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

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.

We break down how hashrate escrow and blind merge mining actually work, the seven proposed Drivechain side chains, the controversial redistribution of 500,000 of Satoshi’s coins, and the central question hanging over the entire proposal: can Bitcoin miners actually be trusted to make this work?

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TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 Intro

8:18 Fork Wars: Paul Sztorc's eCash Bitcoin Fork

11:17 What is Drivechain? BIP 300 & BIP 301

12:56 Satoshi Coin Redistribution & Drivechain Timeline

14:17 Side Chains: Bitcoin's White Whale

18:04 Blockstream's Liquid & Why Side Chains Fail

21:22 Lightning vs Side Chains

23:07 Hashrate Escrow Deep Dive: How BIP 300 Works

28:00 Blind Merge Mining & Core Untouched Soft Fork

32:28 The Seven Proposed Drivechain Side Chains

36:30 Who Validates the Side Chains?

40:40 Are Miners Stupid or is Drivechain Stupid?

44:00 Paul Sztorc's Integrity & Pathological Honesty

51:00 The Fork Wars: Luke vs Paul vs Michael

59:00 What Makes Bitcoin Bitcoin?

1:04:00 Should You Spend Your Bitcoin? Deflationary Psychology

1:13:00 The Future of Bitcoin & Sovereign Individuals

1:20:00 Outro

Topics covered: Drivechain, Paul Sztorc, eCash, BIP 300, BIP 301, Bitcoin side chains, hashrate escrow, blind merge mining, Bitcoin miners, Satoshi Nakamoto coins, BIP-110, Luke Dashjr, Michael Saylor, Bitcoin ossification, Lightning Network, Bitcoin scaling, privacy, prediction markets, Bitcoin hard forks, Bitcoin governance, and the future of Bitcoin.

The COLDCARD exploit was an emperor-has-no-clothes moment for Bitcoin. In this episode of the Hell Money Podcast, Casey Rodarmor and Erin Redwing break down what happened, how AI may have changed the balance between attackers and defenders, and what the fallout exposed about Bitcoin security and culture.

“Don’t trust, verify” is one of Bitcoin’s core principles — but over time, heuristics like Bitcoin-only, open source, self-custody, and trusted developers became ways of deciding what to trust instead of actually verifying. So what happens when those heuristics fail?

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 COLDCARD bug exploit explained

4:00 Did the attacker use AI?

8:10 Bitcoin Red Team

14:53 AI, eclipse season, and what breaks next

16:48 A 9/11 moment for open source and self-custody

23:39 AI defense for open source software

29:19 The crisis for Bitcoin self-custody

30:54 What does it actually mean to be a sovereign individual?

34:26 Self custody is worth fighting for

39:50 The cultural coddling of COLDCARD

45:43 “Strong opinions, weakly held” found dead

48:15 Coinkite’s development practices and the warning signs

56:59 Outro

Casey Rodarmor (creator of Ordinals) and Erin Redwing dive deep into the history and drama behind BIP-110, Bitcoin's controversial anti-spam filter proposal. This episode covers the origins of Bitcoin's spam debate, Luke Dashjr's decade-long anti-spam crusade, the rise of Ordinals, Inscriptions, and Runes, the Bitcoin Core vs. Bitcoin Knots conflict, and a full technical breakdown of what BIP-110 actually does — and why it's doomed to fail.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro

2:11 Satoshi Dice and the origin of Luke Dashjr's anti-spam crusade

10:20 Meta-protocols arrive: Counterparty, OmniLayer, and Tether's origins on Bitcoin

11:56 The op_return byte limit history

18:41 Why Ethereum failed

28:51 Ordinals launch in Jan 2023

40:12 Insidious motivations behind anti-Ordinals backlash and the Swanfluencers

53:42 What BIP-110 actually is and does

1:00:43 BIP-110 signaling timeline and activation dates

1:08:16 Explaining the mining difficulty adjustment problem for a minority fork

1:21:00 Why BIP-110's filters are trivial to bypass (Ordinals and Runes survive regardless)

1:25:33 Final thoughts: why the whole community should log off and move on

Topics covered: Bitcoin history, Satoshi Dice, Luke Dashjr, Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Knots, BIP-110, Ordinals, Inscriptions, Runes, op_return limit, meta-protocols, Counterparty, OmniLayer, Tether origins, Ethereum vs Bitcoin, NFTs, crypto history, Bitcoin maximalism, soft fork vs hard fork, mining difficulty adjustment, Bitcoin spam debate, Gloria Zhao, Bitcoin Core V30, mempool, Bitcoin Cash, block reward, Bitcoin culture wars, engagement farming, Mechanic, Matthew Crowder, RGB protocol, Taproot Assets, Xverse, Stacks.

Cypherpunk Bitcoin builders Jesse Posner and Erik Cason (author of Crypto Sovereignty) return to Hell Money to talk about their new venture, Vora Aegis — a local-first, privacy-preserving personal AI device built on the same self-custody and cryptographic principles that power Bitcoin.

We dig into the growing collision between government power and frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, the EU's Chat Control and the US KIDS Act, mandatory digital ID and KYC creep across the internet, and why Big Tech companies like Facebook are quietly lobbying for identity verification. Jesse and Eric break down the security architecture behind sovereign AI — dual-LLM privilege separation, prompt injection defense, OPRF cryptography, formal verification, and Fifth Amendment-resistant key recovery — plus the philosophical stakes of AI, human cognition, surveillance capitalism, decentralization, and digital sovereignty in an era of centralized control.

PRE-ORDER THE VORA AEGIS: https://shop.vora.io/products/vora-aegis-vip-deposit

FOLLOW ERIK & JESSE:

https://x.com/Erikcason

https://x.com/jesseposner

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Timestamps

0:00 Intro

4:56 Sovereign AI vs. frontier AI

7:43 AI psychosis

9:52 Is AI already the new power structure?

14:19 EU Chat Control and the US KIDS Act

16:05 The Banality of Evil: Facebook and mandatory digital ID

23:22 Anonymity, Operation Choke Point 2.0

30:08 AI telepathic hive mind

34:39 Bitcoin self-custody & sovereign AI

43:55 Introducing the Vora Aegis

48:32 How AI could save decentralization

49:47 How Vora Aegis works

1:13:04 Technical challenges building sovereign AI

1:17:00 Eschatology, sovereignty, and the future of AI

1:27:21 The new Gutenberg printing press

1:33:19 Non-state actors more powerful than governments

1:38:04 Vora Aegis pre-orders and launch timeline

Topics: Bitcoin self-custody, cypherpunk ethos, sovereign AI, AI safety politics, Anthropic, OpenAI, surveillance state, digital ID, encryption, privacy, prompt injection, hardware wallets, decentralization, local AI, open weight models, personal data ownership.

In this special mid-year astrology episode, Casey and Erin dive deep into the biggest astrological event of 2026: the minor grand trine between Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus unfolding throughout July. Erin reviews her 2026 predictions so far (including her OpenAI-government partnership call), breaks down the February Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and lays out what's coming in eclipse season this August. Casey — stepping into the astrologer's chair for the first time — offers his own interpretation of the July trine, connects it to the rise of AI, and even proposes a new "solar astrology" framework built on the heliocentric model.

Topics covered:

- OpenAI vs. Anthropic

- Astrology of AI

- Sam Altman vs. Trump

- UBI and Universal Base AI Stock

- S&P 500 astrology

- The future of humanity

- The rise of AI religion

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Timestamps

0:00 Intro

7:23 World Cup accent challenge

10:27 Reviewing 2026 predictions

25:58 July 2026 astrology

26:11 Casey's 2026 astrology

35:37 Introducing: Solar Astrology

1:15:21 Market analysis: S&P 500, Anthropic, OpenAI charts

1:27:37 What parts of your humanity do you want to preserve?

1:32:16 Closing: key dates for the July trine and August eclipse season