Miguel Medeiros – Bitcoin Gave Us the Keys to Money. Now Let’s Unlock the Web

I’m a backstage guy — a developer, not a speaker. But I got up on the BTC Prague stage out of moral obligation. Because the web is broken, and I believe we’ve built something that can fix it.

The Web Is Locked

Let me be direct. The web has three massive problems: centralization, censorship, and walled gardens. Your data on social media isn’t yours — it’s theirs. Your identity, your social graph, your content — all of it belongs to a platform that can silence you the moment you say something they don’t like.

I’m from Brazil. I’ve watched a left-wing government ban Twitter and Rumble simply because those platforms refused to censor users. The good news? People learned to use VPNs. The bad news? Governments have that power — and they will use it. Free flow of information terrifies the status quo. If you build something truly uncensorable, they’ll call you a threat to democracy. We will be hunted no matter what.

The walled garden problem is just as bad. You don’t own your identity. You don’t own your social graph. Switch platforms and you lose everything — your followers, your content, your connections. Everything on today’s web is an IOU.

Not Your Keys, Not Your Identity

We searched for existing solutions. We couldn’t find any. So we built our own stack — and the foundation is simple: cryptographic key pairs. Your private key stays secret. Your public key is your identity. Not your keys, not your identity.

We built a keychain app called PubRing that lets you generate a key pair offline and use it to authorize clients. That’s your sovereign identity — no registration, no permission required.

Decentralizing DNS with Mainline DHT

Once you have an identity, the next question is: how do you find someone’s data using their public key? Today we use DNS — and DNS is centralized. You buy a domain, beg Cloudflare to update records, point to a server. Permission at every step.

During our research, we found mainline DHT — the same peer-to-peer network BitTorrent uses. It has a spec that lets you store up to 1,000 bytes of data, queryable by public key. That’s enough to store routing information. So we built Pkarr — a tool that lets you publish and resolve decentralized DNS records tied to your public key. We also built PKDNS, a local DNS resolver, so you can literally paste your public key into a browser and load your website.

Unstoppable URLs and Home Servers

Your data lives on a home server — either self-hosted or rented from someone you trust. The routing layer points your public key to wherever that server lives. If a government bans your server, you migrate your data, update your DHT record, and your public key stays the same. Your links stay the same. It’s like whack-a-mole — ban one server, another pops up. This is what we call unstoppable URLs.

Indexers and the Full Stack

Raw infrastructure isn’t enough to compete with centralized social platforms on speed and discoverability. So we built Nexus — an indexer for the pubkey ecosystem that organizes data and gives you fast, queryable endpoints. Think of it as Google, but for your decentralized social graph.

On top of that, we built client apps — the pub.app layer — that make it simple to publish posts, articles, files, tag profiles, follow people, and build a custom feed without opaque algorithms deciding what you see.

Bitcoin Isn’t Inevitable — Neither Is a Free Web

I have two kids. I want to give them a better world.