hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado hopefully everybody can hear me okay i still can't believe i did an entire video with no audio it's just one of those senior moments you see i'm getting old getting old falling apart guys it's just uh just how it is today is thursday february 23rd 2021 and you know it's a fun day a lot of hard work has gone down the memes are still coming there was blood in the streets in bitcoin land as we were reminded that this is still a very volatile industry and what goes way up can go way down always remember that you throw a rock in the air the rock eventually comes down and sometimes you get lucky and it hits a ledge and you have a higher resting state but with great gains there are great losses so be careful out there and manage your expectations accordingly wherever you fall in the space my old frenemy ah [ __ ] it mostly nuisance dan larimer of course wants to comment on ada and say that somehow all the things we've done are just hype and speculation you know this space needs to go through a great maturing i'm happy to work with people the other day i got an email from gav wood and he said hey let's do something together i'll reply back tonight and i'm happy to do something because it works better when people work together you know at some point we'll do something with the taizos foundation we'll figure out something that makes sense and i'm happy to work with anyone including the ethereum foundation and the reason being is that we have to be adults and professionals and where and when working together makes sense for our ecosystems and for the progress of crypto in general uh that's a good thing uh our egos aside the past aside it is what it is what is so bad about our lives that we have to hold on to petty bitter rivalries from the past honestly all the people who were ogs if they were smart their lives are very good right now and we work for passion and i just don't understand why people go throw stones like that especially people that don't have a stake in any of this the reality is that they raised four billion dollars we raised two percent of that and despite that difference in capitalization we wrote nearly 100 scientific papers built a colossal ecosystem and we are making revolutionary changes on a daily basis in not only the scientific domain but also in our industry as a whole the governance system we're developing is the most advanced in the entire cryptocurrency space and the fastest growing nothing to ten thousand people flip the page it'll be a hundred thousand come on now kids you know the consensus work that we've done is leading the entire industry or boris omega will be the capstone you can put a fork in it it's done okay at that point everything is just a iteration we don't really need a lot of revolutionary changes there on out and there's not a damn field we ain't doing something in whether it be sonic's the snark we created to compete with plonk and compete with lipsnark or it be the pioneering work we did with the extended utxo model and the new programming languages we created which are actually coming faster than you think in all these things we did it systematically methodically and we did it with honesty we told people what we were going to do we did it and we told them what we did some cases it took years in case of or boris that agenda so far has consumed six years of my life and the scientists lives who participated in it and you know what it's probably going to take another two to four years for that agenda to get to a point where everything is iterative instead of revolutionary to a point where it's harder to get your paper into conferences because the novelty is diminishing the major results in the field the gold rush of those things have been discovered it's more about use and utility from optimized protocols the same for programming language theory there's probably a good 10 years or 15 years more work that is needed to be done before we have the right way to do a smart contract and it just kind of fits and works and feels right much like javascript took two decades to get to where it needs to go the contrast between the eos project the cardano project is we told all of this to you guys up front they did not they said 500 000 transactions per second million transactions per second it's even in the name earth operating system whatever the [ __ ] they wanted to call it about how they were going to kill ethereum take over the whole market i remember when they raised that money i was in new york at consensus they rented several floors of consensus their logos and banners were everywhere and there was even on times square on the billboard the eos logo reminding the world how they were the sacred ones who were going to deliver us from darkness and where are they at a joke you know they have tons of architectural problems tons of issues that need to be resolved and let's be clear their design is not decentralized and will never meet the promises they made now they have so much money they could easily go into market and find great things build great research teams build great engineers and actually start chipping away at the enormity of the promises and expectations that that community has but they choose not to do that and that's their prerogative because they got paid up front and they have no fiduciary responsibility to do anything other than i guess count their money and then the founders of that project have the audacity to say that ours is just built on hopenium dreams that the hype of cardano is finite and ephemeral and then when we finally launch our desperately flawed technology people will come back to earth meanwhile we just keep writing papers meanwhile we just keep writing code meanwhile we just keep growing and onboarding people and building things we're here to stay the decades that come the wars of the future will have good fortune and occasional bad fortune but i'm here i don't quit i've never quit i always fight i always push forward no matter what happens i wake up every morning and i say what do we need to win today what do we need to accomplish today because that's my personality and that's who i am and every person i hire in my organization has that mentality or else they don't survive and so we've had to let some people go or some people quit because the pace was too hard we pushed them too long it's hard to be working in that kind of relentless mode i hate that we're not further ahead it makes me sick to my stomach i never rest on my laurels even though i try to pursue things in such a systematic and methodical way it's never fast enough for me and i wake up every day saying how can we move today just a little faster how can we be just a little better i read paper after paper looking for slightly better technology for the next edge the next graduate student that i think is promising that we can find a way to bring into the family and get them to start writing papers in our ecosystem every deal i look at i always ask how can i make this deal optimal how can i make this deal work for our ecosystem how can we use this to bring millions of people into cardano because that's just my personality i hate to lose i like the win and winning is we bring a world operating system over decades to come to bear with our values and our principles that's who we are that's what cardone has always been about which is why we care so much about leadership development it's why we care so much about innovation management it's why we care so much about checks and balances it's why we care so much about empowering the community it's why we care so much about giving people the resources that they need for their roles i had a meeting today about the perfect piece of stake pool hardware most people wouldn't care but i said you know risk five is looking really interesting and cube's os is looking really interesting these days is it possible that we can do a roll up of nitro key cubes os sel4 and a risk 5 device because they got this new hardware coming out for around 600 bucks that just looks phenomenal why not you know you have to be relentless like that every waking moment you have to wake up and say how could i be better how can we do better and have that mentality and that personality you wake up at 4 30 try to wake up at 4 29 the next day or maybe 429 in 30 seconds and work just a little harder on the treadmill just a little harder writing the code because if we don't do that someone else will and we'll lose the momentum there have been a lot of setbacks and most of those i take ultimate responsibility for as a ceo i hired the people i came up with the strategy i thought certain things were going to work and i don't care if people let us down it's my fault because the buck stops here on my shoulders and the only thing i can do is be better tomorrow we could have for example had a very different launch strategy we could have from day one had smart contracts the day we launched cardano we already had a fully working ethereum virtual machine now i felt it would have been terrible to latent our ecosystem with the mistakes of the past and it was a much better idea for us to doggedly pursue a programming language model that would be vastly superior now in hindsight we perhaps could have come up with a halfway measure that may have been a little better instead of launching daedalus as our primary gui interface maybe it would have been better using uroi and scaling up those resources for it and having an enterprise cli maybe it would have been better not betting the farm on languages that weren't quite ready for mainstream and going with something a bit more predictable who knows on the other hand it created relationships and it created a mystique that we wouldn't have had otherwise and perhaps we would have executed well but have a quarter of the adoption and that common suffering and pain has made the ecosystem as a whole better for each and every person because they're stronger too and they have that mentality we all kind of have a chip on our shoulder at this point because not a single one of us if you've been here for a while hasn't been kicked pissed on or had dust pushed into their eyes and been mocked by someone setting dan aside because dogs do bark but the caravan has to move on there are some bigger critics no larger than the bitcoin maximalist you know the video i was making uh where the sound was out was about bitcoin and i have a bizarre love-hate relationship with that ecosystem on one hand i fully acknowledge and most of my competitors do not that none of us would be here if not for bitcoin and bitcoin was a necessary step in changing the mindset of the entire world to pay attention to ideas that had been percolating for decades but had never gained traction this is why i call bitcoin the most important innovation of the 21st century beyond that of the internet it created a global awakening that we need new money finance needs to be programmable and we need different relationships with identity value and governance and that's fair but that doesn't mean that bitcoin is the end-all be-all no more than the steam engine proving that mechanical labor was far better than human labor launching the industrial revolution excuse the steam engine's terrible downsides and the demand to replace it with something far better so when we look to the future we say that bitcoin should be replaced or upgraded so that it's no longer an ecological environmental catastrophe it should be replaced or upgraded to something better so that it actually can be competitive with throughput settlement times cost of operation programmability governance and yes they absolutely need a governance system or else explain to me why bitcoin cash exists explain to me why the people that i grew up with in this space were demonized and hardened feathers for having slightly different opinions about protocol parameters like how big a block should be you don't throw away the people that made you who you are because you have a disagreement you find common grounds and where you can't you at least preserve the relationship as best you can the fact that that was impossible means that the governance system is not working properly the fact that the ecosystem can't evolve means that the governance system is not working properly they can put their fingers in their ears and say this is a feature not a bug and somehow despite these things all other things will die everyone else is a scam and they only the holy anointed ones who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time will win and everyone else will lose it's madness it's a cult and it is a road to nowhere and it wouldn't bother me so much if not for the fact that i get bombarded and every single other altcoin gets bombarded with the same tired tropes scam coin [ __ ] coin ra ra ra 10 years of progress of science of engineering for our industry as a whole but apparently none of these maximalists want for a moment to believe that perhaps there's something better than the steam engine perhaps you don't have to spend more electricity than an entire country like ecuador switzerland to be able to accomplish the same thing that is madness yet that's where they're at and they try to indoctrinate people and turn people against each other and make people hate each other and the sad thing is that we in the altcoin space have already come up with things that could make bitcoin immeasurably better protocols like prism from promotive swanath could make it ten thousand times faster with very few trade-offs protocols like nipa powell's from dns syndros and aguilos kiosas could give you awesome light clients and side chains simplicity or things like extended utxo could give bitcoin programmability with a similar security model to the one that it currently enjoys why not do these things faster better cheaper lesser downside it's technology it's the fact that thousands of smart people spent 10 years of their lives thinking hard and coming up with new ways to do things if you tell me technology doesn't evolve how many of you want to be running currently windows 95 on your computer if you're telling me technology and protocols doesn't evolve how many of you would like to be running a 56k modem at the moment or for that matter a graphics card made by 3dfx one of those old voodoo cards the whole point of the technology space and the human condition in it is competitive pressures inspires the best and brightest amongst us to wake up every day and make things better and that's what we did our competitors did in the altcoin space as a whole did yet the cult of satoshi and bitcoin maximalism prevents people from recognizing that that was what the other video was about my dismay and it's just sad that we have to throw away our own and focus on the things that divide us and ignore science ignore progress in exchange for a tired old trope of there's only one truth of the matter we as an industry stand at a crossroads we're right at the edge of legitimacy in the mainstream and whether we are treated as a rube goldberg machine to make a few very lucky people very wealthy as a fad or we fundamentally change the entire world brick by brick at its very core in foundations has everything to do with how we treat each other has everything to do with our empathy and our openness and our ability to understand despite our differences what people are trying to accomplish i do not look at my competitors as evil as bad human beings i look at people who have differences of opinion different backgrounds and different values and i'll give them the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise and i hold them accountable for the things that they do good and bad and you'll hear me oftentimes praise people and you'll hear me oftentimes criticize people now i'm not perfect in fact seldom do i make the right decisions oftentimes i make incomplete bad decisions because of incomplete partial information or a misconception about something and that's okay the point of having a great company is to somehow find a way to blunt that and despite these things get you to move forward but in no way does that somehow excuse our industry as a whole for the things that it continues to seem to do i have no patience anymore for maximalism and no one should and i have no patience anymore for blind criticism that people levy we've moved past that how the hell can we welcome people who have no grievances or dogs in our fight if all we do is say welcome to crypto pick a side and once you've picked a side the all the other sides will hate you we have a place to do that it's called prison when you go to a federal prison usually you have to join a gang to survive and then you spend your entire time there fighting the other ones supporting the home team i don't want crypto to have that kind of user experience cultural experience otherwise we don't deserve the future we keep broadcasting that we're going to deliver frankly the legacy system is better because at least it is a little bit more inclusive at least it is a little bit more fair even in with all of its evils so as we stand at that crossroads and and we look to ourselves we must slay the evils of maximalism it is okay to hold people accountable and criticize them but also understand that we can venerate them for the good things that they do and also understand that despite criticism at times we can work together especially when it's in the best interest of everyone in the space and finally we all need to take a chill pill we really do just relax you know i love competing i love the discipline i love pushing forward i love the fight i have fire a lot of fire even bought one of those fake fireplaces over there because that's fun it's what gets you up in the morning but just because i like competing and i like the competition and no way says that i should treat people poorly or like enemies they're not we're all fellow travelers on the road of crypto on these rivers we all wake up every day trying to roughly if we're giving people the benefit of the doubt accomplish great things if polka dot or tazos or f2 was to become the dominant standard i still do believe it's possible given enough time and if the process of participating was inclusive enough to actually make substantial progress in making the world a better place i just so happen to believe that cardano has the best chance of success and i just so happen to believe that cardano has the best collection of values in the best community to execute and get us there but this is not a sum zero game where for us to win everyone else must lose or for us to lose everyone else must win it's not that simple it's a nuanced thing and it's entirely possible that we could wind up with five or ten different standards just like we have more than ten dominant languages in the world and it's entirely possible that what we think the future is going to look like will be radically different from the one that we envision perhaps even better and that's what makes it fun and that's what makes it interesting as an industry all i have control over is how i act and react and all i have control over are the decisions i make for my company and the things that we do as an ecosystem together and every day i try to remind people don't focus on the price that's a red herring i try to remind people that if you're really serious about being part of this then you need to optimize the things that you're good at if you're not good at math don't try to be a mathematician if you're not good at art don't try to be an artist each and every one of you has some special talents and special capabilities and the point of an inclusive system is despite the differences in your background you should have the power somehow to rise within the system the point of the legacy systems and why we seek to destroy them is that they don't do that they don't have that property they don't look at people for being people instead they look at them as commodities and they value them accordingly many parents tell their children make sure you study a field to make money become a doctor become a lawyer become an accountant become an engineer it doesn't matter if that's your passion or what you're good at go do it because it's safe and predictable and then with that money the limited time you have left after you're stressed from doing a job you hate go spend that money somehow doing the things you like two weeks a year and that's a good life what kind of a system inflicts that upon people we need to change and the point of this industry is to change the way society works to change the way companies work to change the way we make decisions to change the way property works to change the way value works to enable people to monetize things they never thought were monetizable i spent years studying mathematics it's a dreary field if you ever want to get rich because no one values it outside of the academy and even within the academy they're usually the people who live off in their own little department the more pure the math gets the more abstract the math gets the less people care and the greatest honor you can have is someone actually read your paper seriously a few mathematicians even enjoy that properly imagine if you could participate in that field and get paid to write mathematical proofs whether you work for a university or not imagine if you could be a mathematician on the side as a part-time job just like people are painters on the part-time or babysitters on the part-time or uber drivers just something you could do at your level with interesting problems and still commit contribute to the overall field we have a product called q adidas that's exploring just that thing a marketplace for deduction and once you realize that that superpower is not unique to that domain it could be in every domain you can fundamentally change the incentives behind passions and give people the means they need to pursue the things they love catalyst alone over the next 12 months will inevitably allow hundreds if not thousands of people to wake up every single day and work for a cryptocurrency you can't do that with bitcoin it's not possible had that been possible i'd have a full-time job right now working for bitcoin i probably still be running the bitcoin education project and every year thinking about the next curriculum the next book the next tutorial devoting my talents to that but because that didn't exist that wasn't possible i had to go do different things in the industry but guess what it is here in cardano with catalyst there will be people paid to have opinions experts there will be politicians in our ecosystem within the next 12 to 24 months your passions whatever it might be it could be art it could be psychology it could be science it could be engineering it can be marketing it doesn't particularly matter whatever it happens to be if you choose to make these things available and you can convince people that you're credible they will give you the shot that's the promise of the systems we're constructing and if people realize that such a thing exists they'll come and flock to our protocol to our ecosystem and you know what they'll do once they come and flock to our protocol and our ecosystem will grow and when we grow other people say how do we compete with those guys well let's imitate them let's become them and then suddenly people will work for ethereum and they'll work for other protocols that's what we call victory and that's what we call changing the world that's what we sought out to do and every day we move closer to that we don't know what it's going to look like at the end we have ideas aspirations hope vision i'd like it to look in certain ways but we don't know and we're not going to pretend that we do anyone who does is either a mad man or a con man or something in between instead we just hope that it can grow and evolve and like those growing the great trees we water it every day we tend to the soils every day and we believe no matter what happens it'll be better than what we found that's the goal that's why i'm still in crypto and i'd like to believe a lot of people are in crypto for that reason now many of you are in it for the money gene simmons is that's okay because sometimes people need something to get them in and once they're there if the community is right little by little we can slowly chip away and transform and convince them that there's a higher purpose and convince them that there's more meaning in these things than digits on a computer screen and if we can that's a victory and if we can't then we have to wake up tomorrow like i do every day and say how can we be a little better how can we be a little bit more competitive a little bit more persuasive and what skills can we personally master to get it done the next time so we're all at a crossroads i know where i'd like to go and i think i know where you guys want to go to and i'd like to believe the industry as a whole would honestly like to make a real difference in the human condition during the 21st century and all they have to do is grow up and all they have to do is have some empathy and realize that this is bigger than our egos and bigger than our wallets thanks for listening
