Home on hack.bs

Coworking

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re looking for a coworking space in the Brescia city centre, you’re in the righ place! We’re open everyday, from Monday to Friday, from 9:00 to 18:00.

Our prices:

Daily entrance: 15€

5-visit pass: 50€

Monthly membership : 120€

Quarterly membership: 300€

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.

Bitcoin Shop

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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’ by Valerio Dalla Costa
The book ‘Mamma ho comprato Bitcoin!’ by Lorenzo Primiterra
Stickers - some free, some for a fee :)

Donate

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

You can support our project by donating Bitcoin, either on-chain or via Lightning, to our campaign below.

No matter how small the amount may be, we express our deep gratitude to those who generously donate their hard-earned satoshis to our cause. We love u ❤️

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:

There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it. There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it.

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! ↩︎

Cypherpunks

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties. The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech, and it will not go away merely because we might want it to.

Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.

Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.

Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one’s identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.

We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor’s younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.

We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.

We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.

Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don’t much care if you don’t approve of the software we write. We know that software can’t be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can’t be shut down.

Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation’s border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.

For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one’s fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.

The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace.

Onward.

9 March 1993

Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>

HackForHire 2025

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Join us for an exciting 24-hour coding marathon with a unique prize up for grabs: a job offer from TwentyTwo Devices to work on their latest project!

What

The goal of the hackathon is to build a multi-platform (Android, iOS) app using a technology of your choice (native, flutter, react native, kotlin MP, etc.).

More instructions will be given at the beginning of the event to ensure a level playing field, but you can expect to be given a topic for a very simple app, which you will then have to build (it will only take a few hours) and then expand with your own ideas.

No prior knowledge or experience with Bitcoin or hardware devices is required. Just mobile development skills are needed.

Who can participate?

Anybody can participate, but you need to be over 18 years old. We don’t care about credentials, age, or experience: we only care about your dedication and creativity. Students are welcome to join, but since the position will be full-time if you decide to accept you won’t be able to keep attending classes.

Since we are looking for a single person, we won’t accept teams but only individual participants.

When

The hackathon will take place on Saturday, March 22nd 2025 and Sunday, March 23rd 2025. The competition beings at 12:00 PM (noon) on Saturday and ends at 12:00 PM (noon) on Sunday. Afterwards you will be given two more hours to record a short (1-2 minutes) video showcasing your project, either with an emulator or a physical device.

Where

The event will be held both in-person and online.

Note that we don’t have much space at the office, so please don’t forget to mark the checkbox in the form if you plan to join in person and we will let you know if we still have capacity left (we apply a first-come first-served policy).

Prize

As mentioned above, the prize is a job offer to work on the new Portal mobile app. We are looking for a full time dev to develop a cross-platform (Android and iOS) mobile app, who can be completely autonomous maintaining the project.

The RAL for this position is in the range $40.000-$55.000/yr, depending on the experience, talent, etc. The offer will also include a portion of equity in our startup.

The position will be partially in-person and partially remote: we plan to work from Brescia every Mon-Tue-Wed, then remotely Thu-Fri. We are also renting a hackerhouse in Brescia, so you will be able to stay there if you want, for free.

Note: Since we are a US-based company we can only hire people in Italy as contractors under “partita iva”. If you don’t have it we can refer you to a really good accountant and cover all the costs to open it.

Rules

You will have to work by yourself, but using AI is allowed (even Cursor in agent mode).

We will ask you to work off of a remote filesystem (at least for your source code directory) so that we can monitor the evolution of the code over time. We will review the snapshots if we suspect you have not been working by yourself or if you’ve been heavily copying parts of other projects.

After reviewing the videos and the code, we will select the top 4-5 candidates and hold video calls with them, to get to know them better and ask questions about the project they’ve developed.

We will then offer the job to the person we think would be the best fit for our company. If they reject the offer we will keep going down the list until somebody accepts.

In the unlikely case that we cannot find a suitable developer, we will then offer a monetary prize of $1000, paid in BTC to the best project.

How To Register

Fill out the following form:

Also don’t forget to join our Discord server to stay updated on the latest news and announcements.

Livestream

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page embeds the twitch player. You can view livestreamed events here.

Click here for past recordings.

Mailing List

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

If you’d like to receive updates about our hackerspace, event reminders, and more you can subscribe to our mailing list.

To preserve your privacy we don’t use any third-party service provider to collect and process your data: we have our own instance of Listmonk, hosted on our servers!

Subscribed

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for subscribing!

Transparency

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In this transparency page you’ll find all the expenses incurred by the hackerspace, so that anyone can keep an eye on how we spend the resources we have.

Being funded mainly through voluntary contributions, we care deeply about ensuring our donors feel like their money are being used for a good cause.

Yearly Financial Report

2023