In recent years, privacy and freedom have come under attack. State surveillance has intensified, financial regulations have tightened, and the anonymity of transactions has been increasingly scrutinized. Yet, in the face of these challenges, our resolve remains unbroken.
HARDCORE signifies our uncompromising commitment to defending individual autonomy against all forms of control. We reject the chains of coercion and embrace decentralization, anonymity, and cryptographic freedom.
As pioneers of a new order, we stand at the forefront of technological innovation, driving progress for a free society. The old world is crumbling, and from its chaos, we will forge a future built on freedom and innovation.
HARDCORE means challenging control, forging new paths, and continuing the fight for our rights. Let us stand united, firm and unwavering, as we rise together, guided by the indomitable spirit of freedom into the future.
This is our moment.
For the very last time, welcome to the Hackers Congress Paralelní Polis!
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SPEAKERS
J. Gdanski
privacy, security & risk-management expert, CEO & Founder of Evertas
exiledsurfer
open resourcerer
Maxim Orlovsky
radical transhumanist & CEO at Pandora Core AG
Ryan Lackey
cypherpunk, security entrepreneur, co-founder of HavenCo, CSO at Evertas
Amir Taaki
DarkFi cryptography
Mitch Altman
hacker & inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone
Jarrad Hope
the thought leader & co-founder of Status.im and Logos
Rachel-Rose O’Leary
DarkFi core dev & writer
ThatOnePrivacyGirl
privacy researcher, independent investigative journalist, and educator
Amin Rafiee
founder and CEO at Bittopia University
Travin Keith
freedom maximalist & flag theory connoisseur
Juraj Bednar
educator, writer, cryptoanarchist & biohacker
More coming soon
Cody Wilson
Cody is the founder and director of Defense Distributed, a non-profit organization that developed and published the world’s first open-source gun designs suitable for 3D printing. Forbes called him one of the most polarizing figures in technology, and Wired named him one of the fifteen most dangerous people in the world. Since the development of his firearm, the Liberator, Cody has become the spokesperson for the digital arms revolution and an enfant terrible of the lecture circuit. He is a member of the tech fraternity unSYSTEM. His work has been featured in DOMUS Magazine, exhibited at the New Museum, and has been permanently acquired by London’s V&A, the world’s greatest museum of design.
Serinko
History proves that healthy communities need anonymity and privacy to protect themselves and progress freely without fear. To build that, we need to redefine tech, economics and most importantly, our philosophy and practice.
Michael Schloh von Bennewitz
Michael is a computer scientist specializing in crypto-secure electronics and embedded development. He is the founder of Monero Devices and is responsible for the research, development, and maintenance of Opensource software repositories. A prolific speaker in four languages, Michael presents at technical meetings every year.
Martin Habovstiak
Voluntaryist, programmer, Open Source contributor, and co-founder of Paralelná Polis Bratislava. Co-maintainer of rust-bitcoin library.
Christian Lewe
Christian is a researcher at Blockstream, where he mainly work on Simplicity. He builds tools and teaching materials around their research projects. Zero-knowledge proofs, cryptography and mathematics are topics he finds very interesting because they are not what they seem on the surface..
Chandran
Chandran is an experienced software engineer specializing in embedded systems engineering. Having grown up in Auroville, an experimental town with idealistic aspirations, he has experience with the expectations and disappointments we encounter when idealism meets reality. Chandran aims to contribute to developing mesh networks on Bitcoin.
Darko
Advocate of sovereignty and privacy preserving tools. Co-founder of Hodling SA which provides non-custodial hardware based Bitcoin multisignature wallet solutions.
Sodomak
Cryptoanarchist, IT security consultant, sysadmin, long-time member of Prague’s Paralelní Polis. 30 years in the stands of AC Sparta Prague.
Odysseas
ex Protocol engineer at Nomad and currently founding Phylax Systems, a startup in the area of blockchain observability. Passionate about privacy and sovereignty.
Jonathan Harvey-Buschel
Jonathan is a Protocol Developer at Lightning Labs working on the Taproot Assets protocol. He has previously worked on schemes for lossless Bitcoin transaction compression, the Lot49 protocol for offline Lightning channels running on mesh networks, and secure-key-deletion Bitcoin vaults.
Tony Nakamoto
While studying finance at university Tony came in contact with yoga. Now he understands the world through the perspective of the Austrian school of economics, Bitcoin, and choiceless awareness.
Martin Leskovjan
Martin obtained his legal education at Charles University in Prague and has built a career in the fields of IT security and crypto technology. He is also recognized as a co-founder of Paralelní Polis. His professional journey has deeply influenced his specialization in information security law, smart contracts, blockchain technology, privacy protection, and related areas. Beyond his professional pursuits, Martin’s main passion centers around whitewater slalom.
Maxim Orlovsky
Maxim is a transhumanist and cypherpunk performing scientific, engineering, and business activities.
His primary focus is building foundations for the future – foundations, which will unlock the full potential of individuals, enabling self-sovereignty, privacy, and censorship-resistance. This is the future of vertical progress and humanity’s evolution into forms much outside of what current collectivistic society can propose or allow.
Polto
With over 20 years of expertise in Free Software and Open Hardware, tech entrepreneur Alexander Poltorak has been involved with the Bitcoin ecosystem since its early days. He has been working as a Bitcoin consultant since 2016. He is an advocate of Libre Software, cryptography and all technologies empowering sovereign individuals and helping preserve the core values of anonymity, privacy, censorship resistance, decentralisation and security.
Calle
Calle is an open-source developer in the Bitcoin space. He believes that humanity can only be saved if we can restore the privacy and freedom of individuals in the age of the internet.
Mário Havel
Mário is a hacker and researcher working with EF 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.
Harry Halpin
Harry is the CEO and co-founder of Nym Technologies, a pioneering startup dedicated to the development of a decentralized mixnet aimed at eradicating mass surveillance. With a notable background, Harry previously held the position of Senior Research Scientist at MIT. During his tenure there, he played a pivotal role in orchestrating the standardization of the Web Cryptography API across various web browsers. He further contributed his expertise as a Senior Research Scientist at Inria de Paris, where he spearheaded interdisciplinary studies in the realm of sociotechnical systems and privacy. Holding a Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh, Harry Halpin’s scholarly acumen extends to his role as a cryptocurrency educator at the American University of Beirut.
Rachel-Rose O’Leary
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.
Max Hampshire
Max is a senior DevRel for Nym, previously a smart contract engineer and writer/researcher. Building demos and tutorials for mixnet application developers.
J. Gdanski
J. Gdanski is the Founder and CEO of Evertas, where he has led Evertas’s technical development and underwriting, as well as secured multiple fund rounds from top investors; he is a security, privacy, and risk expert.
Prior to launching Evertas, he was a leader in the enterprise blockchain space and was one of the first to work on institutional custody for crypto. In this capacity, he served as an early, significant contributor to blockchain consortia including R3 and Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, of which he was a founding member. He was an integral part of the first enterprise blockchain RFP and has worked on numerous blockchain-based systems.
Max Hillebrand
Max is an economist, cypherpunk and entrepreneur focusing on the advancement of freedom technologies in cyberspace. He is a contributor to Wasabi Wallet and the CEO of zkSNACKs.
Tatiana Moroz
Tatiana is an American folk singer-songwriter and a driving force in the cryptocurrency industry. She unites modern technology & economics with the classic social awareness & influence of songwriters of the 60s and 70s. She is the creator of the TatianaCoin, the first musical artist coin, and the alpha for the concept of artist tokens. Her inspiring album “Keep The Faith” was released in 2017 and funded via cryptocurrency. Her latest album “Love Songs for Idiots” was released in March 2023.
A graduate of Berklee College of Music, Tatiana Moroz has been a vocal advocate in the Bitcoin community since 2012. Tatiana performs and speaks at crypto and liberty conferences globally.
Victoria Jones
Dr Victoria Collette Jones is an award-winning dentist, who has worked in the UK dental industry for over twenty years. Her experience with Bitcoin came in 2016 when she introduced Bitcoin as a payment method to her business. Victoria now works as a Bitcoin Advocate, supporting individuals and businesses that are similarly interested in adopting Bitcoin as a payment method. Through her newsletters and talks, she shares what she knows about finance, history, and politics to support the adoption of Bitcoin. She published her first book ‘Truth Decay – How Bitcoin Fixes This, Unveiling The Path To Financial Freedom’ in March 2020.
parazyd
parazyd is a free software developer, currently working and leading the development efforts on DarkFi and anonymous engineering.
Pavel Hubacek
Pavel is a Czech cryptographer with research experience from Denmark, Israel, Italy, and the USA working on the theoretical foundations of computing. Pavel received the Neuron Impuls Award in the category of computer science for individuals under 33 years of age. His work focused on various significant problems in algorithmic game theory, computational topology, and combinatorial optimization.
ThatOnePrivacyGirl
J9 / ThatOnePrivacyGirl is a privacy researcher, independent investigative journalist, and educator on topics of informational self-determination and (counter)surveillance. She is the author of ‘This Month In Bitcoin Privacy’ (TMIBP) newsletter, and a board member of Open Sats. During 2023, she was part of the Human Rights Foundation’s (HRF) CBDC Tracker fellowship.
Lusine Vardanyan
Lusine Vardanyan is the Co-founder and CEO of Artlex Consult, the company providing legal and business consulting services for FinTech and crypto-companies. She holds a PhD in Criminal Law, and conducts her PhD research at Palacký University Olomouc (Czech Republic) in the field of EU law. Her academic publications focus on the problematic aspects and existing challenges of data protection, mass surveillance, and digital sovereignty from the perspective of EU law. Lusine is also the author of the article “Digital Integrity: A Foundation for Digital Rights and the New Manifestation of Human Dignity”.
Mike Michelini
Michael is an American social media, e-commerce, and SEO Specialist that has lived in Asia since late 2007. He is a passionate business connector that helps companies do business in China as well as Chinese companies to work in overseas markets. He built the cross border e-commerce community GlobalFromAsia.com. GFA is a platform to help cross border business owners learn, network, make business partnerships, and grow global businesses.
Silke Noa
Silke Noa is an activist lawyer and mathematician with a passion for privacy tech. Silke has advised blockchain projects since 2014 focusing on legal product design that is pragmatic and dispute-resistant. Silke is admitted to practice law in England & Wales, New York, and Germany and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.
Alexis Roussel
Alexis Roussel is the Chief Operating Officer of Nym Technologies, the start-up solving the internet’s privacy crisis. Alexis is also the Co-Founder of Bity.com, a crypto-finance service provider in Switzerland. He holds a Masters in Technology Public Law and has served as an E-Governance Specialist for the United Nations, and was the President of the Pirate Party of Switzerland – aimed at promoting a human-centric and distributed approach of a technological society. He is the co-author of the book “Our precious digital integrity” promoting a novel fundamental right to the digital integrity of the human being.”
Will Scott
Will’s work revolves around the pursuit of a more resilient web. His endeavors span various projects, ranging from conducting internet-wide measurements to developing privacy-focused messaging systems. Currently, his focus lies on privacy and data transfer protocols at Protocol Labs.
Having previously worked as a ski instructor, Will made the decision to relocate to Germany. Additionally, he possesses proficiency in the Chinese language and takes pleasure in engaging in activities involving fire. An interesting aspect of his journey includes teaching computer science in Pyongyang.
Ketominer
Ketominer is a cypherpunk and self-hosting enthusiast known for being the founder of Nodl, which produces Bitcoin and Lightning Network nodes for personal and business use. He is also the founder of Host4Coins, a service that allows users to pay for server hosting services using Bitcoin.
His focus on self-hosting and decentralized technologies reflects his commitment to individual privacy and control over personal data. Through his work with Nodl and Host4Coins, he has helped to advance the cause of decentralized technologies and empower individuals to take control of their digital lives.
Bob Summerwill
Bob Summerwill is the Executive Director of the ETC Cooperative. He has been a community member of the Ethereum project since 2015 and of the Hyperledger project since 2016.
Bob has been programming since 1984 and a professional software engineer since 1996. He started his blockchain journey in 2014 and he has been building bridges to enterprise and towards mainstream adoption since 2016.
exiledsurfer
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.
Jarrad Hope
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.
Paul Rosenberg
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.
Paul J. Dylan-Ennis
Paul is a researcher whose interests lie in cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin and Ethereum, with a growing focus on the latter. He believes that cryptocurrencies are best understood as cultural expressions with associated micro-economies, and his research focuses on the creativity of cryptocultures.
Paul’s research is primarily qualitative in orientation, and he draws on the theories of social imaginaries proposed by Taylor and the commons put forward by Ostrom. He is particularly interested in how these concepts manifest within the polycentric forms of governance described by Polanyi, which are characteristic of cryptocurrency cultures.
Travin Keith
Travin is a freedom maximalist and, though initially unwantedly due to numerous immigration problems for over a decade as highlighted in his talk at HCPP19, flag theory connoisseur. His experiences from living in 8 countries across 4 continents, while working in various capacities for multiple companies and organizations in up to 11 countries at varying points in time, have led to aspects around flag theory to become second nature. Though these projects have largely focused on tech and fintech, he recently got more involved in the travel and food industry.
Seth For Privacy
Seth is a privacy educator who hosts the “Opt Out” podcast. He also contributes to the Monero project, a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency.
Ryan Lackey
Ryan 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 the Chief Security Officer of Evertas Insurance and lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Juraj Bednar
Juraj 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 online courses and content about privacy, crypto, and entrepreneurship.
Pavol Luptak
Pavol is a 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.
Amin Rafiee
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.a
Amir Taaki
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.
Mitch Altman
Mitch is a Berlin-based hacker and inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone, as a featured speaker at hacker conferences, as an international expert on the hackerspace movement, and for teaching introductory electronics workshops. He is the founder of San Francisco hackerspace Noisebridge and also the Chief Scientist and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.
VENUE & ORGANIZER
Paralelní Polis
Paralelní Polis is a one-of-a-kind nonprofit organization that brings together art, social sciences, and modern technologies. The ideas of liberty, independence, innovative thinking, and the development of society are the main underlying foundations of the project.
The project intends to remain state-free as it operates entirely without support from the government, and most of the funds come from voluntary contributions of our donors and partly from commercial activities such as running a unique coworking space and the world’s first bitcoin-only cafe.
It was founded by members of a contemporary-art group Ztohoven, and Slovak and Czech hackerspaces. Its main goal is to promote economic, social, and digital freedom. We try to be a vocal voice of liberty in order to shape the public discourse and ultimately work towards a freer future.
PREVIOUS YEARS
HCPP is the flagship event of Paralelní Polis, which has been regularly attended by over 500 fans and IT experts from all over the world. HCPP is held annually in Prague on the first weekend of October.
Since 2014, our crew has brought to you a number of unforgettable events, like:
PARTNERS
ALLIES
MEDIA COLLABORATORS
