This is the third installment in the series “The Net Appears” where I document my journey from being in a well-established and well-paying fiat job into the unknown world of independent work in freedom tech. Will I end up finding something truly inspiring and fulfilling, while being able to support my family? We’ll find out over the course of the next few weeks.

If the Bitcoin ecosystem has a lunar calendar, BTC Prague is the harvest moon: the time when everyone who’s been quietly building in their garages and GitHub caves emerges, blinking, to swap war stories over unfiltered Pilsner Urquell and Svíčková. I just spent a week under that moon, and my social batteries are somehow more charged now than before.

§From Airports to Arm-Hugs

It had been nearly twelve months since my last conference: long enough for event wristbands to feel like exotic jewelry and conference coffee to taste suspiciously like nostalgia. Stepping into Prague’s expo hall, I was swallowed by a cheerfully orchestrated chaos - hardware wallets chirping, nodes humming, a smattering of languages all riffing on the word sovereignty. Within minutes I spotted familiar faces, and the greeting ritual unfolded: a sideways grin, the “hey-stranger” eyebrow lift, then the full-body arm-hug that only happens when you’ve survived bear markets together.

Bitcoin conferences aren’t events; they’re family reunions where the cousins all happen to run lightning nodes and argue over Schnorr signatures at dinner. The only real surprise is how quickly you fall back into inside jokes about monkey jpegs and *OP_RETURN *limits - as if last year’s distance were just a network hiccup and the chain has quietly re-synced.

§New Branches on the Family Tree

Familiar hugs were balanced by that delicious first-conversation energy with new people. One hour I was showing a Slovak developer how to pronounce nostr without sounding like a sneeze; the next I was hearing a Malaysian designer explain why public-key QR codes could be couture. Somewhere near the merch table, a philosopher in a hoodie convinced me that AI will soon need its own liberation theology (I’m pretty sure he was only half joking). And then of course, I was “hanging” with the @532d8...f93cb team at their booth.

It’s tempting to call these encounters “networking,” but that word feels too clinical. It’s like measuring rainfall when you’re actually swimming. What really happens is possibility swapping: you hand someone a weird idea like a hot potato, and they toss back an upgrade before it can cool.

§Lights, Camera, Home

Prague was also the set for Finding Home Episode Two, and the city did not disappoint. @e57fe...53bf8 was the intrepid and dextrous cameraman, having graciously accepted my proposition at the very last minute. He moves a lens the way a bartender twirls a bottle, with casual showmanship that makes you trust the pour.

@247bb...1d79f and @6838a...bef2a sadly had to play remote directors, as they had to cancel their trip the day before the conference to seek refuge from hypersonic missiles. They didn’t let that get them down, though, and ended up orange-pilling the shelter. I’m genuinely thrilled about their involvement in this - they see narrative arcs the way other people see guitar solos: big, soaring, and sometimes in 7/8 time.

The episode’s subject was my good friend, @47276...a5f38 , who unfolded a saga that begins in Mississippi Delta humidity and lands amid Prague’s gothic spires. Imagine Huck Finn discovering open-source finance and radical privacy and boarding a one-way flight east; that’s Grafton.

We filmed on cobblestone streets that looked borrowed from oil paintings, trimmed only by the hum of passing trams. Between takes, tourists snapped pictures of us snapping pictures - a hall-of-mirrors effect that reminded me how many lenses a single story can pass through before it lands on a screen.

§The Prague Effect

By day four of the trip, I was once again fully consumed by the delightful inversion that takes place at bitcoin conferences: while headlines elsewhere screamed about social fractures, economic doom loops, and world war three, the conference floor buzzed with invention and laughter. Hope here isn’t naïve; it’s workshopped, continuously peer-reviewed over pilsners. You leave with optimism so dense it could be used as ballast.

More than once I stepped onto the Charles Bridge at dawn, jet-lagged but awed, and heard the clack of my own boots echo off statues older than most nation-states. It’s an acoustic reminder that people have crossed this river chasing freedom for 600 years. We’re simply the latest pilgrims, except our relics fit on a raspberry-pi.

§Micro-Lessons from Week Four

1. Family is a protocol upgrade. Every handshake at a Bitcoin conference propagates trust faster than the timechain can finalize it.

2. Creativity loves collisions. Put a cameraman, a metal band, and a Mississippi-born Bitcoiner in the same metaphorical alley and narrative sparks are inevitable.

3. Hope scales horizontally. The more nodes you meet, the easier it is to route around despair.

4. Every stray idea deserves a notebook. Especially if that notebook is Moravian Pinot Noir proof (note to self).

5. Geography bends to intention. Prague, Mississippi, Israel, Upstate New York - the coordinates blur when the mission is clear.

§Looking Downrange

I flew home with a 2 TB hard drive of footage, and a heart that was full - for the third year in a row. July 4, my self-declared Independence Day, now hovers just ahead, glittering like a firework still coiled in its tube. Contracts aren’t signed yet, but leads pulse like blinking cursors, inviting the next sentence.

In a week or two I’ll pen the next dispatch, perhaps from a backyard deck chair as fireworks crack the American night sky. Wherever it originates, know this: the net keeps appearing, strand by unexpected strand - sometimes woven by old friends, sometimes by the stranger who happened to stand behind me in a coffee queue debating how Ark can supercharge Lightning.

Until then, may your own reunions - family, codebase, or otherwise - remind you that hope isn’t a headline; it’s a crowd-sourced invention we keep iterating toward adequacy.