Key facts:
At the conference were experts on Bitcoin, Monero and privacy practices.
Weapons and Bitcoin have more in common than many imagine.
If you asked any conference attendee Guns N’ Bitcoin what do weapons and Bitcoin have in common, the answer will be unanimous: the defense of freedom.
Culturally, the right to bear arms in the US, protected in the second constitutional amendment of 1887, is quite different from that of many countries.
From the outside it is perceived as an activity to which right-wing extremist and racist militants are related, but from within, it is nothing more than a community of citizens willing to defend fundamental rights, which, according to the perception of many, are in danger.
CriptoNoticias was able to verify how weapons and bitcoin are related at the Guns N’ Bitcoin conference, held on April 9 and 10, 2022 in the city of Miami.
While this conference is not as big and popular as Bitcoin Conference 2022, it served as the perfect excuse to meet bitcoin experts who offered talks on privacy, self-custody of funds and mining from home.
How is it related to weapons? The answer was simple: with Bitcoin you can protect your money, but With a weapon you can protect your hardware wallet.
That is why the conference brought together both bitcoiners and specialists in the weapons manufacturing with 3D printersan increasingly booming practice that, like Bitcoin does with money, allows users in this niche to decentralize their activity and exercise their individual self-sovereignty.
In addition, during the conference we were able to get closer to projects such as Ronin Dojo and Start9 Labs, manufacturers of Bitcoin full nodes at the software and hardware level, who take into great consideration the privacy and power of choice of their users.
Ronin Dojo, a project associated with the Samourai wallet, introduced its new node called So muchwhich includes its own graphical user interface (GUI) software and works under the concept plug and play (plug and play).
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Tanto is built with highly resistant metal hardware and, at the software level, it is designed to prioritize privacy and be used with the Samourai wallet, that allows executing the transaction mixing process known as CoinJoin.
For its part, Start9 Labs is a new company that breaks into the Bitcoin node market with its own Debian (Linux) based operating system, which in turn is designed to interact with other Internet communication protocols such as Matrix, a decentralized messaging service.
Monero: the protocol to clean your bitcoins
The conference opened a space this year to talk about Monero, one of the oldest private cryptocurrencies in the ecosystem, and which continues to have a prominent position in the market.
Monero is a reference in privacy and anonymity for other cryptocurrency projects, and one of its most interesting use cases today is that of atomic swaps, which allow exchanges between bitcoin (BTC) and monero (XMR) without going through an exchange or centralized operator, protecting user privacy.
In this area, the talk by Seth for Privacy on the fundamentals of Monero technology, a protocol that, unlike Bitcoin, does not show the amount for which the transactions are madedo not publish the user’s address in the blockchain, and mix the inputs or entries (UTXI), hiding the origin of the expenses made.
Seth For Privacy also exposed 4 possible use cases for Monero with respect to Bitcoin: using Monero (XMR) for everything, with the risk of not saving on an asset that appreciates in value and is increasingly adopted as BTC; use XMR and save in BTC; use XMR to clean BTC and gain more privacy; and lastly, using BTC for everything, with the need to understand how their privacy tools work.
These are the winners of the J Stark Freedom Technology Awards
JStark was an activist and inventor of various types of 3D printed firearms who passed away in October 2021 and left an impact on this community.
To reward the best freedom technologies, the Guns N’ Bitcoin conference awarded the JStark Freedom Technology Awards, with a statuette that honors the memory of this activist.
The award for the best Bitcoin wallet for mobile phones was won Samourai Wallet; in the desktop wallet category, the winner turned out to be Sparrowand in hardware wallets, passportfrom the manufacturer Foundation, which competed with other cold wallets such as Coldcard, SeedSigner, Specter and BitBox2.
In the area of Bitcoin exchanges without KYC, Bisq wonwhich during the year 2021 multiplied its volume of exchanges, and shared this category with HodlHodl and Azteco.
In the plug-and-play node category, Ronin Dojo emerged as the winner, competing with the likes of Nodl, Embassy (by Start9), and One by MyNode.
Finally, an honorable mention was given to Econoalchemist Already have funboth disseminators of Bitcoin self-custody and privacy practices.
This is how this somewhat different event was, which had already been held last year, but which in this edition expanded its spectrum to Monero as a technology favorable to freedom.