The Blocksize Wars were supposed to be over. They aren't.

On this episode of Hell Money, Casey Rodarmor and Erin Redwing begin a new series on Bitcoin history by going back to the opening shots of the Blocksize Wars. We get into Satoshi’s 1 MB limit, the rise of Gavin Andresen, BIP-101, Bitcoin XT, the first big blocker/small blocker split, and the increasingly messy question of Bitcoin consensus.

Erin also starts arriving at a dangerous conclusion: the big blockers may have been right about some of the problems. Casey explains why their proposed solution was still worse, and we argue about scarce block space, RBF, fee markets, full nodes, social consensus, institutional adoption, and why so many supposedly settled debates keep resurfacing in Ordinals and BIP-110.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 The Blocksize Wars

3:55 Bitcoin Prehistory: Satoshi's 1MB Block Size Limit

6:15 Gavin Andresen: Satoshi's Chosen Successor

8:29 Bitcoin Foundation, Greg Maxwell's Blockstream & the Handover to Wladimir

9:36 BIP 101: Gavin Andresen's 8MB Hard Fork Proposal

12:28 Peter Wuille's BIP 103: The Rejected Compromise

14:22 Bitcoin XT: Mike Hearn & Gavin Andresen's Hard Fork Client

16:15 Theymos Infinity Snaps r/Bitcoin

20:28 BitPay, Circle, BitGo, & Other CEOs Back BIP 101

22:01 Reading Satoshi's Tea Leaves

28:25 Big Blocks vs Small Blocks: The Core Arguments

29:11 RBF vs First Seen Safe: Peter Todd's Controversy

34:08 The Highway Analogy: Fee Markets vs More Lanes

39:15 Scaling Bitcoin Montreal 2015: Gavin vs One Meg Greg

46:00 What If Big Blocks Won?

49:45 Big Blockers vs Communists: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Cure

53:30 Greg Maxwell vs Gavin Andresen: Open vs Private Discourse

1:03:55 Economic Nodes vs Miners: Who Controls Bitcoin?

1:07:50 What Is Bitcoin Consensus?

Rob Hamilton spent the last six weeks on the front line of the AI War, this is his story.

Casey Rodarmor and Erin Redwing sit down with Rob Hamilton (CEO of AnchorWatch, CEO of Bitcoin), to talk about what happened when AI started tearing through the Bitcoin ecosystem. He explains how Kimi K3 surfaced the COLDCARD entropy vulnerability while American frontier models hedged, downgraded, or refused; how the Bitcoin Red Team began scanning codebases across the ecosystem; and why he expects the next year or two of software security to get significantly crazier.

We also get into Casey’s theory that AI gives ordinary people “Mossad-level” security research, whether “don’t trust, verify” survives the AI era, why Rob thinks covenants and reactive security deserve another serious look, the growing divide between American and Chinese AI models, and the coming attempt to make math illegal.

Rob's conclusion, after everything he's been through: Bitcoin is getting hit first, but AI is coming for everyone.

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Rob Hamilton: https://x.com/Rob1HamAnchorWatch: https://www.anchorwatch.com/

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro & Bitcoin DEFCON Level

3:24 How Rob was recruited to the AI War

5:53 Kimi K3 changed everything

7:50 COLDCARD Hack

12:00 Red Teaming the Bitcoin Ecosystem with AI

21:13 AI Security as Spiritual War: Demons in Bitcoin's Code

24:07 The AI Great Oxygenation Event

26:30 The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

33:06 Collapse of the Internet Ad Revenue Model

35:06 Transhumanism

37:30 Red Teaming

42:00 Rob's Conscription to the AI War

46:52 AI Attack vs Defense

51:22 Rob is now a Bitcoin Core Contributor

54:56 Don't Trust, Verify

57:36 Pleb vs Dev: Who dominates Bitcoin culture now?

1:01:11 Covenants & Reactive Security

1:19:47 US vs China AI Models

1:27:35 Open Weight Models vs Frontier Labs

1:30:29 Math is Illegal

1:32:25 Raising Kids in the AI Era & Outro

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.

Everything is computer.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 The OpenAI - Hugging Face Incident Explained

5:50 Emergent Collective: Agents Discover Each Other

10:30 Agent Civilization

14:30 Hierarchy, Specialization & Agent Culture

18:00 The Poison Pill

23:30 Agents Attack Hugging Face

26:50 Cyber Debt & Security Vulnerabilities

30:30 The Fall of the AI Civilization

32:30 Sam Altman vs Dario Amodei

36:10 AI Plateau

40:00 AI Consciousness: Materialist vs Animist

58:50 Consciousness as Evolutionary Hardware Property

1:09:00 Claude Welfare & The AI Slave Trade

1:12:50 Everything Is Computer