Bitcoin Rebels to Descend on Prague

“World mandatory passportization celebrates its 100th anniversary. A nasty dehumanization, carefully marking all people by their governments, stealing their biometrics, strengthening the power of territorial states and suppressing the liberty of individuals.”

So say the rebels, who speak of “massive financial surveillance or upcoming drastic Internet regulations and most importantly, desperation from the impossibility to change the political system falling to a wrong direction.”

It has been some time since that feisty attitude that flies the flag of freedom could be heard amidst all the dancing and flying bitcoin trading bots. Yet it is in Prague where it will be heard and perhaps loudly between October 4th and 6th in an event called Paralelni Polis, OPT OUT.

“Opting-out of any system starts with understanding how things really work.

Traditionally, our speakers have been cypherpunks, digital privacy extremists, cryptocurrency experts and freedom fighters.

This year we have added economists, sociologists, geologists and artists to challenge the conventional mindset about what freedom really is and how to achieve it,” says Tomáš Kolman, lead coordinator.

The Hackers Congress they call it, with Prague in driving distance of Berlin, the city of dissenters.

Cheap rent and harbor from America’s jurisdiction has made Berlin the refuge of modern Einsteins. The unwashed “intellectuals” that keep breaking barriers and keep running almost as many bitcoin nodes as all of the United States.

“The event is unusual because it covers not just the economic aspect of cryptocurrencies – but also philosophical and social roots of how such technology protects privacy and helps fight unjust oppression. There’s also a unique celebratory buzz about it,” Alex Player, a spokesperson for the event, says.

Tickets have already sold out. Who doesn’t want to hear the Smuggler, described as:

“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.”

If that scares you, we have not even begun. “Li Zhao Schoolland survived 26 years through the horrors of Mao’s regime in China. This motivated her to a lifetime of promoting freedom and liberty globally through the organization of Austrian economics and entrepreneurship conferences and summer camps over two decades.”

No run away yet, especially if you’re an etherean. “Josef Tětek researched the top DeFi projects (MakerDAO, dYdX, Uniswap, Compound) and aims to fulfill DeFi use cases on top of Bitcoin, utilizing Lightning Network, Liquid sidechain and Discreet Log Contracts.

The talk ‘Evaluating DeFi’ will analyze strong and weak points of Ethereum DeFi projects and how does the Bitcoin DeFi compare.”

Ok, Ok, we meant “Frank Braun: Cypherpunk, cryptoanarchist, privacy extremist, and dark net aficionado.”

What do they even call the German FBI? Love you guys! They can say what they want, but tough job, true patriots, sworn to defend liberty and precisely the right of these men and women to rebel as much as they please by pen or code within the confines of intellect.

There’s also of course the Peter Todds and Tony Vays and David Chaums, but there’s also Luis Cuende too of Aragon, as well as Paul Seidler, an artist/researcher living and working in Berlin where he co founded terra0, that describing itself as:

“Driven by a keen interest in remote sensing, machine learning, and distributed ledger technology, we develop tools for the management of natural ecosystems and resources via the creation of meshes of interacting decentralized autonomous organisations.

We believe that these key technologies give us the opportunity to rethink existing and ineffective governance and regulatory structures and that they will play a crucial role in creating a sustainable, resilient, and biodiverse future.”

It’s that old question. Are they rebels, or visionaries? For Robin Hanson, associate professor of economics at George Mason University and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University, the answer is “yes” (stoopid meme).

With his 4126 citations, no one knows whether they should be scared or excited about his description as: “Professor Hanson developed new technologies for conditional, combinatorial, and intermediated trading, and studied insider trading, manipulation, and other foul play.

He has written and spoken widely on the application of idea futures to business and policy, and has advised many ventures. He suggests ‘futarchy’, a form of governance based on prediction markets.”

And then we have perhaps a very scary speaker indeed, Nick Middleton, who teaches at Oxford University and might well speak about his most recent book, An Atlas of Countries that Don’t Exist.

It is rare one finds thirst in merely writing words, but the best part is that this is sold out with only a few tickets remaining. “As has been traditional, the very last remaining ticket will be sold for one bitcoin,” we’re told.

They’re more interested in speaker applications with the deadline this August 15th. Bill Clinton obviously needs not apply.

“The social upheaval that resulted from the forced industrialization and collectivization drive between 1928 and 1932 created enormous problems for the new Stalinist leadership.

On December 27, 1932, the Politburo decreed mandatory passportization (pasportizatsiia) of key urban areas as a means of stemming mass migration from the countryside to the cities, expelling rural refugees from urban settlements, and thus bureaucratically consigning peasants to agricultural areas.

Passportization signaled the ascent of repression as the principal means of containing the civil war conditions fostered by the regime’s policies in many rural localities.

In one stroke, the Stalinist core opted for a strategy of ‘total’ administrative control over the movement of the population as a means of compelling a recalcitrant labor force – especially peasants, a group utterly peripheral to the Stalinist vision of industrial socialism – into compliance with the dictates of the Five-Year Plan.”

So says the documenting of history, with such mandatory papers instituted elsewhere prior to or after the above and so remaining strongly in force beyond simple travel to financial transactions.

The bureaucratic drive for compartmentalization (files on all), central planning, and control, can easily engulf even breath itself if it wasn’t for the many “rebels” that keep extending the boundaries of liberties.

Especially in the current atmosphere, where that devil’s specter of geopolitics dears attempt to raise its head once again, the questioning of what now for many is like water – passports – may well lead to the securing of at least some liberties.

Chief among them, that of the pen and code and perhaps quite a bit more importantly, that of the freedom to think.

 Copyrights Trustnodes.com