For the Very Last Time

The HCPP24 website said it in big letters: For the very last time, welcome to the Hackers Congress Paralelní Polis! When a conference says goodbye before it starts, that's a strange feeling. A year and a half later, on March 2, 2026, the doors at Dělnická 43 were locked for good. The building's owner no longer wanted anything on the premises that smelled of crypto.

This isn't an obituary. Obituaries get written by people who stood on the stage. I stood behind it.

Salad as a Ticket

I started discovering Paralelní Polis sometime in 2018. A bitcoin-only café, a coworking space, a lecture hall, and people who took cryptoanarchy seriously rather than as a marketing term. After a year of hanging around, in October 2019 I showed up to my first Hackers Congress — HCPP19, theme Opt-Out — together with the Parallel Garden crew and their aquaponic cube for growing lettuce.

I think I was quite convincing. I meant the lettuce. In hindsight I'm not sure everyone else did.

From that year on I didn't miss a single edition until the end: 2020 Digital Totality (covid, hybrid, HCPP TV), 2021 Chaos (smaller, more private format), 2022 Last Shot, 2023 Resistance (tenth edition, Stallman), 2024 Hardcore (eleventh, the last). Over those years my role moved from volunteer through volunteer coordination and runner to ticketing tech, on-site signage and stage tech. More precisely: my role accumulated. Nobody ever took anything off my plate.

Tickets: Pretix, BTCPay, and Two People Who Refused to Stop

At HCPP everything was paid in crypto. Tickets, the bar, coffee, merch. Fiat made no sense there and nobody asked for it. That sounds great in a manifesto, but somebody has to wire it up.

Back then, if you wanted to sell tickets for bitcoin without a middleman, you had two immature things to choose from and you had to bolt them together.

Pretix was, at the time, a decent idea with sharp edges. BTCPay Server was worse. Together they made a system that worked right up until somebody tried to use it.

We split it simply. I kicked the tech — our VPS, pretix, getting the two things to talk to each other at all. Katka, the HCPP organizer, kicked the people who were developing BTCPay. We kept kicking until it became a reasonably working thing.

The skeletons stayed in the closet, of course. They fell out one by one over the years, always at the least convenient moment, as skeletons do. But that system — the thing that came out of two people's stubbornness — today handles ticketing for Dark Prague and everything else under dark.events, which picked up the baton after HCPP.

The building ended. The ticketing system didn't. I'll take that as a small satisfaction.

Volunteers: The Endless Relay

Volunteer coordination has one fundamental problem, and that problem is volunteers.

We first tried a Signal group, later Telegram. The theory: everyone in one group, everyone sees everything, everything works. The practice: whoever has a task right now isn't reading the group, because they have a task. Whoever doesn't have a task is usually too tired to read it either. So the group reliably informed only the people who weren't on site.

That left exactly one working method: find the first volunteer who looks like nobody urgently needs them, and ask them to find and bring me the person I actually need. That person runs into someone else, sends someone else. A human relay with no finish line.

I was never any good with people, so Marry took over the relay later. I don't get the feeling she was much better at it than I was. But at least it wasn't mine anymore.

Stage: Everything With a Battery Will Drain It

Microphones love to disconnect. And they love even more to die — halfway through a talk, with an important speaker on stage and a hundred people in the audience. Presenters, same story. My theory is that a device knows when it matters most and acts accordingly.

Then there are speakers. Specifically the one whose laptop had DisplayPort as its only output. We found out at the moment he was supposed to start. Ten minutes into his talk I came sprinting back from the electronics store with an adapter. The adapter didn't work. I'd rather not go into it, so it isn't here.

What I Learned

When nothing has gone wrong for a while, something is wrong. This is true of every event tech team. An hour of calm doesn't calm you down. An hour of calm makes you walk the room looking for what you missed. Usually you find it.

The people you stay at the bar with until the early hours give the biggest tips. Don't ask me about causality. The data is clear.

Proving I could do something was probably the biggest mistake. Ever since, people ask me questions I don't know the answers to. This is the law of every volunteer organization: competence isn't rewarded, competence is punished with more tasks. Whoever fixes it once fixes it forever.

For the Last Time

Paralelní Polis ended in its original form in the autumn of 2024 — they called it a managed collapse themselves. The association kept existing; the building passed to the Second Culture coworking brand, which kept accepting BTC, LTC and XMR for a while. In March 2026 that ended too.

The ideas from Dělnická 43 outlived the building — Pizza Day, Dark Prague, the people. So did the ticketing system Katka and I kicked into shape. It doesn't sound like much of a legacy. But when someone registers for Dark Prague in a few weeks, pays in bitcoin, and it goes through on the first try, that will be at least partly because in 2019 we didn't stop kicking.

And if something dies mid-talk — well, that's a bit of our legacy too.