Hi everybody, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. I have a bit of a doozy and wanted to read this off for you guys. From time to time, I do my videos, and every now and then, people post stuff. If they take the time to write an open letter that is sufficiently long and try through multiple channels, I’ll go ahead and read the open letter and comment back on it, whether I agree with it or not.
So here it is. It was posted on my YouTube channel, but also on the Cardano Reddit and then the cryptocurrency Reddit. The letter states:
"An open letter to Charles Hoskinson. I often wish you had gone the Satoshi route and remained anonymous. To me, it seems that your desperate need for approval from your peers has made you incapable of being a faceless, nameless, objective presence in our world, which is badly needed. There’s no negotiation of objectivity; we all have subjectivity. For all your talk about making Cardano inclusive and neutral, you’re awfully into people that love to stoke the fires of hate for the LGBTQ+ minorities and poor people by throwing your support behind ultra-partisan Elon Musk or Jordan Peterson. I’m not sure where I supported them, but okay. Maybe I should ask politely: can you please stop associating your best-in-class decentralized open-source technology with alt-right hate group personalities like Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk?
I’d begrudgingly acknowledge that you’re not anonymous like Satoshi and have the freedom to say whatever you want in your AMAs. I’m also positive that a huge percentage of U.S. crypto pros are also healing fanboys and will downvote me for this. However, I wonder if you realize that for most people, the words 'Elon Musk' have become synonymous with the various things you say your technology helped fight against. Sometimes I wonder how a super-intelligent person like yourself could not see past the empty Tony Stark branding and hype to see that all leftists now see a billionaire who is one of the leaders of the modern alt-right.
Then I start to think that maybe you do know this and have decided to throw your support behind this, which is even more damning and embarrassing for people like me who just like your tech. It’s not my tech; it’s protocol. Another sticking point has been the dictatorial and disingenuous way that contingent staking is being forced upon us. See how people write things: is anything being pushed upon you guys at the moment? You even threatened to dial back the expressiveness of the system like some kind of fit that Elon Musk, the man-child, would pull on his subjects. You engage in finger-wagging the community about being a teachable moment, as if we are wrong to fight against this huge change to the consensus algorithm that brings it from being a hundred percent decentralized, inclusive chain to one where stake pool operators can choose to allow you to stake with them.
Well, they can already do that with a layer 2 solution. What happens in the very possible scenario where every stake pool decides to require contingent staking? Well, then you would create your own stake pools, right? The outspoken members of the community who are against contingent staking have great points. Don’t they also have ADA to create their own stake pools? They simply want to stand behind what we have felt was the philosophical successor to Bitcoin rather than some bootlicking love letter to U.S. regulators.
In conclusion, all I’m asking is that you start to understand that you are currently the face and voice of the Cardano brand. Many of us feel that you are enthusiastically dragging our brand into association with hatred, bigotry, and partisanship. I’m also not sure if you understand that many of us are not alright and appreciate not having to abandon a superior technology over partisan affiliations. I sincerely love Cardano’s tech; I fight holy wars over it. Check my history if you don’t believe me.
Well, I appreciate that. However, I and a large group of Cardano developers are increasingly embarrassed by our associations with the alt-right and are very ready to fork the beautiful, elegant tech stack of Cardano and start from scratch with a whole new crypto with Bitcoin’s principles of decentralization intrinsically protected. Sincerely, a huge Cardano fanboy who has had enough."
That’s a whole lot of words, isn’t it? And again, when people take the time to write an open letter, I will read it, especially from a person who has a long posting history.
There’s an authoritarianism that I’ve noticed has crept its way into politics, especially on the left, but sometimes on the right as well, where people say, "Well, I disagree with someone; that person’s a Nazi, a hate group, and hates me and wants my destruction." There’s a difference between disagreeing with people’s lifestyle, disagreeing with people’s life choices, disagreeing with people’s politics, and then saying that we should use the law, the government, the institutions of the government, or its associates to inflict punishment upon you for disagreeing.
What you’ll find is that the vast majority of people don’t care at all about the culture war, whether they’re left-wing or right-wing. Just a fact. If you go to a bar, people have very strong opinions. You look at them and say, "Would you advocate for criminalizing that?" Oh no. Would you advocate for investigations? Oh no. Sixty, seventy, eighty percent.
There are some nuanced figures like Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson. Jordan’s a deeply principled guy, and he’s gotten a little kooky, I’d argue, because he’s been brutally attacked for having very specific opinions. If you really dissect him as a human being, he’s mostly harmless. The challenge is that he punches back when he gets hit, and he’s turned into kind of a bitter fellow and a very angry fellow. He was just paranoid about the use of language because he spent about 30 years of his life researching communism, the Bolshevik Revolution, and how the Soviet Union had mastery over language. What they would do is change language to change perception. They would change the way they said things and the phrases, and that became reality. Anyone who disagreed with it would get gulagged.
So he started seeing that certain people were changing language, and he was deeply uncomfortable with it because they said if you don’t get along with language, there’s a criminal component now. That triggered him in a way that basically created a movement. People now say he’s a hero to some, and other people say he’s an alt-right icon, a symbol of evil and hatred. I don’t care. What I do care about is that he brings something to a conversation, and there’s certainly a constituency there. I don’t really take sides in that.
Now, Elon Musk is a different animal. He’s an industrialist who’s one of the world’s richest and most powerful men. Love him or hate him, he created companies like Tesla and SpaceX, which are anchors that are increasingly in control of a larger chunk of our lives, whether it be the automobile manufacturing industry, robotics, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, or the whole battery-powered industry. He’s the largest manufacturer of batteries around because of the gigafactories. Look at SpaceX: the largest manufacturer of rocket engines in the United States. We were never five before SpaceX was started.
Most people didn’t care too much about them until he started becoming political and then bought Twitter. They say, "Oh, he’s an icon of the alt-right." Well, he’s actually a bit of a narcissist, and I would argue he doesn’t have a lot of technical depth. I remember attending a Twitter space not too long ago where he was talking about the design of Twitter, and an engineer succinctly asked him a technical question, and he couldn’t answer it. He just acted with umbrage, "How dare you ask me this technical question?" I was like, well, you’ve just been talking about the Twitter technical stack for the last two weeks. Why wouldn’t you know about this, especially since you’re making broad sweeping claims about the design of Twitter?
I’ve been a little disengaged from the engineering of Cardano, but I at least know enough about it to kind of know where things are. If I’m asked questions about it, I can navigate it a bit. I won’t be able to tell you specifics in the code of the consensus protocol or where we’re currently at and where we’re modularizing this or cleaning up technical debt, but I have a pretty good idea of how the pieces come together. Why? Because I choose to stay informed.
I don’t think a person at his level, with the amount of employees he has and concerns he has, really can be. It was bizarre to me that he would get involved in a Twitter debate like that, which was completely unforced. He’s a mixed person; he’s all over the place, but he’s a very powerful person. He has a huge amount of influence, and love him or hate him, he’s in a position where he can control the discourse of hundreds of millions of people. That’s valuable to our industry.
Let’s be clear here: it is not alt-right to point out that COVID probably leaked from a lab, or at least that should be an equally considered theory to the natural origin. Yet apparently, it was labeled as alt-right. Now you have the U.S. government, through the Senate, the Department of Energy, the FBI, and other agencies, saying it’s a credible theory that needs to be taken carefully. It’s not alt-right to point out that China has concentration camps and millions of people are in them, and that we should do something about that as a society. I thought we’d protect all people. It’s in the whole point of the LGBTQ movement to say that everybody’s choices can be respected.
Look at Iran; they kill gay people there and imprison them. So we probably should talk about these things if you believe in these things. I try to stay out of all of it, and I don’t pick a side here and there because at the end of the day, it’s not my job to do that. It’s about building protocols. Where it bothers me deeply is when people write these open letters and talk about things like cramming contingent staking down your throat. It’s not even been written as a SIP; it’s already been decided by the community that nothing will be done without a vote by the community.
Yes, it’s a teachable moment to have a debate because we’ve never had a major debate about these types of things in the philosophy of it, and now we have to because of a constitution. But you see how the authoritarian elements come in: if we disagree with that worldview, which is the only worldview that matters, obviously we’ve embraced an evil alt-right Nazi movement and the philosophy of random people like Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk, who have literally nothing to do with Cardano.
It’s so serious that we’re about ready to fork the protocol and take it down a very different and bizarre direction. It’s not alt-right to want freedom of speech; that’s the entire point of these protocols. Let’s be very clear here: social media, for the most part, is censoring people. We know this because if I posted in April of 2020 that I believe COVID started in a lab, I would lose my Facebook account. If I had a LinkedIn account, I’d lose my LinkedIn account or be put in the doghouse. Now very real questions are being asked about that.
It’s the same truth for some things on the left that get reported and are said as facts, and then a few years later, maybe they’re not. That’s a thing; it happened. We all experienced that. It’s not alt-right to question vaccine passports. Should it be the case that you have to show a piece of paper for an arbitrary medicine to go to Starbucks, especially when there are severe and significant concerns about how processes were not followed that were followed throughout the rest of the history of medicine? You’re bullied, belittled, and beaten down, and apparently, that’s labeled as alt-right.
I have every right to express concerns because I am a public figure in that respect, and as a public figure, I have to represent what I feel is a free society. I’d like everybody to have the freedom to share their opinions, the freedom to associate, and the freedom to express themselves. I think that’s a basic human right, and I get really pissed off when small groups of people, often unelected, use their enormous platforms to basically de-platform people who disagree with their particular political philosophy. That’s authoritarian.
I also disagree when people change language to fit their particular needs. When you just change definitions arbitrarily, and this has happened numerous times in the last three years, in some cases completely arbitrarily, I don’t understand it, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable. If we don’t know what the rules of society are, or if a small group of people gets to define that without any oversight, then it creates an enormous amount of social friction.
The whole point of blockchain is that you set it, and once you’ve established it, everybody plays by those same rules. It’s fair; it has this property of inclusive accountability. You don’t trust me; you can verify it yourself. So when I see letters like this, I see a projection of authoritarianism to us, and it’s something that we have to be keenly aware of. Oftentimes when people write that, they’re actually not writing about me; they’re not writing about Cardano; they’re writing about their own fears because they would do this themselves in power.
When we look at SIP 1694, the Constitution, the MBO, these are teachable moments because the reality is everything’s up for grabs: how people use Cardano, the monetary policy, the way stake pool operators work, the process upon which we vote, what’s legitimate, what’s not legitimate, the notion of consent. All of this stuff is a government at the end of the rainbow, and we have to make some hard decisions in the coming year about what’s in bounds and what’s not in bounds.
Actually, today, a lot of people have flown in here to the Longmont office, and I’m going to have a great conversation with them and talk to them. Some of them radically disagree with me; some of them don’t even like me; some of them love me. But I’m just a single voice, along with some of the IOG people that are here and the Cardano Foundation people who are here, to talk about SIP 1694 as an approach to good governance on Cardano.
Now that’s a foundation upon which people are going to make some decisions. Those decisions are only as good as the inputs in the debate and the dialogue. I’m getting real tired of living in a society where people label others, and I’m getting real tired of living in a society without nuance. A smart person, an intelligent person, can entertain the ideas of people they disagree with and find merit in the arguments, ideas, and thoughts of others that they disagree with. They can find good things that people did, and they can find terrible things that good people do. That’s just a fact.
If we can’t admit that anymore, we have to decide that people are either absolutely evil or absolutely good and put them into those buckets based upon our politics. That’s the only way society can move forward. Here’s what you’re going to find out: every person’s evil because the concepts of good and evil are so powerfully disjoint at the moment that there’s no way to build consensus over a ubiquitously good person. If that’s the case, then tell me who’s so pure that they have no sin outside of a religious figure for the religion you happen to believe in.
The only way you can get ahead is to say that people are nuanced and that they have bad ideas and good ideas. Elon Musk saying that humanity should be a multi-planetary species is a pretty good idea. Why? Because one existential event, like nuclear war or gain of function or AI, could wipe out all life on Earth. So having a backup plan is probably a good idea.
Now, all of you who hate him on the left, where’s your SpaceX? That didn’t invent itself, didn’t fundraise itself, didn’t build itself. If it’s so easy, how come you haven’t done it? If it’s so easy, how come NASA hasn’t done it? If it’s so easy, how come China hasn’t done it? At least he’s doing something. You may disagree with the methodology or think he’ll never get there. He’s a big bloviator, but you know the Falcon 9 rocket did land itself, and the spaceship is under construction. Organizations like NASA have signed contracts that have been honored and delivered.
I sat in this very chair and watched an American rocket made by an American company, not Russian, send astronauts to the International Space Station, completely made by private hands. That happened. It’s not a hypothetical; it’s not a bloviating lie; it occurred. Now, you could thank the engineers at SpaceX and say Elon had absolutely nothing to do with it, but I do know for a fact that SpaceX would not exist if not for him. You can’t take that away from him.
Does that excuse his conduct? Does it excuse the time he called that one diver a pedo and got sued over it or all the other reprehensible things? No. But what it does do is tell you he’s a nuanced person who has occasionally good ideas. It’s the same for Jordan Peterson, and it’s the same for many other people on the right and the left and everybody in between.
The only way that governance on Cardano is going to actually get anything done is if we take a step back, depersonalize things, and realize that this is about us, not I. We have to recognize the good, the bad, and the ugly. The very fact that I’m being accused in this open letter for the contingent staking debate of cramming it down your throats is just an example of a lack of capacity to do that.
At the end of the day, regardless of what my opinion is, pro-CS or anti-CS, it created a great conversation with over 2,000 people who attended the Twitter space. Probably over a hundred thousand have listened to it since, and lots of wonderful opinions. The very fact that people are having opinions and talking to each other, and again, the process is to implement it as a SIP and vote on it one way or the other.
Is it the fear that potentially the totality of Cardano could disagree with him that makes him so angry? Then he wants somebody to blame for that: the person who has the audacity to propose the vote that he then has to argue with straw man. What do you get when you lose?
There’s a very real possibility that when IOG says, "Hey, we’d like to
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