Prague, Oct 8 (CTK) – Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin threaten the existence of central banks because they do not depend on central banks, similarly to gold and oil where only the market sets the price, Pavol Luptak, head of the fourth Hackers Congress held in Prague last weekend, told CTK on Sunday.
“When the state wants to take money from the people, it can do it in two ways. Either it increases taxes or the central bank prints markedly more money. Inflation may follow then. There is no such risk with the bitcoin,” Luptak said.
The Prague Hackers Congress is a meeting of so-called ethical hackers and it focused on financial freedom, Luptak said.
“It focused on the possibility of achieving new economic personal freedom using various technologies such as cryptocurrency and anonymous currency. Of preventing the state or banks from spying on us,” he said.
Thanks to coding, terrorists can safely communicate, but most of the other users can do so as well, Luptak said. “Coding has markedly more advantages for society than negative aspects,” he said.
One of the main aims of the hackers congress, organised in the Paralelni Polis centre, was to map the worsening situation in the sphere of financial freedom and present selected instruments that might contribute to its improvement, such as anonymous cryptocurrencies Monero or Zcash, cryptomarkets and decentralised exchanges.
Paralelni Polis and the Institute of Cryptoanarchy are projects related to the Ztohoven guerilla artist group.
Main speakers of the three-day congress were hacker and programmer Amir Taaki, whom the Wired magazine calls one of the most dangerous people on the Internet, U.S. scientist and cryptoanarchist Jim Bell, German privacy extremist Smuggler, American sex anarchist Alexa Martinez, Slovak economist analyst Juraj Karpis, Czech lawyers specialising in cryptocurrencies, Radim Kozub and Pavel Urbaczka, hacker known as SVA and cryptoanarchists Pamela Morgan and Paige Peterson, the organisers said.
Luptak said hacker is not a negative term only. “Hacker is a person who has deep knowledge of technologies, who can use them in nonstandard ways and innovate.”
He said there were black hackers that steal personal data and sell them.
Luptak said a common user of computers and smartphones has rather limited possibilities, but still these precautions can help a lot.
Internet users should use the latest versions of software operation systems for the sake of their security and update their applications, he said. People should also use some other security element apart from their password on social networking sites, such as the confirming SMS in Internet banking, he added.
In case of calls or text messages, people should download some of the applications than can code the communication, Luptak said. “Classic GSM conversations can be very easily wiretapped from various sides,” he said.
He said hackers will always be ahead of their pursuers, like doping athletes are ahead of anti-doping laboratories.
The more we move into the Internet world, the bigger part of our lives we spend on smartphones. The more personal data we provide to Internet portals, the more space hackers get, and the more crucial security is, Luptak said.
Protection of some vulnerable spots is still nonexistent, he said.
