Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from rough and rugged Wyoming, up at my clinic. I wanted to make a quick video to talk about something we've all been dealing with as an industry, which has unfortunately caused a lot of heartburn and heartache among the American cryptocurrency industry in particular.
As many of you know, we've had a bit of a disagreement with the current administration about how cryptocurrencies should be regulated. The issue has been that, in the absence of laws being passed, the U.S. cryptocurrency industry has to deal with regulation by enforcement. Regardless of the outcome in the courts, the enforcement is tone-deaf and continues to carry out the same policy, which has cost tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of American jobs, as well as the loss of a trillion-dollar-plus industry.
In my own personal experience forming Ethereum in Switzerland, since Ethereum was founded there, 1,290 businesses have followed, with a total market value of over $380 billion. Those, plus the businesses in Singapore and the businesses in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, just to mention three jurisdictions, probably would be more than 3,000 firms, the majority of which would have been domiciled in the United States had our crypto policy been reasonable.
Today, there was a very interesting statement from this administration. Let me share it with you, as reported by Bitcoin Magazine. The U.S. President Joe Biden's administration says Biden would veto legislation that allows highly regulated financial firms to custody Bitcoin and crypto. To read off the statement of administrative policy, the administration strongly opposed the passage of HJ Resolution 109, which would disrupt the Securities Exchange Commission's work to protect investors in the crypto asset markets and to safeguard the broader financial system.
HJ Resolution 109 was meant to validate the SEC staff bulletin—just a bunch of noise and garbage. It's one thing to have regulation by enforcement; it's another to say that when the legislative branch comes together, they talk to everybody and come up with proposals for how we, as a nation, can innovate and move forward. To say that you'll just veto it is absurd. The Securities Exchange Act was passed in 1933, and to say that it is sufficient to regulate assets that came 90 years later is an absurd statement. Cryptocurrencies can be commodities, securities, currencies, loyalty points, and non-fungible tokens all at the same time. How do you do asset-based regulation when things can move between categories on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, and facts and circumstances can change all the time?
The legislative branch's job is to look at emerging technologies and say we need new laws, new categories, and new definitions. For example, when the United States was founded, flying was something of Icarus; it was not a real concept. The concept of the Federal Aviation Administration regulating U.S. airspace for commercial air travel was a fantasy. To say that some law passed in the 19th century would be sufficient to regulate U.S. airspace in the 20th century, after the Wright Brothers invented the plane, would be absurd.
It is equally absurd to think that something created during the time of FDR is sufficient to regulate this new technology through enforcement with inconsistency at the judiciary and among the commission itself. But that’s the opinion of this administration—Operation Choke Point 2.0.
So, this November, if you vote for Joe Biden as a cryptocurrency holder, please understand the intent of this administration is to destroy the American cryptocurrency industry. It is unambiguously clear they have confiscated, lied, and repeatedly hurt our industry in every way possible, whether it be restricting access to bank accounts, regulation through enforcement, anti-clarity, reversing decisions that had already been made, or obstructing the legislative process by saying if you pass the bill, we’re just going to veto it.
I don’t really care who you vote for, whether it be RFK, Trump, or somebody else, but do understand that a vote for Biden is a vote against cryptocurrencies. A vote for Biden is a vote against the American cryptocurrency industry. As an American, it gives me a great degree of heartburn to watch an industry that has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of American jobs be destroyed and moved to China, the Middle East, Europe, and other places.
This is an industry we invented. We invented the cryptography, we invented the algorithms, we have the talent, we have the infrastructure, and we have the markets. This is an industry, like AI, the internet, and all the things before it, that we should be number one in the entire world. The only reason we’re not is because of the policies of this particular administration. That’s just the reality. If you vote for Biden, that is what you’re voting for this November.
I’m not telling you who else to vote for; that’s your conscience. But understand the consequences of this. When they make statements like this and obstruct the legislative process, when they regulate through enforcement, this is what you get. When someone is innovating, they have to ask themselves if they want to go to a country that says things like “come and register,” but it’s not actually possible, and you don’t get any clarity. Even a commissioner of the SEC says this publicly. Or do I want to go to a country where I can directly engage with the regulators, and they’ll tell us what they want? It’s a negotiation; they’re friendly, they’re not adversarial, the law is unambiguous, advice can be given, and you can converge to a regulatory decision within weeks to months.
This is the lived reality in dozens of countries now throughout the world. This administration wants to create a reality where we’ll never tell you; you’ll find out after you get sued by us. Even if you win, we’ll still sue you, and even if you win, we’ll try to hurt you some other way by taking your bank account away or just making stuff up, like saying that Speedy Banks in Wyoming, apparently a full reserve bank with all your money there, is riskier than a fractional reserve bank, which, by the way, we’ve noticed fail like SVB and others recently. They make stuff up like “uninsured,” but then they prevent people from getting the insurance.
What does insurance mean when there are 100% of the deposits on hand, and the instruments they carry are American treasury bills? Is it the policy of the U.S. government to punish American firms for holding the debt of the United States? Is this administration saying that the debt of the United States is not as good as holding U.S. dollars? It’s pretty extraordinary when you think about it, but apparently, this is how it works.
So again, a vote for Biden is a vote for more of this. So make that decision come November about who you support. I’m not advocating for Trump; I actually personally endorsed RFK. I’m not telling you who to vote for; I’m just telling you there are consequences for the 53 million Americans who hold cryptocurrencies. These things are becoming more aggressive and more unbounded and disconnected from reality. It’s extraordinary to me to watch friends go to prison, to watch good companies get sued, and to watch day after day an increasingly hostile regime against American innovation.
To those who believe in national security and have the audacity to say that somehow cryptocurrencies interfere with national security, please answer this question for me: our number one adversary, according to every document the U.S. government produces, is China. The number one vector of attack that China has on the sovereignty of the United States is through cybersecurity. They’re hacking our infrastructure every single day. Millions of Americans know this who work in this industry; information security is hacked all the time. Industrial espionage occurs all the time.
The number one producer of high-quality cryptography and information security is the cryptocurrency industry. We have the best incentives, the best training, and the best people. You can see it by the paper volume in cryptographic innovation. Zero-knowledge proofs were a weird abstraction that nobody cared about, and this industry pushed that entire notion of cryptography ahead by decades in just a few years. Not to mention the advancements in homomorphic encryption and multi-party computation.
By driving the American cryptocurrency industry abroad, you won’t kill it, but you will lose all of the brain trust that understands cryptography and information security. They’ll just leave and go into the hands of China to be weaponized and used against us, in the Middle East to be mercenaries for the highest bidder, to be used against us in the coming wars. So if you believe in national security, do understand that a vote for Biden produces this.
I’m tired of it. I’m so tired of the lies. I really am. I’ve tried to keep the peace, and I’ll endorse RFK because I like the man. I try not to tell you, but I do need to inform you on this one. We see it every single day; we feel it every single day as an industry, and it’s getting pretty old and repetitive. The language doesn’t even make sense. It’s tiring to watch senior economic advisers not even know how money printing works in the U.S. government, yet apparently be qualified to advise all of us about our monetary policy as a nation-state.
It’s tiring to watch no accountability and officials in this administration go before the legislative branch and simply refuse to answer questions or lie and not be held accountable for their actions. I’m so tired of it, but in particular, it really hurts our industry. It doesn’t kill it; it just hurts the United States of America, my country where I live. If you’re an American, understand this: there’s nothing Joe Biden can do to kill Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies as a whole. All he can do is make sure that the United States is second or third best, if not lower on the list in that party.
We have to set out the greatest financial innovation since the invention of the corporation. We have to set out the future of the world economy and how money is going to work for the world. The consequences will be measured in the trillions, the tens of trillions of dollars, and the jobs will be measured in the hundreds of thousands to millions. This is hurting America when they do these types of things. If they understand there are political consequences to these types of positions, such that they lose elections, maybe, just maybe, we can renegotiate the relationship instead of having it dictated and mandated by the corporate masters that run the parties.
So come November, be a single-issue voter: vote crypto. If they’re pro-crypto, pull the lever, and if they’re anti-crypto, don’t vote for them. If you value what we’ve created here over the last 15 years, if you don’t care or think other issues are more important, I fully appreciate and understand that. But ask yourself, if we play a counterfactual, how many industries can we lose before America is not America anymore? What if we sat out the internet? What if we sat out the personal computer revolution? What if we sat out the aerospace revolution? What if we sat out mass manufacturing, the automobile industry? What if we sat out the oil and gas industry? How many of those, if we sat out, would translate to the United States being still the wealthiest, most powerful nation? At what point do we collapse?
We have more than $34 trillion in debt on the books and unfunded mandates and liabilities far higher. The only way we’re ever going to be able to return to a balanced budget is to grow our way out of it. We can’t tax our way out of it, and how you grow is by embracing the future. This is one of the pillars of the 21st century alongside AI, quantum computing, and other things. What this administration is doing is systematically destroying America’s race. It’s putting 50-pound weights on our legs and saying, “All right, let’s go race.” I’m sorry, you can’t win if that’s the case, and I don’t want to watch the people around me, my nation around me, get poorer, less competitive, and ultimately have a dim future.
So in November, vote crypto and understand who isn’t voting crypto. Thank you.
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