Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is Sunday, October 8th, 2023, and it is time for yet another one of the impromptu, always fun, always exciting surprise AMAs.
In the office today, I'm doing some work on the Constitution, among many other things. I figured, you know, I haven’t done an AMA in a long time—not by choice; it’s just been busy. A lot has been going on, and it would be good to see what’s going on with you guys and what your questions are. It’s a very loaded time in Cardano; there’s lots going on. We had NFT XLV, we had Rare Evo, and there are obviously a lot of workshops happening.
We’re right in the thick of things with Sonano Net; I think we’re at version 8.5, and we’re getting pretty close to full implementation of the SIP. From a feature perspective, things in the SIP you can actually do through the command line. It’ll be a little while more—maybe a few more releases—before I think we get there. At that point, it’s productization, meaning we actually have to do integration, testing, and keyway, and all those types of things. However, that means Sonano Net has fully realized, and people can begin messing with it, playing with it, and having a lot of fun with it.
We’re kind of moving along and getting those things done. 2024 is really looking, from an IO perspective, to be the year of side chains and Mithril. Those are the two big things I would love to see get done from a research perspective. There’s Ouroboros, Leos, and input endorsers. We worked really hard last year to get some of the foundations of input endorsers set up as the directionality of the research. This year, we’ve been tightening the bolts and really figuring out exactly how we want to do it.
I think what will happen is once that’s been completely set up, then a firm like Typed or some other will go into heavy modeling and analysis mode. That’ll be a concurrent thread that runs with all of the stuff required for the plumbing of side chains. Boy, is there a lot of plumbing that needs to be put in for side chains.
Of course, there’s the third thread that never stops—there are multiple threads. It’s like we’re weavers here. That third thread that never stops is improvements to Plutus and the development experience. We’re starting to fall in love with Ain a little bit. The Hydra team actually prototyped some of the Hydra stuff with Ain and did a cross-comparison to Plutus script, and there are some good things there. It’s a great ecosystem; it really shows you the power when the community comes together and comes up with a good idea.
We have to be very pragmatic about these things, and there are many other threads, like how to get Mithril into the node itself, improvements to the network stack, and peer-to-peer, which is already here. People are using it, and obviously, that rollout comes over time. It’s fully realized with Genesis, which is already underway. There’s a fixed cost contract out to tweak about it, so people are chipping away at things, and hopefully, in the first half of next year, we’ll see that if they keep the deadlines.
So, just a lot of stuff, and I’m very happy with the progress. It’s a new development paradigm; it can’t be everything to everybody. It’s a completely new network; no one’s ever seen these types of things before. Yet, the assumptions we made in the lab are coming true in reality. For example, many of you saw the tweet about Mithril: a 20-minute bootstrap time for a full node—20 minutes!
This is Mithril version one. Mithril version two is almost done. Leo Raisin from Boston University came over to Edinburgh for a semester and worked with our guys. He did the compact certificate paper with Alran, a really great top-notch researcher. So, he came over, worked with our guys, and took a lot of great ideas from that ecosystem and merged them with ours. It was a nice bridge between those two.
I think we’re getting down to the bedrock about what can be achieved with certificates like that. There’s a lot of work on Plutus as well, and I’m super excited about the direction of that. It’s hard to fire on five or six different threads of research at the same time, but I’m pretty impressed with how the team has been approaching that.
There are still a few more announcements for the end of the year. When you look at Mithril and side chains, I think people will be very happy about that. Plus, I have a Twitter space tomorrow with Iran on Midnight, and I think people will be very happy about Midnight as well.
On the commercial side, at IO, we have ventures like Realo, which is John O’Connor’s company. He was the director of African operations for a long time, and he did deals like the Ethiopia MOE deal, which, by the way, is still going on. It’s still a thing. I love when people say it’s been canceled or it’s a lie; that’s still a thing. It has survived through two separate ministers of education, a war, and other challenges. There’s actually a whole team that works on it; they’re part of our PI process and integrate quite well with the Prism team. We deployed it on the old Prism 1.4, and when the Prism framework upgrades a little bit, it will be a later version of 2.x.
X will be the rollover to that RS. We'll see how to scale that because there are a lot of problems and many different dimensions on how one would scale that across the entire economy, and whether it’s even a wise idea to do so. But you know, it’s still underway. John led that effort with many different African jurisdictions, which were extremely crypto-curious in 2021 when Bitcoin was $68,000, but not so much after FTX; that whole well dried up. However, the people of Africa never lost their passion. In Nigeria, more than 20% of people own or know somebody who owns cryptocurrency. That’s a country of 200 million people—think about that. According to data from a big consultancy like Gartner or McKinsey, you’ll have to find that source, but it’s very vibrant. You’ll see it anecdotally when you see the events in Nigeria; a lot of people show up. It’s actually the same in Kenya and many other places.
Real Co is based in Kenya. John has been putting it together, and that’s where a lot of the ideas we’ve had about microfinance and remittances are coming together. Denal Patel, the former Chief Product Officer of Input Output, is now working over at Real Co with John. They’re both founding and building up that company alongside many people who were responsible for the pilot projects we did. The rubber meets the road where you actually have direct consumer adoption, and there are a lot of cool things there. There are ebbs and flows in how much you can get done at any given time. Technology tends to be the least limiting factor; it’s usually the macro cycle. Corporate procurement goes to hell when a recession happens for new technologies, and when the U.S. government is trying to kill that technology, it’s doubly so.
You actually have to pivot from a B2B or B2G strategy to a B2C strategy and go direct to the consumer because there’s always a demand signal if there’s a good product. Once you have a large customer base, you can work your way back to B2B and B2G—that’s just how that works. I’m pretty comfortable and happy with it. Prism is looking good too. We’re on quarterly release cycles with the PI system that they have and backfilling a lot of little things here and there. I’m definitely going to open Cour, and my hope is that it can become a Hyperledger project, right up there with Indy and the rest of the gang. There’s a lot to do though, and it’s under great leadership with David Harding. He’s a wonderful CEO and a really smart guy who has been in the identity world for a long time.
Lace is looking great too. I’m very happy with Lace, and there are lots of cool announcements and things. I do get involved from time to time personally with Mike Ward and Tyan and the product team there because I like the fact that we have a monthly release cadence. I also like that we can really start getting to unfinished business. Right now, we have multi-delegation; we’ve got to get delegation portfolios in. I’d also like to see hardware multisig, a paper wallet generator, and just U2F key integration—tons of little things. We’re going to really master that.
It’s nice because it allows us to have great conversations about ZP3, SIP 95, and how one would build a DApp store. We had some phenomenal ideas there that will work their way through. It makes us care a lot more because we’re on the receiving end of the technology, just like Hydra makes us care a lot about the DApp side of things. We have to use the tools we build to implement Hydra. If they don’t work as well as we’d hope, then we need to make some improvements. Overall, I enjoy the pace of that. I’m an aggressive guy, so I’ll push harder to speed it up a bit, but I do want Lace to be the standard for the industry—not just for Cardano, but for the industry—on a good wallet experience that is safe and effective, with premium features.
2024 is going to be a good year for that. It’s a good team, and I really admire them for their ability to push through and get something launched. It’s always scary when you launch a product—not scary in the GSC sense, but you know, scary when you launch a product and actually get it in the market, have customers, get feedback, and they yell at you and say, “Hey, you’re not as smart as you think you are.” That’s true. There are a lot of things on social media right now—a groundswell of some exceedingly loud but very small minority of people in the Cardano community who, whenever they don’t like the way things go, just say things like “people dumped” or “IO controls the network unilaterally,” or a whole bunch of these types of things. That’s on them.
There’s only so much time and oxygen in life, and at some point, you just have to throw in the towel and let them burn themselves out and flame out. In general, I blame the times and social media for our inability to have conversations with each other. You see, in any healthy rivalry or disagreement, there’s always a little jabbing that occurs. If you like football and a person is a Broncos fan, we have a legendary rivalry with the Oakland Raiders, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the San Diego Chargers. Why? Because we’re all in the same division, and we fight each other multiple times per year. Sometimes the Broncos win, sometimes they don’t, if you’re a Kansas City fan.
We always have a little fun jabbing each other every Sunday when those games come in. Well, that doesn’t mean we hate each other, and it doesn’t mean we don’t actually work together and communicate with each other. Most of the things that reasonable people do through Twitter and social media—when they say “Ethereum’s this” or “Cardano’s this” or “Solana is this”—are just in that lens. The point is just to drum up a little of those feelings. You’ll notice something: we all stay in the same league. We’re all cryptocurrencies, we all work together, and we all have the same common foes—CBDCs, central banks, and totalitarian regimes.
The delta between the aspirations of your average Ethereum person who really believes in Ethereum and the average Cardano person who really believes in Cardano is not very big. You’re both using public key cryptography, both using wallets, and both using a cryptocurrency, which makes you a very small minority of the world population at the moment. Yet, unfortunately, there is this uncanny valley where, even though people are 98% alike and aligned, that 2% delta actually ends up creating more tribalism than people imagine. This is amplified by social media, where people think it’s okay to say things like “people are evil,” “people are dishonest,” or “people lack integrity.”
It’s also okay to just lie and omit huge amounts of history. For example, the Genesis keys—it’s no thing that’s hidden; it’s all there. Three entities: it’s IOG, Mergo, and CF. There’s an entire off-chain governance structure and on-chain implicit governance structure about how those are used. For example, we don’t do hard forks until 70% of the SPOs upgrade. That precedent hasn’t been violated, and it’s there. There’s all the stuff that happens behind the scenes off-chain to keep those keys secure, and they’re used in a very deliberate and considered way. It takes months to coordinate even minor upgrades at the moment.
Now, those keys are hardcoded into the Cardano Genesis block and have been for a long time. When are they going to be replaced? Well, why do you think we’ve been talking about ZP 1694 since 2021? You know, this concept of upgrading the governance stack of Cardano. Even before there was a SIP 1694, there were discussions about elements in fundamental criteria that would have to go into the Genesis keys—for example, deprecating them and replacing that concept with a notion of a constitutional committee. Go from static and hardcoded to dynamic and voted on with a quorum that can be expanded.
It’s an M of N with fixed terms, and then also allow Plutus scripts to be used in it so you can have multiple parties control one of those keys as opposed to a single organization, for example. There are all kinds of bespoke governance structures, and they would also be beholden to an on-chain constitution for a variety of guardrails that one would want to put in the system. Then, we would go from a unicameral to a tricam model, adding DPs and stake pool operators formally into the governance process. This is not a new concept; we’ve been talking about it this year in more than 50 workshops. The entire reason for its existence is for that.
Every single person on the development side of Cardano is aligned, trying very hard to test and understand and build infrastructure toward that end, including community projects that are trying to figure out how to make a great experience for DAOs, for accountability, audit, and oversight. What will voting look like in practice? How do those results get broadcast? What did we learn from the Catalyst experiment? What did we learn from Pado Dox’s open governance or Tezos’s four-stage governance process? These types of things make it incredibly disingenuous to say the goal of this entire endeavor is to preserve and protect the very thing the endeavor is trying to replace and remove.
Why would you do it? Why would you go and say these things when all the evidence is in that direction? Millions—actually, tens of millions of dollars at this point—of development effort and scientific effort have been spent, and the entire desire is to do that. I don’t know why people do that. I don’t know why they feel emboldened to say these types of things, but they do. That’s just the nature of discourse today on the internet, and generative AI is only going to make it worse because people will just make stuff up and then use AI to reinforce that. People just choose to believe what they want to believe.
We live in a world today where truth is not an objective absolute thing. People basically invent a fantasy and then ignore any evidence that would dissuade them from that fantasy. They double down on anything that confirms it, and then they build a group around it. They run through and absolutely have to have that group every day reinforce it. There’s a purity test; anybody who presents a differing idea from it gets pushed out. I see all these people say, “Oh, well, Charles called me a liar.” Welcome to the club! Well, yeah, if you lie, I call you a liar. That’s just what it is; it’s objectively wrong. They manipulate the narrative to try to fit into a fold where, of course, he did that. Then they say it’s a cult, and all these people are lying because they don’t have any free will. Apparently, everybody listening who likes me agrees with me—you’re being manipulated.
According to these people, you’re all members of this cult. I say, “All right, well, my whole goal is to put the whole network in as many people’s hands as possible and decentralize things.” We even get academic institutions to physically measure the level of decentralization because for 10-plus years, our entire industry has been claiming decentralization, but nobody bothered to put money, time, and effort into measuring it objectively. Basic concepts—governments didn’t do this when they were supposed to, and they’re trying to create legislation and regulation based on it.
So we spent millions of dollars and put our money where our mouth was and founded a lab at the University of Edinburgh specifically for this end. It has a dedicated professor, graduate students, and engineers. It doesn’t work for Cardano; it’s going to start at Bitcoin and work its way down the list and measure the amount of decentralization. So there’s an objective metric that nobody can argue with that basically talks about where the network is centralized and where it’s decentralized. Why would a person whose objective and goal is to centralize everything and preserve and protect a cult of personality want to have an entity he can’t control basically give him a report card on whether he achieved that or not?
Why would we go through the peer review process? When they can’t explain the papers, what they do is attack the very peer review process. They either say it’s illegitimate because they’re not journals, not understanding that in computer science, the peer review process is done with conferences. Talk to any computer scientist about it; it would take five minutes. Go down and send them an email. Ask them. Don’t take my word for it. Ask them why they show up for these conferences. Why do people have to referee at a conference? You don’t do this in physics; you do it in computer science.
But no, the process must be wrong because there’s no reasonable explanation of how we take the time to write, over a seven-year period, 200 papers. Is that marketing? What marketing value do I get out of those papers? Can anybody read them? Can anybody understand them? We predicted all the problems Ethereum was going to run into with Casper years ago. Nobody in the media looked at it, cared about it, or wrote about it. Why? Because they couldn’t understand the paper. So it’s certainly not marketing. If these papers were bad papers, then why are they getting accepted at major peer review checkpoints? Why are people getting poached? Why do people get tenure? Why do people get promoted in academia?
Is it just that the entire space is crooked and corrupt? How you get promoted in computer science is completely divorced from the impact of your research? Is your conspiracy so strong that all of computer science now has to be aligned to be co-opted by the evil Charles Hoskinson? But it’s a cult, according to them, why? Because it disagrees with their worldview. That’s okay. It’s okay in a broader sense because why should we expect anything different? Look at politics today, look at the politicians today, look at medicine today, look at education today. Why should crypto be any different?
You can’t get angry about these things; we just have to accept that they are what they are and move forward. The thing is, the more successful you become and the more you accomplish in life, the more you push forward in life, the more enemies you produce, the more disagreements you produce, and the more anger and vitriol you produce. At some point, you no longer are human; you’re something else. You’re some straw man that people have put up or an idol that people have put up to deify or to demonize and attack, and you can never have a conversation anymore. Maybe that’s where we’re at, but that’s okay because we predicted that too.
That’s why SIP 1694 exists; that’s why Intersect exists; that’s why I keep pushing for member space to organizations and decentralization. It’s real easy to attack one guy; it’s a lot harder to attack a movement. That’s what we’re doing as an ecosystem. That’s what Satoshi did; he had the foresight to leave before that happened. It’s what Vitalik is enduring right now with his own community. It’s what every single cryptocurrency community is enduring with people that give it a little bit of a push to get started.
That’s the nature of things; that’s why blockchains are necessary. I’ve been thinking a lot these days about what’s required to write a constitution and what’s required to leave a legacy of good ideas that ought to be preserved and protected. The point of blockchain technology, the point of the industry as a whole, is to acknowledge that humans are flawed and they’ll always let you down, no matter who they are, myself included. No one is perfect in everything, and anyone who asserts that is certainly not perfect.
The point is that you have to introduce systems that don’t lie, systems that don’t have problems, systems that objectively enforce a reality upon people, even if that constructed reality is not the same as actual reality. The fact that we all play the same game and are beholden to the same rules is what makes the game fun, interesting, and useful. There are no laws of physics behind football having a touchdown worth seven points, six points, and a point after. There are no laws of physics about that.
But they just decided—the whole league could get together and change to say a touchdown is 10 points instead of six points, but they don’t. Why? Because all those records and people that came before, and the social dynamics of that change would be dramatic. Well, now it’s said that a point after is six. Now I’m doubting myself; it’s six with the point after. Yeah, and because you can do the two-point conversion as well to get to eight. Yeah, so it’s six and one. It’s too early. Anyway, there are no laws of physics behind that.
But socially, it’s a constructed reality, and it’s a strong constructed reality. Blockchain takes this concept of these constructed realities and puts them on steroids, makes them super strong, grows them up, and can use that for the basis of consent, truth, and money. It gives you objective metrics that you can look at about how much consent there is and how much security there is behind that constructed reality that exists. That’s a very powerful thing because we’ve lost the ability in this post-truth world to regulate and moderate ourselves.
Look at Elon Musk; he’s the greatest example of an unhinged person because somewhere along the line, I think he legitimately decided that the world is made up and we’re all living in a simulation. So what he’s doing is just maximizing the hilarity of things. No normal person would spend $45 billion to buy a company that has brand equity that’s a decade old with 300 million people liking it and then just change the name to X and make sex jokes about it. But he does because it’s funny to him. If you believe the world’s a simulation, it makes no difference overall whether something is built to last or it’s built just to humor you because it’s a simulation.
It can change at any given moment; every one of your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, your religious faith, your whole family is just a video game—it was all made up. So there you go. He’s just going to keep doing crazy and interesting things and pushing the bounds of things, having 12 kids, all this stuff. He’s unhinged; he’s not connected to anything. There are no rules for a person like that. You can sue them, you can write tell-all books about them, you can do all kinds of horrible things; it doesn’t impact him. He’s still just as rich.
So you need something to ground yourself and connect to, or
1% see when you have DS, you can have this conversation. Get Indian DS to join and represent. Just calling it how I hear it, this is the most delusional talk I’ve heard all week. Bro thinks he’s super deep; I’m dying laughing.
All right, thanks, Kevin. Just keeping it real, man. It doesn’t have to be deep to keep it real. Charles, you look good. What do you think about a husky side chain? Should all projects in Cardano aspire to be a side chain?
Um, no. The vast majority of projects should be dApps or native assets. Side chains make sense in the context that you’re trying a completely different execution model and scripting language. You have very different demands regarding your data availability, storage requirements, and how you manage your blockchain. You need different things that a base layer is not going to necessarily give you. You want a different consensus notion, these types of things.
So it makes a lot of sense, for example, with World Mobile. You have a huge global network, you have hardware, you have spectrum that’s licensed, and you have very heterogeneous user sets where the vast majority of people are consumers on handsets, and a small backbone of people are providers. You need to federate that. So that’s a very different network than, let’s say, a CBDC, where there’s just one entity at the top pushing things down, or an asset-backed stablecoin with the same notion, or a very different entity that a very decentralized network like Cardano’s consensus notion.
Side chains allow you to have these multiple models coexist in the same ecosystem and then create mutual network value for each other. But if your goal is to build a DEX, why would you care about any of those things? For example, you say, “No, I want to run where all the liquidity is so everything can go through, and my job is just to efficiently get value transfer.”
My scrotum has a better-looking beard. You call me illusional; now you’re saying I have a scrotum beard? Or actually, wait, your scrotum has a beard? Is it like a full beard off your scrotum? I’m trying to understand the insult here.
Kevin, tell us how it’s going at the Hoskinson Health and Wellness Clinic.
Actually, quite well. We have over 4,000 patients. We have multiple providers, mostly family practitioners and internists, with a few specialists coming in. Next year, we’ll have the full pharmacy, hyperbarics, and imaging. The operational lab is just turning on now; it takes a few months to get cleared and the LIS and all the other things running. I was just up there, actually, and right now it’s 10,000 square feet. We’re just about to build a giant extension on the back of it—a 5,000-foot tropical greenhouse that’s a bridge to a large steel structure connected to it, which will be about 20-plus thousand square feet with all of those additional lines.
Hyperbarics are looking good, and that program is going to be fully operational hopefully next year. There’s a lot of training, a lot of certification, and you know normal physicians aren’t trained on how to do that stuff, so you have to approach it systematically. But over 4,000 patients is a really good start for a 35,000-person town. It’s more than 10% of the population is a patient already, and we just got started this year.
How are all the animals on the ranch getting along these days?
They’re doing really well. Hunting season’s almost over for the bison, and they’re doing good—500-plus bison running around and a big elk herd. The elk and the bison kind of hang out; they have fun together.
Charles, how are Cardano ambassadors appointed?
That’s a CF program at the moment. Cardano ambassadors should have their status renewed every 12 months. Yeah, there’s some—I would like to be able to vote for or not vote for. Let me tell you, there are Cardano ambassadors failing in their capacity; they should go. In my view, the entire program should be deprecated and moved to a voted program, and basically, people represent through some blockchain-based process. Frankly, there should just be a smart contract that people use for it, and then as part of the Cardano budget, a certain amount of funding goes every year to the ambassador program.
The foundation did a good job bootstrapping and carrying that forward, but now we have voting, now we have on-chain governance, and so it makes more sense for that to occur. You get much better discovery of candidates because, I mean, if you’re sitting in a Swiss foundation, how are you going to know about what the person in New Zealand is doing? You know, how are you going to know about what the person in Chile is doing or something like that? It’s really hard, no matter how on the ball or vigilant you are; you’re just not going to see those people.
So let the blockchain be the broker for people to discover, and then let people vote their local clusters and distribute accordingly or run competing programs, for example. Then there’s a democratic consent behind people’s status.
A lot of people are talking about how Hydra is flawed. You know, Hydra is not flawed, guys. When you have a product that is on very strong footing, you have a ton of evidence about what its long-term capabilities can be. It evolves with more than 12 releases per year because they release, I think, every month or less with something new. There’s a lot of community participation and actual projects in your roadmap, and you’re trying to solve real problems like large NFT drops or whatever.
It’s something that’s a priority; it’ll get there. It’s just a question of how long is it going to take—three months, six months, one year, two years, three years—and how fast is that protocol evolving? So if you just take a look at the snapshot today and say, “Well, it doesn’t solve my problem,” okay, well, if you come back a year later, maybe it will. It’s not going anywhere; it’s a permanent piece of infrastructure that continues to evolve, and the scope of problems that it solves grows and grows and grows.
I think this is an example of where a CEO looks at something different than an engineer would. An engineer is in the weeds, and what they’re trying to do is say, “What is the best tool for the job?” If they don’t have that tool, or that tool I give you is not quite fit for purpose, they say it’s the wrong tool.
Well, the CEO looks at the state of all tools and says, “Okay, what processes do we need to put into place so that year by year that engineer has a larger set of tools and a better set of tools to work with?” If we find a process where, in two, three, four, five years, we have the best tool set of any group of builders, I’d say that’s mission accomplished.
If you look at Cardano, that’s where we’re at. We have Hydra as one set of tools, the side chain strategy as another set of tools, the evolution of extended UTXO and Plutus as another set of tools, and a lot of off-chain stuff as another set of tools. Okay, well, any one of those things potentially could solve your problem.
I look at the evolution of those things and say, “Okay, are we making the right bets?” The other thing is you have to get the right feedback. That’s the point of a member-based organization being in charge of your product roadmap because then the people who are actually in the trenches and building have a direct line of communication to the product people to influence where the product goes.
So you can have better predictions about your sets of tools. That’s what was done with Mithril and Hydra, where it went from nothing to where we’re at with such a large group of people doing interesting things.
Now, is it perfect? No. Does it solve everybody’s problems? Oh Lord, no. But will it get to a point in the evolutionary horizon where it does solve a lot of problems for a lot of people? The answer is yes.
So what’s the problem? What’s the issue? Why are we having such drama about the whole thing? We know the peak throughput can go in a certain direction because we modeled these types of things, and we have competing protocols and products that have also demonstrated that.
So we know where that story goes. Is there a need for the story to go in that particular direction today, right here, right now? Are we having $500 transaction fees with Cardano? Are you having to wait six hours to use a dApp in Cardano? No. So why would we need these things? Why is that the number one priority?
Why not instead just follow the process and get the tools to gradually grow out? It’s free and open source, and you can use it where and when you choose to use it.
Here’s what happened: people took Hydra outside of IO as a marketing thing. They made YouTube videos and said, “Hydra is the secret weapon that’s going to kill Ethereum and kill all these other guys, and Hydra is going to do this thing—million transactions per second—because I read it in a blog post that that’s its theoretical maximum or something like that.”
Then obviously, if we have that, it’s like it’s the super weapon that will win the war and beat everybody. So they built this giant expectation vertical, missing the entire point that even if you had that capability, let’s say you could do it, it wouldn’t win because that’s only one narrow dimension of a much broader war that you’re fighting for hearts and minds.
It’s your developer experience, your security, how you handle off-chain, and your storage layer, your data availability. There are dozens of dimensions that exist there. You have to look at all of them and say, holistically speaking, is this whole unit moving in the right direction? Are we very brittle, narrow, and fragile?
Do we have a very tiny bridge to success? If that happens to not be the road we take, we’ve already automatically lost the fight. So when it didn’t meet those narrow expectations, people said, “Well, obviously it’s a scam; it’s a failure. These people don’t know what they’re doing; they’re all incompetent.”
Meanwhile, there are all these people building, doing great work, and coming up with good ideas. They’re thinking it through, and there are already next-generation protocols. That’s why there’s Mithril 2 to succeed Mithril 1, and there are already discussions of how do we make that ubiquitous and actually even get into the blockchain as some form of a data structure, like in the header or something that’s really powerful.
When you do that, smart contracts can touch it, talk to it. When you do that, it’s a very good thing.
Yeah, so that’s just the nature of how things go. It’s also an indication when people have never done product development or led a company or done software development. It’s hard; it’s a real job, and you have to understand a lot about these things in order to be successful.
Is IOG working on a high-level project? Can’t provide details yet, which will impact adoption on a large scale. Well, we’re talking about those things. Like, really, it’s a direct extension of all the Africa stuff. It’s getting put into a dedicated leadership structure, a dedicated company, and we think that’s really going to create continental adoption and get a lot of users into Cardano and Lace, and actually a lot of utility in TVL on the chain. But that’s just one example.
Do you know where Dan Larimer is now? What does he do?
I know where Dan Larimer is—probably retired, living off the EOS money he raised—$4 billion, and then he walked away.
Charles, what can be done to stop the Cardano FUD? It’s been too damaging for too long. I feel it every day; it makes me older, fatter, and more worn down—all the white in my scraggly scrot beard.
Yeah, um, next year it’s just going to have to be funded. You guys are going to have to come together, and you’re going to have to have some conversations and decide how much you want to spend on creating a marketing function and a brand function for Cardano.
We’ve done what we can with Cardano 360 and these other things, but it’s never really the place of a core developer to try to learn and invent how to be ecosystem builders and marketers. There are much better, cheaper, more qualified people than us to pursue that, and frankly, that needs to be decentralized.
So the point of on-chain governance is to make a priority of these types of things, and then I think things will get a lot better. You know, the Ethereum community will also be a lot happier with EIP-1694 because what will happen is they can’t reconcile Cardano being successful or being legitimate.
So they’ll say, “Ah, Cardano fired its founder; Charles has been fired, and now Cardano is successful.” That’ll be the narrative of 2024. If EIP-1694 comes through, then they’ll like Cardano; they’ll suddenly want to work with it, they’ll enjoy it, they’ll embrace it. The FUD will go way down because it’s just personal, and there’s a very strong distaste among certain people there.
That’s all right, you know, and that’s the point of decentralization. It gives you an anchor to be able to be in the club, so I think that’ll help a lot too and tone things down a little bit.
Why did you say a Ripple settlement would be catastrophic for the crypto sector?
Well, let’s just think it through. I know the XRP people sometimes have trouble with this, but let’s take a step back and really think it through. If Ripple had settled with the Securities Exchange Commission, they would implicitly be saying that Ripple was a security. But the issues are resolved, and perhaps they’d get some clarity to move forward.
But that would legitimize and embolden the SEC to continue going after layer ones with the same arguments they hit Ripple with. If Ripple won a court case, which they did, the judge would say the SEC is wrong, and the secondary market sales of tokens are not securities transactions; they’re not investment contracts as defined by Howey.
In which case, that strengthens the ability of the entire industry to fight the SEC against regulatory overreach and regulation through enforcement. So which one would you rather have? A localized potential victory like what EOS got with the Block One settlement for just that particular ecosystem, or would you like something that results in benefit for the entire cryptocurrency space?
Given how much time, effort, and money had been expended to get there, it would have been catastrophic to lose that piece of bedrock that would help every single cryptocurrency project and company like Coinbase be able to preserve and protect the liquidity of the industry and the operations of many of the core developers in the industry.
It’s not okay regulation through enforcement. It’s not okay to say, “Come in and register,” but then there’s no valid path to do that. When you, in 2021, give a company like Coinbase the ability to do an IPO, they have an S-1. They tell you your business model and say, “We’re okay with retail investors buying shares in your company; we don’t think that’s going to harm them, and we think the claims you’re making are lawful and legitimate.”
Then two years later, you sue them for that exact same business model and say, “We’re not beholden to the decision of the S-1.” What does “come in and register” mean? It basically means, “Tell us everything about your business model so we can figure out where to sue you.”
That’s the perception. This is not the right culture; it’s not the right environment; it’s not collegial; it’s not collaborative. There’s no way to comply because they purposely prevent compliance. It’s basically Kafkaesque.
So anything that constrains and limits that aggressive enforcement is good, and anything that enables and empowers that aggressive enforcement is catastrophic.
Does this even make any sense at all?
Should Israel use nukes on its enemies?
Uh, what is to be done with Palestinian sympathizers? That’s nonsense. Come on, think. In the Gaza Strip, a lot of those people are also Israeli citizens, so they’re going to nuke their own people? Come on, that’s a difficult situation.
The whole Israel-Palestine situation has so many layers to it. I’d really encourage you to listen to Lex Fridman’s interviews. He did a series of interviews that are very, very good. He interviewed Bibi Netanyahu, he interviewed Yuval Harari, and then he interviewed a Palestinian poet. All three of them had radically different views because they’re on radically different sides of the entire conflict.
Those three things together—about five hours of your life, six hours of your life—are probably the most informative five or six hours of your life you could ever watch because it would unlock a lot of perspectives you’ve probably never seen or heard about regarding Israeli society, Palestinian society, and the plight and pains and the amount of fragmentation that is currently there.
It’s a very difficult region to manage. There’s been incredible progress with the Abraham Accords, and overall, the directionality of peace is occurring. But you have flare-ups that occur from time to time, and this Hamas thing is an example of a flare-up that will be met, unfortunately, with brutal retaliation, which will then lead to more violence as well.
It’s a cycle, but they get smaller and smaller, the circles over time. There are no more Yom Kippur Wars.
All right, we’re just going to go ahead and mute this guy. I don’t know why people sit in the channel all day long and just spam.
Why was there no counterattack by crypto companies on the SEC? Why didn’t you all unite against the Securities Exchange Commission’s decision?
There’s nothing we can do. I mean, we tried. Lots of money was spent, and the issue was that there were certain groups of people that, in 2022 especially, SPF, who were literally trying to create a regulatory structure where their nepotistic companies could run and control things, and everybody else would be shut out.
The problem is not everybody in the crypto industry’s incentives are completely aligned. If you’re a regulated business and you look a lot like a bank, you’re totally okay with them passing a law that says only you multi-billion dollar regulated businesses can do business in the
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