Hackers Congress in Prague: The First Day

aaronkoenig (68)in #hacker • 8 years ago (edited)

The Hackers Congress by Paralelní Polis in Prague has started. Here are my impressions of the first day.

I got up early to catch a train and arrived in Prague just in time for the first talk. It was given by the Czech art group Ztohoven who recounted how they removed the Czech flag from the presidential palace in Prague and replaced it by a red pair of men's underpants.

As a symbolic act to "decentralise power", they cut the flag in more than 1000 pieces, connected them to Bitcoin transactions and distributed sheets of paper containing a bit of the flag and a private key to random people in major Czech cities. A very funny campaign that got lots of attention by the Czech and international press.

The second talk was about Steem, given by Czech AI developer Peter Hroššo. It was a very basic introduction into the nuts and bolts of Steem which to my suprise did not cause a vivid discussion. Not many people showed up for this talk. The interest in Steem among cryptoanarchists still seems to be rather low.

The biggest venue of the conference is a theatre across the backyard of Paralelní Polis. There I listened to Kevin Flanagan Coombes who spoke about reputation-based governance in ancient Ireland. He had obviously attended the talk about Steem, as he compared the meritocracy of the Irish clans to Steem's reputation system.

I then had a drink - which of course I paid in Bitcoin - in Paralelní Polis' café and chatted with many old and new friends and people from as far as Japan.

So I came late for a very well visited talk by a masked gentleman who called himself Smuggler. This early Bitcoin adopter from Berlin spoke about decentralised law and a stateless society. Decentralisation through technology is the main topic of this year's congress and his talk received a lot of positive feedback from the audience.

Finding your way from talk to talk

Then Jörg Platzer from Room 77 in Berlin raved about a "negative blocksize" for the Bitcoin blockchain. I liked his old fashioned presentation style using an overhead projector, but I could not follow his argumentation, so I left early.

Later that night Vít Jedlička gave a talk on Liberland, the state he founded in an unclaimed area between Serbia and Croatia. Vít is a die-hard libertarian who wants to create the perfect state, with no taxes and an extremely limited government. Hope he succeeds!

The documentary he screened afterwards showed that some obstacles are still to overcome, especially with the Croatian border police, who arrested Vít and his crew several times.