 | (* Not actually decentralized) Catch up:
ETHPrague Day Three I wake up in plenty of time for the last day of ETHPrague. Also, miraculously, both the toilet and the shower are free at the exact moments that I want to use them. I'm OK with being a pod person, I think. This is quite good. Then I walk out of the shower only-mostly covered by a wet t-shirt and a young man says good morning to me cheerfully before trying desperately to make it clear that he did not look at me and will never look at me again. I fear he may not ever make eye contact with anyone ever again. Day Three kicks off with a sobering perspective shift that feels intentionally out of place at a crypto conference. With no official live stream to record it, the presentation is a raw, slide-driven argument for protecting the physical world from total digital engulfment. When the offline movement meets privacy advocates is presented by Hynek Trojánek, who admits his entire understanding of our conference is based on attempting to understand the Wikipedia page on Bitcoin. But his perspective is a strong one: we are engineering a terrifying baseline of digital exclusion, and defending a "Right to Analogue" is a vital mental health sanctuary against mandatory digital compliance. That demand for an analogue escape hatch connects directly to the usability crisis that Olaf van Wijk addresses in Recovery is the key to sovereignty. Van Wijk tells us that for 80% of the population, absolute cryptographic security feels incredibly unsafe because of the risk of losing a seed phrase. Account abstraction may handle basic authorization on-chain, but it completely fails to recover the core cryptographic secrets required for true privacy tooling. We need more privacy, we need more zk-proofs, we need censorship-resistant systems. All of this requires secrets to operate, and he argues that this is the same as externally owned accounts. Yeah but your security is not safety is the most "only in crypto" product I have ever seen. José Pedro Sousa starts with a series of frankly frightening wrench attacks in France, reassuring us that he doesn't want to scare us before describing severed fingers. "If all your information is on your phone, when someone points a gun to your head, you will hand over the phone." He is representing SpaceComputer, who wants to solve this by -- you guessed it-- launching secure chips (TEEs) into space, into orbit on a satellite, so that your signing keys are physically unreachable. But the entire premise relies on the classic fantasy that you can just say "oh, but I can't" to violent criminals and they will stop cutting off your digits. An audience member points out that if you can access the chip for your transactions, then your attacker can force you to transact. Yes, but the timelock. Sousa reminds us of the successful case where a timelock saved the day. This is the April 2026 Burgundy case, where the attackers kidnapped the man's wife and child to hold as hostages while they waited out the timer. It's true that the Gendarmerie rescued the hostages before the transaction window unlocked. Still, this doesn't strike me as a great success story so much as a cautionary tale. Honestly, if I were that wife? I'd be filing for a fucking divorce. I decide to skip the next sessions in favour of protecting my blood pressure and head out of Municipal House, on a mission for the greasiest street food I can find. An American couple wait in line behind me, suffering from currency and cabbage concerns. "Do they have brats?" "Yes, there are brats right there on the grill." "What about sauerkraut?" "I don't see any sauerkraut. I don't think they have any sauerkraut. Not hot, anyway. Do you want a brat?" "Do you think they take credit cards?" "I don't know. We have cash." "What kind?" "Euros" "Do you think they take Euros?" "Yeah, I think they will. But I hope they take cards." "Everyone is paying with cash." "What kind of cash?" "The, uh, kroner, or whatever they are." "They aren't paying in euros?" "No. And there's definitely no sauerkraut." Thankfully, they walk away before I can gouge their eyes out with an overcooked sausage. I reluctantly return to Municipal House feeling altogether unfit for human contact. When Technology Meets the Museum World restores my faith in humankind. Ivo Macek, the director of the City of Prague Museum explains how they are using tech to make local history cool, for example a full-sized projection showing where a railway station used to be. He explains that a key issue for museums is that if a collection is not visible, it doesn't exist. Traditionally museums have added more screens but most people don't use the mobile app or show much interest in browsing online collections. The answer is better story telling and he believes that AI can help us get there. They are building a system where a five-year-old can naturally prompt the catalog to "show me everything with the sun on it," instantly pulling hidden specimens out of the dark. They also built a strictly closed-loop chatbot that gives sourced museum info without hallucinating, point-blank refusing to write code or give you a recipe for Czech dumplings. And then it is time to return to the amazing Smetana Hall, restored from hackerspace to its full concert-hall glory. The closing ceremony starts with Shaka Lei Kaumaka and the Open Source Orchestra which started at ETHPrague in 2022. The conference had over 1,000 attendees and the hackathon shipped 64 projects. We applaud for all the bounty winners. It feels like it is over. But no. We have a major concert from Jaroslav Ježek Conservatory (KJJ) who present us with their annual showcase. The students entertain us by shifting quickly across an amazing range from choral pop to big band to Pat Metheny to modern fusion. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be video of the concert because my photographs don't do it justice. It was a beautiful and thoughtful end to three days of top-tier content. I walk home, no longer trusting myself to use public transport, and have a delicious bowl of goulash and dumplings. It's also my last night as a pod person. I enter my plywood sanctuary and spend the rest of the evening in blessed silence, except for the farts of my neighbor. I have strong thoughts about privacy and not all of them can be solved by zero-knowledge proofs. --- This series was supported through the generosity of the Peacock Foundation. [link] [comments] |
You can get bonuses upto $100 FREE BONUS when you:
💰 Install these recommended apps:
💲 SocialGood - 100% Crypto Back on Everyday Shopping
💲 xPortal - The DeFi For The Next Billion
💲 CryptoTab Browser - Lightweight, fast, and ready to mine!
💰 Register on these recommended exchanges:
🟡 Binance🟡 Bitfinex🟡 Bitmart🟡 Bittrex🟡 Bitget
🟡 CoinEx🟡 Crypto.com🟡 Gate.io🟡 Huobi🟡 Kucoin.
Comments