Your VPN Knows Too Much | Carl Dong

<p>A traditional VPN sends your entire internet history through one company that also has your name, address and payment details. Liam sits down with Carl Dong, founder of Obscura VPN and former Bitcoin Core developer, on why two hops beat one and why AI makes privacy urgent.</p><p><br></p><p>Guest: Carl Dong, founder of Obscura VPN and former Bitcoin Core developer:</p><p>X: https://x.com/obscuravpn</p><p>Website: https://obscura.com/</p><p><br></p><p>BOOK A CONSULTATION</p><p>Holding Bitcoin for decades raises two questions: who protects it, and how it reaches your family. Onramp answers both. Three institutions protect it, and no single one can lose it, move it, or use it. Inheritance built in. Insured through Lloyd&#39;s of London. Speak with our team to see if it fits.</p><p>👉 https://go.onrampbitcoin.com/consult-fs-pod</p><p><br></p><p>GET ON THE LIST</p><p>• Onramp: our research, event invites, and the week&#39;s Bitcoin news in one free email. https://go.onrampbitcoin.com/research-fs-pod</p><p>• Early Riders Insights: the best content in the ecosystem, weekly. https://www.earlyriders.com/research</p><p><br></p><p>ABOUT THIS EPISODE</p><p>Carl Dong grew up building ways around China&#39;s Great Firewall, then worked at Blockstream and Chaincode Labs on Bitcoin Core, where his focus was software supply chain security. He explains reproducible builds and fuzzing, and why AI&#39;s infinite patience turns theoretical attacks into real ones. He makes the case that a traditional VPN swaps your ISP for one unregulated company that sees all of your traffic, and walks through Obscura&#39;s two-party relay with Mullvad, where neither company knows both who you are and where you go. He covers disguising VPN traffic as HTTP/3 to get through firewalls in airports, hotels and China, and why privacy tools have to be as easy as the alternatives. Liam and Carl also discuss AI agents overtaking human web traffic, connected AI that may know you better than anyone, private and local models, and how recent hardware wallet supply chain attacks harden the industry.</p><p><br></p><p>CHAPTERS</p><p>00:00 - Carl Dong: from the Great Firewall to Bitcoin Core</p><p>03:15 - The VPN trust problem and the two-party relay idea</p><p>06:29 - AI, infinite patience and software supply chain attacks</p><p>08:41 - Reproducible builds: verifying Bitcoin Core downloads</p><p>11:15 - How a traditional VPN works and what it can see</p><p>14:25 - VPNs as custodians: don&#39;t trust, verify