Peace, Love and Cryptoanarchy #HCPP16

Over the summer, I was invited by David Stancel to be a guest speaker at Hackers Congress Paralelní Polis 2016 (HCPP16). 

In his invitation, David wrote the following:

“I’d like invite you on behalf of Paralelní Polis - a unique nonprofit bitcoin-only organization based in Prague, Czech Republic. We respect and love your freedom activities at Follow My Vote, and it would be a great pleasure to have you at our third annual crypto-anarchist conference Hacker Congress Paralelní Polis 2016 - Decentralized that will take place from Friday 30th of September to Sunday 2nd of October 2016 in Prague.“

Many people would have read the words “crypto-anarchist conference” and immediately declined the invitation, in fear of being associated with anything related to anarchism. But, not me. I was honored.

Contrary to what many believe, when anarchists talk about anarchism, they are not talking about chaos, nor are they talking about being supportive of living in a chaotic society. All anarchism really refers to is a political philosophy that advocates self-governed societies based on voluntary institutions.

By receiving this invitation, it seemed clear to me that David understood the power of blockchain-based voting software and the need for verifiably honest consensus building tools in any type of society.

In our efforts to bring truth and transparency to the voting systems leveraged in elections within democratic societies around the world, many have come to view Follow My Vote as a pro-democracy movement. In reality, what we are is a pro-freedom movement.

By accepting the invite to HCPP16, I was hoping to address this common misconception and start a larger conversation about our desire to develop consensus building tools, tools that would help support the establishment of voluntary societies around the globe.

On September 29th, I boarded a plane and took a red-eye flight to Prague, traveling over 4,000 miles to reach my destination.  

When I arrived, I dropped off my luggage at my hotel and immediately headed to Hackers Congress Paralelní Polis 2016. Paralelní Polis was only a 15 minute walk from my hotel, so I decided to travel on foot. 

 

For those of you that have never been to Paralelní Polis, it’s an all black building nestled in between two others. It calls out to the curious mind as to what might be inside.

As I approached the building, the conference was just getting started. There were pods of people still standing outside, smoking cigarettes and engaging in thought provoking conversations. As I found my way to the front door, I got a feeling that this was going to be an interesting weekend.

Stepping through the door of Paralelní Polis was like stepping off the grid and into a secret walled garden. It was like there was an invisible cloak wrapped around the building keeping our secrets safe from the outside world. 

Once inside, I felt right at home. The air was filled with the smell of coffee and fresh pastries. They had a really nice cafe located right on the ground floor, and they only accepted bitcoin! 

If you didn’t have any bitcoins, you need not worry, as they had Bitcoin ATM’s you could use to convert your cash to crypto right there on the spot. 

And, just in case you didn’t already have a Bitcoin wallet of your own setup, at the registration desk, each attendee was given a card with a Bitcoin wallet address printed on it, which you could use with the Bitcoin ATM’s.

After checking in at the registration desk, I was already feeling the jet lag setting in, so I grabbed a latte with a double-shot of expresso and make my way to the first talk I attended. And, just when I thought this place couldn't get any cooler, while on my way to my first talk, I noticed that they had a TV fixed above the walkway, tracking the price of Bitcoin in realtime!

To kick things off, I listened to Pavol Luptak speak about “HOW GOVERNMENTS PUSH FORWARD THE SECURITY OF CRYPTOMARKETS.” Pavol covered a lot of ground, which mainly focused on how police and government agency raids were the main reason all cryptomarkets had to improve their overall security to survive and keep their business running.

During the Q&A portion of his talk, when asked of what crypto-currency he preferred to use, Pavol stated that he liked Monero due to its privacy and security features and because of its untraceable nature.

From there, I sat in on a talk about “ANCIENT IRISH ANARCHY,” which was given by Kevin Flanagan, whom had recently moved to Prague to be around more like-minded individuals. 

I have to say, Kevin is a brilliant guy. He has a wealth of knowledge with respect the history of society in Ireland. In his talk, Kevin mentioned that Ireland lived under a native set of laws and customs for thousands of years and was keen on writing things down from very early on. During this time, Ireland was ‘stateless’, there was no central authority making laws, issuing decrees or collecting taxes, there were no police force or prisons, and judges did not have the authority to enforce their decisions. His main takeaway was that principles of anarchy have been tried, there are historical examples that worked, and there are valuable lessons for today's world to be learned from the past.

Another talk I checked out was given by Lasha Antadze, entitled “FUTURE OF GOVTECH 4.0." 

 

In his talk, Lasha reviewed the current trends of blockchain technology and its use in government. He also presented his project for Decentralized Auction 3.0 for state property privatization and lease.

Perhaps one of the most interesting talks I attended throughout the entire weekend was given by a guy named Smuggler. He spoke about “HOW TO ORGANIZE A STATELESS WORLD: RULESCAPING.”

In his talk, Smuggler shared his ideas on a legal protocol for multiple political entities co-existing in the same territory, a pan-anarchist legal protocol. 

He argued that humans would be better suited if we break the state monopoly by undermining the legitimation of states through a secession of government services and replace the states monopolistic system of laws through rulescaping. 

Smuggler also shared was his theory on how law creates society and society creates law. He contested that the creation of law, codifying “right” and “wrong” behavior was a good thing and that it would support cooperation and exchange among individuals. 

When talking of rulescaping, he referred to it as law as social networking, using open source software tools to create laws that people can voluntarily subscribe and unsubscribe to through declarations of adherence. 

These declarations of adherence would be created via smart contracts. From there people could copy, modify, merge and split laws as needed using such software tools. While listening to Smuggler speak, I remember thinking that we at Follow My Vote have the capability to build such tools and integrate them with the blockchain.

Smuggler concluded his talk by reinforcing the notion that society, order and cooperative without a coercive monopolistic state are possible.

Smuggler also provided some direction as to what people can do to start working toward breaking the state monopoly.

My next stop was to listen to Anna Riedl’s talk on “IMPACT THINKING.” Anna's talk focused on how to apply science and rational thinking to determine the most effective ways to improve the world, reduce suffering and save lives. 

She shared a story about how the concept of triage originated as result of war time activities, where medics would enter a war zone and be forced to make difficult decisions of who would receive treatment and why, in an effort to save as many lives as possible. Anna then suggested that we apply these same principles to charitable giving in effort to make the most impact with the money we donate, a concept she refers to as effective altruism.

As Anna’s talk was wrapping up, I ran over to another stage where Joerg Platzer was giving a talk on Bitcoin blocksize entitled, “A NEGATIVE BLOCKSIZE FOR AN HONEST DIGITAL MONEY - THE LAST TALK ABOUT BLOCKSIZE YOU WILL EVER NEED TO MAKE UP YOUR MIND.”

Although I only caught the tail end of Joerg’s talk, the conclusion seemed to be that Bitcoin has become extremely centralized due the concentration of mining power in a handful of mining pools that are essentially controlling block production. And, he argued that a negative block size would allow the masses to compete again for block production, making the Bitcoin blockchain more decentralized, as it once was and was always meant to be.

“BAD MONEY,” was the next talk I listened to, which was given by Juraj Karpiš. Juraj had a cool calm way of speaking. I really liked his style. He spoke with a smile on his face the whole time. It was almost like he was implicitly saying, “I know something you don’t know.” 

 

Juraj seemed to know a lot about the banking sector and shared some lessons learned from the last big banking crisis. He talked about the big state and how it needs bad money to thrive. Acknowledging that reforms are not probable, he gave conference-goers some good advice on how to live a good life with bad money.

Once the talk on Bad Money had commenced, I bounced over to a talk given by Amanda B. Johnson called “CAN ANY BLOCKCHAIN-BASED NETWORK REMAIN DECENTRALIZED? A STUDY OF INCENTIVES.“ 

Amanda’s spoke about how Dash, a decentralized currency network, hopes to combat the trend toward centralization for the sake of efficiency. She contends that it starts with proper individual incentives, and ends with proper architected governance. As Amanda’s talk was wrapping up, she took questions from the audience. When asked about Dash’s recent announcement of adding full support for AML/KYC compliance, she maintained that nothing about the software will change as a result of this decision.

From there it was on to a much anticipated talk from Vít Jedlička, President of the Free Republic of Liberland.

On April 13th, 2015, Vít announced that he had a vision to create a voluntary society free from taxation and was staking claim to a 7 km² plot of land located on the Danube river in between Croatia and Serbia. This new country would be called Liberland. 

The goal was to create competition at the state level for the most value resource on earth, people. Since then, Vít has made massive strides in building a global network of supporters who are interested in one day becoming citizens of Liberland. 

During his talk, Vít showcased a roadmap of the milestones he hoped to achieve over the next few years. 

He also mentioned that, although it wasn’t necessary to gain international recognition in order for Liberland to exist, it was a top priority and an initiative that was taking up a majority of his team’s time at the moment.

Vít also spent some time talking about the Liberland Mobile App, which is currently under development. The Liberland mobile app allows Liberland E-residents to fully enjoy benefits of global Free market. 

Combining the features of UBER, Fiver, airbnb and eBay anybody can offer their service based on their GPS location or address free of charge. The idea is that Liberland E-residents build up their reputation by paying voluntary taxes to Liberland. They get Liberland merits in return which they can later exchange for full Liberland citizenship.

As a member of Vít’s team, serving as the Head of the Office of Liberland in Virginia, I was there to support Vít and help him field questions from the audience after his presentation was over.

On day two, it was my turn to present! 

My talk was entitled “THE FUTURE OF VOTING: END-TO-END VERIFIABLE BLOCKCHAIN-BASED VOTING SOFTWARE.”

As the Co-Founder and CEO of Follow My Vote, I opened up my talk by sharing the story of my first voting experience in the United States, which was during the United States Presidential Election of 2000.

This election was between Al Gore and George W. Bush, and ending up being one of the most controversial elections in our history. On election night, at first, the media announced that Al Gore had won the election. Later on, the media then stated that George W. Bush had actually won the election, which prompted Al Gore to demand a recount.

The election came down to the state of Florida, where vote totals were being disputed. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in, stopped the recount, and awarded George W. Bush the victory.  I spoke of how this didn’t sit well with me. I had come to the realization that elections in my country happen in a black box, as there is simply no way for me to independently verify the results of our elections to ensure they are honest.

I went on to mention that we are now living in a new paradigm of what is technologically possible. And, with the advent of blockchain technology, we now have the tools we need to build end-to-end verifiable blockchain-based voting systems capable of hosting verifiably honest elections and polls of all types.

I talked extensively about the issues with the current voting processes and systems that we have in place today, focusing on the fact the we are relying heavily on procedural security (meaning people doing their jobs correctly 100% of the time) to ensure election outcomes are accurate. 

I also mentioned the problems with voting using paper-based systems, voting by mail, and voting using electronic voting machines (which are all vulnerable to fraud and corruption) and stressed the importance of taking advantage of a rare opportunity to leverage end-to-end verifiable blockchain-based voting software to root out corruption in elections within our respective societies.

Another topic of interest I covered was Follow My Vote’s anonymous ballot issuance process, which will enable all voters to have their identity verified, be issued a ballot, cast their ballot, and count the votes stored securely in the blockchain-based ballot box, all with revealing who voted for whom.

I talked about how we were truly innovators and architects at Follow My Vote, having been recognized in an international publication as a global leader in secure voting system design.

When wrapping up my talk, I wanted to make it clear that using our blockchain-based voting software to host verifiably honest elections is just one of the many applicable use cases. So, I spent some time talking about Follow My Vote's mission statement.

Follow My Vote’s mission is promote truth and freedom by empowering individuals to communicate effectively and implement non-coercive solutions to societal problems. In other words, we are driven by the desire to build software that allows people to communicate in an effort to work together to solve their own problems within society without the need for government.  We want to give every individual on earth a voice, an opportunity to cast their opinion on anything and everything their heart desires. By developing a voting system and making it blockchain based, we are essentially creating an honest polling platform where no one’s voice can be censored and all votes are verifiable, a system that will help us get to the heart of what it is the we believe in, as individuals and the human race as a whole. We envision our software being used to connect and empower like-minded individuals, to include those that may be unsatisfied living under the rules of their current society. In this way, our software could one day be a tool for anarchists, one they could use to declare their independence and start anew.

Upon finishing my talk, I took questions from the audience. And, before leaving the stage, I gave a live demonstration of the software we’ve developed to date.

NOTE: all of the software code we develop is completely 100% open-source and can be found hosted here on github.com. If you are interested in contributing code to our open-source project, please visit the code contributor page of our website for more info on how to get involved.

Once my talk was over, I grabbed some lunch and went to check out Paul Rosenberg’s talk. In his talk entitled “HOW TO EVOLVE AND HACK YOUR SOUL,” Paul shared his thoughts on how humans are generally more evolved than their conduct would indicate, due to enforced behaviors. 

He also spoke of some simple evolutionary steps that we can take quickly, once we see them. Paul ended his talk with the topic of "How to hack your soul" and plugged his new book “Breaking Dawn.”

From there, I sat in on a talk given by Andreas Antonopoulos where he shared his “THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF MONEY.”

I wrapped up day two by listening to Timothy C. May speak about his  “THIRTY YEARS OF CRYPTO ANARCHY.” Timothy is the author of “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” and has been credited with coining the term crypto-anarchy. As such, his name has become quite legendary in crypto-anarchists circles. 

To pay tribute to Timothy, Paralelní Polis has posted a copy of an email he wrote back in November of 1992 on their walls.  

In this email, May makes striking predictions about the spread of crypto-anarchy, which are now becoming realized in today’s society.

Timothy refers to crypto-anarchy as his name for the version of a kind of anarchy where cryptographic tools provide the means for an un-coerced network of voluntary transactions. During his talk, Timothy spoke about how many of the technologies he expected have been realized, such as widespread encryption, anonymous remailers like TOR, file-sharing tools like BitTorrent, and most notably, Bitcoin and blockchain-based systems.

On day three, Jamie Bartlett spoke about “DOING JOURNALISM ABOUT THE DARK NET.” Jamie is the author of the book "The Dark Net," based on front-line reporting from underground internet subcultures, and writes about the subject for mainstream media outlets.

I first met Jamie in Croatia while attending a conference in celebration of Liberland’s one-year anniversary. Since then, Jamie has been a big supporter of Follow My Vote, featuring us in an article he wrote when covering the Liberland conference for the Telegraph, which was entitled “The crypto-libertarians using technology to undermine the nation-state.”

My next stop was to see Sam Patterson speak. Sam Patterson is the Operations Lead at OpenBazzar and co-founder of OB1. His talk was entitled “OPENBAZAAR: FREE TRADE THROUGH DECENTRALIZED COMMERCE.” In his talk, Sam hit on how existing commerce online is centralized by a handful of companies who monitor data, censor trade, and use tightly controlled payment systems. 

For those of you that have never heard of OpenBazzar, it’s an open source software project which creates a decentralized network for trade, using Bitcoin. Because OpenBazaar removes the middleman, there are no fees, there is no censorship, and there is no mass collection of data. Sam wrapped us his talk by explaining the project's history, how it works technically, and how future changes will further enhance decentralization and censorship-resistance.

Another captivating talk I attended was a panel discussion entitled “WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT WAYS TO ACHIEVE FREEDOM.” The panelists were Frank Braun, Vít Jedlička, and Lasha Antadze. They all had different perspectives on exactly how to achieve freedom, but generally agreed on what it means to live freely. As someone who was steadfast in starting his own country, the President of the Free Republic of Liberland, Vít Jedlička was adamant about not trying to reform society from within and contended that the only way to become free is to build your own free state. This reminded me of the ole Buckminster Fuller quote “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Near the end of the panel discussion, Lasha Antadze shared his predictions for freedom in the future. Lasha seemed to think that people will naturally migrate over time to live near like-minded individuals, and from there they would form their own communities, find a way to self-sustain, and eventually declare their own sovereignty. When speaking to Lasha later that day, I let Lasha know a bit about Follow My Vote and the blockchain-based voting system we were working on. I also mentioned to Lasha that I shared his vision for the future of humanity, which is when he said that Follow My Vote’s voting software would really help in building consensus within such communities, enabling them to flourish much faster. He seemed to just get it without blinking an eye. This brief encounter alone made my trip worth it!

The final talk I listened to, on Sunday, was given by the one and only Smuggler. If there’s one thing about Smuggler, it’s that he definitely draws a crowd. This talk, like his talk on the first day, was packed with people. Only this time, his talk would stir up some controversy among the crypto-anarchists in the room. 

This talk was about “AGORISM VS PARALLEL SYSTEMS.” 

NOTE: Agorism is defined by wikipedia.org as “a libertarian social philosophy that advocates creating a society in which all relations between people are voluntary exchanges by means of counter-economics, thus engaging with aspects of peaceful revolution.” And, counter-economics is the sum of all non-aggressive human action which is forbidden by the state. 

In his talk, Smuggler basically bashed agorism as being an idealistic path to freedom, as opposed to being a realistic option. It was his belief that an agorist society would be squashed by those who stand to lose from people being truly liberated here on earth before said agorist society even got started. Thus, he advocated for living freely under the radar by developing parallel systems and temporary autonomous zones.

By the end of the conference, my head was spinning from all that I had taken in over the course of weekend. So, I took some time to relax in the cafe and snagged a picture with my good friend Alena Vranova from Satoshi Labs.

As it turns out, if you were to take a picture and post it to instagram with the hashtag HCPP16, they had a printer setup that would print out a photograph for you right there on the spot. Check it out!

Before I left Paralelní Polis, I used the last of my bitcoin to buy some t-shirts for me and my boys: Nathan, @modprobe, and Will, @slickwilly. 

Throughout my weekend in Prague, I had spoken to so many people with different opinions on how life should be lived and varying ideas how we might be able to get from where we are at now to living peacefully in voluntary societies. When boarding my plane to fly back to Virginia, I realized that I was leaving Prague with more questions than I had answers. 

One thing I knew for sure was that I left Prague feeling inspired. I had gained a new sense of hope for humanity. I have come to the conclusion that the desire to be free is something innately in us as human beings. In the deepest depths of our souls, I tend to believe that we are all anarchists. Many of us just don’t know it yet. All we anarchists want to do is live freely, by our own rules, as long as our own rules don’t violate the non-aggression principle.

To wrap up, I'll leave you with this. Whatever path you take to realize your freedom, you can't walk that road alone. Thus, we must find a way effectively communicate with each other and work together to build non-coercive solutions to societal problems. This is what we are ultimately trying to accomplish at Follow My Vote and we need all the help we can get. If you are interested in getting involved, I’d love to hear from you.

Peace Be With You!

-ONELOVE