A Conversation with One of Bitcoin Cash’s Most Prolific Developers

Calin Culianu is the #1 contributor to the Electron Cash project. Also, he contributes to BCHN, and has created the Fulcrum server. Definitely a Bitcoin Cash hero in my book. I picked his brain a bit about all things Bitcoin Cash, and got some juicy answers. Calin likes to talk, so let’s check it out.

Jonald Fyookball (JF): So Calin, how did you get into crypto?

Calin Culianu (CC): You got time? All right. I had a friend who was, I used to play games with him online. We were part of this crew online. This was like 10 years ago, or whatever, like in 2012. And he was telling me about Bitcoin and it piqued my curiosity. I didn’t know anything about it. And he was telling me how you could mine and you do transactions through your computer, and it sounded so weird. And I was like what is this stupid shit?

And I didn’t pay attention to it, and then I heard that podcast with Joe Rogan and Andreas Antonopoulos. When Bitcoin hit $1,000, that’s when I decided to get into it, which was not the best time to get into it.

And then, Satoshi. I think he was still, was he still around? I think he might have still been around when I first was reading about it. He was still in the forums. He hadn’t disappeared yet.

Can I just say one more thing, the thing that drew me, I realized how this is outside of the whole system, outside the banks, the government can’t fuck with me. I was like I can put some of my money here just in case things go belly up. This is outside of that. Why not? Why don’t I just put some of my wealth in this, and then it’s just like covering your bases. It felt really free. It felt liberating. I felt free. I don’t know. There’s something about freedom in it that really appealed to me.

JF: Where were you when the whole scaling debate started blowing up?

CC: I mean it felt like a betrayal because the whole thing was like this is going to become global money. And Satoshi, on the Bitcointalk forum, I mean he was talking about how he was going to scale it. People were asking him: can this really scale? And he was like yeah, we’re just going to… hard drives are going to be cheap someday. Some day you can download a DVD movie in five minutes. It’s not a big deal.

And the whole, everyone was on board with that. We’ll grow this thing until it can’t grow anymore. We’re going to become global money. It’s permissionless money. It was so weird. It’s like one day your wife comes home and she’s like I’m a man. Haha. I thought we were married. It’s like a betrayal. You don’t expect it. It’s like random. Like the whole thing about them not wanting to raise the blocksize, it felt ridiculous. I was like: what’s going on? I can’t even believe we’re arguing about this. It was obvious to me.

And then, there were the guys talking about Lightning. So, they were like Lightning, Lightning, this and that. None of these smart guys know what they’re doing. But, it still felt shady. It…