Blog on hack.bs

Coworking space, Bitcoin shop, eventi, e tante news

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We promised to send regular updates on the blog, and here we are, 7 months since the last post.

Don’t hate us! :P

The Coworking Space

Our coworking space is finally open to the public!

Let’s be honest; we’re not a luxury coworking space. The place is a bit spartan, but it’s filled with friendly folks, and that’s what really matters, right? :)

Our rates:

Daily entrance: €15

5-day pass: €50

Monthly subscription: €120

Quarterly subscription: €300

Due to limited seats, we need to implement a waiting list. If you’re interested in our coworking space, please register here. We’ll get in touch with you as soon as possible!

Please note that the coworking space is open to members only; the membership fee is €10 per year and can be obtained directly at our location.

The Bar

“Bar” might be a bit of an overstatement - hack.bs has a red refrigerator filled with drinks. Hooray!

The Bitcoin Shop

Our location hosts a small Bitcoin-focused shop where you can purchase:

Official hack.bs T-shirts
Official ‘Il Priorato del Bitcoin’ T-shirts
Jade hardware wallet
Coldcard hardware wallet (coming soon!)
The book ‘Villaggio Bitcoin: l’alba di una società nuova basata su una moneta sana e onesta’
Stickers - some are free, and some are not :)

We have plans to expand the shop and eventually open an online store. Stay tuned!

Events

In the past few months, we’ve organized various events, including:

Monthly meetup - once a month, a meetup with a presentation followed by dinner
Satoshi Spritz Brescia - an informal meetup for Bitcoin enthusiasts in Brescia
Hackerspace nights - once a week, members gather at our location to work on various projects related to the space

We plan to continue organizing these events and start film clubs (nights where we watch a movie all together and discuss it), hackathons (programming competitions), informal meetups, and much more!

Even beautiful things come to an end…

…we’ve reached the end of the post :(

To stay updated, follow us on our social media:

Twitter - @h4ckbs
Instagram - @h4ckbs
Telegram Channel (in italian) - hack.bs

Until next time!

Wen Open

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post is a quick update on the work going on behind the scenes to finally open the hackerspace.

The Good News

The good news is that we’ve received the keys from our landlord, and the whole space has been finally cleared of all the furniture that had been left inside by the owner.

The Bad News

The bad news is that removing the furniture allowed us to finally see the naked space for what it is, and there are definitely a few things that need to be fixed. It’s not going to be a major renovation, but still it will slow us down and delay the opening of the space.

We are now talking with our landlord to coordinate the work between us and them, splitting the expenses that they’ll have to cover, and the ones we will. The silver lining is that most of the work should be under their responsibility, so at least it won’t cost us too much money, but it will cost us in terms of time and delays.

So Wen Open

For the time being the honest answer is that we don’t know. We could be ready in April if everything goes smoothly, but it may also take longer depending on the availability of the contractors working on the space. Luckily the work required is mostly labor-intensive, so it shouldn’t be subject to delays in gathering the material itself, but when other people are involved in the process we cannot have any certainty.

More Updates

Other than the office everything else seems to be moving forward quite nicely. Since the last update we have:

Completed the paperwork to register the association, the rent and utilities contracts, and submitted everything to the relevant state entities.
Finalized the design of our stickers: we’ve designed, ordered, and received the stickers for hack.bs. We ended up producing five different designs, and they will be shipped soon to everybody who donated to us in the past few months.
Finalized the design of the t-shirts: we settled for two awesome designs, and already placed an order for 100 of them (50 of each type). They will be ready by the end of next week, and afterwards we will start shipping them out to our supporters.
Speaking of supporters, we’ve also received an unbelievable amount of support from the Bitcoin community: we are now at 5k+ EUR of donations received, plus a 2.1M sats grant from Geyser.
We’ve been doing PR work, speaking about the space at a few events and podcasts, namely: Builders In Bitcoin EP #27, Citadel Dispatch EP #87 and Priorato del Bitcoin.
Lastly, we’ve been working on furnishing the place, and we’ve already taken delivery of a few desks, chairs and one large sofa. We have more of them coming soon, but we are pausing deliveries until the renovation work is done.

Video

We want to close this post by showing you a video of the space. It’s really messy at the moment, but keep in mind this is just our starting point. There are two floors filmed in two different videos:

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The ground floor will host the main office space (in the large room) and the “coffee area” in the back, with couches and a space designed to relax and socialize.

The basement will become our “garage”, where the noisy stuff will go. Think about 3D printers, CNC machines (like the one that has been recently gifted to us!), servers, etc.

In conclusion, we are very excited about the progress we have made in setting up hack.bs. We couldn’t have done it without the support of our community, and we are grateful for every donation, grant, and word of encouragement that we have received. We are looking forward to completing the renovation work and welcoming visitors to our new space soon. Stay tuned for more updates on our progress, and thank you for being a part of this journey with us.¹

This closing paragraph was written by ChatGPT, and is so much better than anything else we could have written ourselves. ↩︎

We Finally Have a Home

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It’s official: today we signed the lease contract for a commercial space right in the city center!

It’s a relatively big commercial space, at the ground floor, in a very central area. This space should be more than enough for our initial community, with room to spare for growing and hosting larger events in the future.

The place is very close to the main subway station that serves the city center, Vittoria. It’s only a 4-minute walk from there. It’s also close to the train station, at around a 9-minute walk.

The full address is Contrada del Cavalletto, 24, Brescia¹.

View Larger Map

There’s still a bit of work left to do before we’ll be able to open to the public, but this was one of the most critical tasks and being done with it means we are making a huge step forward.

We are now looking into furnishing the office and if everything goes smoothly we should be able to host a grand opening event in the month of March. If you don’t want to miss it make sure you are subscribed to our mailing list!

Want to help? We are looking for used furniture (desks, office chairs, shelves, couches) to fill up the place. If you live closeby and have something you want to get rid of, we’ll be happy to come pick it up :)

For everybody else: just hang tight, we’ll be ready soon!

Writing this blog post we realized OpenStreetMap doesn’t know where the number 24 is located on that road. We’ll submit a fix soon! ↩︎