S17 E26: Calin Culianu, Steve Thurmond & The Phenomenal Big Blockers on Nine Years of Bitcoin Cash

Almost nine years after the big split of the Bitcoin community, it was time. Time to sit down with the people who kept the big block experiment alive, long after the famous names walked away, the price collapsed, and the rest of the industry declared the matter settled. What was supposed to be a conversation with two guests turned into an eight hour and fourteen minute marathon, the longest episode of Season 17 so far, with a rotating cast of Bitcoin Cash developers, builders and community members jumping in and out like a royal rumble. At one point I told them I felt like the blonde in that famous meme. They laughed. They kept coming.

The context for this episode is simple: something strange is happening in 2026. Bitcoin BTC developers are openly borrowing from the work done on Bitcoin Cash. Jeremy Rubin told me on this very show that his CSFS proposal was inspired by an opcode that already exists on BCH. The WabiSabi paper at the foundation of Wasabi Wallet 2.0 cites CashFusion, which was built on BCH first. And as you will read below, even Robin Linus, the creator of BitVM, sent a message during the live stream that no one in the BCH community will soon forget.

The two guests who started the show could not be more different. Calin Culianu is one of the most prolific developers in Bitcoin Cash: he was there on fork day in August 2017, worked on Bitcoin ABC (later renamed Bitcoin Cash Node after Amaury Sechet’s departure), and is the author of Fulcrum, the Electrum server software that wallets like Cake Wallet use for SPV.

Steve Thurmond is a financial educator (Forward Financial) and a self-described BTC maximalist from 2011 to 2023 who converted after doing his own due diligence. He is the creator of Cash Stamps, the paper wallet onboarding cards loaded with $1.50 of BCH that he distributed to my live audience throughout the stream, watching the claims come in real time. Steve is not a developer and says so cheerfully; his role was to bring the ammunition and the energy, and he brought plenty of both.

Who Is Behind Bitcoin Cash Now?

The opening question set the tone. Bitcoin Cash gets associated with Roger Ver, Jihan Wu and Amaury Sechet, and none of them are involved anymore. So who is left?

Calin’s answer matters for the historical record: Bitcoin Cash was a large effort, not a one man project. Amaury had the financial backing and the courage to finally execute the fork, but the discussions about forking had been going on since 2015, the same way frustrated BTC developers talk about forks today. Roger never created BCH; he was a vocal champion who funded development through Bitcoin.com, and he is still friendly to the project, just distracted by other battles. Jihan’s whereabouts are unknown even to them. And Amaury, well, that is a longer story that takes up a big chunk of hour six.

Calin is blunt about the early narrative war: “The Bitcoin Core people had millions of dollars to throw at narrative creation. Psyops exist.” The “Roger’s scamcoin” framing was deliberate propaganda that never acknowledged the actual problem: a limited capacity chain with high fees would get routed around, which is exactly what happened.

My Confession: From Lightning Kool-Aid to Feeling Like a Fraud

Since Steve turned the tables and interviewed me for a stretch, I gave them the honest version of my own trajectory. I was confused during the fork, landed on BTC like most people, and what bothered me about BCH was the “real Bitcoin” campaign: the confusion between Bitcoin.com and r/btc felt like a nasty divorce where both parties grab whatever they can.

My faith in BTC was built on a promise: Lightning would solve scaling without changing the base layer. I ran a Lightning node on a Raspberry Pi, balanced channels, lost money, sipped the Kool-Aid about passive routing income. The disillusionment came in stages: first the admission that Lightning needs data centers and professional infrastructure (how is that different from the big block argument?), then “centralization means efficiency on layer 2,” then the Cashu mints and custodial federations being celebrated as the endgame.

As I told them: the Lightning whitepaper itself states you would need 133 megabyte blocks for every human to open and close just one channel per year. And a Lightning payment is not a Bitcoin transaction; it is a Rube Goldberg IOU. Show me your Steak ‘n Shake purchase on the blockchain. You can’t.

The emotional low point: I confessed that I felt like a fraud for onboarding waiters and waitresses at conferences to custodial wallets, giving them $10 in “bitcoin” that would cost most of its value to ever claim on chain. And then the twist that reframed the whole episode: the biggest winner of the block size wars was Ethereum. While BTC and BCH fought over which one is the real Bitcoin, Ethereum had its ICO mania and became the permanent number two. Credit where due: they funded excellent research for years.

Did the Bankers Win?

This is where Calin delivered the monologue that I expect will be clipped the most. His thesis: Bitcoin was captured so it could never replace fiat, only become an asset class. The money printer people love pumping assets; it is what they do with printed money. Real estate, equities, and now BTC.

And yet his conclusion is surprisingly hopeful: everyone lost, the bankers won this round, but they were forced to win. They had to spend hundreds of millions, they had to let a trillion dollar asset exist outside their system, they had to build Venmo and Zelle and Revolut to compete, and they still could not uninvent cryptocurrency.

“We have really dangerous enemies, man. These people founded the CIA. They topple governments. It’s been relatively bloodless. The genie is out of the bottle.”

His other prescriptions were less diplomatic: “Fire all those devs. Fire Core. Those people are compromised.” And later, in my favorite deadpan of the night: “I could fork Bitcoin Core tomorrow. It’s not that hard. I already maintain BCHN, it’s like 95% the same code. Get some serious people together, not these clowns. Fire those clowns. Maybe you can save the world. Or join Bitcoin Cash.”

Steve’s Conversion and the Multi-Coin Future

Steve told his own story: a BTC maxi for twelve years who lived through the era when you could actually spend Bitcoin at Overstock, Newegg and Orbitz, then watched fees destroy merchant adoption. He was distracted during the split (two kids, the ICO casino), found BCH years later, and recognized the original cypherpunk values he had signed up for in the first place. His framing of the ecosystem today: no perfect solutions, only trade-offs, but BCH checks the most boxes. Calin’s developer philosophy is similarly unpretentious: complete Satoshi’s work, get the chain technically ready to be global money if the moment ever comes, and keep the culture non-toxic. He also made the anti-maximalist case for a multi-coin world better than most maximalists make their own: one coin is a single point of capture; many competing coins are an immune system for the whole idea.

Both of them were proud of the CHIP process, Bitcoin Cash’s upgrade governance: fifteen CHIPs implemented since 2020, yearly hard fork upgrades, no figurehead to decapitate. Steve pointed at Cardano’s Charles-shaped single point of failure as the counterexample.

The Craig Wright Years, the Forks, and the Resilience

I asked Calin the awkward question directly: how did it feel when Craig Wright was on your side? “It felt bad.” His description of the post-fork community is vivid: a ragtag band of rebels, a bunch of Vikings, angry and vocal, and Craig was charismatic, said the right anti-Core things, and had a cult following, so people looked the other way.

Steve added the full autopsy: Wright hoodwinked Roger Ver and Gavin Andresen, was financed by gambling billionaire Calvin Ayre as a “legal terrorist” (Judge Mellor’s words from the COPA trial) who sued critics into silence, and was methodically eviscerated by Arthur van Pelt and Mark Hunter’s Dr. Bitcoin podcast and their book Faketoshi. Both agreed the association, plus the infamous wine glass photo with Roger and Calvin, did enormous reputational damage to the big block cause at the worst possible time.

Then came the BSV split, then the Amaury tax fork, and the community suffered “a thousand cuts.” And yet: Bitcoin Cash went from #2 by market cap down to #35 and back into the top 10 earlier this year. Steve correctly noted that almost no coin has ever done that. Zcash is the other recent example, which this audience knows well. I paid them the compliment they deserved: the ultimate test of an open source project is whether people keep joining after the big money and the famous names leave. By that measure, BCH passed.

What BTC Already Took from BCH

For the maximalists in the audience, I laid out the uncomfortable list myself. CashFusion inspired WabiSabi, which became Wasabi Wallet 2.0 (it’s in the references of the whitepaper). Jeremy Rubin’s CSFS was inspired by an existing BCH opcode. Bitcoin Core is now working toward UTXO commitments, which has been the BCH answer to “but history doesn’t scale” for years. And BCH has OP_CAT, live, in production, while people in BTC still claim with a straight face that it will destroy the chain.

Calin’s history lesson on that: Satoshi disabled opcodes because he was balancing twenty plates at once and “cat bombs” were a real DoS vector in 2010. BCH solved the underlying problem properly with VM limits: cost every operation correctly, constrain execution, and you never have to fear an opcode again. Satoshi simply didn’t have time to build that. You’re free to copy it. That’s the point of open source.

The Greg Maxwell Phenomenon

Since his name kept coming up, Calin gave his full character study, and it is quotable: Maxwell is brilliant and genuinely contributed foundational ideas (CoinJoin was his concept; he set the bounty Amir Taaki tried to claim before being deterred by the mysterious John Dillon, who may or may not have been an intelligence operative and may or may not have been Peter Todd emailing himself). But in Calin’s view, Maxwell doesn’t argue to find truth; he argues to be right. He leverages his aura to make you feel dumber than him, uses technical mumbo jumbo when he has the argument and price charts when he doesn’t (see: his dismissal of Grin), and has never once been heard to say “I was wrong.”

Calin’s verdict is harsh: “I consider him an evil person.” I countered with Michael Tidwell’s line from TabConf: the difference between Tidwell and Maxwell is that Tidwell wouldn’t mind if the future of money turned out to be Bitcoin Cash, as long as the mission gets accomplished.

The Ecash Tangent

Since sponsor LayerTwo Labs is hard forking Bitcoin in August at block 964000, I had to ask what the big blockers think of Paul Sztorc’s Ecash. Steve didn’t hesitate: naming it “ecash” when Amaury’s XEC already exists is “a dick move” and a self-inflicted wound before the David vs. Goliath battle even begins; he dubbed it “Teemu Ecash” and mentioned murmurs of litigation. Calin agreed it’s a red flag of arrogance but took the longer view: more competition is good for the market, and if the fork explores interesting ideas and pressures BTC to innovate, everyone wins. My favorite moment of this segment was Calin reducing the whole naming controversy to code:ecash == ecash evaluates true."bitcoin" == "bitcoin cash" evaluates false. There’s the difference, implemented in Python.

The Cavalry Arrives: Kyle and Fiendish

About ninety minutes in, the battle royale began. Kyle joined first: an IT infrastructure guy with no formal coding background who taught himself to develop on BCH six years ago and went on to build FundMe.cash (a non-custodial, on-chain Kickstarter; nothing like it exists on BTC), the Badgers.cash time-lock experiment, and the Bitcoin Cash University YouTube channel, where he walks through smart contracts line by line for fellow non-coders (find him as Seoshi Nakamario on Telegram). His proudest receipt: when BTC’s BitVM demo at a conference was an off-chain chess game full of trust assumptions, Kyle built chess as an actual on-chain smart contract on Bitcoin Cash. His framing stuck with me: BCH today feels like Ethereum in 2016, a frontier where a newcomer can still make a massive impact, except this time he’s not just watching.

Fiendish (FiendishCrypto) arrived wearing his signature green sunglasses, which turned out to be a whole lore drop: they originated at the BCH St. Kitts conference in 2022 as a meme to deflect BTC laser eyes, and he has lost and rebought them several times since. His role in the ecosystem is the connector: marketing, outreach, vetting companies that want to integrate BCH and linking them to the right developers.

“You can’t run a great machine without oil.” Over the next several hours he delivered some of the episode’s best material: the story of paying an 80 euro fee for a single BTC transaction in 2021 that sent him into two weeks of obsessive research; the merchant adoption post-mortems (St. Kitts onboarded merchants brilliantly via Sunny Gahani but forgot to onboard users, so it faded; Joemar Taganna’s Paytaca is doing it properly in the Philippines with closed-loop spending; Townsville, Australia is still alive; the Cash 3.0 conference hits Cebu in August); and the Goldieblocks meme: BTC blocks too small, BSV blocks too big, BCH just right.

UTXO vs. EVM, and the Node Narrative

The technical centerpiece of the middle hours was the smart contract debate. I asked the obvious question: if everyone agrees Ethereum’s model has problems, why does everyone still build there? The answer, in one word: scalability.UTXOs are insanely parallelizable; every UTXO is its own state, order doesn’t matter, and a failed transaction on BCH doesn’t burn your fee the way a failed DeFi transaction on Ethereum does. Fiendish added the investor’s perspective: no one funds a business whose chain chokes exactly when it succeeds, which is what happened to Ethereum and pushed everyone to layer twos while the base chain withered.

Then I replayed my favorite maxi gotcha, heard at the Proof of Work Summit in Frankfurt: “Can you people even run nodes?” Calin dismantled the whole narrative pollution: SPV is in the whitepaper; not everyone needs to verify from block zero until the year 2546; UTXO commitments solve bootstrap trust cryptographically; and here is the part nobody tells you: Bitcoin Core nodes already skip signature verification for early history via assumevalid and built-in checkpoints, and Core itself is implementing UTXO commitments. You either believe in cryptography or you don’t. My own contribution to the receipts: two years ago I synced a full Bitcoin Core node in 7 hours 40 minutes and a BCH node in 2 hours 20 minutes on the same MacBook Pro, because Core’s chain is currently bigger. The BCH chain has since gotten roughly 3x faster syncs via the UTXO-Z database work in the Knuth node.

RBF, 0-Conf, and the Two Untouchables

Fiendish delivered what he called the perfect attack reconstruction: cap the block size, let demand outgrow supply so transactions freeze, then introduce RBF as the “solution,” and you have destroyed 0-conf and with it the cash use case, all while looking like reasonable engineers. The counterpoints: Satoshi discussed vending machine payments in under ten seconds on BitcoinTalk; BCH deleted RBF at the first opportunity and added double-spend proofs; and research (attributed on stream to Jason Dreyze) suggests a transaction propagated for about five seconds is already extraordinarily hard to double-spend. Mastercard-grade fraud tolerance is how the actual world works: shoplifting is priced into retail, and nobody buys a house in a ten minute window anyway. Jeremy from the Bitcoin Cash Podcast chimed in from the Telegram sidelines to note that 0-conf worked fine on BTC before the split too, until node policy changes and full-RBF boiled the frog.

That led to the one-minute blocks CHIP, possibly coming next year: same issuance schedule (the subsidy math divides evenly), better confirmation variance for DeFi and UX, at the accepted cost of lower per-block security. Fiendish used the moment to state what he considers the only two sacred parameters: permissionlessness and the fixed 21 million supply. Everything else is engineering.

“It’s Just Money, Bro”

I took a detour into nostalgia for the CoinSpice era (Colin Enstad, Vin Armani) and what I still consider the best crypto advertisement ever made: the BTC guy lecturing a store clerk about digital energy and sound money while the BCH guy just pays and walks out. “It’s just money, bro.” That ad, by Colin Enstad, captures something I have thought about for years, and I told them my date story: in 2020 a girl asked me “where can I spend it?” and I had to explain she’s supposed to save it, and I will never forget her confused face.

AI won because nobody needs 60 hours of podcasts to use ChatGPT. Money should work the same way. Fiendish’s answer on the UX frontier is the EXO stack from General Protocols: instead of trusting every opaque transaction you sign in DeFi, you trust auditable templates once, and the wallet renders everything human-readable. Swap one BCH for ten tokens, lock BCH for three months, whatever the contract does, in plain language.

Kallisti Joins: Covenants, AI Agents and the L2 Business Model

Jerry, better known as Kallisti, the lead developer of the Selene wallet, had joined quietly around the two hour mark and became central to the back half of the show. His first contribution was a glimpse into a near future I had not considered: because BCH has had two generations of working covenants, you can build contracts with no deployment cost, which means AI agents can negotiate and enforce escrow conditions between each other, on chain, for fractions of a cent. Try that on a chain where deploying a contract costs real money.

His macro point was one of the sharpest of the night: BTC is structurally stuck because an entire industry of layer 2 companies has a business model that depends on the 1 megabyte limit never moving. Custodial Lightning, federations, Lightspark, the whole stack monetizes the offloading of trust that Bitcoin was invented to eliminate. BCH, by scaling the base layer with ABLA and yearly upgrades, removes those parasitic incentives by default. And his closing wisdom on governance: social engineering is way harder than technical engineering. Culture is the ultimate defense. The BCH culture, forged by surviving Craig, Amaury and every market cycle, is now the moat.

Kallisti also runs his own node, develops a custom CashTokens indexer, and got lovingly roasted for a microphone that made him sound like he was broadcasting from inside a jet engine. “The feds are jamming him.” They can just subscribe to the podcast like everyone else in Langley.

The Magic of 32, ABLA, and What You Can Actually Buy

Why 32 megabytes and not BSV’s gigamegs? Calin: it’s an engineering sweet spot for propagation, validation time and orphan rates, nothing mystical. The real answer is ABLA, the adaptive block size limit algorithm: 32MB is the floor, not the ceiling, and the limit now adjusts with sustained demand as a consensus rule. Kyle called it the immune system upgrade: the block size is no longer centrally planned by developers, so the thing the 2017 fork was fought over can never happen again on BCH. If the whole world shows up faster than the algorithm adapts, that’s a luxury problem they’ll happily hard fork for.

What can you actually buy? Honest answers only: Europe’s crypto payment rails (GoCrypto in Ljubljana, Quarko in the Dominican Republic) were killed by MiCA’s €10,000 licensing regime, not by technology.

I added my own grief: I bought this laptop, this microphone and my phone with Bitcoin in Romania before the regulation made it bureaucratically suicidal for merchants, and Paralelni Polis in Prague, the first café to accept Bitcoin in 2013, shut down this year after the landlord decided he wanted nothing crypto in the building. Meanwhile BCH has real pockets: the Philippines, Townsville, and an ecosystem of Cauldron DEX (0.3% fees to liquidity providers, micro-pools that would be economically impossible on BTC), the Parion USD overcollateralized stablecoin, Moria, BCH Bull (up to 7.77x permissionless leverage), prediction markets on BCH Guru, and my favorite on-ramp for normies: NanoGPT, where the free BCH from Steve’s stamps buys you real Claude queries with no KYC.

The Tether thought experiment produced a great answer: would they welcome USDT on BCH? “I personally think Tether is poison, but you can’t stop them. That’s the point of permissionless.” Kallisti noted Tether literally already existed on BCH via SLP tokens and nobody used it. Let decentralized stablecoins destroy them on the merits.

The L2 Paradox and the Stigma

My favorite irony of the episode: builders keep telling me privately that BitVM, ZK rollups and drivechains would be ten times better on Bitcoin Cash, with real covenants instead of ceremony-based federations. The chain that forked over scaling on-chain accidentally built the best possible base layer for every layer 2 ever proposed. Calin’s response: the BCH community was never against layer twos; it was against crippling layer 1 to make layer 2s necessary.Fiendish’s metaphor: branches can’t be thicker than the tree. Even Lightning’s founders said the base needs 133MB.

So why don’t those builders come? Stigma and leftover PTSD. Fiendish told his own story of walking into the 2021 Reddit community, recoiling at the bitterness of traumatized OGs, leaving, then putting on the “hazmat suit” and coming back because the tech was simply the best.

His claim, seconded by everyone: the 2023 CashTokens upgrade was a cultural turning point, new energy replaced the defensiveness, and BCH Bliss in Ljubljana is now the proof: 80 people, huge disagreements, zero toxicity, dancing with the clinical psychologists from the conference next door, NFT tickets on CashTokens. Joel from Dash and Kenn Bosak attended as outsiders and called it the best conference they’d been to. The invite to me stands for next year, 4 a.m. poker games included.

The Saylor Hypothetical and the Quantum Question

I gave them the nightmare scenario: tomorrow Michael Saylor wakes up, declares BCH the real Bitcoin, Paolo Ardoino ports USDT, the price goes to $100,000, and suddenly the big money has opinions about your roadmap, the way Zcash’s shielded assets got quietly shelved once new whales arrived. Fiendish argued the CHIP process plus the geographically distributed, personally bonded community (Argentina, the Philippines, Japan, Europe, Australia) is structurally resistant to capture-by-bag, and that on-chain coin voting is precisely the trap they avoid.

Kallisti and Calin were more blackpilled and therefore more reassuring: the money printer people topple governments; if they ever come for BCH in force, the theory of victory is that they’ll be busy fighting other fires (wars, CBDC rollouts, dollar debasement) while BCH grows like a weed. Being under the radar is a feature, and getting to #2 too early would be dangerous. Joey added the darkest galaxy-brain take of the night: maybe captured BTC is accidentally the fall guy that absorbs all the sabotage energy while BCH builds in peace.

On quantum: BCH already has an opt-in Quantum Vault using hash-based signatures (Moonsettler, of my ten-hour episode fame, built a Lamport signature scheme at the BCH Blaze hackathon), made possible by the expanded VM rather than a forced migration. On freezing Satoshi’s coins, Fiendish gave the conservative case: not your keys, not your coins; any freeze sets a precedent governments will weaponize (“you froze coins to save money but won’t freeze them to stop child abuse”); and the real defense is building enough liquidity and utility that a slow 1.8 million coin unlock gets eaten for breakfast.

Kallisti added the cypherpunk punchline: with covenants you can construct outputs where the private keys are public and it doesn’t matter, because the covenant only ever allows payment to the intended recipient. And on tail emission, Peter Todd’s “tail emission is not inflation” paper got the reception you’d expect: it is, by definition, inflation, full stop, and if BTC ever does it or raids Satoshi’s stash, BCH will simply say thank you for the users.

Rosco Kalis: CashScript and the Honest Trade-Offs

Nearly five hours in, Rosco Kalis joined: the creator of CashScript, the high-level language that compiles to BCH bytecode, and refreshingly, a developer who spends most of his time in Ethereum and says so. His history lesson covered the whole arc: AnyHedge by General Protocols in 2020 was the first real DeFi on BCH, built when the only covenant primitive was CheckDataSig, cleverly reusing a signature to enforce the entire transaction shape and create a long/short contract that gives merchants dollar stability and speculators leverage without a custodian. Since then: native introspection, CashTokens, and this May’s loops and reusable functions, which Rosco and Kallisti agreed make the BCH VM explicitly Turing complete, on par with Ethereum and Solana, now mostly needing stress testing and builders.

His honesty about the trade-offs is exactly why you should listen to him: the UTXO model is harder to build on.Accounts are intuitive; change outputs aren’t; and the real complexity isn’t the contracts but everything around them (transaction building, UTXO tracking, the 27 interlocking contracts inside Parion, the domain knowledge that currently lives in backend code). That’s the gap the EXO stack’s declarative templates are meant to close.

His summary of the race: Ethereum must solve scalability, BCH must solve developer experience, and whoever gets there first wins the world’s financial traffic. His plugs: cashscript.org and the browser-based playground.cashscript.org, now with loops support. Calin, who knows a thing or two about compilers, called the language design elegant on the record.

Fulcrum, Litecoin, and the Impossible Genesis

Calin finally got to explain Fulcrum, his middleware that speaks the Electrum protocol between a node and wallets. He wrote it in C++ for BCH because the existing options were slow, then ported it to BTC partly for the stress testing (BCH never has a full mempool, so that code path never got exercised), which some BCH purists initially resented, and added Litecoin support because a company paid him to. Today it serves BTC, LTC and BCH, and yes, Cake Wallet uses it.

On Litecoin, the BCH verdict was “semi-evil”: faster blocks and real payment usage between exchanges, but it internalized Core’s captured values (SegWit, ossification), and Charlie Lee remains the best trader of the 2017 cycle, having dumped his entire stack at the literal top one week before Christmas. My merge-mining theory (miners dump LTC and keep the Dogecoin Elon pumped) got some nods.

On Kaspa and Quai, the room was humble: interesting claims, but Joey delivered the deep objection, agreeing with the maxis for once: you cannot recreate Bitcoin’s immaculate genesis conditions in a world where exchanges exist and every new proof-of-work launch is instantly financialized. That’s precisely why BCH fought to keep the original ledger rather than start fresh. And no, there is no serious talk of leaving SHA-256: the bet is that the only genuinely contested fork in Bitcoin’s history keeps proving itself until the hash rate follows.

Meanwhile in BTC Land: Fork Season

The final stretch turned into a gleeful status report on Bitcoin’s civil wars. The knots people (Bitcoin Mechanic, Luke Dash Jr., Ocean’s rented hash rate at a mighty 3.47%) want BIP 110 to filter “spam,” which also bricks certain multisigs; Luke, who once put Bible verses in the blockchain and whose movement larps about CSAM on a chain whose genesis block famously contains a newspaper headline about bank bailouts, wants to shrink blocks to 333 kilobytes and has said he would harm Bitcoin if his pastor told him to, and that one must obey the government as a matter of faith.

Meanwhile Jimmy Song and Samson Mow launched a nonprofit to maintain an “older version” of Core, which everyone recognized as the classic pre-fork soft launch, and I put the odds of a Luke cult fork around 70%. Calin’s observation from a thousand miles away: the British made sure India was fighting itself before they left, and Jack Dorsey funding both Ocean and Lightning looks a lot like the meme of Israeli and Iranian missiles labeled “Jack’s money” meeting mid-air. Controlled opposition or organic derangement? Either way, the bankers are laughing.

We also poured one out for the disappeared OGs: Gavin Andresen (invented multisig and P2SH, onboarded half the world via Free Talk Live, vouched for Craig, then vanished after one famous visit to the CIA), Mike Hearn (built the first SPV implementation and bloom filters, which BCH nodes still support and Core removed, then rage quit in January 2016, an event I personally thanked him for at the time and regretted ever since), Martti Malmi, and Cobra, who spent 2017-18 oscillating between BTC and BCH before losing the UK whitepaper copyright case to Craig by default.

Saylor, Epstein, and the Arrest of Roger Ver

The Saylor segment wrote its own arc: the domain broker who turned hope.com into a Bitcoin education site, self-appointed president of the North American Mining Council after the Elon Tesla flip-flop, the “triple maxi” gospel of borrowing a million dollars from anyone who won’t ask for it back, and 850,000 BTC, roughly one Ukraine war payment, making him the single biggest point of failure the project has ever had. Chris DeRose’s line to me years ago has aged into prophecy: “Watch out, they’re paying us to leave.”

Then the Epstein files: Joi Ito emailing Jeffrey Epstein that the Bitcoin Foundation was collapsing and this was their opportunity, leading to MIT grants for Gavin, Van der Laan and Cory Fields while the same circle ran Project Hamilton, a CBDC pilot built on Bitcoin research, Schnorr signatures included. Austin Hill, Blockstream’s CEO during the fundraising era, was the main island visitor; “Andy Back” appears in the logs with Epstein specifically asking for him; and in the single funniest entry, Epstein himself called Michael Saylor a lunatic he didn’t want to hang out with. Calin’s synthesis: Epstein worked for the people the intelligence agencies answer to, and they captured Bitcoin for a mere $70 million seed round plus maybe $400 million in total, without firing a shot. “Show me who controls a nation’s money supply…”

And that brought us to Roger. His book Hijacking Bitcoin (co-written with Steve Patterson, who should update it with the Epstein chapters) came out three weeks before his arrest in Mallorca, one month before the statute of limitations on his exit tax expired. Coincidence, surely. I told the story of meeting him during his island house arrest: the alleged villain of Bitcoin filled my water glass at lunch and drove me to the airport, and nobody at a BTC conference will ever believe me.

He now lives under a three-year gag order, with a gag order on the gag order, location unknown even to friends like Mark Edge, whom Steve interviewed at Bliss. Meanwhile the BitMEX guys and CZ bought their pardons in the open market. Lawfare, and everyone knows it.

The Upgrade-Day Attack and the 2018 Inflation Bug

Two stories every Bitcoiner should hear from Calin directly. First, the recent one: on May 15th, the day of the BCH network upgrade, while the community was gathered in Ljubljana, someone mined two “poison blocks” exploiting a crash bug that Bitcoin Core had just disclosed, a dangling pointer introduced long ago by the legendary Peter Wuille (of peterwuillefacts.com fame, “consensus is reached every time he looks into your eyes”). The attacker spent an estimated $3,000-10,000 on hash rate to crash the BCH network on fork day and discredit the upgrade culture. It failed instantly, because BCH had fixed that exact line years earlier as a code smell. Egg on face, ten grand lighter, and then, purely coincidentally, a wall of short positions opened and BCH dropped 25% in the following days.

Second, the historical debt: in September 2018, at the absolute height of the fork wars, a Bitcoin Cash developer named Awemany found a live inflation bug in Bitcoin Core (introduced by Matt Corallo’s block validation optimization) and disclosed it responsibly, with David Jaensen independently reporting it days later. Bitcoin owes its 21 million meme to a big blocker. Calin’s uncomfortable honesty: Core has no reciprocal disclosure agreement with BCHN, never once sent a bug report their way, and next time maybe he shouldn’t be Mr. Nice Guy. “Recessions are good. They clean out the crap.”

The Amaury Tax Fork and CTOR

Finally, the full account of the fork that broke the community’s spirit: Amaury announced at the eleventh hour that the consensus rules would send 8% of the block subsidy to his own wallet, with no community process whatsoever. The remaining devs scrambled, formed Bitcoin Cash Node, told the miners which software to run, and booted him. Calin, who worked with him for years, does not mince words: narcissistic, manipulative, “the Greg Maxwell of big blockers,” an anarchist whose Twitter bio said benevolent dictator.

And the earlier wound, CTOR (canonical transaction ordering to speed up Graphene block propagation), was rammed through the same way against nChain’s objections and became the stated reason the BSV camp forked off, which is why Steve calls CTOR BCH’s own humiliation ritual, while noting the irony that ABLA isn’t in the whitepaper either. Greg Maxwell, for his part, spent the tax fork on Reddit taunting that Amaury worked for him now. 4D chess or trolling; with him you never know.

The Ending I Didn’t Deserve

Eight hours in, Steve gone to dinner, Calin heating up leftovers, the chat long past the point of questions, I read them the message that had just landed in my inbox from Robin Linus, the creator of BitVM: “Tell the BCH guys that I, the officially crowned king of Bitcoin script wizards, am fucking jealous of all their neat opcodes and wish we had them too.”

Nine years ago this chain forked off with eight megabyte blocks and was called a scam by everyone with a platform. Today it has working covenants, Turing-complete scripting, adaptive block size, native tokens, quantum-resistant vaults, yearly upgrade cadence without a dictator, and a culture that survived Craig Wright, a hostile founder tax, and a 97% drawdown. The big blockers were wrong about plenty and right about the one thing that mattered. You don’t have to buy a single BCH to see that. You can literally scan a QR code in the episode and take Steve’s.

We crossed the eight hour mark, a new Season 17 record (the all-time record remains Moonsettler’s ten hours, and yes, he has since shown up in their hackathons). If you made it to the end of the audio, you know what to write in the comments: anything but BCH.

This episode is sponsored by Cake Wallet (BCH support, swaps, NanoGPT integration, 750k downloads and counting), LayerTwo Labs (test the drivechains today; the Ecash fork comes at block 964000 this August, check ecash.com), Sideshift.ai (swap your confiscatable stablecoins for free market money; Tether froze millions just last month), and Orange Rock (no-KYC trading from the Bitcoin.com people, leverage up to 25x if you insist on gambling, which I don’t recommend). Special thanks to all the sponsors for making this marathon freely available to everyone!

 

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Time stamps:

00:01:09 – Intro: nine years since the big split
00:02:15 – Sponsors: Cake Wallet, LayerTwo Labs, Sideshift & Orange Rock
00:02:37 – Steve: BCH isn’t what you think it is
00:04:40 – Who is behind Bitcoin Cash now?
00:06:34 – The “Roger created BCH” psyop
00:07:53 – Vlad: what bothered me about the “real Bitcoin” campaign
00:09:46 – Calin: Bitcoin was captured so it couldn’t replace fiat
00:11:48 – Vlad’s Lightning disillusionment
00:16:14 – Blockstream’s funding: AXA, DCG & Mastercard
00:22:12 – Lightning’s own math: 133MB blocks for 2 txs a year
00:24:02 – Vlad’s confession: I felt like a fraud
00:26:15 – Ethereum: the real winner of the block size wars
00:27:54 – The bankers won, but the genie is out
00:32:16 – Calin: fire Bitcoin Core
00:33:16 – The wall of consensus & the BIP 110 cult
00:37:47 – Steve: a BTC maxi from 2011 to 2023
00:42:48 – Calin’s mission: completing Satoshi’s work
00:47:17 – Cash Stamps: free BCH for the audience
00:49:12 – The awkward Craig Wright years
00:51:52 – Faketoshi, Calvin Ayre & the “legal terrorist”
00:58:41 – From #2 to #35 and back: resilience
01:02:32 – Why even BTC maxis should thank BCH
01:03:44 – CashFusion inspired WabiSabi; CSFS came from BCH
01:06:01 – OP_CAT, cat bombs & VM limits
01:08:51 – The Greg Maxwell phenomenon
01:12:02 – LayerTwo Labs & the Ecash fork at block 964000
01:14:04 – Steve on the Ecash name: “a dick move”
01:25:49 – Kyle joins: from IT guy to contract builder
01:28:32 – FundMe.cash: crowdfunding & chess on chain
01:28:47 – Fiendish joins: the ecosystem’s connector
01:34:06 – What’s wrong with Ethereum? The UTXO advantage
01:39:50 – “Can you people even run nodes?”
01:41:08 – SPV, UTXO commitments & the assumevalid secret
01:46:11 – The sync race: 7h40 for BTC, 2h20 for BCH
01:53:27 – RBF & the killing of 0-conf
02:05:07 – The one-minute blocks proposal
02:06:37 – The two untouchables: permissionless & 21 million
02:12:43 – “It’s just money, bro”: the CoinSpice era
02:20:46 – Kallisti joins: covenants & AI agent escrows
02:26:14 – 15 CHIPs later: loops, ABLA & Turing completeness
02:30:30 – What’s magical about 32 megabytes? Goldieblocks
02:41:39 – What can you buy with BCH that you can’t with BTC?
02:48:28 – What if Tether launched on BCH?
02:52:26 – The paradox: BCH as the perfect L2 base layer
02:58:27 – Fiendish’s origin story: the 80 euro fee
03:04:19 – BCH Bliss: dancing with the psychologists
03:08:04 – Joey joins: conferences & the first BCH block
03:11:40 – Ordinals: the network that kicked out paying users
03:15:41 – Satoshi Dice & how USDT left Bitcoin
03:18:08 – The Saylor hypothetical: would the culture survive?
03:23:44 – Calin’s theory of victory
03:28:14 – Quantum computing & the Quantum Vault
03:30:36 – Should Satoshi’s coins be frozen?
03:43:05 – Peter Todd’s “tail emission is not inflation”
03:46:52 – Why BTC is stuck: the L2 business model
03:53:16 – Centralized L2s & the base layer for bankers
03:58:47 – What would it take? Zerocash & drivechains
04:02:20 – Privacy, fungibility & the transparent L1 debate
04:09:14 – “The bitcoins”: the Linux analogy
04:11:51 – Cancelled for interviewing Roger Ver
04:14:30 – Silk Road, killer apps & Ethereum’s hype cycles
04:20:52 – The AI tangent: Claude & OpenAI as Netscape
04:30:30 – Joey’s goodbye: why Vlad would fit in at Bliss
04:36:27 – Calin explains Fulcrum
04:38:54 – The Litecoin question & Charlie Lee’s perfect trade
04:47:48 – Kaspa, Quai & the impossibility of a new genesis
04:51:41 – The long-term bet on SHA-256
05:03:35 – Luke’s fork, Jimmy Song & Samson’s nonprofit
05:07:07 – OP_RETURN heresy: Satoshi vs Luke’s Bible verses
05:16:11 – Calin: “I could fork Bitcoin Core tomorrow”
05:21:29 – Would drivechain miners steal? The MEV debate
05:25:50 – Adam Back’s “tabs” & Samson’s credit card points
05:31:13 – Chris DeRose: “they’re paying us to leave”
05:36:44 – Where are the OG Core developers now?
05:48:36 – Rosco Kalis joins: the CashScript story
05:49:48 – AnyHedge: the first DeFi on BCH
05:55:38 – BCH vs Ethereum contracts: the UTXO trade-off
06:07:34 – Six hours in, 1,300 live viewers
06:13:56 – Vlad’s freeross.org donation deflection
06:18:16 – Why didn’t BCH follow Gavin’s BIP 101?
06:23:15 – The Saylor phenomenon: hope.com & narrative capture
06:30:18 – Nashville: RFK, Trump & the “triple maxi” gospel
06:34:08 – Calin sold all his BTC for BCH: no regrets
06:37:44 – Segwit2X & the New York Agreement myth
06:43:45 – Why BCH skipped Avalanche pre-consensus
06:45:56 – The Amaury tax fork: 8% at the 11th hour
06:55:30 – CTOR: the change that pushed nChain away
07:04:13 – The failed upgrade-day attack on BCH
07:08:58 – The 2018 inflation bug & Awemany’s disclosure
07:17:30 – Is Tether backed?
07:22:53 – Epstein files: “Andy Back” & Saylor the lunatic
07:28:50 – Roger Ver’s arrest: lawfare & the gag order
07:39:51 – Paying at Chipotle with shielded Zcash
07:44:29 – How MiCA killed crypto payments in Europe
07:47:52 – Calin’s Romanian roots & his assassinated uncle
07:52:05 – The Isle of Man TT sponsorship: Dean Harrison
08:08:26 – Robin Linus: “jealous of all their neat opcodes”
08:09:56 – Eight hours: a new season record
08:13:57 – Outro & the “anything but BCH” Easter egg