Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today's December 10th, 10:48 p.m. Just about to go to bed, but I figured I'd make a quick video to talk about some of my thoughts from the last 48 hours. I did an AI AR this morning, and it was a good time. We're making great progress, and all things considered, this is exactly what I was hoping for with a launch on Cardano.
You have an asset that brings a lot of interest and excitement. It's something new, something different, and something for the industry as a whole to coalesce around. Already, there's a tale of two cities that exist. Depending on who you ask, some say, "Wow, within 48 hours, an asset was launched on Cardano that had a higher market cap and more trading volume than Algorand." That's really remarkable for Cardano as an ecosystem, especially when many in the industry say it's dead, that its best days are behind it, and that it's falling apart. It's capable of launching an asset at that scale, creating this kind of hype and excitement, and getting people legitimately fired up about the future.
On the other side, there are those with a pathological addiction to bad faith. They ask, "Where's the DEX liquidity? Where did this happen? Where did that happen?" Every step of the way, when they are proven wrong or realize that things are being done in stages, they just move on to the next thing to complain about. It's gotten so pathological that it seems like they are utterly incapable of accepting a win, feeling joy, or advancing at all. They move from one crisis to another, one bad faith interpretation to another. Honestly speaking, it's not only psychologically exhausting, but it also makes your heart hurt. You imagine that this neurosis must leak into every dimension of their life.
They must be standing in line at Starbucks, thinking, "When I order this drink, they're going to get it wrong. I'm going to order it with whipped cream and say it's lactose-free because I'm lactose intolerant, and they're going to put lactose in it." Then they move on to the next thing, "When I park here, even though I've paid the meter, they're still going to give me a ticket." It's driving everybody insane.
We had two ways to interpret today. I chose the former. I said, "Wow, it's amazing that we were able to get a win in a year like this. It's been a real hard year, and everybody worked so long to make this day happen." A lot of people joined that interpretation, and they felt that win. It was a really great experience. But then you go to Twitter, and it's just causing this mass neurosis. It's getting worse, not better. People move on from one thing to another. I'm old enough to remember the ADA voucher scandal, the fake Fred stuff, the soft fork, and all this other nonsense. One thing after another, and every comment gets twisted and manipulated.
We just have to start opting out as a society, and I have to start with myself. I thought about what we can do differently next year. My way of communicating and engaging with everyone is predominantly on X, and there are a million people there who love me. It's so much fun, and I really do enjoy it. But every time you want to see your friends, you have to put a suit on and swim through a river of [expletive]. And it's got [expletive] hippos in it trying to eat you while you're swimming through this river of [expletive]. People say, "Just ignore all of it." It's hard to ignore when 50, 60, 70, or 80 comments are all negative or bad faith. It's one after another every single day, consistently bombarding me.
If I ignore all of it, I also ignore the good comments. So either I have to read them all to see which ones are real and good, or I read none of them. If I read none of them, I'm not engaging with you. Then I have to pay people to read it, which is almost like when Facebook pays its moderators to decide what content to censor. They spend half their time watching terrible things and get psychologically messed up for $15 an hour.
So, I guess I can outsource it to them. That's where we're at. I like my friends. I enjoy hanging out with them. I really enjoy engaging. On the other hand, I'm exhausted from swimming in this river of [expletive] with the [expletive] hippos. I'm tired of people saying I'm obese and overweight. Yeah, I have the courage to take my shirt off on the internet. Do you? I'm really tired of people saying horrible things about me every single day. It's nothing but a river of [expletive] with [expletive] hippos. At some point, you just have to say enough is enough. It's torture.
I have to do something different, but I can't lose the engagement because that's valuable to the ecosystem, my company, and all of you. So, here's what we're going to do. Since there's no meaningful way to surf that river safely, starting next year, I'm going to create a digital twin of myself. I'm going to partially turn over my Twitter to that digital twin and work with some of our AI people. We're going to call it Project Simulacra. It will mostly run and moderate my X account. I'll try to extract as much value as I can, all the love, well-wishes, and meaningful productive conversation, and move it to another channel that has more curation and doesn't have the [expletive] hippos.
Then I'm going to spend a lot of time in targeted discussions. I'll be in the Midnight Discord extensively, starting with the Midnight Ambassadors, and then I'll do regular events in the Midnight Discord. In that Discord, I'll enjoy engaging with people one-on-one because, in person or over audio, people are generally respectful and engaged. Even if they disagree, they at least want to have a dialogue. There are still some rude people, but typically the rest of the community shouts them out when they come in because they realize how rude that person is being.
This is not the case on Twitter. If I punch back, I get attacked and labeled a bad actor for defending myself, and that becomes the story. So, we're going to create that digital Simulacra. I will gradually migrate most of my communications off Twitter and find paths to link the conversation from Twitter into different channels. Hopefully, we can get better-moderated channels. It's sad because I really do enjoy Twitter. It's a great place to get news and connect with people.
But there are different ways to do that, and I think it's going to be psychologically a lot healthier. To everyone else on Twitter, I encourage you to find a way to do the same. It's not healthy. This is doing something to humanity. I don't think psychiatrists and psychologists fully understand it, but it's giving everyone a license to treat each other in a way that, if they did it in person, they would honestly get the [expletive] kicked out of them.
Would you walk up to someone at a supermarket and say, "You are [expletive], overweight, ugly, evil, a sociopath, a terrible human being, a thief, and a monster"? If you did that ten times, how many times could you do it before that person just hits you in the face? But you do it online because you're a coward, and the algorithms are built to encourage that behavior. They create a social dynamic where we live in a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde psychology. The problem is our brains were never designed for that.
We treat both encounters psychologically the same, whether online or in person. Even if intellectually we think it's different, our lizard brain treats it the same. We have to put a stop to it. After the launch of Midnight, I expected to see a lot of support within the Cardano ecosystem, and there certainly is, but some things have just gotten so boring and tiring. There's also a group of people who are seriously deranged about me, who have decided that I am an evil person, and they will never be convinced otherwise. Any engagement with them is counterproductive.
They're a cult, an anti-Charles cult, and they collect themselves in little cabals. It used to be the fake Fred cabal, but that got disbanded. They have this seething passion and have never been able to articulate their grand issue. They cite my credentials, past events with Ethereum, and former employees, but every interpretation is built on the worst possible assumptions. No counterfactual information will break their narrative. They see me as evil, and it is their divine duty to destroy me. They follow me to any platform I go to. You see them on YouTube, on X, and whatever platform I use.
Unfortunately, I have to move to increasingly moderated platforms because when they come to my YouTube channel, I can click a button, and that person's gone. I can't do that on other mediums, and I just don't have time for the derangement. There's no engagement with someone who has decided that you're evil. They have made up their mind that your only purpose is to harm them, manipulate them, steal from them, and cause damage to others. You can't negotiate or reason with that person.
You see this a lot in politics now, and it's promoted and exacerbated to levels we've never seen before. I believe it's the algorithms. If any of these people spent meaningful time with me, they would probably develop a different opinion. There was one journalist who interviewed me, and I won't mention his name, but he has a vendetta against me. He wrote a negative article about me and has spent seven years on this vendetta. He uses that Yahoo bump as an example of my extreme narcissism.
It's a bizarre derangement that some people have. I don't know where these preconceived notions come from. It's not your business to speculate on my psychology. But it's almost as if people just want to be right about whether I'm a good man or an evil man. All I want to do is build stuff. At the end of the day, all I want to do is build. Is that not self-evident after me being here for 15 years?
At some point, you just do something else if you don't want to build things. I built BitShares because I was interested in solving the two biggest problems in the cryptocurrency space. There was a thread on Bitcoin Talk that I created back in 2013 called Project Invictus. My thought process was that we needed decentralized exchanges and an algorithmic stablecoin to address volatility. I created the first algorithmic stablecoin and the first exchange called BitShares.
I also created the Bitcoin education project and brought 70,000 people into the cryptocurrency space. Then I realized we needed programmable transactions, so Vitalik and I and others teamed up to create Ethereum. After that, I went my own way because we had differences of opinion. Gavin created Polkadot, and I created Cardano. Cardano has been around for 10 years, and we've accomplished a lot.
We were the first to implement a provably secure proof of stake, the first extended UTXO at scale, and the first real use of a functional programming language with formal methods. We wrote academic peer-reviewed papers and wrote code, telling everyone what we were going to do, and we did it. I built and built and built. I wear my heart on my sleeve and give the same speech again and again. If you review the transcripts of all my presentations, you'll see an 11-year consistency.
It's hard to be a pathological liar and say the same thing for 11 years straight. You do that because you love what you do and genuinely enjoy building and solving hard problems. Maybe it's because I was under-socialized as a homeschooler or because I had a rough time when I first went to college at 15. But here's the thing: I'm happy with what I do. I love my life and the things I do.
There are hard days, but there's no path to do this if it's all about ego and greed. The only reason I get up every morning, even when I don't have to, is that I care and want these things to work. The most hurtful thing about all this algorithmic madness is that it doesn't come through. People either can't see it or choose to believe it's all an elaborate act. They go back to a preconceived attack pattern that feels old after years of repetition.
At this point, it's like hearing the attacks on Trump. I don't care if you love or hate him; he's been in the public eye for so long that it just feels old. We get it; he's orange, he says weird things, and he tweets hurtful things. But repeating it for the millionth time isn't going to change anything.
We all just want to move on. We want to grow and get to the next level as a species, as a society, and as projects. I refuse to believe that this is the standard and that this is all we have to endure. I endure it because I love what I do and accept that it's a necessary evil and the cost of doing business. But 99.9% of people won't endure this type of punishment.
There are plenty of people willing to explore frontiers and face dangers to see beautiful vistas, but nobody will move to live there until we build the roads and infrastructure to keep them safe and secure. Our job as pioneers is to conquer new lands, make new ideas safe, and make them accessible. That's not possible if all we have to offer is toxicity.
We need to find new places to host that dialogue. Social media companies have done both beneficial and damaging things to humanity. They've created a reality where we can all talk to each other and know everything about each other. But they've also created an incentive to focus on the worst parts of each other.
Imagine the utopia we could live in if we focused on the best parts of each other and worked together to make those parts even better. As the creators of these platforms continue to count their billions, they are investing in artificial intelligence to propagate this madness to the next level. People talk about AI doomers and how AI will destroy society, but the real danger is making humanity unrecognizable and creating a culture that feels alien to us.
Blockchain can't solve everything, but it can provide different ways to talk to and collaborate with each other. One of the things that has become blatantly clear is that we absolutely have to build a social network. It needs to incentivize collaboration instead of conflict. The big themes of Midnight are rational privacy, selective disclosure, and cooperation.
In learning how to get the incentives right, I believe we can build a social network at scale that brings millions, if not billions, of people together and encourages them to cooperate instead of destroy each other. That's something we need to do for humanity to improve and move to the next stage. Honestly speaking, it's the only way I think we'll get out of this.
I don't like the direction the world is going. It feels hollow, and it makes me want to retreat and not engage with people. That's sad because I love people. If you see me at conferences or events, I enjoy direct engagement. I'm always shaking hands, hugging people, asking where they're from, and how they are. It means a lot to me that people take time out of their schedules to come see me and share their stories.
Anything that makes a person want to withdraw and not engage is harmful and bad. This algorithmic madness has to end. As I said at the beginning of the video, I'm going to figure that out on X and put an end to this madness once and for all. Who knows, maybe AI Charles will be a little more fun and engaging, and it'll be a better Simulacra than me. If it ever says anything wrong, I can just blame the AI.
Then I'll find ways to engage with people in real mediums where there are consequences, and people can be a little more civil. Hopefully, that will help debug the situation. I can't deprogram the anti-Charles cults; it's just not possible. I accept that being a public figure is a fact of life. The key is to ensure they don't have any meaningful influence on our economic opportunities or create liabilities for Cardano as a whole.
As a founder, you always think about whether you are becoming a liability for the ecosystems you love. Does your presence enhance or hinder the economic opportunity of Cardano? I even asked the question last year, "Is Charles a cancer to Cardano? Yes or no?" It's hard to know because the voting on Twitter is skewed. The majority, by a slim margin, said yes, while many said no.
The comments seemed mostly in favor of me, but the majority said yes, and some of those people were Ethereum supporters. Does that even matter? Perhaps that limited the opportunity for Cardano. As a founder, you have to think about whether you are helping or hindering the process. It's a humbling experience to realize that sometimes the parent shouldn't be in the room because they hurt their kids' ability to grow.
This year in governance was a lesson in that. There were so many fights and passionate discussions at Input Output that we decided to stay out of many cases and not vote. We realized that even if mistakes were made, the community had to grow and build the capabilities to self-govern. It was painful because, in many cases, it stalled or slowed things down in a very competitive environment where time is of the essence.
As the big guy, I ultimately get blamed for everything. If the price goes down, I'm a horrible human being who made all the mistakes. If we didn't make a deal, it's my fault. That's just what you sign up for as a founder. But sometimes, it's necessary to not be in the room and let things grow.
I think that's the other advantage of this. Twitter has diminishing returns because, while engagement is fun, any misengagement or mistake is a liability to the ecosystem. You can't live in a system where one mistake is a forever mistake, and you can't live in a system where that mistake becomes everyone's problem.
If the demand is perfection or infallibility, then AI will handle it better. At least you can say it was a machine. Then you can focus on real human engagements where you can win people over individually. I think there's truth in that.
I want to convey to all of you that I have your backs. I love what I do. When I wake up every day, I put a lot of thought, care, and consideration into how to make these things awesome for everyone. How do we make them usable? How do we make the experiences great? I want these protocols to be beloved so that people will take care of them.
I don't want products; I want Midnight and Cardano to be here forever. I want all the time and effort we put in to be meaningful.
In addition to focusing on experience and UX, I want to emphasize that it's not just me; the team at Input Output, all of our engineers and scientists, share this sentiment. For the vast majority of them, this is not just a job; it's a passion. They love the fact that they've built something with exotic technology that actually works. They've created new protocols and developed a perspective that looks at the world a little differently. They are able to protect, treasure, and let it grow and thrive. Everything we said would happen has happened, and that's pretty magical to witness.
That’s another reason why we get a bit defensive. What do you do when people attack your loved ones? What do you do when people try to destroy the things you care about? If it were just a phone, would it really matter if I lost it or if it got damaged? You could just buy another one and transfer your data. It's a fungible good. Sure, you might be annoyed by the inconvenience and the lost money, but at the end of the day, we all know how that story ends. It ends up in a box when the new one comes out. But when it's something you love and it gets destroyed, you can't replace it. All the effort that went into it is gone.
There’s a normally high level of passion among the architects, engineers, and everyone else involved. That’s another reason why I love what I do. I get to work with people who have souls, who care, who genuinely put in the work, and who possess craftsmanship. It's special. Have you ever worked with someone who truly loves their job? It's infectious. It doesn’t matter if they’re a ramen chef, a cobbler, or whatever the job is; the fact that they love what they build is an amazing thing when you think about it.
Every day is an opportunity to be better. I figure I won't opine too much on all this. Thank you for making today a good day, and I appreciate all the well-wishing. I understand the other side of it and where people are coming from. I know how we can move things forward. We’ll see more people in the Discord, and next year will be a different year—a nice reset. I'm looking forward to engaging in new ways. I’ll still do the live streams, but I plan to make them more structured.
I’m going to start having some moderation in the comments and probably have someone with me. I’ll announce a time slot instead of doing surprise AMAs, aiming for some degree of regularity. I want to funnel as much traffic into the Discord because we want to build that community up. So, I’ll probably do a relay, and if you want to engage, you’ll need to be in the Discord. You can watch from these types of channels. We’ll figure out those techniques as I pull the social media team together for that.
I have a nice studio set up that I need to get around to finishing, and there's another studio in Gillette that has the same setup. We were supposed to build one in the office, but we haven’t finished it yet because we’ve been busy traveling over 260 days a year. That’s a priority for Q1, along with a lot more moderation for all these things. I apologize if this makes me seem a little more distant and results in less engagement, but please know that the time and engagement will be spent building Midnight, Cardano, RealFi, and other projects.
I will still attend some conferences, aiming to make time for the big four, and I’ll always make time for the community because you matter. I’ll try to find opportunities to talk to smaller groups from time to time. However, there will be less engagement on Twitter because it simply won’t be there. If you get a reply, it’s from a robot, not from me. If you reply back, the robot will aggregate everything together, providing me with sentiment scores and the top ten comments, filtering out all the junk.
I’ll still be able to read a lot of your well-wishes, so it’s not a wasted endeavor. It’s just a different medium. Unfortunately, that’s where we are because I don’t want to swim in the negativity anymore. I’ve been bitten by too many metaphorical hippos, and honestly, there’s no value or fun in it anymore. I have better things to do in life and better things to build.
Thanks for listening to my midnight rant. If you haven’t checked it out yet, visit midnight.network. It’s pretty cool. Join the Discord and become an ambassador. I’ll keep promoting that for 90 days. I hope to see everyone in Hong Kong at Consensus if you can make it. If not, there’s the Japan tour. I’ll be in Hokkaido all the way down to Okinawa, and we’re getting all the dates set up in time before Hong Kong. There will be lots of announcements and exciting developments. Japan's liquidity hasn’t even opened yet in the markets, so that’s going to be very fun.
I’m glad to see that we had a win this year; we really needed one for the ecosystem as a whole. I look forward to 2026. It’s the Dawn of Hydra. We have Laos, Starstream, and now that Midnight is out, things are just going to get better. We have Reali, and we finally get to address the needs of the banked and unbanked. Everything is coming together. The whole Cardano vision is finally fitting into place, and we have the foundation we need to change the world. That’s what I’m going to focus on. Thanks, everyone.
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