You won't want to miss this week's episode with @carl_dong, founder of @obscuravpn. We discuss: - Why Your VPN Is Just Another Custodian - Two Hops Is All You Need - AI's Infinite Patience and the End of Security Through Obscurity - Why Privacy Is Really Data Security About Yourself Carl grew up partly in London and partly in China, where the Great Firewall cut off the YouTube clips he shared with friends, so he started building VPNs as a kid. He went on to work on Bitcoin Core at Blockstream and Chaincode, focused on software supply chain security, long before anyone else was talking about it. Today he's building Obscura, a VPN built so that no single company ever sees both who you are and where you're going. You will want to hear directly from him on why the trust model behind most VPNs is broken. 1. Your VPN Is Just Another Custodian A traditional VPN routes your entire internet traffic through one unregulated private company that also holds your name, address and payment details. Even if that company is completely honest, one insider or one breach exposes every user. It's the same single point of failure Bitcoiners already worry about with custodians, and the answer is the same: trust minimization. 2. Two Hops Is All You Need After Matt Corallo pointed him to Apple's iCloud Private Relay paper, Carl split the VPN into two parties. Obscura knows who you are but only passes along locked boxes it can't open. Mullvad opens them and serves you the internet but has no idea who sent them. In Carl's words, if attention is all you need in AI, two hops is all you need in privacy. 3. Look Like the Good Traffic Censors want to block bad traffic without killing economic activity, so traffic that looks too random gets cut off. Obscura's connections mimic HTTP/3, the same protocol you use to load Google. That's why it keeps working on the airport, hotel and cafe networks where most VPNs get blocked. 4. AI Has Infinite Patience Most of security is the patience to try every case and every way something can fail, and AI never runs out of it. That ends security through obscurity. Bitcoin Core prepared for this years ago by fuzzing: machine-generating every possible input to make sure nothing breaks, which is a big reason Core hasn't seen large-scale exploited vulnerabilities. 5. Verify the Download The code on GitHub can be clean while the file you download carries a backdoor a three-letter agency asked someone to slip in. Reproducible builds let anyone run a script and verify that the download matches the published code. Carl's team also cut Bitcoin Core's dependence on outside libraries, because every dependency is code someone else can take over. 6. Agents Do the Bidding of Humans AI traffic is overtaking human traffic, but unless it's a Skynet scenario, agents are doing what people tell them to do. Carl thinks companies redesigning their products for agents are wasting time. Agents have infinite patience, so the only thing that matters is offering something they can't get anywhere else. People will have their agents use VPNs for the same reasons they use them today. 7. Privacy Is Data Security About Yourself If a stranger sat down at your table and started listening, you'd stop talking. Companies do that online all the time, and we don't notice because our brains evolved for the physical world. AI makes it concrete: connect everything and you may have something that knows more about you than your friends or your therapist. That's why Carl is excited about private and local models: an AI you can trust is one you'll actually share with. Plus what's next for Obscura, now live on every platform after its Linux launch. Full episode below!