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.

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.

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.

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?

Panel - Truly Anonymous Cryptocurrencies

The panel discussion with Monero, Zcash, HORIZEN people will raise both philosophical and technical questions related to truly anonymous cryptocurrencies. What impact will they have on our society? How can the governments cope with their massive use?

Moderator: Pavol Lupták
Panelists: binaryFate, Arno Pfefferling, Peter Todd


binaryFate
BIO
Post-doctoral researcher in the field of AI and optimisation algorithms; early Bitcoin advocate and entrepreneur; Monero contributor and supporter since its inception.

ABSTRACT - Fungibility is the real deal
Having run a Bitcoin business early on, I encountered first hand the problems associated with its transparency and inherent lack of fungibility. I believe it is important to educate about the relation between privacy and fungibility, the implications of mass surveillance enabled by our technology and financial system, and that the aim of so-called "privacy cryptocurrencies" is actually to provide the basic fungibility we must expect from a functional currency.


Arno Pfefferling
BIO
Arno Pfefferling is 30 years old, holds a M.Sc. degree in material science from Freiberg (Saxony) and have worked since 2011 in the semiconductor industry. Got in touch with DLT in late 2016 and work since September 2017 for HORIZEN, a privacy coin with core features from BITCOIN, ZEC, DASH. After almost twelve months in the ZEN BLOCKCHAIN FOUNDATION the responsibility which Arno currently has is for business development within the Central European Region. Spreading the spirit of ZEN to continuously grow the community as well as enable individual blockchain use-cases which needs vital privacy features. Long term goal is to be part of a full secured economic platform where participants can use HORIZEN for crypto payments, ZenChat for anonymous messaging, ZenHide for borderless internet access, ZenPub for decentralized file storage, ZenGrid for edge computing power and ZenHelp as Q&A desk. All under the mission of lead blockchain technological forefront & contribute to humanity through innovation.

ABSTRACT - Truly Anonymous Cryptocurrencies
What is privacy in a digital 100% decentralized eco-system and where do I see the zk-SNARK technology in comparison to Monero, Bitcoin and next generation technics like Mimblewimble and so on. This are points which I would like to discuss within the panel.


Peter Todd
BIO
Peter Todd is an applied cryptography consultant known for his work on the OpenTimestamps project, Bitcoin protocol research, and contributions to the Bitcoin Core project.

Trade-offs in the history of money, from shells to Bitcoin (but especially in Bitcoin)

This presentation will be an attempt at representing organically and at a high level the history of monetary technologies (with particular focus on the most recent one, Bitcoin) from the perspective of the different trade-offs involved in any step of their evolution. The speaker will try to give an organic account of classical as well as less discussed trade-offs, like the ones existing between transaction costs and divisibility (gold vs silver), between verification costs and independence from third parties (coinage practice), between privacy and local security (binding vs hiding in cryptocurrencies), between privacy and scalability (obfuscation techniques in cryptocurrencies), between scalability and independence from third parties (Bitcoin “scaling debate”), and so on.

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.

Behind enemy lines, part 2

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.

Lightning Talks

Speakers: Smuggler, Alexander Biersack, Jim Warnock

Smuggler
BIO
Cryptoanarchist for 20 years. An operator of anonymous remailers and darknet hangouts. Author (Second Realm - Book on Strategy, The Treasure that is Privacy, Aristocracy of Action). Privacy extremist and crypto absolutist. Coder, admin, network cuddler. Covert communications specialist.

ABSTRACT - Secrets and Time - how much torture can you endure until your key expires.
What do you do when the border guard asks you to decrypt your laptop? Or the judge pressures you to give up passwords? What about that robber that wants to grab your cryptocurrency seeds? Similar problems in the physical space have been solved by banks using time locks on their safes, but what about the digital space? Cypherlock is a tool for linking secrets with time to give you some breathing room in those situations. In this talk, Cypherlock is presented, explained, and demonstrated by its developer.


Alexander Biersack
BIO
From math, physics and computer science student to software developer and IT entrepreneur and anarchocapitalist. Alexander has always been a contrarian who believes in voluntary interaction and free markets, a lover of freedom and liberty. He wants to create flying cars and believes they will change the way people see the world. He is interested in scientific progress, especially in genetics, nuclear micro reactors, breeder reactors, molten salt reactors, thorium, fusion and nuclear rocket propulsion to get to Mars in weeks and to Jupiter moons in months. He is also interested in social progress through cryptos and the spread of libertarian ideas.

ABSTRACT - Where we are going, we don't need roads
Will the dream of flying finally be fulfilled? Will the road end at self driving cars or will we soon be flying directly from our home to the rooftop of our office and take the lift down to work? From a home in the green countryside to town without traffic congestions? No more rush hours? What current developments exist and what personal flying devices can we expect to see in the near term future?


Jim Warnock
BIO
Jim Warnock grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and after graduating from the Woodrow Wilson School of Politics at UVA. He has worked in many different industries for brands like The Financial Times, Zegna, and the History Channel in leadership positions in sales, TV and Film production, and marketing. As Director of Outreach for HRF he assists activists fighting for freedom from Syria to Venezuela to North Korea working in fundraising and programming to find creative solutions to some of the world's most pressing issues. He has been instrumental in the creation and promotion of several impactful new programs at HRF, and is honored to lend his creativity and sales experience in the promotion of freedom and human rights.

ABSTRACT - Freeing North Korea with Media and Information
Jim Warnock, Director of Outreach for Human Rights Foundation, presents Flashdrives for Freedom, a unique program that takes donated flash drives, fills them with outside media and educational content, and sends them into North Korea in an effort to inform the North Korean people about the outside world and help free them from the brainwashing and information control of the Kim regime.

Bitcoin: The Ultimate Social Justice

We tend to define good as charitable work that helps people short-term, like feeding people, or giving them shelter for a night. Real good is about giving people freedom to pursue their interests and let them contribute to the building of society. This talk will be about how Bitcoin is the path to real social justice.

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!

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 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.

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.

Hardware Wallet Threats and Vulnerabilities

"Get a hardware wallet" is the defacto advice given to store cryptocurrencies securely, but how secure are they in reality? When you receive a bitcoin, how do you know that really happened? When you send a bitcoin, how do you know where it actually went? What's the deal with evil maids? Here we'll go over what types of attacks existing hardware wallets can and can't protect against, how peer review and open source works with respect to hardware wallets, and finally, how they compare to other ways of securing digital assets.

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.

Where Art Thou, Bitcoin?

Paralelní Polis Golden Coin Auction

Benefit auction; proceeds from the sale will be for the support of a Paralení Polis program and close the last edition of 100 silver coins Ross Ulbrich 2017 in a symbolic way. More info about the project: https://www.paralelnipolis.cz/coin2017/

Live Music Performance and Party

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.

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)

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?

Panel - Panama Papers

Panama papers panel will reflect the Panama scandal that happened two years ago. Many people, including Adolfo Enrique Linares Franco, the influential Panamanian libertarian, consider Panama papers to be invasive and dangerous intervention to privacy of a lot of people and companies.
On the other hand, many people, including Pavla Holcová, Czech investigative journalist, believe Panama papers may help us to reveal a lot of scandals and bad behavior.

Panama Papers, does our society benefit from this massive leak?

Come and join our discussion.

Moderator: Pavol Lupták
Panelists: Adolfo Linares, Pavla Holcová


Adolfo Linares
BIO
Adolfo E. Linares F. obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Law and Political Science from the University of Panama in 1990, and later studied Law in Capital Markets, Banking, Maritime at University College London, University of London, United Kingdom. (1990-1991).

Partner of Tapia, Linares and Alfaro (www.talial.com) since 1992.


Director of St. Georges Bank (https://www.stgeorgesbank.com/) since 2013.

President of AEGIS ASSET ADVISORS INC. (http://www.aaapanama.com/) an external asset manager (EAM) company with an investment adviser license from the Superintendence of
Capital Markets of the Republic of Panama.

President of Compañia Inmobiliaria San Felipe (http://www.sanfelipe.com.pa/), a real estate developer company, since 2012 to the present.

Deputy Minister of Education from July 2001 to January 2004.

President of the Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture of Panama from April 2009 to April 2010.

Member of the editorial board of newspapers La Estrella de Panamá, founded in 1849 and second oldest in Latin America, and El Siglo, local tabloid founded in 1981, from 2004 to 2010.


Pavla Holcová
BIO
Pavla Holcová is the founder of the Czech Center for Investigative Journalism, where she has investigated cases concerning Serbian organized crime figures, Macedonian secret service investments in Prague, money laundering, and offshore companies. She is a co-recipient of various journalism awards, including the Global Shining Light Award and European Union investigative journalism prize. She is closely working with Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) as regional editor and also served on OCCRP board of directors. Pavla worked on various international projects and investigations such as Panama papers, Paradise Papers, Russian Laundromat or Azerbaijani Laundromat – exposing payments from Azerbaijani government officials to European politicians. In 2016 she was named by Financial Times as New Europe 100 – European changemakers.

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.

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.

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.

Government under a Bitcoin Standard

In its 10th year, Bitcoin continues to operate as a viable decentralized alternative to central banking and its traditional functions: it has an automated, uncontentious monetary policy, and it offers final settlement of payments across the world in under an hour. Should the internet’s version of a central bank continue to grow, what would be the economic and political implications to the balance of power between individuals and governments worldwide? How would a growing irrelevance of central banks impact governments? What does the gold standard era tell us about the role of government in such conditions?

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.

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.

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.

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?

Skin in the Game or How Systems Learn or Don’t Learn

The idea of skin in the game seen as risk mitigation, filtering, and learning device. How its absence hurts systems

Skin in the Game or How Systems Learn or Don’t Learn

The idea of skin in the game seen as risk mitigation, filtering, and learning device. How its absence hurts systems

Skin in the Game or How Systems Learn or Don’t Learn

The idea of skin in the game seen as risk mitigation, filtering, and learning device. How its absence hurts systems

Closing Speech