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Full-stack sovereignty with @TMIYChao
Recorded: Jan. 20, 2026 Duration: 0:59:31Space Recording
Short Summary
In an engaging discussion, crypto enthusiasts explore the launch of Bordel, a new hackerspace initiative that combines community funding through a crowd loan mechanism with innovative projects. Participants can earn a 2.5% APY while contributing to a physical space that embodies the spirit of decentralization and collaboration in the crypto world.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Mario, what's up, man?
How are you?
Yeah, perfectly.
Yeah, very well. Yeah, thank you so much, Nate. Yeah, very well.
Yeah, thank you so much, Nate.
Yeah, doing well.
How are you?
I'm good, man.
I'm good.
I'm glad we got no audio issues right off the bat, considering you're probably on some
hacked together open 3D printed hardware that you built.
Yeah, totally.
I mean, I'm on LibreWolf browser and it works, but I also tried to install the Twitter or, I mean, the X app on Android.
Because I remember some time ago when I was doing space, it gave me trouble, so I had to install the app.
And it turns out that the app doesn't work now.
I mean, I cannot log in on Graphene OS, so I learned something new.
you. That is good to know as I'm setting up Graphene. Inspired by you, I got a Pixel 9a,
That is good to know as I'm setting up Graphene.
and I still have to flash it on. I've just been delaying because I've been kind of getting back
into my old pattern of thinking really adversarially, thinking like, all right,
what coffee shop am I going to go to to set this thing up so that when I first log in to,
I think they
make you provide a Gmail account to first turn on the phone and even get to settings.
Um, but, uh, yeah, I've been delaying on it and I'll do it sometime in the next week, but
graphene is, is awesome.
And from what I can tell, it's come a long way in the last five years since I used it.
Oh, yeah, that's awesome.
Uh, really glad to hear that and glad to
hear i inspired you and if you need any help always feel free to reach out glad to go to
walk you through it next week and a good news is that you don't need a google account you um you
might need to just connect to wi-fi but without any login or anything uh and we have the same phone
that's awesome yeah perfect all right well then i can definitely ask you for help. That's awesome. Thank you, man. Yeah, we see we've got a couple people already joining. So we can just start and then everybody that wants to listen in later can can start from basically the very beginning because we started on time. This is great.
um so i uh i wanted to to cover all of the uh i guess maybe to give give an intro of yourself
would be would be best first um i know you from uh organizing the coolest events in crypto bar none
uh no exaggerations um hosting uh techno music parties um and uh and being the guy that is living the most, I would say the most,
the most cypherpunk that I'm aware of. There might be some John McAfee's out there still that are,
that are living like completely under the radar. But as far as I know, you've got probably the
most hardcore setup of anyone. And then of you're at the ethereum foundation building real stuff in crypto so um yeah that's that's how i would
introduce you and your claims to fame but um yeah go ahead and uh say hi everyone
yeah thank you so much nate uh it's a lovely intro and hey everyone listening uh let's see a couple people here hello and uh yeah um it was lovely and like yeah i mean i try it's one of my one of my um
strongest strongest beliefs is like to uh you know uh be true to my beliefs to my to my to my
words and when i preach something i actually want to use it i want to want to run it i want to uh
live by this role.
So I have like maybe what you would call some hardcore setups.
But you know, I'm still, it's still very relative.
There are people that I look up to that also have even more compromises
and more interesting things.
So I think we all, everyone has some space on the spectrum.
And I'm glad i can
inspire more people to to seek to um try something more and uh yeah i mean the most important thing
i mean if we talk about you know linkedin sort of like career-wise like yeah i work in ethereum
foundation for now now it's uh six years um uh working on the protocol on the ethereum core
I'm working on the protocol on the Ethereum core, helping to onboard new core developers mainly and help to ship hard works faster, making Ethereum better for everyone.
So that's sort of my normal life job, but in my hobbies to hack around and do some cool projects that can empower individuals and bring more
freedom to my life and to others.
Amazing.
What started you on this path of living your values?
And maybe even before that, what started you on the cypherpunk path?
How did you become a cypherpunk? Oh, wow. Well, I like to say that I'm inspiring cypherpunk path how did you how did you become a cypherpunk oh wow uh well i like to say that i'm
inspiring cypherpunk right like i think that the the word is being thrown out too easily these days
and uh i like to say that you know with my setup i'm still not quite there and i and i aspire and
i aspire to be a cyberpunk and and i aspire that for like maybe almost 10 years now because, I mean, if we go way back, I mean, it started basically my childhood.
I was sort of questioning the system when I was in elementary school and I realized like, you know, the school system is just flawed and learned about some maybe libertarian stuff about free education and some Austrian economy.
And then during high school, I discovered a local hackerspace.
I discovered this community of hackers, also sort of libertarians, kryptonarchists.
And that's where I learned about these values, the kryptonarchy, the cypherpunk.
There was a progress bar hackerspace in Bratislava that started all of that.
And then Paralnypolis
in Prague. So basically through the local communities. I mean, that's why I believe
in the impact of real communities and actually meeting people. And it was sort of a
philosophical training that I went through because I was inspired. It was a completely
new world, right? Being sort of a kid and discovering
all of this um and uh always questioning the system because because i see just uh so many
so many things being unfair and and uh everybody trying to put me on the on the same path right
like oh you need to study this you need to find some uh some job and you need to have your social security. And like automatically they put you in the system and it felt sort of natural to me.
And when I see people in the community, in the hackerspace who are able to use other tools than the mainstream,
who are able to opt out from the system, it was really inspiring.
And I realized that I have basically everything in my hands.
I was when I was 19 and graduated from the high school.
It was like I can do anything I want finally.
So I closed my bank accounts and found a job that pays me in crypto.
And I did it the way that I actually wanted it to do.
I dropped out from university and just fully focused on work in crypto and hacking and just being myself.
You've been doing this for five, six years now.
You've basically been living on open source hardware and software, I think.
What is the, like, what is the extent,
how, how far you mentioned there are people that are doing this more extremely than you.
And I'm very curious to know, uh, about more about what those people are doing that, that
you are not, but, um, like you showed me at, uh, at the conference that we went to in Santiago. You've hacked a Casio watch and made it give
like a bunch of different data. Can you talk about that? Oh yeah, I mean, I love Casio, right?
It's a nice little project. It's this mod by a hacker from New York, oddly specific objects. I
mean, all the credit goes to him uh did amazing work basically
designed a pcb a module that goes into the casio watch and now you have this regular casio watch
which everybody's been using for you know 30 40 years and and uh instead of the old simple board
you can just put a modern processor there it It's ARM CPU basically, and the firmware
can be programmed in C, so you have a hidden computer on your wrist, and whatever the segment
display lets you do, you can display there, you can do, so it has like accelerometer, it has also
NFC, but a bunch of little toys, like when you get bored, like some games
and a periodic table and time on Mars.
And it's also practical in the sense
that you can have some secrets there actually.
So for example, OTP, you can have OTP on your wrist.
It's more of a fashion choice than anything.
But that's one, I think we were at this dinner with friends and we realized how much your
watch tells about your personality, right?
Like we have somebody with Apple Watch, someone with like a fancy mechanical watch, somebody
with Garmin and I'm there with my Casio, right?
Like, and heck Casio, of course.
So I guess everyone has their preference.
And actually I've been also testing PintTime, which is this open source smartwatch with much more features.
I've been giving that a try.
It works sufficiently, not as smooth as I hoped.
But I love exploring these options and just trying out what's there, what is privacy respecting.
And just like
because we gave up on this right like everybody using these smart devices on their on their body
completely sharing all the data automatically and uh and i think we often forget like how
normalized this got so like having analog watch or and then and then like some uh digital which
watch or and then and then like some uh digital which doesn't actually share anything it's uh
it's weird that it's even special um yeah i mean i was um i want to branch off onto that uh you
know the idea that people have given up a bit on privacy and taking for granted that everything's
connected but i'm curious what do you think are like the coolest possible features that you could
fit into that watch like how far away are we from having think are like the coolest possible features that you could fit into that watch?
Like how far away are we from having a completely, like the latest local LLM running on that thing?
Oh, I mean, talking about the Casio, I mean, you are very much limited by the battery and by the computational power.
and by the computational power.
For example, a friend of mine,
who is from Argentina, coded his own app for the watch
that calculates the moonrise and moonset.
He likes to watch the moon above the horizon.
And just the calculation was so heavy,
it drained all the battery in a few days, right?
So you end up being limited by the physical constraints there.
But I think that, like, with, you know,
hopefully with the Moore's law moving and so on
and with the technology improving,
we can get some interesting stuff.
Like the big meme in Ethereum right now
is the validators under ZK.
So in the lean consensus,
we could have Ethereum validator running on a smartwatch because it's easy enough to validate a zero knowledge proof just with minimal hardware.
So that's one future that I'm looking to.
That's crazy cypherpunk.
Yeah, that would be incredible.
And that would definitely, I feel like, make the home stakers happy.
And it's a large contingent. So to branch off into that concept,
you mentioned that people have kind of given up on privacy. And Joel Valenzuela, and I talk about
this a lot, that it is entirely possible to live on free and open source and uh and on crypto can you talk about how the challenges have changed
over the years for you like when was it really difficult to do this because there was definitely
a point in time where it was it was like the challenges were new every day and it seemed
almost insurmountable but how has that evolved over the years for you right um i mean it's uh it's always maybe certain trade-off or certain
challenge in a sense that um it it evolves it gets developed it gets better every day and the
question is like when it stops being um an excuse right so um some years ago some of the technologies
you might have to be developer to be able to even run it.
And as more developers, that's the beauty of open source, right? Like the people,
the community build something, shares the documentation, improves it, and just gets
better and better. So it's up to you when you get on board and when you feel comfortable.
And I don't think that everybody should just try to be as hardcore as possible but they should strive to you know uh go for the um the free and open
source vision if they if they believe in it they shouldn't be shouldn't be afraid because uh there
will be always the community and people to help them and over the years yeah it definitely got
better i mean i started using linux maybe 10 years ago. And honestly, like I found it,
the onboarding is always the hard part. Like that's another thing that people are maybe
afraid of, like some different system. I'm switching from iPhone to Android, from Windows
to Linux, whatever. But these are just like patterns. These are just some things that
we learned. That's another thing about a school system that they force you,
they build your knowledge on proprietary tools, which is crazy.
And then you graduate and you need to pay a license to use your knowledge.
It's incredible.
So I think it's important to start as soon as possible.
I always say, you know, my kid is going to have like a desktop computer with Linux.
If he wants to game, he got to figure it out in the future.
But still, so the user experience just gets better.
And I think that it's like maybe learning to drive a car or something.
Oh, manual transmission.
That's so complicated.
How can I ever do this?
And after you spend a few days with it, you get a hold of it, and it's pretty easy.
And especially with certain big projects like Linux I mentioned here, it grew so much over
the years, and it's becoming more and more mainstream, especially these days with alternatives being so terrible. My mom uses Linux. She switched to Mint and immediately knew what to
do. It just reminds her of Windows XP from 20 years ago. So it just works. Yeah. And there are
some technologies that are really like more maybe technical oriented more for technical people i remember so when i got the pine phone uh five six years ago six years ago yeah it was like
january 2020 they released uh uh the pine phone like maybe the first like this modern smartphone
running on linux and i was excited to finally have a linux phone but it was it was the braveheart
edition more oriented towards developers so nothing worked like camera didn't work.
Even the calls, you had to, you had to do like some common land magic to even connect
to the, to the operator network to GSM.
So, so it was, it was funny.
It was more of a, something to play around.
And that's something that I, that I also like, you know, this just childhood wonder,
just this, this exploring and learning and then sharing, then sharing the documentation, your experience on forums, on Twitter or whatever, just to show people that this is possible, that you discovered something and share your tips and hacks.
And then it gets better.
And today, after five years, I mean, I tried again the PinePhone last year.
And you can have like a portable operating system.
You just connect to a monitor and you can have a tiny computer anywhere.
So it became much, much more usable over the years.
And that's maybe more of an extreme example.
But also, like you asked me about the open hardware.
It's one thing that's still a big challenge.
Like there is not enough open hardware,
like the open hardware is a big challenge.
And for example, what I'm running is core boot
on a modern Intel CPU.
And that became also very easy.
Like just a few years ago there to be able to do this,
you had to run some much older platforms,
some like 10, 15 years old Intel CPU. Now it's possible on like one two-year-old CPU,
which is just modern, same performance as you get anywhere else. So that's really nice. And
when I talk about people that are even more hardcore,
they would tell you that,
oh, but this core boot on modern CPU
still has some proprietary blobs.
It's not as free as it could be.
And you need to use this like 15 years old machine
to be even more free.
And it's more, maybe the diminishing returns.
Maybe it's like,
really like you want to be there for the philosophy
and I have a toy like that that that I use time to time, but not as the as the main main driver.
Yeah, I think.
Yeah, I think there's a distinction between types of freedom there that people miss where they're so focused on freedom from this concept of negative liberty from,
it was Hayek that wrote about this in the Constitution of Liberty. They're so focused
on how to get freedom from adversaries, namely governments and banks and large tech companies
with surveillance that they forget that the main goal is to have freedom to do whatever it is they actually want.
And it sounds like you strike a good balance. How do you find that balance?
How do you determine what is worth doing and what is just a cool but ultimately irrelevant side project for getting a little bit more privacy?
for getting a little bit more privacy?
I mean, you have to explore.
You need to give it a try.
Like, again, I mean, over the years,
I tried many things and I stick with some, right?
I like to explore.
I like to get excited.
And when something is not too much trouble
and gives me a reasonable, pragmatic result,
I stick with it.
I think there are two parts to it.
I like your framing, the freedom to, freedom from, and the freedom to, like, heck, to circumvent,
to play with stuff is also very important to me.
And I would also frame it as, like, whether I care about the morality, the philosophy of it,
that I want to be free because it's a stance,
it's something that I want to show, represent,
or whether it's really just pragmatic that I need this for privacy.
And from the pragmatic reason, anyone should seek privacy,
anyone reasonable should understand that I don't want to use this,
I don't know, AI camera that looks don't want to use this i don't
know ai camera that looks at me all the time and says everything to the cloud like that's pretty
basic um and uh and the question is like where the individual feels uh comfortable what is your
threat model and how much you care about your privacy or what is specifically your use case
although for me like right now we are on X, like a proprietary platform.
And I don't mind, I like to have this public.
I like to spread this anywhere I can.
But if I talk about something more sensitive, I would do it,
you know, without cameras, I would do it.
If I don't know, it's different when you are tweeting
and when you are using a computer
to for example, handle your finances, then you need much more security and privacy, right.
So it really depends on on on individual and I don't think there is a one one rule for
everyone like you should you should seek for this or this is what you must use, you know,
as much as I love to suggest tools and force people to use stuff that I like, people should find what they feel comfortable with.
Although I feel that we miss, and especially in crypto, people like to preach one thing but don't really practice it.
To really understand the ideas behind it the the not
just the open source but a free part in the free software yeah and i think um you know it's a great
point where it depends on a person's threat model but certainly in crypto people should be using a
little more of private applications whether that's for the crypto aspects themselves
and DeFi and doing their banking and whatnot, or whether it's communications about the kinds
of things that they're building.
And I can think of a couple alternatives to the mainstream apps that are used for these
things, but what are those in your mind? Like, what are some of those applications that you wish were used more by people in crypto to do the kinds of things that we do?
I mean, like in crypto, I mean, one thing that we need to realize is that we are here in our tiny bubble as well.
We actually care.
We actually use these things.
But most of the people just go on Coinbase.
They just install some proprietary app
and put their KYC
and just go to buy some coins, right?
So I think it starts from this,
avoiding KYC,
avoiding platforms that somehow hold you in
and embracing the actual tools like exactly what
you say like people in crypto should use more open source because the crypto uh bitcoin ethereum
everything it's open source the idea is that it's just math it's just a key pair it's so so uh easy
permissionless uh that you can just use i don't know uh simple python script to generate
those keys and run it right so having a wallet that's open source that's that's the first thing
and uh also um uh then uh the whole stack right what browser you use what uh operating system
and um having like this uh a little private corner for your for your crypto stuff and yeah the
the the thing with crypto is that there is also not one thing for for everything like if there is
a wallet that does you know 50 different currencies like it's not going to do one with
proper feature set so it's better to have like a proper monitor wallet,
proper Ethereum wallet,
and making sure that it's updated and it's open.
And yeah, I see many people or many crypto apps
also just depending on Chrome, Chromium,
without any other support.
And right now, like the Chromium is the majority of the web.
It's literally a monopoly pushed by Google.
So it's also something that I want to fight against, right?
Like just being the 0.01% that I can add to the user base of Firefox
and these apps and show that they should also care about the plurality of users.
Yeah, definitely.
And I think I really like something that you said there.
You said putting things into their own little corner.
It's like sandboxing not just your applications
on the operating system itself,
but to sandbox parts of your life and crypto experience.
You might not need to use the most private operating system
or even Linux for your daily activities.
I would recommend it because Windows and Apple are both able to,
maybe Windows to a greater degree, able to spy on their users,
and it's not free.
And we don't really know what they're going to do with the data in the future.
But I like this idea of sandboxing applications.
It's like, you know, you, you might only, so the point there I think is that you might only need
privacy for 10%, 20% of your life.
privacy for 10%, 20% of your life.
And if you want to sandbox those things,
then you can get a second phone and run something
like Graphene on it or run something like Lineage
on an old Android phone.
How do you think about that kind of setup
for most crypto people?
Yeah, of course.
I mean, so that's a basic uh uh like a security approach the compartmentalization
i'm not sure if you're not straight but like like in cubes right uh you have different compartments
you have different containers for for different parts of your life and also on the internet like
i don't know like uh internet for me always was like this um uh you can detach, you can have your own internet persona and different names, different personas, right?
And it's just the normies who put everything on Instagram and they just double down on their real life.
But I think it's so great that we have this like digital realm where you can have freedom and you can compartmentalize things.
and you can compartmentalize things.
And so having different devices, of course,
like the full separation, it's great,
especially if you think about,
if you are not sure about reinstalling your phone
and computer and just changing everything,
like, of course, you shouldn't do that
if you are not sure about it.
And many people have an old laptop,
old phone lying around that they can flash, they can install something on it and play with it.
I think this is one of the important things about Linux as well or other operating systems.
Like what Microsoft did last year was terrible with the end of 10.
the end of 10. And like, you have so many good electronics there that are that become
computer waste if you if you cannot flash Linux on it, if you cannot just run, run Linux
and make it a proper computer. So if you have, I don't know, 10 years of laptop, it's perfectly
usable. It's nice for all the basic stuff. It's all you need. But with some windows or
something, it would be basically unusable.
You can give it a second life and you can learn with it.
You can give it to your kids, parents.
You can write it as a server on a shelf.
You can do a bunch of things with it.
So also, like, I did a PS4 hacking two years ago.
Like, I run Ethereum node on Linux on PS4. So anything that's, you know, sitting on a shelf can be really utilized
to learn, to experiment, to give you freedom.
Yeah.
I get my godfather got a laptop from 2009 and it works well on Linux.
Amazing.
And these are cool hack kind of projects that I think, as you were starting to say earlier, they're not that difficult anymore. And I think especially in the age of LLMs, it's possible to troubleshoot just by vibe coding. I would encourage people to do that. I mean, that's what I've done to set up Linux operating systems on my old computers and now a newer computer
for my main driver.
I've got, you mentioned cubes,
the less technical among us,
cubes is a computer operating system
that sandboxes the applications
in the way that we were describing.
It segments the activity of the application itself into a section of the RAM of the computer.
So you'll have a bunch of different windows on your computer up, and they will not be able to communicate with each other.
And this is a really good privacy and security feature.
But you don't need to necessarily go to that extreme. You can have
something like Ubuntu is really standard Linux program, and you can run operating systems,
virtual operating systems within that pretty easily and have each of those operating systems
be for, say, one of your wallets or for one of your applications that you want to keep data separate between that you can even run windows within a linux environment and these are not
that technical this is you know 20 minutes 30 minutes of um chatting with the one of the latest
llms to help you set it up and uh so that's that's um i i would love if more people were using these free open source alternatives in crypto to secure privacy for themselves.
But I think it is kind of a culture thing.
And I would love to talk about culture in crypto with you.
What you know, how do you think the culture has been evolving and uh and you know
maybe we'll talk about where it can go from here right um i mean yeah it uh the culture evolved a
lot i mean i don't or i mean i feel weird to think about myself as an og or something, but I guess I've been around for a while because I felt like,
you know, 2016-17 when I was first like exploring these things more deeply, I thought like, you know,
this is already an established thing. Like there have been so many. Andra Santanopoulos was the
biggest name at the time. And today people don't even know about him.
The culture shifted so much that people like him,
who've been great technical and focused on the origin,
the core values, the cypherpunk background,
the economics, the SD economics,
they've been replaced by more mainstream oriented, right?
Like today, when you look at the, like with each wave, it comes in waves, right?
You have the bull run, the bear market,
and it's a wave that basically washes away what was before.
So many people don't know, many people that I meet
and they're biggest defenders of Bitcoin or something.
They came in like 2022, 2023 and have no idea what's been before, right?
And it's still very new for them.
And it's something natural, though.
It's something that happens.
There is a great article on the evolution of subcultures and invasion by mobs, the members of public.
And that's what that's
what really happened like uh the um the creators uh were the first the first wave and and then the
uh the enthusiasts who helped to spread it but as the as the uh public got more interested
sort of sociopaths and and promoters and influencers who tried to leverage
this came in and sell it.
They just sell it.
They just use it as a marketing.
They talk about making money.
They told that it's all about one narrative that they want to push.
And we forgot, I think, the diversity of the narratives.
We forget a bunch of these original values.
And, like, there are still people like us, even if they are coming new.
That's, again, like, why I care about the communities, why I care about movements.
Like, that's why we work on this hackerspace in Prague where we want to gather and create like a community
that's focused on the actual tools
and the actual values than just shilling hard, right?
Some token or some narrative.
And that's something that I think we need to continue defend
because we are getting smaller and smaller as the whole crypto industry and communities growing and the bigger it gets, it's the more normies or more people who are in just for some self interest or some monetary interest or some short term.
or some uh some monetary interest or some some short-term uh uh the more of these people get in
and we become smaller and smaller smaller part and uh and then the question is like what is this
whole thing it's not about uh those values it's not about uh um the crypto anarchy cypherpunk
anymore it's about uh i don't know mich Michael Saylor or something. It's very different.
Yeah, Number Go Up has fleshed out the ideologically aligned
or at least drowned out their voices over time.
Sorry, continue.
You were talking.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
The loudest voices are completely elsewhere,
but that's why we need to, we need to, we can't give up, right?
Like, if we care about this, we need to stay true to our values and help to still build this community and don't become like, you know, because I feel also what happens is that it's not just that there are new people coming in, but the old people, you know, they get rich or they just don't care anymore.
They get tired of it.
And I totally understand that.
Like if you've been in the space for 10, 15 years, like it might have been enough for you.
But that's why we need to foster the new generations and continue spreading these ideas.
A hundred percent.
And I think that's what you've been doing in a lot of your different initiatives. So I want to talk about the hackerspace that you've worked on before and the one that is coming up in a little bit, but maybe we done there and the culture, the actual like, you know, the people in the community that you've built there is one of, if not the most aligned with the cypherpunk spirit.
And it's partly because of the cool shit that you do.
It's like these epic parties that probably half of the people in this space have been some of these and know what I'm talking about.
But that to me is like the coolest possible culture that we could be building in crypto.
And you mentioned the Geeks, Mops and Sociopaths article. So I linked that. I also linked the
crypto version that I wrote about that article, drawing it to our space. And I have some ideas
on the kinds of things that we can be doing to revitalize the
culture in that way. But I think what you're doing with the hacker space is a good example of that.
It's like creating a cool community of people doing really impressive and nerdy and also
underground like anti-establishment things. How do you see that interacting with the broader Ethereum culture?
And what kinds of things would you like to see more of maybe in Ethereum in this vein?
Right. Yeah, thank you so much, Nate.
It's really lovely that you really consider it that cool.
And I didn't know that you have a crypto-run of the article.
I need to see that. That's exactly what I was thinking about.
Awesome. And how I see it in a broader Ethereum,
like, again, our goal is what you said, like, to create
a cool project, cool community, something that's
interesting and it invites people. Like, my idea is to, you know,
have something that is actually interesting that maybe creates art, brings
people who are interested in some art form, like you mentioned, party with interest in music and
visuals and lights and so on. But then they learn about the technology behind it, the actual ideas So to invite people in, not just for the monetary reasons, but for some other values that they resonate with and they can see it within our community as well.
Ethereum in a way that maybe is a bit more different, but like actually connects it to the real life, actually connects it to the physical spaces.
So, I mean, the goal is to have, you know, everything open source.
And we created the way that we want to fund this is also open.
It's the crowd loaning mechanism that's basically, you know, open contracts on Ethereum where anybody from the world can just lock money in a loan and loan it to us to run a physical space.
So instead of very abstract, like AVA-like loans that are somewhere in the cloud, somewhere on the Ethereum, and there are no specific names to it, there are not specific places to it.
specific places to it. This is more like, you know, down to earth specific real community that you can membership in the community, in the space.
If you enter, there is a physical log that you can open with your Ethereum wallet, for example, by signing, by proving zero-knowledge proof, so you also have privacy.
So we can experiment with some real-world features that are demonstrating the usefulness
features that are um that are uh demonstrating uh the usefulness of it the privacy and uh
of it, the privacy.
you know uh it's it's something that's I would consider it small I mean we are talking about
uh like a space for a couple dozen people and uh and uh some some good projects and there are
people raising millions for crazy startup ideas and completely, you know, heads in the cloud.
So the idea here is to have something more tangible, something that you can literally
touch, you can support it, but then use these technologies also to be active member in the
community and see the results, see the progress, see support specific projects
and participate in them, actually.
Yeah.
And so this, what you're describing, I think is what you're calling own at this point.
And this is a crowd loan that you've structured so that people can loan money, loan USCC, in order to fund the
purchase of a new venue for Hackerspace. And maybe before talking about the mechanics and
how this application works, which is really neat, can you speak a little bit about what you've been
doing already and how you've been involved in hackerspace this last iteration?
Oh, right.
And then what you're doing from here.
Yeah, of course.
So, I mean, I've been involved in a couple of hackerspaces.
I mentioned Progress Bar in Slovakia.
Then we opened Paralnapolis in Slovakia.
And later I've become part of Paralnapolis in Prague, which evolved into Bordel.
Paralnypolis in Prague, which evolved into Bordel.
Basically, in the basement of this place,
we opened our own concept called Bordel
that we've been running together with Josef,
who is listening here, and some other folks.
We created a tiny space with concentrated chaos, we call it.
So, you know, a lot of projects, a lot of people,
a lot of art in little meters squared.
And again, the idea of hackerspace by itself is to provide a community space for creativity,
for exploring, for sharing, for building together.
And that's a backbone of a movement of something that's actually fostering a community and some
also philosophical training and um and the people and the people that have uh sorry you you go and
i'll hold this thought yeah i mean go ahead go ahead we can i mean well i i wanted to share some
of the cool stuff that you guys had done at parallel only polis because i think it's funny
um there was one there are a couple of things that stood out to me and we've talked about this
before. One was the IDs where you had like 10 different people using the same ID because they
all looked a little bit like the composite image that was created. And there were some funny legal
shenanigans that came about from that. And then there was some funny legal shenanigans that that
came about from that and then there was the time that I think someone like broke
into was it the president or the prime minister's house and like blew his pants
on a on a flagpole I don't know there was something like that I don't know if
you're at Liberty to speak about this it was there was years ago more than than
years ago the founders of the original place the the whole project the there were there were these activist artists who um one of the
things they did was they um they climbed on the prague castle and took down the presidential flag
to put like big red underwear and the interesting part is actually that that uh what they did with
the actual flag they stole um With the stolen flag, they
decentralized it. They cut it into 1100 pieces and with each square, with each piece of the
flag, they attached a Bitcoin private key. So they basically gave money back to the people who've been uh paying the the damage in texas anyway right um and it was 2015
it was like two bitcoins at a time um yeah and i wonder if any of them kept that those are like uh
that's like second generation cascadius coins almost and it was actually way before my time
i mean it was it was i mean as i started to get into space, these were the sort of cool things that influenced me to learn more about this.
And I want to do more of this cool stuff to influence the next generation.
And so in our own hackerspace in the basement, we did a couple of our own projects, which were more maybe hardware-oriented or software-oriented.
We've built this Bitcoin ATM that's fully offline, so you can sell Bitcoin with the internet.
We had NFC cards for Bitcoin Lightning, first in the world.
for Bitcoin Lightning first in the world.
So we experiment with Bitcoin technologies, with Ethereum.
So we experiment with Bitcoin technologies, with Ethereum.
It was also before we started this,
but there was in the hackerspace,
there was a project of Ethereum bird feeder,
which also inspired me a lot,
because it was something like you have a bird feeder
that where is Ethereum contract
that rewards you for feeding the birds.
It was like a proof of concept,
but something that also inspired me to think about these things more in a tangible, physical way. Because when you try to onboard people and you
talk about the DeFi and all of these contracts, it's very abstract and it's very hard to imagine.
But if you have examples like this that you feed a bird or you come to Hackerspace and you are able
to open the door by paying or by proving your membership,
that's something that's actually tangible.
So we've built a couple of these projects.
There was a cat toy that generates randomness
and can secure private keys.
Actually, if you're using Ethereum layer twos,
they use the blobs, the KZG cryptography,
and that's secured by like 20 cats,
thanks to our little project project uh catropideer
um so this like amazing art and and technologies that's uh that can inspire people yeah
well not to mention that i think it was bordell was where the merge was launched out of
yeah yeah like you guys are doing some official legit stuff. I mean, it's this perfect combination of the cypherpunk and the playful.
And, you know, you've got that.
I think that's essential to revitalizing the spirit of crypto.
Yeah, I mean, totally.
Exactly what you said.
Like some playfulness and some interesting projects.
some playfulness and some interesting projects.
That's exactly the goal.
That's exactly the goal.
And the merge, the Bordel merge was probably the moment
where we really like got forever aligned
in the Ethereum culture community
because the many core developers,
like I don't know, more than half a dozen core developers
from the GoEthereum team, the biggest client,
met there in the Bordel basement where we coordinated the Robsten merge.
And actually the countdown, because I was working on the core development and my role in the proof of stake transition was to time it, to do the math basically to, to figure out when it's supposed to happen, to schedule it.
And the scheduling tool that was always publishing this data
was on the Bordel.wtf.
It was so funny to see, like, I don't know, Vitalik, CNBC,
like all these, you know, biggest outlets
talking about huge Ethereum change,
and you can follow it on BordelWTF which was
the hackerspace domain that I grabbed
and it was like the first thing I could use
only available domain I had at the time to
just quickly deploy during the testing
and stick
and that's where you posted the
loan primitive that you guys have
for yeah and right now we are
using it as an actual
hackerspace website yeah there is still archive of the that you guys have for... Yeah, and right now we are using it as an actual HackerSprits website.
Yeah, there is still archive of the merge stuff,
but I continue to use the website for the HackerSprits.
I posted the link to the loan.
So maybe we could spend a few minutes
talking about the crowd loan primitives
that you've created and how that works
and what it does and how people can participate.
And I'd like to close by asking a little bit more about communities.
And I have another question to float for you at the end.
Okay, yeah, cool.
So I want to crowd loan because, as I mentioned, I've been part of a couple of hackerspaces over the years,
paper spaces over the years, like these basically four different projects.
like these basically four different projects.
And with each of them, the problem was the rent, the survival.
If you're running a nonprofit community, it's just always hard to survive.
You need to manage the memberships.
You need to have some sustainable model.
And with big enough community, it's possible,
but it's always like investing into someone else's property
and then getting, I don't want to be vulgar,
but yeah, you know, you get scammed often.
We had problems with the people who rented the space
and they basically own everything that we build there, right? If we
want to do some cool art installation, change the space to our vision, it stays with their property,
not with ours, because they can just kick us out anytime. So the idea here is to actually own a
building, to have, again, something tangible, something real that we can
have and show that all these crypto schemes are not just like some speculation, but you can use
it as an actual mortgage, you can use it as an actual loan to have a physical space like you
would get if you want to get an apartment or something and um on the example of uh the
community space we created the crowd loan so we call we call it crowd loaning because it's uh
similar to maybe crowdfunding uh uh with the idea that in crowdfunding you know you just
you want to buy some new cool gadget you uh put you know 50 bucks and you get a gadget and hopefully they will build it and ship it to you
one day with this the idea is to use the blockchain to use the smart contracts that we have for quite
some time now to to leverage even more liquidity so the idea is to enable people to not give us 50 bucks for the membership, but to just lock it, to lend us
some money, some liquidity, as the same way as we would get maybe mortgage from a bank, but, you know,
out of the system, we are bankless. So instead of going to a bank, we go to the community, we go to
you people. And as individuals, you can decide to allocate capital towards something that you like.
So you can just take part of your liquidity.
You have some, you know, a couple thousand dollars in your savings.
And instead of sitting on a bank account or in some DeFi somewhere on Aave, you can lend it to a real community.
You can lend it to the uh to the contracts that we have so the contract is basically like uh
uh uh uh uh a peer-to-peer loan but it's like peer to any anybody can look in money many people can
look in uh their liquidity and if it reaches the threshold similar to crowdfunding it needs
to reach some threshold uh 180 000200,000 in our case.
If it reaches a threshold, we can activate the loan and based on the collateral that we put there, of course,
we can activate it and take out the USDC, the stable coin,
to get a physical building.
And then we paid back based on the membership.
So instead of paying a rent, we use the profits of the space
to pay back the lenders,
even with some interest rates.
So you get an interest rate,
you get 2.5% APY
as doing some conservative crypto investment
or something.
And at the same time,
you are actually funding some real projects. And my
idea is that, you know, this also can enable people to leverage more of their liquidity
instead of, you know, giving away money, they can just, they will get everything back. So
they don't need to be worried that it's, you know, they are giving away 1000 bucks or something
because they will get back 101,025, right?
And now if you think about it this way, there is some interest rate.
Maybe if you care about the interest rate, if you care about the profit, you would go to some fancy DeFi with like, I don't know, 5%, 7%.
So let's say you can get 5% extra elsewhere.
And instead, you look at to Bordel loan where you get only 2.5.
Well, you lost 5%, which is 50 bucks on a thousand.
So that's the $50 donation that you gave us.
You gave us the donation of a lower interest rate.
And based on that, you have the different tiers.
You have the different like crowd loaning, crowdfunding tiers where you get membership
in the space.
You get t-shirt, you get for some higher
donation, you get like maybe some partnership tier and so on. And the idea there is, again,
not just to give away the money and forget about the project, but you are basically vested in it.
And now that also, I believe, can motivate people to just stay in touch,
to actually visit the place, to claim their membership.
And during the next couple of years,
when we are paying back the loan,
you can be in touch and make sure
that we are paying you the money back.
I mean, of course we get liquidity if we don't pay it,
but still you can uh you can
be there and and follow the projects because you are actually actually vested so it creates also
some long-term relationship I hope um yeah yeah and I I love the framing of you know it's a it's
basically a donation of the APY that you would earn over the time period. And it comes out to not be too much,
especially when you compare it to what you're getting
and what you're funding.
You know, the vision of this,
like you get a level of membership at Bordell
and when it launches,
and every time you check into ETH Prague,
you could have benefits that you're tapping into
by being there, not to mention the other
in the side events and things like that, that, that token dynamics and punk.fun definitely want
to host and be a part of, but the others that the people might be doing in the same timeframe.
So there's this element of it's, it is a, it is a donation, but we're a service.
And then there's also the ideological component.
It looks like I'm reconnecting.
I was saying there's also the ideological component of what the vision of what you're funding.
This is like, to me, this is the, you are prototyping the infrastructure for network states.
And that's the thing that I find the most compelling about this.
And so what I wanted to close with is asking you
how you view this community scaling or evolving over time
and how you see it being maybe a part of the network state vision
in the next five, 10 years.
Yeah, right.
I mean, so this is really just basics, right?
Like we start from zero with first like prototyping this crowd loaning, this like funding mechanism.
Then we will, I mean, we already figured out something, but then also like what we are doing is buying the physical property for crypto.
That's another sort of showcase that we can do
and then just fostering the community building projects that's that's the first step and as it
gets established i would like to see um what they'll becoming more of an um more of an uh
hub of uh projects and people that can deliver some useful tools by training and building
people and then having them build cool things, connecting them with the right people, with
investors or something that could create even the long-term sustainable model of uh of having um not really an accelerator but
some sort of like active community that um uh that has hands in many different projects and
different different domains and with the network states like i mean we talked about this also with
with jared and with with logos like uh some of these network sit projects are very much aligned
with everything that we do so um i think i see clear integration there that the tools that uh
that they uh provide and uh also the ideological training can and um the communities need to be
integrated to become part of something bigger so it's's not just like, you know, we are doing one cool thing that you can visit in Prague,
but we are part of a much wider community where we can collaborate and we can make it stronger.
We can explore their tools and provide our take on it.
Like, for example, the membership mechanism that I mentioned,
that's something that could be applied in a network state.
And the sort of an education platform or sort of like alternative school mechanism is something that I'm also interested in.
And of course, we will do a bunch of like workshops and education in the space.
and education in the space,
but that's also something that needs to be shared
and collaborated across a wider community
of whether it's a network state or whatever you call it.
We used to call it cloud societies back in my day as well.
And that's the idea here basically
that we are leveraging this network,
this global community to empower the local communities
and building the symbiosis.
Awesome.
And with that, I think we're at the top of the hour.
So you guys heard it.
I mean, you've heard the vision.
And I would say it's not just that Bordell will be this.
It will be a group of aligned builders that are creating epic technologies for social coordination, but they already are.
A handful of them are in this Twitter space already.
And I appreciate you guys for showing up.
Thank you for what you've done.
Thank you for what you're doing.
And thanks for joining this space today.
And everybody else, I posted the link. It's loan.bordell.wtf in the space today. And everybody else, I posted the link,
it's loan.bordell.wtf in the chat here.
Go throw 50, 100, 200 bucks in there.
I mean, it's really,
you're going to be getting the money back over time.
It's streamed back to you.
The contracts are super secure
that they're a fork of code
that's been audited in production for years now.
And there's very little downside risk.
So not financial advice, but go make a donation to this epic project.
Mario, I'll let you close it out.
Yeah, thank you so much, Nate.
No, I really appreciate you.
I appreciate your kind words.
I appreciate you having me.
And yeah, I mean, please do support Bordel in any means you can I mean you can always reach out and
you know ask about anything if you're interested in helping with something specific or just you
know being part of the community everyone is welcomed and come visit us during Eat Prague
or whenever you visit Prague hopefully there will be a basement you can ring and have some friendly
people to give you a tour. Yeah, guys, definitely second that shout out to ETH Prague. And I hope
to see all of you there and everybody else that listens to this after the fact. Thank you all for
joining and we'll talk to you next time. Awesome. Hope you liked it. Have a great day, everyone.
Bye-bye. Thank you.
