hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado so today is november 18th 2021 and uh it's been a long day a lot of meetings today good news on all the fronts the engineers are doing their job business people doing their job uh you know and it's just yet another one of the days of work next week is thanksgiving and i've just been kind of looking at a lot of my reports and i have all kinds of notes and other things i've taken but um we look at a lot of sentiment scoring and sentiment analysis and lately i've seen uh unusually high amount of people that are obsessed with things like price uh or you know they say stuff like oh well everything's failing the sky is falling and there just seems to be an utter lack of perspective in this space so from time to time i do make videos last year i made one right after the markets completely collapsed because of covid and everything was down like 30 percent 40 today and there's blood in the streets and people got so worried and there was a call to fundamentals in that uh presentation in that speech and i basically said to people calm down chill out it's okay you see cryptocurrencies are a very unique moment in human history and i think it's really important especially for new people who have kind of fair-weathered their way into the industry to understand what that moment is because perspective has been lost and as a consequence calm is no longer there it wasn't too long ago that there was this era of calm monetary policy stable and persistent inflation about two three percent per year you know deficits weren't too bad national debt wasn't too unmanageable gdp growth was looking pretty good uh things were stable but underlying all of that was this idea that there was nothing constraining the excesses of government and there was an incestuous and still is incestuous relationship between government and corporations all across the world and what's happened since the year 2000 to 2021 is we have seen an astronomical increase in the amount of money in circulation justified by kinsey and economics and modern monetary theory to the point where in the united states in particular half of all the money in circulation has been printed in the last two years we are passing bills in the us like the infrastructure bill and probably the build back better program that cost more money than all of the money spent by every u.s president from george washington to george h.w bush combined in one fiscal year a personal example anecdotal example uh my ranch up wyoming i bought a bunch of propane fuel tanks for about twenty five thousand dollars each big big field tax companies sold them to me five months later we're having trouble getting labor to barium company that sold them to me reached out to me and said hey we'd like to buy some of those tanks back from you to resell them we'll pay you 35 000. five months price went up 10 000. that's the wholesale everything's up timber is up steel's up there's real inflation probably over 20 percent this year the supply chains are so screwed up that i saw the other day the spot price of west texas intermediate oil negative thirty seven dollars had to pay people to take it some people california on the other side of supply chain are paying over six dollars a gallon for gasoline all-time high on one side of the supply chain you have to give it away on the other side of the supply chain it's at an all-time high these are not functioning markets there's a lot of problems here and some people say these are transitory or some people say these are structural you see things like the great reset be pushed upon us you'll own nothing and be happy things like capitalism has failed it's time for a new system and usually it's some sort of massive increase in government spending and uh complete restructure of the economy where the factors and means of production are owned by the few as custodians of them for the many so the point of cryptocurrencies have been it's uh opt out nation states are starting to do it like el salvador and more will come and each and every person who enters the cryptocurrency space they're opting out in their own way and the problem is we've never really seen this before on a global scale and so what's happened is it's created all kinds of difficult markets where pricing things are at many times really hard to understand for example we have dogecoin and they ship shibuya stuff and they have accumulated technically tens of billions of dollars of value but there's no real use or utility outside of the fact that there's a social network behind them the adherence of these things would argue that these social networks themselves represent the value and therefore that's all you need old school people like me say you have to have a real fundamentals real transactions real commerce a potential for use and utility a path to these things and a view on how these things are going to work with the world change the world and maybe we're both right maybe we're both wrong who knows the reality is though that millions of people across the united states and collectively tens to hundreds of millions across the world have entered the cryptocurrency space and as a consequence of entering that space negative and positive it is changing the structure of the world economy to the extent that it's unlikely we can ever put pandora back in the box box is open all of these things have come out people expect instantaneous liquidity people expect trading markets that trade 24 hours a day seven days a week there's a darwinian nature to technology now there's a lot of copying evolving iteration every year we will see thousands of cryptocurrency related projects launching around the world without end regardless of economic conditions it's also created a distortion about expectations of return and many regulatory bodies have warned people about this but it is unrealistic if there's a hundred x in something to expect that to happen every single year it just can't math doesn't work that way but as a consequence of local returns people have developed very unhealthy views on how long things should take and where value comes from and many people are starting to subscribe to the greater idiot theory of get in fast get out fast and somehow you'll have this great life and what's been missed is the fact that the system they're exiting back into is fundamentally sick and unhealthy if we continue the united states because we are the world reserve currency on this disastrous monetary policy there is a very real possibility of a default or hyperinflation or both dragging the entire world into the greatest depression and has ever seen that's not hyperbole that's not an idle threat it's a real reality which is why when you look at things like land purchasing the purchase of gold guns ammunition emergency storage the exodus of capital into other assets and the fact that magic internet money is collectively worth more than the bottom 100 economies of the world added together after just 12 years of coming out it is a very real possibility okay so that is where we are all at now we can vote and we can try to build structures and try to be resurrect and transform and evolve the legacy system or we can opt out and go into the new system or perhaps pursue a hybrid strategy but the very definition of money the very nature of money the very question of should nation states be entrusted for the production of money can they be entrusted for the production of money in a world with politics and social media and a world that's globalized these are the real things that our industry is facing every day now cardano in particular we built this project with the aim of a long term outlook decades and we built this trying to provide a path to provide real meaningful solutions which are fair for as many people as possible and that are open and transparent and also work every single category whether it be scalability we have pro things like pipelining and input endorsers and all these other optimizations that are coming quickly to enable us to scale to millions to billions of users on the governance side catalyst is growing and it's the largest decentralized organization in the world containing over a billion dollars of assets to distribute to projects and then all those metrics are going at a rapid rate but if you look at a five-year a 10-year a 15-year or 20-year package we really feel that there's a strong possibility cardano could be the back-end of many nation-states running billions of transactions on a daily basis running national elections being the property register of small nation states medium-sized nation-states the backbone the root of trust of the identity systems of the future and the biggest preserver of human rights the world has seen now i don't know what that's worth i actually don't know how value works anymore uh especially when it's in dollar denominations because things are worth tens of billions of dollars that make no sense that they're worth tens of billion dollars but i do believe if you have a network with billions of people using it that network is too big to fail for humanity and as a consequence we'll be here forever or at least until something else replaces it and it's really hard to replace something that has billions of adherents and users just look at the internet how would one build a new version of that we've tried for four decades unsuccessfully there's a stickiness about these types of network effects so i think that people need to calm down and they need to return to first principles and take a look at the philosophy of the space and take a look at where the human race is at and understand that the avaricic pursuit of an arbitrary unit of value whatever that might be euros dollars etc etc is not meaningful in any sense of the word it isn't the point of the cryptocurrency industry and that all these fair weather people that have entered in with 49ers mentalities they're not going to do well the point of the backbone projects like bitcoin like cardano and others in this industry including ethereum are to pursue the future and try to guide humanity towards better ends for us all that's what we're after that's what we seek those are the kpis upon which i hold myself accountable and this community for the most part holds itself accountable those are the things i care about and i do care about value from the perspective of providing maximum value to as many people as possible which is why we pursue the developing world it's why we have a b to b to c strategy and a b to g to c strategy where we bring corporations large companies large governments they bring tens of millions of people at a given time it's why we care about a holistic approach like having a decentralized innovation system a decentralized brain for research it's why we care a lot about metadata and identity and other things because these are the things that are required to make applications useful and the bedrock that we have laid with the research we've done we have a clear line of sight to solving the problems that are required for a system to work at a scale of billions of people almost every one of our competitors just simply don't that's a fact and they say they do until they tell you they have to build another version of the software or some miracle will come or it's temporary centralization or would they have to restart the network or these things and they have great marketing and they have great people to convince you of such things and then they die slow heat death after a period of time we know our stuff works because we wrote the proofs we went through peer review we took the time to do things right input endorsers for example can improve the throughput of the base ledger of cardone by a factor of 20 to 40 in our current benchmarks we're looking at and that came in a paper in 2016. that's how prescient the research has been in the direct line of sight it's had and that's just one of dozens of innovations that are coming that don't even require a layer 2 solution when you look at the power of a route of trust of cardona the point there is once you have it you can use that to bootstrap high performance permission systems that have similar trust models to the underlying route trust which all these newfangled amazing bft protocols that have fast finality and many tens of thousands of transactions per second they always have the same question where do you get the quorum from and usually trust us the power of aura boris is you get that for free incumbent in the design of boris itself and there's no limit to how many you can launch it's just an economic question these were all built into a very clever design that has been validated by years of research patient hands patient engineers patient people and we have scale now millions of adherents in our ecosystem who aren't going anywhere so when you bet on these things you take a look at 5 10 15 years i firmly believe the fruits of our labors will blossom and that this ecosystem's best days are ahead of it and i don't particularly care about the ebbs and flows of the short term because the reality is the macro in this moment in our space is deeply controlled by factors no one in the cryptocurrency space has any influence over i had to sit down after calling senator after senator going to our community the broader cryptocurrency committee traveling to washington dc and watch the indignity of an infrastructure bill be passed with a poison pill for our entire industry because an 84 year old senator who is retiring next year wanted more money for the military and on the other side of the political aisle people came together and didn't want to have debate because they wanted to guarantee the passage of the infrastructure bill not caring about the consequences to a three trillion dollar industry and now we have to undo that damage and it will take weeks to months a lot of hard work and a lot of money out of my own pocket amongst other people in the industry to get it done just to undo damage that was installed for no reason at all other than to hurt our industry that's a macro event i have no control over no one in our industry has any control over not to mention all the other macro events from china banning bitcoin from all kinds of economic events to this unlimited and monetary policy creating artificial distortions in the equity market to negative interest rates to dozens of other things that come regulatory and otherwise every week there seems to be something that comes out positive or negative that has some degree of influence and impact on our space and then we have fair weather ceos who possess enormous power who come into our space and they distort things in their own ways from elon musk with dogecoin to statements by the fangs and it seems like you can't do much there so in the short term what do you do you can't do anything you keep your nose to the grindstone and you focus on the long term the fundamentals the trends the vision are we growing yes is the technology built on solid foundations yes do we have the right innovation process absolutely are the right processes to empower the community over time to be able to deal with any threat regardless of what it is of course is the system getting more decentralized over time of course is the programming model amenable to a multi-paradigm compute computing approach such as certified software yes of course and dozens of other areas like evm compatibility and compatibility for mainstream developers these are foundational capabilities they require discipline and a calm hand good leadership and a lot of hard work in order for these things to exist and once they're done you get to the next plateau and then that enables you to get to the next plateau and fight new adversaries like quantum computers and dozens of other things that will exist in the next 10 20 years they allow you to explore new markets like the metaverse the spatial web these things they allow you to look at how to make d5 realfly and get it into the hands of the billions of people who need it and make it useful for people they also allow you to compete with monopolies and network effects it's not lost on me that the browser and mobile computing are in some way permissioned environments in apple and google and microsoft they have enormous say over what we see and consume so if crypto lives in these interfaces we have to work real hard to make sure that either we have competing interfaces or the ability to deploy despite these companies because they're eventually going to enter our space as soon as regulatory clarity comes and inflict their three billion person network effect on all of us that's another macro event i can't control but i have to plan for or react to as a ceo in this industry it's complicated that's what we signed up for because changing the world is complicated and that's what we all want to do at the end of the day at the end of this technology it has nothing to do with code and papers and software interfaces and all these terms it's about people that's it and in the 21st century we have to ask a very simple question how should people live exiting the 21st century so in the year 2100 when we look to that how should people live and do they have a higher standard of living more freedom and do they feel like they're in more control of their lives than when we entered the 21st century i signed up to build a system to be part of a solution so that when we exit the 21st century we're better off than when we entered individually and collectively as well as the world as a whole i do not believe this century is going to see the survival of fiat monetary policy the way it's structured it's mathematically impossible at this juncture for these central banks to continue doing what they're doing human beings have also shown an inability to restrict themselves when given absolute power which is why we're in the position we're in the point of blockchain technology is it acts as a social law of physics it constrains us from ourselves and we have shown to need this in a global economy with many existential problems the point of projects like cardano are to bring an all-of-the-above approach you bring the best engineers the best engineering techniques and methodologies the best scientists the best community and the countries that need these solutions the most all together to try to have a balanced comprehensive approach to get these things done and the source of value comes from the fact that that community dedicated as it is is capable at some point at solving these problems locally and globally that's where it comes from and those are the standards upon which we view ourselves every single day so that's what i'm doing and i call upon everyone to calm down to have calm peace there's no rush it goes up value goes down markets go up markets go down fair weather people enter and exit and they create an enormous amount of noise so much noise but it never once distracts me my company the researchers who work with us and the project as a whole cardano from its ultimate mission and its ultimate pursuit and it's never going to stop me from every single day shouting from the mountaintops about what fight we're really up against the dying legacy systems of the 20th century which are not adequate and not capable of fairly dealing with the world in its current form and if we are to continue following them lead us to rune in war and economic collapse i would much rather have new systems that evade and avoid these realities and get us to a more peaceful state while preserving the fruits of the enlightenment personal freedom and liberty privacy the autonomy of humans self-determination i don't want to live in a black mirror dystopian world i don't think anybody listening to this podcast this live stream really wants to either and you know what you are not passive in this you have a choice you every single listener have a choice you can opt out or you can stay in the legacy system and cynically complain about everything in which case you deserve the chains on your wrists because you had the ability to put an end to it voting with your feet voting with your passion voting with your wallet voting with your mind voting with your beliefs and evangelizing a better future for us all the point of an open source project is you don't sit on your ass and wait for somebody else to build something for you you grab a shovel and help them dig you help them build this is a collective monument and what it looks like and whether it gets finished or not is as much your concern as it is mine now i have resources so of course they're committed but those resources will eventually fade away hyperinflation alone will make all of you billionaires soon enough just like it did in zimbabwe and venezuela don't for a moment believe that some elite class of people will somehow bail you out of this unfortunately it's not that simple anymore this is a collective problem caused by decades of negligence poor policy and kicking the can down the road a fundamental lack of courage amongst our political class endowed by a democratic mandate from an apathetic voting class that recused itself from its basic governance responsibilities the only way you can solve that is to rise up and take the power back and you do that by working by contributing by building by evangelizing by thinking by designing by writing code by writing protocols by trying to solve real problems by decentralizing by recognizing the perils of centralized power and not being seduced by the temptations of creating it for a local solution to a temporary problem and you do that by being calm you do that by being reflective by not overreacting by letting the passions of the moment die for a moment and understanding that not everything is as bad as people make it out to be and yes there are downs but there are also ups and you have to remember and account for all of them together as a final note i'd like to thank everyone in the cardano community because the vast majority of them seem to actually get this which is why i honestly believe it's the strongest and best community in the cryptocurrency space deep down inside each and everyone knows it's a long road ahead take decades to truly see it through end to end but they also know it's the single most important thing they could do because ultimately success is defined as changing the world for the better for your children for yourself your grandchildren your parents the people you care about the environment you live within and the governments you live under if we succeed the world will no longer tolerate corruption the world will no longer tolerate hypocrisy the world will no longer tolerate a fundamental lack of rule of law centralization totalitarianism dictatorship it will no longer tolerate people being treated differently for the color of their skin or their religious beliefs instead we're all treated equally endowed by math and protocols and each and every one of us has equality of opportunity our merit will separate us our character will separate us but our access will not that's what you're fighting for at the end of the day i think that's worth a lifetime and i think that's worth a pursuit we're committed to this we're not going anywhere we're going to keep building we're going to keep designing we're going to keep pushing it's a mission in that respect and we're emboldened by the fact that there are now millions of people with us on that so committed they tattoo the logo on their body so committed they named their kids after ada lovelace and cardano so committed a lot of them wake up as volunteers thousands if not tens of thousands every single day spreading the good word they name their hotels after the protocol and they're here they're lifers plant trees some of which the shade they'll never know they planted them for us so thank you community for being along this road and also showing the rest of the space how to be calm and hopefully they get the message in the lesson and they understand the significance of the work the space as a whole is doing cardano doesn't have a monopoly on the moral high road in this respect the reality is there are many good people in many different projects across this industry some of whom don't even like us and don't even care about us and think we're doomed to fail and call us a scam who still actually believe crypto has these values and this potential for humanity and good for them the more the merrier many ships pointed in the same direction we don't all have to be on that boat it's okay thank you for listening