BOSS Battle

Bitshala

Software is starting to act on its own behalf, and **it has no way to pay**. The financial system assumes a human with a legal identity behind every account, which leaves autonomous systems dependent on someone else's credentials, credit, and permission. **Bitcoin is the only money that doesn't ask who or what you are.**

This track sits at that intersection in both directions: what becomes possible when machines can transact natively, and what machine intelligence can do for the people and infrastructure already running Bitcoin. *Both are wide open.*

Machine Money

Best in Machine Money

Most of what we do online runs through intermediaries who can revoke access, read the contents, and change the rules. Nostr and ecash are two answers to that — one for identity and speech, one for value — and they share an assumption: **that the useful properties of a system shouldn't depend on trusting whoever operates it.**

This track is for exploring what that assumption makes possible, and for confronting where it still falls short. *The primitives exist; the applications, the economics, and the experience are unsettled.*

Freedom Stack

Best in Freedom Stack

Bitcoin's ledger is **public by default**, which means every payment you make is a permanent record someone can trace, cluster, and sell.

This track is for builders working to make Bitcoin **private in practice, not just in theory**. Build tooling that makes good privacy the default rather than an expert-only setting. It's for people who think the hardest problem isn't whether privacy is possible on Bitcoin, but **why it still isn't the norm** — and who want to do something about it.

*Strong submissions here don't just add a privacy feature — they make the private path the easy path.*

BOSS Battle

BOSS Battle

Bitshala$3,000

Bitshala

$1,000: Machine Money

$1,000: Freedom Stack

$1,000: Cypherpunk

Bitshala$3,000

Bitshala

$1,000: Machine Money

$1,000: Freedom Stack

$1,000: Cypherpunk