decentral.community at 38c3

This is a monero-beginner-friendly workshop for nerds, bring your computer to follow along and by the end you will have a monero wallet in your terminal and understand how to use it.

Let's sign each other's PGP key for a safer internet !

Let's say you have a colorblind friend - how can you convince them that red is different from green if they biologically cannot see the difference? ZKPs: zero-knowledge proofs! These are a state of the art cryptographic method for proving the veracity of certain statements without revealing anything except that the statement is true. When paired with the post-quantum security guarantees of code-based cryptography, your personal information could not be safer - but how do code-based ZKPs work? Join Freeman Slaughter and Rigo Salazar for a primer on code-based ZKPs, how they work to thwart quantum adversaries, and what YOU can do to protect yourself.

ESP-NOW? Python? MicroPython? Reticulum? What's the connection? The interfaces we build in this workshop 🐍🍄📡🤝🌐

A meetup for all rationality adjacent communities

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/hub/en/event/lesswrongsscacxrationality-meetup/

Let's hack on Linux for AArch64 devices, in particular the X1 Elite ones from Qualcomm. Bring your device or questions.

A collaborative dialogue to examine and challenge the philosophical foundations of decentralization. What does decentralization truly mean? How does it intersect with centralization? Are they mutually exclusive or do they represent a false dichotomy? What other conceptual binaries may have shaped these ideas—object and subject, order and chaos, truth and lies? Are we inevitably bound by binary logic and symbolic reasoning or can we transcend these frameworks to adopt a more phenomenological perspective? What do we actually experience when engaging with institutions, systems or protocols? And how do the unnoticed elements receding into the background still exert their silent influence on every participant willing or otherwise?

A non-exhaustive list of references: The Tyranny of Structurelessness, The Tyranny of Tyranny, Extitutional Theory, Non-binary Logic, Performativity, Hyperstition, Do-ocracy.

Through a performative and self-reflective lens, this dialogue will probe the boundaries and inherent tensions of decentralization.

Each assembly in the habitat will do a short 5 min intro to let people know what they are up to.

There were many projects around the new millennium seeking to create decentralized/anonymous networks. Most failed, but they had some good ideas that died along with them. This talk will cover some "lost gems" from that era.

Capitalism has taken a dark turn: the inherently totalitarian nature of state-power in capturing (bodies, surplus-value, ideas, and information) has fused with the extensive scope of global capitalism. The result, following Shoshana Zuboff, is a “surveillance capitalism” that now renders available the personal data of everyone worldwide to the capture of largely clandestine entities (Big Tech, data brokers, intelligence agencies, etc). Understanding the emergence of this new model of power over information is crucial in developing tools that can reverse it, making the Internet finally a place for private and free exchange.

Before the advent of the Internet, Deleuze and Guattari offered a philosophical model for understanding both the differences between state power and capitalism: while the state can be defined by a mechanism of “capture,” capitalism liberates flows in order to extract a maximum of financial value. These mechanisms of “territorialization” and “deterritorialization,” however, are far from opposed: what surveillance capitalism shows is the novel combination of these techniques in a new paradigm of informational exploitation. Capitalism deterritorializes information access so that new modes of state and corporate capture to exploit it.

Thankfully, there are many traditions of technological resistance at our disposal: not simply encryption to protect the content of our communications, but also novel network systems capable of scrambling the metadata traces our encrypted activities leave behind everywhere for capture. This presentation will focus on mixnets as one available tool. What mixnets accomplish is a concrete network-level “becoming-imperceptible,” abstractly proposed by Deleuze & Guattari, for all users. By passing all web traffic through a “noisy” network designed to confound surveillance capture, the possibility of an internet secured by default anonymity, or imperceptibility, becomes a route of escape, or a “new earth” on which to live.

This talk will explain the benefits of decentralized protocols which use public keys directly as identities, and encourage this approach for newly-designed protocols.

Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git. Unlike centralized code hosting platforms, such as GitHub or GitLab, there is no single entity controlling the network. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users retain sovereignty over their data and workflow.

Free your code!

TLS (the security layer behind HTTPS) and Tor onion services (anonymously hosted TCP services) are both excellent protocols. Wouldn't it be nice if we could use them together? In this talk, I'll cover a working implementation of combining TLS with onion services, without compromising on the security properties that each provides.

The DNS has an inherent scalability advantage over Namecoin. But that doesn't mean we're not going to optimize Namecoin as best we can. In this talk, I'll cover several tactics we're using to reduce the on-chain data stored by Namecoin -- while minimizing the UX impact.

If user mistakes cause their website to go down, that's already bad -- but not nearly as bad as if user mistakes make them permanently lose control of their website or get doxed and arrested. This talk is about how we're helping Namecoin wallet users avoid mistakes before they cause irreversible consequences.

Monero uses an adaptive block weight based upon the CryptoNote excess size penalty with a median over the last 100 blocks, https://web.archive.org/web/20200402140852/https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf to provide the capacity for increases and decreases in the number of transactions. In 2019 this adaptive block weight was modified by the introduction of a long term median over the last 100000 blocks to mitigate against a sharp increase in the block weight, due to possible spam attacks. In 2022 changes to the Monero adaptive block weight in order to mitigate against a sharp increase in transaction fees and allow for a smooth recovery, and further growth in the block weight after a sharp drop in the number of transactions, were introduced. The proposed Full Chain Membership Proofs++ will require changes to accommodate transaction weights of around 10000 bytes, and fixed proof weights to accommodate dynamic increases in transaction weights. Furthermore, a spam attack in early 2024 has indicated the appropriateness of a tighter pricing of block weight growth. We will discuss the resulting Monero fee market and the necessity of Monero’s constant emission of 0.6 XMR per block to ensure POW security and protection against spam. We will propose: An increase in the minimum penalty free zone from 300000 bytes to 1000000 bytes, a reduction of the surge of the short term median above the long term median from 50 times to 16 times, together with an increase in the growth rate of the long term median from 1.7 times to 2 times, and the introduction of a 1000000 block sanity median with a growth rate of 2 times. This will in addition to provide the necessary support for FCMP++, provide additional protection against spam attacks and approximately cap the overall growth rate of Monero blockchain to the historical growth rate of residential and small business bandwidth. We will also discuss the resulting transaction fee changes and simplification of the transaction fee calculations by Monero wallets.

CROSS is a lightning-fast post-quantum digital signature scheme currently in round 2 of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's call for signature schemes. Here, we offer an overview of how CROSS works, the benefits and drawbacks inherent, and how the post-quantum paradigm will shape the future of protected signature protocols.

The concept of network states offers an innovative framework for reimagining social organization in the digital age. This talk explores the journey of creating a hackerspace that embodies the Monero community’s core ethos of privacy, decentralization, and technological innovation through research and development. By examining the practical realities of decentralized organizing, the discussion highlights key friction points, including the difficulties of achieving consensus in a non-hierarchical community and the challenges of turning a conceptual vision into a financially viable, operational hackerspace.

Commons Hub represents a new generation of place-based Web3 spaces that transcend traditional IT-focused innovation to address broader challenges in systems design. Inspired by the ethos of hacker spaces—collaboration, experimentation, and open access—Commons Hub extends these principles to tackle pressing issues in natural and socio-economic systems design. Positioned within the context of the metacrisis—a convergence of social, ecological, and economic crises—Commons Hub also functions as a leftist prepper project, equipping communities with tools and knowledge for resilience against looming systemic collapse. This talk examines where and how these hybrid spaces emerge, exploring their ambivalent relationship to crypto as they draw on it for funding, inspiration, and technical innovation while remaining critical of unfettered financialization. By navigating these tensions, Commons Hub and like-minded spaces offer new pathways for collective survival and post-capitalist experimentation.

"Despite its potential, crypto has been met with skepticism and fear from progressive hacker-culture and activists. However, its roots in cypherpunk, cooperative governance, and Solarpunk ideals offer a promising foundation for alternative socio-economic systems. This talk will explore how crypto has been corrupted by corporate and governmental capture, and how to reclaim its potential for social and environmental good by breaking free from taboos and sparking new, imaginative thinking."

In this hands-on, one-hour workshop, participants will learn how to set up BTCPay Server with Monero integration on a VPS using Docker for deployment. The session will cover everything from initial server setup and hardening, Monero wallet creation, to configuring BTCPay Server. Participants are encouraged to bring a Ubuntu-based laptop to follow along with a demo VM installation, enabling them to replicate the setup process. By the end of the session, attendees will gain the skills to deploy a BTCPay Server instance for an e-commerce website. No prior experience with BTCPay Server is required, but familiarity with Linux basics is recommended.

Let's say you have a colorblind friend - how can you convince them that red is different from green if they biologically cannot see the difference? ZKPs: zero-knowledge proofs! These are a state of the art cryptographic method for proving the veracity of certain statements without revealing anything except that the statement is true. When paired with the post-quantum security guarantees of code-based cryptography, your personal information could not be safer - but how do code-based ZKPs work? Join Freeman Slaughter and Rigo Salazar for a primer on code-based ZKPs, how they work to thwart quantum adversaries, and what YOU can do to protect yourself.

Bring or build your own antennas and see what they are tuned to.

The Pocket Science Lab is an open source device designed for students, educators, and makers to explore STEM concepts interactively. it is a multifunctional tool that combines a range of scientific instruments into a portable format, including an oscilloscope, multimeter, logic analyzer, and more.

Know about OpenWrt? Have a router running it? Did you consider building it yourself? Instead of trusting the vendor? Or want to run Reticulum on an existing OpenWrt device? Or one one that is tiny, portable and costs 25 euros? Lot's of questions, will bring some answers :)

In 2012 started the Rojava Revolution. Since then, thousands of cooperatives, communes, councils have been created, and have become the working political system for the whole region North-East Syria. Because of its own democratic essence, it is constantly under attack of authoritarian regime around in the region.

While quantum computing startups make grand promises, the field's most lasting contribution might not be in building computers at all, but in revolutionizing how we think about and visualize computation. This talk demystifies quantum computing hype while introducing the fascinating world of diagrammatic reasoning - a visual approach to understanding quantum algorithms that's changing how we think about computation itself.

The bitcoin kernel library encapsulates Bitcoin Core's consensus logic and allows developers to interact and take part with bitcoin's consensus. The talk will focus on an array of use cases for the library, from targeting riscv bare metal, using the library for web-scale indexing, to alternative full node implementations.

Speech is protected, should be free and everyone seems to agree to it. But for some reason, we are told that financial communication is not speech. Cypherpunks tend to disagree and they consider uncensored, private financial communication essential for a free society. But unlike other activists, cypherpunks do not convince and lobby, they just make it happen. Where are we in the path to cypherpunk utopia now? Is the cypherpunk dream gone?

The right to respect for digital integrity is an emerging right to protect people's digital lives.

This talk will introduce this new legal concept, its possible implications for data protection and how this concept is being introduced in the current legal framework. The talk will also be an update of the implementation work with the adoption of the right in the Constitution of Geneva voted with 94% approval rate on the 18th of June 2023. The right is also voted in November 2024 in Neuchatel, and a initiative has raised 10'000 signatures in Zurich.

Crypto commons are decentralized systems that harness blockchain technology to enable collective stewardship of shared resources. While offering innovative mechanisms for scaling commons governance, these systems introduce critical tensions between individual utility-maximization and the communal values foundational to managing shared resources. This talk examines the political economy of crypto commons communities, focusing on how internal social norms and crypto-economic mechanisms interact with external market pressures. By critically analyzing the promises and limitations of blockchain-based governance for scaling equitable resource management, this presentation introduces an often overlooked subculture in crypto that offers an alternative perspective on the (f)utility of blockchain for post-capitalist systems design.

An introduction to the theory of (wireless) mesh networks. We try to describe the problem that routing tries to solve, concepts and challenges.

Keywords: loop detection, hidden node problem, identificator/locator, distance vector vs. link state

The future of global sustainable prosperity lies in decentralized energy production.
Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm offers a unique solution to grid stability and off-taker risk by rewarding computational work in a highly flexible manner regardless of location which in turn increases its own decentralization.

In 2014, the Singaporean Government launched its Smart Nation initiative, a tech policy framework aiming 'to harness infocomm technologies, networks and big data to create tech-enabled solutions', which was recently refreshed as 'Smart Nation 2.0' - with sub-initiatives like the Open Digital Platform and Singpass Face Verification as practical implementations of the Smart Nation vision.

With the massive scale of data collection under Smart Nation 2.0, are there any guarantees of data privacy? Could these initiatives be used for the purpose of mass surveillance on the public by any administration, future or current? This talk seeks to analyze these implementations of the Smart Nation initiative as a case study for the social, political and privacy implications of the Smart Nation initiative as a whole. What does the concept of a "smart nation" or "smart city" mean for us as hackers?

In my talk 'Art with the EVM and Zero Knowledge Proofs', I'll explore the possibilities of working with smart contracts and zero knowledge proofs through three of my works. These trustless blockchain-based pieces reveal the unique properties of decentralized programs as an artistic medium, drawing parallels with historical movements such as systems aesthetics, net art, and the demoscene.

The open source, open hardware security key Nitrokey 3 will be introduced. What you can use it for such as two-factor authentication, passkeys, FIDO2, OpenPGP smart card and more. Also ask any technical question on the Nitrokey 3 or general questions regarding the Nitrokey project.

During this workshop, we'll install GNU Boot on people's computers either internally (via software) or externally (with a flasher, requiring to open the computer).

Computers you can bring will be what we currently support (see https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuboot/web/status.html). Do not hesitate to prepare information for us, like hardware specifications, and think about making a backup before coming!

A collaboration table where CCC attendees work together to achieve goals. Bring your project, and in one-hour sessions, connect, brainstorm, and make progress.

A hands-on workshop on Micro Reticulum.

Warum verformen sich Metalle und brechen nicht wie viele andere Dinge? Wie können wir verhindern, dass sie sich verformen? Wie funktioniert Verformung überhaupt? Diese Fragen erkläre ich mit einer Einführung in die Metallurgie und ihre physikalischen Prozesse.

Offworld.Voyage is an astronaut training project focused on the design and development of self-contained ecologically sustainable all-vegan research facilities - intended for use in live immersive simulation missions that solve for interplanetary exploration as well as adaptation to the extremes of a rapidly changing biosphere on Earth.

During this workshop, we'll install GNU Boot on people's computers either internally (via software) or externally (with a flasher, requiring to open the computer).

Computers you can bring will be what we currently support (see https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuboot/web/status.html). Do not hesitate to prepare information for us, like hardware specifications, and think about making a backup before coming!

There will be a follow-up install party on Monday afternoon.

Z-Wave is a mesh network commonly used in smart homes. The new Z-Wave Long Range enhances the local private sub-G network with distance up to 2 km. This allows rouse Z-Wave beyond the smart home field, e.g. in commercial automation and agriculture.

This talk will be about the new features of Z-Wave Long Range, implemented security and possible applications.

I'll go through known security threats, protocol evolution and comparison with competing solutions.

I'll show how to make your own Z-Wave and Z-Wave Long Range devices and controllers using Z-Uno SDK and Z-Way software.

Complicated configuration and leaky primitive structures are harmful and continue to plague applications that attempt to integrate with anonymous overlay networks. Let's learn how to treat our users better and build applications which will make privacy the default, and not an add-on.

This workshop/talk is geared toward developers from beginner to expert. Some familiarity with abstract types is helpful but not necessary.