Devcon 4 comes to Prague — the Ethereum Foundation ratifies the city's cryptoanarchist lineage

OCT 30 2018 · 12:00

Video: Devcon4 Keynote - Vitalik Buterin Date: 2018-10-30 · Type: conference · Hub: prague · Tags: prague, devcon, ethereum, conference, eth2, beacon-chain, cryptoanarchy The Foundation's site-selection decision was itself a statement: Prague was chosen because of Paralelní Polis, not in spite of it. Devcon 4 ran October 30 to November 2 2018 at the Prague Congress Centre on 5 května 65, a brutalist convention complex in Praha 4 Nusle — deliberately unglamorous, deliberately functional. The conference drew approximately 3,000 attendees, the largest Devcon to date. It came four months after the first public Ethereum 2.0 specification documents, two years after the DAO hack and fork, and at a moment when the protocol's scaling roadmap had crystallized around the Beacon Chain and sharding. Vitalik Buterin's keynote laid out what would become the ETH 2.0 research agenda. Justin Drake and Carl Beekhuizen presented early BLS signature research. Danny Ryan's sharding talks anchored the technical program. The choice of Prague was not logistical. The Ethereum Foundation's site-selection conversations in 2017–18 explicitly cited the Czech cryptoanarchist scene — Paralelní Polis, Trezor, brmlab, the broader culture of Holešovice — as part of the argument for Prague over other candidate cities. The Foundation wanted to situate its gathering within a lineage of serious, principled anti-surveillance thinking rather than in a financial-industry conference circuit. Prague was, in this reading, the only European city where that framing came pre-installed. Devcon 4 was also the moment the Ethereum community confronted the Parity multi-sig freeze (November 2017, one year prior) and the broader question of what the protocol owed its users when code behaved as written but catastrophically. That reckoning was still ongoing. The Prague Congress Centre hosted it in the same city where Václav Benda had argued, forty years earlier, that the answer to a broken official system was to build a parallel one — not to reform the unfixable. Facts • Dates: October 30 – November 2 2018, Prague Congress Centre, 5 května 65, Praha 4 • Approximately 3,000 attendees, the largest Devcon at the time • Vitalik keynoted on the ETH 2.0 roadmap including Beacon Chain • BLS signature research, sharding architecture, Casper FFG presented • Site selection explicitly cited Paralelní Polis and Czech crypto scene as part of justification • Devcon 4 followed Devcon 3 Cancún (Nov 2017) and preceded Devcon 5 Osaka (Oct 2019) Primary Documents • Devcon 4 — Archive of talks and presentations — https://archive.devcon.org/archive/playlists/devcon-4/