Would CCC and Recon be better? TBH I never understand why people (not companies) need to go to Vegas. It's expensive, corrupting and hot during the summers. Montreal is a much affordable place.

I go to CCC and Defcon every year and they are night and day.

CCC actively discourages companies from advertising unless they are fully open source community driven orgs. Governments are even less welcome.

While even the Privacy Village at Defcon asks you to agree to the terms of service of Discord, Slack, Youtube, and other corpos... CCC self hosts everything including Voip, IRC, Matrix, 3G, 4G, and DECT, all linked together in various ways.

While Defcon has strictly controlled talks approved by sponsors and appointees of the Defcon corporation that themselves work for mostly proprietary corporations, CCC is an entirely volunteer driven organization from top to bottom and you can give a talk anywhere you want about anything 24 hours a day as long as someone else has not already reserved that spot.

While Defcon has villages reserved and approved by committee and corporate sponsors, at CCC any community can apply for table or an area and almost all are granted as space relative to the size of the community. You can do basically anything you want with your space. You can also access the event and your space 24/7 so the hacking and party never fully stops.

I go to Defcon because it is the corporate paid excuse a handful of actually capable hackers I like to hang out with have to hang out. And maybe two or three talks worth seeing.

I go to CCC because it is the nearest place I can go experience thousands of actual hackers that believe in making the world better through open source, right to repair, music, art, and maximizing sharing and collaboration. Almost every person I talk to is an instant friend. People who largely agree technical talents are meant for more than raising shareholder value.

I love CCC and I keep going in hopes I can bring some of that back with me to silicon valley.

If anyone goes to CCC be sure to visit the Church of Cryptography which I am usually around.

Vegas (and Orlando) are probably the two cheapest places to travel to in North America. Hotels and flights are both plentiful and cheap. Before Covid you could get like $60 a night hotels on the strip and $150 flights.

CCC is just Euro-Defcon. It's fine if you prefer Europe over Vegas (understandable!) or winter to summer, but otherwise: it's the same thing.

CCC would be better but REcon is kind of niche because it’s focus is reverse engineering and not “hacking”in general.

Congress may be considered "better" in the sense that the MIC would not find a forum there (and would be relentlessly made fun of). More importantly and as to your point about the expensiveness: The Club and all the volunteers put an inordinate amount of work in making Congress as accessible as possible on many levels.

Something something discreet hookers and a company credit card.

Defcon is a "joke" compared to CCC.