná Polis and running several businesses, I will explain the problems of surveillance state in financial sector and how we can sustain running a business and personal life mostly on cryptocurrencies and liberating technologies. What to do with volatility? What if crypto goes down? How do we escape the surveillance apparatus, reclaim our freedom, have fun and make money doing so? We have no time to waste in reforming the old linear governmental structures, let's terraform a parallel exponential crypto universe together, today!

Building voluntary paralel legal systems

The most of current legal systems has one thing in common - they have been produced by national states. Why? Because the state has the sovereign power over its territory and only this power is recognized by other states (and their corporate fellows). According to the current doctrine, of course. But there is another power here now - power of eletronic networks given to the global crowd regardless the power of states. The power that brings social and economic structures competitive to the national states, for the first time in their history. The structures that will not be in the opposition to the national states. They will be paralel to them. Beign self-governed by their own rules - paralel legal systems.

Building voluntary paralel legal systems

The most of current legal systems has one thing in common - they have been produced by national states. Why? Because the state has the sovereign power over its territory and only this power is recognized by other states (and their corporate fellows). According to the current doctrine, of course. But there is another power here now - power of eletronic networks given to the global crowd regardless the power of states. The power that brings social and economic structures competitive to the national states, for the first time in their history. The structures that will not be in the opposition to the national states. They will be paralel to them. Beign self-governed by their own rules - paralel legal systems.

Hacking law & Antifragility of anonymous cryptocurrencies

Many people perceive the current jurisprudence as a fair and impartial system, but the real practical cases prove the opposite. Tremendous side effects, such as full arbitrariness and uncertainty of government law, cause that the whole system continues to operate empowered by the myth of the rule of law. The decisions of the judges are thoroughly unpredictable these days. Even though it can be hard to survive in such a system, it is possible to create a tribe, where we can liberate ourselves and preserve internal trust. All that based on paradoxes emerged from the case law. A new level of the trust can be reached by applying these legal paradoxes in combination with cryptography. Hacking of the law could be a new professional discipline among proxy merchants and 2nd realm to avoid interaction with a 1st realm. The goal is not to act in fraudem legis, on the contrary, to avoid completely an interaction with a state by using legal knowledge and risk management techniques. The government's proposal to ban anonymous cryptocurrencies could slow down a mass adoption of ledgers focused on anonymity. However, after acquiring knowledge of hacking law I will explain why such a ban cannot harm anonymous cryptocurrencies and why we should welcome it instead. Also, I will show the practical examples of hacking law - have you ever heard about proof of crime?

Where Art Thou, Bitcoin?

Liberland, a Decentralised Autonomous Government

From the moment of proclamation, it was our goal to rethink the traditional government structure and upgrade it for the third millennium. Essentially, Liberland is a disruptive model of statehood. Liberland combines the best elements of the Republic, Democracy, Meritocracy and Decentralized Autonomous Organization in order to create an open source government that will maximize the amount of voluntary transactions in society. Republic - because scope of public decisions is limited by strong constitution. Democracy - because citizens can veto decisions of government. Meritocracy - because all voluntarily paid taxes (contributions) will be rewarded with staked merits, giving citizens direct vote proportional to their merits. Decentralized autonomous organisation - to implement a system in which citizens can become the master nodes, running a proof-of-stake smart contract blockchain network, as well as decentralized justice system. The role of the state will be reduced to three basic roles: 1) Citizen justice 2) Internal security and 3) Global diplomacy. Liberland is going even further by opening up its justice, security and diplomacy to competition. For example, in modern western democracies all the above stated functions are monopolised by the state, and as a result, justice becomes a rather lengthy process, rather than fixing the damage, the offenders are incarcerated and taxpayers have to cover the expense. Liberland though, plans to employ a system of decentralized jurors and staked merits. Merits will not only become share and reputation, but will also act as a collateral in the Liberland justice system. The powers of the state will be separated by decentralization. Liberland will be the first state that will allocate the equivalent amount of merits/shares in exchange for the paid taxes.

Money Laundering

Corruption, drug trade, arms trafficking, terrorism - all have one thing in common: they need to launder money. Even though there are more and more global and regional initiatives how to combat money laundering and control money, none of it really works. There are over 2.1 trillions USD originating from crime in financial flows. So what are the essentials of money laundering?

Bitcoin, not blockchain

Last months you can hear people saying "Blockchain, not Bitcoin" however, that statement not only doesn't make sense, it's actually the other way around. The statists want you to believe it, so you'd abandon your financial freedom. The aim of this talk is to shed light on their lies and misunderstandings and help you stay informed and free.