Bitcoin Core Dev Walks Away… to Battle The Great Firewall of China (with Carl Dong)
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
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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