 All right, for those of you who are just walking back into the room, we're switching it back up to the opportunity and global impact track. Next up, we will hear from Mario Havel, and he will be sharing what he has learned from building a parallel economy using Ethereum. Before I introduce Mario, do we have friends in the audience from Central Europe today? Raise your hands, Central Europe. Cool, cool, cool. Okay, Mario is someone I've had the great pleasure of hanging out with and also learning from. He is a protocol supporter and researcher working with the Ethereum Foundation, co-founder of the Bordell Hacker Space. A bit louder. Mario has been building and educating local communities in Bratislava, Prague, Barcelona, inspired many people to live crypto-native and contribute to the free and open source software ecosystems. Please join me in welcoming Mario. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for the lovely introduction. I really appreciate that. And I'm excited there is so many friends from Central Europe here because, so what I'm planning to do here today is actually to share a bit of experience from Central Europe, experience of building local parallel policies. So the name of the talk in the schedule is Building Parallel Economy, but that's too narrow a topic and it will be actually more about parallel society, parallel structures in general. So yeah, so that's the first question I guess. What is this parallel society? What are these parallel structures I'm talking about? And yeah, let's see where it leads. So first of all, to somehow define, somehow explain what are the parallel societies. Let's talk a bit about theory of social change. I believe that many people in the world, but especially all of you folks here have ideas how to make world better, how to improve societies, how to make betterment for everybody, because well, there are many issues in the current society, in the governments, in the cultures and there are a bunch of utopias, but especially there are various ways how to achieve the change, how to achieve this improvement. And I will very oversimplify the social change theory. I'm very sorry about that, but to sum it up, we have some top-down approach to changing society, which is we can imagine some politician creating better rules which will improve the life. We have, also I vote, right? I'm giving my voice to somebody speaking for me, so he has then top-down power. The bottom-up approach, coming from communities, coming from people, from activists, whether it's entrepreneurial, non-profit activism, and people actually building projects which are church permissionlessly changing the world. And within the social change, I also have to mention revolutions, which are another, maybe kind of sudden kind of change in society. I hope you can see the slides through me, actually. Yeah, nice. And we can argue about many issues of these approaches. First of all, there is the violence involved, especially in the top-down approach. When we have government enforcing rules, it requires coercion. Also, revolution can be kind of violent. And there might be hidden violence even in some bottom-up approaches. So that's one of the critique. And the second thing is effectiveness of various approaches to social change and the effectiveness in the terms of social context, I would say. So the problem with, for example, the top-down approach is that the politician or somebody who is creating these rules for us needs to follow the zeitgeist of society, the social context. For example, the politician in very conservative country cannot make very liberal reforms. So he always needs to follow what the electorate wants. But also in the bottom-up systems, we are limited by the social context in multiple ways, like when you are creating a movement which is too outside of the overturned window, it's hard to gain traction. And you might be even out-sensored. And also in the activism, we see these limits where I'm putting my productive energy to something I believe in. But it might be used completely differently in the current social context. So for example, I'm building some open source tools. I'm contributing to some open source ecosystem. And now government takes this open program and uses it for an army, for example. So I've actually contributed to something I didn't want it at all. So yeah, so we can argue about effectiveness and issues for the social change. But the main issue here, or what I want to mention is that none of these work in totalitarian regimes. So in the authoritarian regime where you cannot freely vote, so the top-down doesn't work at all. You don't have freedom of expression. People cannot do any forms of activism. This is not possible. And so what I would like to share here is the experience from Czechoslovakia, which experienced decades of totalitarianism after communist regime, which started after Second World War. And in the late 60s, there was a kind of a liberal wave in the socialist communists to run Czechoslovakia, which argued for opening borders so people can actually travel to the West, for example, argued for certain free market principles and so on and so on. And of course, the big Soviet brother didn't like that. And as a part of the Eastern bloc, it was something which was very discouraged. And it resulted in invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. And yes, so the Warsaw Pact, the Soviets just sent tanks. And well, compared to Ukraine, these days, Czechoslovakia wasn't able to fight back. So for the coming years, it experienced strong Soviet-run communist totalitarian regime. And especially in the 70s, in the coming years, there was an era of so-called normalization, which was a wave of a strong totalitarianism. And this resulted in intellectuals, in people, in scientists, in artists being persecuted, being forced to become just workforce, not intellectuals. And people were persecuted, spied on. And of course, this kind of totalitarianism results in some opposition, in some distant movement. And there was, so around the whole Eastern bloc, there were many interesting and courageous distant movements. And in Czechoslovakia, there was also various of them, for example, like second culture, which was, for example, folk singers, artists like, but one important and probably the best-renowned distant movement from Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia need to mention is Charter 77. And Charter 77 was, well, it was a collection of essays. It was petition, which was appealing to government. So it starts to comply with, basically, what it promised to stop violating human rights, civic rights. And as peaceful as humanitarian, this movement was, the government really took it back. Government started to chase people behind Charter 77 and publicly destroying their figures. And basically, it was, yeah. So there are many interesting people on this picture. You might know, on the very left, Václav Havel, who later became the first president of Czech Republic and his world-renowned humanitarian liberal. And so the Charter, it was a collection of essays. It had few spokesmen. And one of the colleagues of Václav had one of the leading personas in Charter 77. On the right here was Václav Benda. And he, within this distant movement, he actually focused on exploring how is the movement itself evolving, how it reacts to the persecution from government. And he described it as Paralpolis. He noticed that this contra-culture, this persecuted subculture or movement is building parole structures, its own culture, its own education. We had, there was many books which were just prohibited. And these were distributed hand-written within these communities. So he described it as, yeah, as Paralpolis. And Paralnypolis, an original or Paralpolis, could be defined as set of strategies for creating some independent society. This is outside of the context. There's this big quote here by Erby Fuller. But it kind of sums up the idea that I have there. Basically, when I'm in the society like the communist regime, I cannot fight against it. We cannot have protests because we will be violently punished. We don't have any freedom of expression. We cannot write freely. There is only a single party, the communist party. We can vote. We cannot change anything. So we are forced to building free independent parole structures. And it's not just out of the necessity, but I believe that it's also effective and moral approach. This is something similar to what Gandhi says, right? Be the change you want to see in the world. And so, yeah, Paralpolis is, to me, a set of strategies, set of various parole structures. And here are some examples. So the pillars of Paralpolis would be not just the name of the talk is the Paral Economy, but here it's just within the context, right? So it's Paral Education, Paral Economy, Paral Culture, Civic Rights Protection, which was actually the main reason behind Charter 77, Paral Infrastructure, Governance Systems for these people. And this is not something which is strictly defined, which is like, OK, this is the Paralpolis, these structures. It's these are just examples. It's always based on the circumstances what the Independence Society actually requires in that moment. And it's completely up to you, right, the community, what it needs in that context. And yeah, speaking about the social context, when I mentioned before, so here is a beautiful thing which Paralpolis enables. And that's actually having these, let's say, design principles rooted in the Paralpolis itself. And so when we are building these Paral structures, we are building them on the basis of positive social context. And we can feel free to put our productive energy towards Paralpolis. Czechoslovak dissidents invented, it's something that's been described, but I would say it's anthropological constant throughout the history. We see people creating Paral structures out of necessity throughout the whole history, whether it's Christians who were persecuted in the ancient Rome, or in the recent history, maybe hippie movement or LGBT and similar countercultures ended up actually building their own Paral structures. OK, now where Ethereum fits in all of this. And Ethereum, like speaking about these technologies, I have to go all the way back to Cypherpunk. And Cypherpunk is another movement which actually comes to life in the late 70s and 80s. And this was a movement, a community of various interesting people, many programmers, scientists, mathematicians, entrepreneurs, people who at a time where internet computers and encryption started to spread, the governments, well, wanted to fight with it. The government said the encryption is a weapon. It's something which only army can have. And wanted to limit what people can do with their computers, what can actually happen, what kind of encryption we can use. And Cypherpunks were people who stood against this, who not just built tools, as it's described here very nicely by Eric Hughes, built the tools but also created precedences against regulation of cryptography, for example, Fillmore, who started EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, very renowned in today. And so the Cypherpunks. So the first part here, it's a part of a Cypherpunk manifesto by Eric Hughes. And the second part is a manifesto of cryptonarchy, which is a movement growing from the Cypherpunk. And the manifesto was written by Timothy C. May, the guy on the left in the picture. And Timothy May took the idea of the Cypherpunk even further, not just to protect ourselves, but to actually achieve freedom through the digital technologies. It's like 30 years old, it was further distributed on a conference, Crypto-88 in 1988. And I have to say, it's very prophetic if you read it. And he's arguing basically about what we see today. I believe that today, when you look at the world, when you look at the digital world, the digital realm, is, well, I would say bigger than the physical one. It's maybe even more important. And we can leverage these technologies because the government, the autorityans, will have the power, the coercion power, in the physical world, but they are losing it and maybe never really headed in the digital one. And that's thanks to tools of Crypto-anarchy. The Crypto-anarchy is a bit like something, something ideological, like it's some political idea, like anarchism based on crypto, I don't know. To me, Crypto-anarchism is a set of tools. It's a toolbox, which allows for many important things. Generally, I would say that Crypto-anarchy allows to build human interactions more voluntarily rather than based on coercion. And it comes with many important tools, with tools for anonymity in the internet, digital money, encryption, and privacy, which I believe is the fundamental building for freedom. So we have this parallel polis, which is a set of strategies for building independent parallel structures. And now we have Crypto-anarchy, which is a set of tools for building independent communities. Well, it kind of fits together, doesn't it? So there is this lovely building in Prague called parallel polis, as you can see, instead of Crypto-anarchy. And I would say this building is actually like the manifestation of the connection between the physical and digital world. And this is where it comes together, in the idea that we can build these parallel structures, these independent communities, thanks to the tools of Crypto-anarchy. And parallel polis has been running for over nine years now, educating about these technologies and experimenting with them. So in the talk, I would like to actually later explain some examples of how we experiment with Ethereum as tool of Crypto-anarchy for building parallel societies. But one piece that got parallel polis famous is actually this little place, Bordel. And many of you who followed the merge might have heard about Bordel WTF, but it's named after actual physical place, which is in basement down there of this building. And the basement is called Bordel. And you might know these memes about the Robston merge with the whole Get Team, which happened there. So the parallel polis is like open platform. Talking about a specific project, it's open platform for various communities to meet. Because when various communities, I'm now talking about the Crypto, not just Ethereum, but we have Bitcoiners, Monero people. I have Monero socks here. And also people who are actually building privacy tooling and encryption tooling and artists and so on, meeting this place and creating beautiful things. So there are a few things we experimented with in parallel polis considering Ethereum. So I mean, I don't really have to explain this. I believe that you folks who understand Ethereum know that it's such a strong tool for what I explained, because it enables permissionless coordination. And I would say it's a cypher punk, solar punk, lunar punk, sage punk, and pixel punk tool. Very versatile tool. Kind of when I have a toolbox of the CryptoNarchy tools, Ethereum would be a Swiss knife, which enables me many things. And these are some of those few important things that we use in our little experiment with parallel polis. And first of all, the TEFI or the open finance, the permissionless finance, which Ethereum enables. This is something which is necessity for, well, I would say, dissidents or for people who don't have access to the traditional finance or don't agree with immorality of the traditional finance and want to explore the permissionless alternatives. And parallel polis, this building that I showed, accepts only cryptocurrencies for the whole of its existence. There is actually a Bitcoin cafe. It's a cafe which accepts only crypto. There is a co-working. There is many people coming to this building and they are forced to pay with crypto. So all the income is actually only cryptocurrencies. And it's kind of a mess to live crypto natively because of the volatility, because of the bear markets, which will come always, right? So thanks to Ethereum, we have tools like stablecoins. We have tools like collateralized loans. So the DEFI here is not about chasing yield farming, but about actually using this to survive economically in some parallel economy. So as an individual who is living without banks, it's a tool which is a necessity to be able to survive with just crypto. But also as the organization, as polis, it's great that we have the tool like loans. And it's not just using the tools, but there are also people coming from parallel polis who are creating these tools. There is PWN upon finance, which is aiming to bring mortgages for crypto natives for people who don't have or don't want to have access to the traditional finance. Public goods. I also didn't have to go deep in those because you folks are here. You understand what public goods meme in Ethereum is. But the realization here, how it clicks, it's super, it's really amazing, right? I mean, we have the whole, the parallel society, the parallel structures, which are mostly all public goods. The whole building that I show, it's non-profit. It's public good, which provides education. It provides platform. And it's something which needs to be funded, not via coercion, via taxes, or someone, but alternatively, regeneratively. And what we experienced is that parallel polis get sexifully crowdfunded multiple projects, not just for itself, but for example, the other tough COVID winter, the volunteers from parallel polis had a truck with Bitcoin coffee on the wheels and provided coffee for doctors fighting the COVID in the hospitals. And this coffee was free for them. It was crowdfunded mostly with Bitcoin and Fiat, not with Ethereum, to be honest. But still, the crowdfunding and the public good funding in Ethereum tools are much stronger. Parallel polis accept donation on Githcoin, on Give It. And generally, if we want parallel structures, they need this kind of funding running out of time. But yeah, the governance, another important part, we need reputation systems and governance. What we experimented with is, for example, tokens for people who are contributing for volunteers who get awarded with our own token. And based on this, you can track the contributions in the physical space, in the local community, but also in the digital one. Like example of the digital parallel polis would be, for example, the network states. There is Balaji's book about it. Vitalik has a good article on it. And or like network states or parallel or cloud societies or parallel societies, it all sounds the same to me. And these are local or digital communities which need governance and reputation systems. And Ethereum provides that. Parallel polis, the specific project in Prague, created these beautiful silver coins or medals. As a tribute to Alan Turing, the certificate of these is NFT on Ethereum. But also before we, there were coins, silver, and even some gold ones with iron swords, Ros Ulbricht and others. And these had certificate on Bitcoin as a multi-second Bitcoin. So it was kind of like a technology, but still this is something which sends crypto weddings were a cool idea which almost get materialized in the Slovak version of Parallel polis in Bratislava, where a lawyer was working on basically this parallel kind of wedding where, so as a homosexual, he was fighting for having same-sex marriages, which are not possible in this country. But he created, as a lawyer, he created the contracts, peer-to-peer contracts, which enable similar things as having the normal legal marriage. And the certificate of these can be a contract on Ethereum. It was, yeah. Yeah, security system. This was a concept which didn't get materialized, but there was a nice idea, a nice concept, about having like parallel, uber kind of polis based on Ethereum. In a way that I have a fountain, I have a physical device in my home which I fund through a contract, and when you come, you beep your NFC card like you have these cards with your ENS, and you get rewarded by basically securing the perimeter. As a proof of concept of these, we had, there was a bird feeder in Parallel polis, it's a cute project, which does this incentivization for, this kind of incentivization for feeding birds. So we have like a bird feeder with a device where you tip your card, you put there, you put there a bird seat, and you get paid from a contract where everybody can send money, right, for feeding the birds. So incentive systems and environmental protection, another important thing which Ethereum also helps with in free independent manner. There is a project which was also funded thanks to quadratic funding, which was at ETHPRAC in Parallel polis, and the turtles, and these are folks from environmental tabs from Parallel polis, who another piece of community which came and learned about this ecosystem, and these folks are coming to Indonesia, saving turtles, and the thing is that each turtle is unique, they have unique faces like people, so they make NFTs out of them, and you can adopt them, you can buy them and support the actual protection of the turtles, because it's a lot of work to be on the beach all the time and make sure that they're right. Yeah, good. I think I went through it. And so the motto that we use in Parallel polis is enter the outside. The idea here is that thanks to these technologies, thanks to these parole structures, we can, I don't want to say opt out, when people often say this opt out from the system, use crypto, you are opting out, but it's not like opting out to some vacuum, because you are actually entering something, right? So you enter the Parallel polis, but at the same time, you are entering outside. And better than English, I like it in Spanish, or Czech, enter la fuera. So yeah, enter the outside, I guess that's it. Thank you so much. I can't believe I made it on time, and I'm sure if we have room for some questions. Anybody? It's all right, thank you so much for coming, folks. I really appreciate all of you here. Hope you liked it, and I will be around here. You can find me if you see MaskedAnon, it's still me. Just leaked it, but whatever. Yeah, normally I work in the protocol support. It was totally out of EF stuff, but there is my email. Feel free to contact me or Twitter. Yeah, thank you so much again.