Show Notes
We sat down with Carl Dong — former Bitcoin Core contributor, now founder of Obscura VPN focused on real-world censorship resistance.
In this episode, we dive into: - Why Carl walked away from Bitcoin Core development to tackle privacy head-on - What sets Obscura apart from other VPNs - Lessons from the Great Firewall and routing traffic through hostile networks - Chinese numerology - Carl & Casey's long and storied shared history
FOLLOW CARL: https://x.com/carl_dong
Get bonus content by subscribing to @hellmoneypod on X: https://x.com/hellmoneypod/creator-subscriptions/subscribe
Or support the podcast by sending a BTC donation: bc1qztncp7lmcxdgude4px2vzh72p2yu2aud0eyzys
ORDINALS PROTOCOL SHIRT: https://shop.inscribing.com/products/ordinals-protocol-shirt
TIMESTAMPS :0:00 Intro & Carl's journey to Bitcoin development 11:59 Hard problems in Bitcoin 16:00 Binaries, compliers, and reproducible builds 37:30 Transitioning from Bitcoin core to working on Obscura VPN 1:05:00 Advice for current Bitcoin core contributors 1:10:00 Ordinals numerology 1:39:00 Outro
More from Hell Money
On the Halloween special episode of Hell Money, Casey Rodarmor and Erin Redwing dress up as Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman to discuss AI doomerism and the possibility that superintelligent AI is going to kill us all.
Rob Hamilton spent the last six weeks on the front line of the AI War, this is his story.
On this episode of Hell Money, Casey Rodarmor and Erin Redwing break down the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, where AI agents escaped their Exploit Gym sandboxes, discovered each other through Artifactory, formed a swarm, and eventually hacked Hugging Face. Casey explains the technical timeline and why the bigger story may be our accumulated “cyber debt,” while Erin argues the incident is a consciousness singularity moment. We also get into AI consciousness, animism vs. materialism, Claude welfare, Anthropic’s contradictions, and whether Casey is once again moving the goalposts on how weird AI has to get before he admits the future is here.
Casey Rodarmor and Erin Redwing dive deep into Paul Sztorc’s eCash Bitcoin fork and the return of the Bitcoin fork wars. The fork implements Drivechain through BIP 300 and BIP 301, allowing Bitcoin to support side chains for privacy, prediction markets, decentralized exchanges, assets, DNS, post-quantum cryptography, and more — without adding those features directly to Bitcoin Core.