Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is June 5th, 2023. Another day in paradise, huh?
A lot of you watching are wondering what I’m going to say about recent news items and events in Cardano and all these things going on. Well, it’s a decentralized ecosystem, and the magic of being a decentralized ecosystem is that it certainly speaks for itself. Nobody speaks on behalf of it; there are millions of people in it and thousands of people building on it. We’ve already heard from DC Spark, we’ve heard from Wing Riders, and we’re going to hear from everybody else.
You see, the reality is that when you’re a protocol that has inspired people and means something to them, people take care of it. It’s really refreshing to see all of that in the last 12 hours. But I did want to make a more philosophical video that is in a broader context about why we fight.
In 1942, the U.S. Department of War released a series of seven films called "Why We Fight" that every soldier fighting on the U.S. side in World War II was required to watch so they’d understand the point of the conflict and what was at stake. You could call it propaganda or good motivation, but the point was that there was a war of philosophies. On one hand, you had those who believed in democratic principles, consent of the governed, liberty, and freedom. On the other side, you had totalitarian regimes led by autocrats who wanted the world to follow their will—the few versus the many.
As we look to the 21st century and where the world is moving, we face a similar philosophical debate. There are those at Weft and other places who feel that society has become intrinsically too complicated for people to govern themselves. They believe that the few must, out of necessity, rule the many, wrapping these ideas into mandates like ESG. You’ll see other acronyms and words, but at the core, it’s “we know better than you.”
The cryptocurrency and blockchain industry is not an industry of a single voice or mission; it’s a movement that has some loose principles. Those principles are power to the edges, disintermediation of the middleman, and freedom for as many as possible. More importantly, it’s also a principle that everybody plays by the same rules. That’s what makes Cardano special, and that’s what makes Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other great protocols special. This idea that everybody has to play by the same set of rules is not the case with legacy systems. Certain people get special privileges based on the families they’re born into, the amount of money in their bank account, and the political connections they have.
The magic of the system we’re constructing, the world we’re building together, is that if we pull it off, we reset the relationship of the governed with those who govern. What that effectively means is that the 21st century can be the first century in human history that actually has liberty and freedom. The United States is a complicated and difficult country. We were born of a disagreement—taxation without representation. The only reason we became a great power was because of the tremendous personal sacrifice of those who fought in the Revolutionary War and the leader who decided to put country first over himself and resign his commission, allowing the United States to create a fertile democracy.
This democracy has been challenged again and again, from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement to today. No one is universally happy; in fact, most people are generally dissatisfied with the U.S. government. This is an example of the industry in its current state. The reason people are so passionate about crypto is that it’s not just an investment product; at its core, it’s a philosophy, a political belief. It’s just as much regulated by the FEC as it should be. What people are basically saying is, “I believe in power to the edges, I believe in self-sovereign identity, I believe in freedom and liberty.” As a result, I’m putting my money where my mouth is and my time into this. We’re all going to come together, figure it out, and build it—an army of volunteers, a ragtag militia for the future.
That’s a very different thing than Microsoft, Google, Apple, or Amazon. This is about all of us, each and every one of us. We just want some human rights, and we’re not really happy with where things are at. Nobody, if you pull them, would say, “I believe the people in charge should be in charge and we can’t find anyone better, but we’re stuck with them.” We’re stuck with them because of a political bureaucratic ossified process that has resulted in a two-party monopoly where it’s all about power at any cost. There isn’t a lot of integrity there.
We didn’t start this industry; it was started in response to a failed governance event—the 2008 financial crisis—which brewed from over 30 years of misconduct by central bankers like Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and treasury secretaries, and U.S. policy in an incestuous relationship with banksters who suffered no consequences for destroying the American economy. We were told to trust them, whether it was the Black-Scholes crisis of ’87, the S&L crisis in the early ’90s, the long-term capital crisis of ’98, or the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2008. We were told, “Trust us, we know what we’re doing; it’ll all be better tomorrow.” Yet, we faced another collapse, more corruption, and more problems.
So we said, “You know what? We, as an industry, are going to come together and do something different. Maybe we should have money that we control. Maybe we should have deflationary instead of inflationary monetary policies. Maybe we should own our own identity, be our own bank, and have a say in how our data is used.”
One of the reasons I joined this industry many years ago was a friend of mine who was a waitress. Her husband was an undocumented immigrant and a drywaller. I used to go to the restaurant where she worked and have lunch. One day, I came in, and she was crying. I asked what was going on, and she told me that her husband had been pulled over by the police. They saw he had some money in the car—he had just been paid for a two-month job in cash. They confiscated it; it’s called civil asset forfeiture. Knowing full well that he couldn’t defend himself out of fear of his status, they just kept the money. There was no probable cause for that. He explained to them that he was a drywaller and had just been paid, but they took the money. That happens every day. Civil asset forfeiture—that’s the government we live in.
The reality is that we, as a society, can and must do better. We have to either acknowledge that we don’t respect the rule of law and property rights, or we have to embrace systems that protect the individual. This was the intent of the Constitution. This was the intent of what we originally started the American experiment with. Because our governance system failed to live up to our expectations, we, as citizens, rose up peacefully, expressed our political will, and created a new system—one that holds everyone accountable equally. It goes from “don’t be evil” to “can’t be evil.” One that says you have to consent before something happens, one where you’re in control, not somebody you’ve never met.
The next ten years are going to be the biggest years of change in all of our lifetimes. This is it. It’s like the 1930s staring at the 1940s. Everybody knows something’s brewing; they don’t quite know what exactly is going to happen, but they know nothing will ever be the same again. The reality is that we have a great convergence of trends and technologies that will completely redefine everything—from how our governments operate to who’s in control to who has a say over how your life goes.
We quickly noticed the COVID lockdowns and how we all went from living in a free society to not. How quickly can things change? With the world of generative AI and global transnational agreements being signed, nation-states no longer have full say over their people. Yes, finance is going to be in the crosshairs. There are people who want to create CBDCs, and these CBDCs are not just about more efficient money. They’re not just about somehow getting rid of cash because that’s better for society, according to a few. They’re about putting control of what you’re allowed to spend your money on into the hands of people you’ve never met, whom you don’t vote for, and who are unaccountable to any legislative process.
In some cases, they don’t even live in your country. For example, if you’ve already filled your tank of gas this week, maybe you’re not allowed to do that until next week because you’ve reached your weekly allotment. That can be decided by a bureaucrat—not the president, not your congressman, but by someone you’ve never met from an agency you probably don’t even know about. The same can be said for any activity that’s determined to be not socially beneficial or fit into a particular agenda.
This system is not a hypothetical scenario; it’s one that’s being put into place with social credit in the People’s Bank of China today, right now, for over 1.5 billion people. It has already been deployed, thanks to partnerships with Tencent and others, to over 200 million people here in America. There are many people who subscribe to this as a good idea inside our federal bureaucracy.
The only problem is that there’s a glitch in the matrix. You see, you don’t actually need to do a CBDC if your goal is efficient digital money; you can use cryptocurrency for that. Our industry is an uncomfortable counterexample to a reality that some people have already decided the human race needs to exist within for the greater good because of the proliferation of existential technologies, global warming, and other concerns that keep them up at night. Thus, our industry has to be captured. Sometimes they move quickly, sometimes they move slowly, but it’s always in one direction— a little less freedom every day, a little less opportunity every day, a little less innovation, a little less control—until one day you wake up like a boiling frog, and it’s gone.
So the next ten years are going to be the great test for all of us. We have to stand up and rise to the occasion and tell people we should own our own money, own our own identity, and ultimately be in control of our lives. We shouldn’t accept that out of convenience or fear that somebody we’ve never met, someone who doesn’t even live in our country, gets to have more say than the people we elect. That’s something we have gone past as a society, as a species. That’s what you would expect living in ancient times and being conquered—not in a world that’s post-enlightenment where information is accessible instantaneously.
It’s going to be either a utopia or a hell; there isn’t really a middle ground. That’s why we fight. That’s why we’re in the cryptocurrency industry. If you’re here to make money, there’s plenty more money to be made in synthetic biology, AI, or other things. If you view this as some sort of passive investment, you completely miss the entire point of where all the passion, excitement, enthusiasm, and the armies come from.
There are tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people who have learned these lessons over the last 13 years and have decided to devote their lives to freedom and to a greater, better world—one where every single person rises together, not just a few. That’s what I signed up for; that’s why I fight. And that’s why when you have some craziness today, yesterday, or tomorrow, it doesn’t really bother me that much. You see, there will be bigger foes than this.
The reality is we’re facing the entire global order, and I think we’re going to win because I believe in the goodness of people. That’s the last point you have to make: you have to make one big decision in life—whether you believe people are fundamentally evil and corrupt or that people are fundamentally good but sometimes make mistakes. I’ve always believed that people are basically good, and if given an opportunity to rise, they can and they will. Based on that belief, everything flows from there.
You see, it’s a big decentralized ecosystem; it’s chaotic at times. But you know people will come together because they believe we have an opportunity to do things not just differently, but better than we did before—not just with Cardano, but the industry as a whole. The tens of millions of people, the trillions of dollars, the enormity of what we have accomplished as an industry in the last 13 years makes everything else pale in comparison and truly cannot be stopped.
We will see a day where decentralized identifiers are the dominant way of identifying people, and you’re in control of the keys—not a corporation, a government, or a transnational body. We will see a day where when you have money in your wallet, you own that—not an IOU from an organization that at any time can take it from you for no particular reason or because you violated a particular policy or agenda.
We will see those who want to drag us into the past, who have authoritarian bends because they feel they’re better qualified to run your life and society than you are, returned to the history books as yet another group of people that lost the political fight. Some days it’s a hard road; some days it’s an easy road. We’ve had a lot of easy times recently, but I’ve been in it since the beginning, and I can tell you there were some harder times.
We’re now in a phase where we do have to have our voices heard, and we do have to remind people that this is a collective exercise—one gargantuan decentralized, resilient living organism that just wants to improve things. For our part, we write protocols, we write code, and our protocols and code that we design and develop go into the public domain. People debate it; some people adopt it, others don’t. We are one cog in a gigantic machine, and you are too.
I think our future is brighter than ever. I believe that our best days are ahead of us, and I honestly believe that the lessons of the past, if we take wisdom from them, can be applied here. It always seems dark, and it always seems like these are tough days. That’s okay; they were tough days in the 1950s when my grandfather fought in the Korean War. They were tough days when, on the other side of my family, the Norwegian side fought against the Nazis in World War II. They were tough days when the Italian side immigrated to the United States with just the shirts on their backs, hoping to build a great life in America.
You know what? That’s a story that so many of you listening have or are currently enduring. So when you have an army built with people like that who have true grit, we can endure some tough days, we can endure some chaos, and we can endure a little bit of madness. Chokepoint 2.0 is a thing. You see it across the whole industry, from speedy banks rejecting accounts to basically everything becoming a security now, I guess.
But if you widen the aperture and look at the overall progress, we’ve gone from being totally ignored to winning as an ecosystem. All we have to do is keep building, and all we have to do is allow our voices to be heard and remind people we’re not going away. Freedom is only one generation away at any given time from being completely and absolutely lost because those who come after us may not remember the lessons we had to learn. Every generation has to rediscover what freedom means for them.
Never allow anyone to tell you that you don’t deserve human rights. Never allow anyone to tell you that you don’t deserve to be in control of your own identity, your money, your economic agency, and ultimately your voice. Anyone who tries to take it from you, remind them that that’s not how we do things in the 21st century. Every human being on this planet, no matter where they’re born, who they’re born to, or what political system they’re in, is equal. That’s the faith I keep, and that’s the belief I hold.
Thank you all for being on this journey with me. It really is fun. I’m going to be here tomorrow; you’re going to be here tomorrow. We’re all here together. Until next time, my friends, have a wonderful day. Cheers!
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