What up guys? It's rehrar with another CCS proposal, but this time it's not about me. We're talking about the big C3 conference.

For those who don't know, the Chaos Communication Congress is the biggest hacker convention in Europe. Monero has had a presence there for the past several years, with last year being the pinnacle. The Monero ecosystem teamed up with RIAT to put on the Critical Decentralisation Cluster (CDC). A cluster is similar to a village in Defcon, which is just a space outlined for a group of likeminded people where they can control their own content beyond that of the conference proper.

Last year, the CDC was a major success, with our cluster being one of only three available stages where talks took place, as well as hosting several smaller FOSS and FOSS-friendly projects. Check out https://decentral.community to see who was present (but hurry, this site will be updated with new info soon). My (rehrar) summary of last year's conference can be found here.

For the past several weeks, the community has started to come together again, as the CDC is confirmed to return this year. We've had meeting in the #monero-ccc IRC channel, we've set up a project on Monero's Taiga instance, and are working out volunteers, budgeting, and other information of spreadsheets.

It's come time to start to raise money for this effort, and we've decided to do it in a somewhat interesting way. Last year, there were a few businesses and organizations that donated a LOT of money to make the cluster happen. These same organizations (and more) seem to want to help again this year, but we would like them to do it as a part of the Monero community via the CCS.

One of Monero's biggest strengths (and the reason we are the only named non-Bitcoin cryptocurrency presence at the conference, similar to Defcon) is our grassroots nature. We want the Monero community to help make this happen. All individuals and sponsors will be pointed to the CCS to make this year's cluster a reality.

I cannot stress enough just how important this is. Monero is beginning to solidify itself in these hacker ethos spaces, and one day in the future we will be a known, common, and perhaps even necessary fixture in it (as most of us already believe we are).

We are asking for 560 XMR to make this happen. Our budget can be viewed on this Google Sheet. (yeah yeah, google. Save the flak. We're working on it.) WARNING! Because it is Google, use a private or incognito window to open it unless you don't mind a Google related identity leaking.

The 560 XMR was reached by rounding up the 27,455.26 Euros displayed in the sheet to 28,000 (as a practical buffer), and converting on a price point of 55.34EUR/XMR (Kraken at time of writing) leading to ‭505.963136971449 XMR. Lastly, we add a 10% price buffer and round to the nearest 10 for 560.

We are requesting that this XMR be released immediately to a 2/3 multisig wallet, whose keys will be held by Matthias (parasew), myself, and the last held by binaryFate. This is so any large, but time sensitive purchases can be made quickly, and without continual pestering of the Core Team.

Any questions or concerns can be raised on this MR, or at our weekly C3 meetings.

Thanks everyone. I hope we can all make this happen!