Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. I had to make a quick video because the Charles Derangement Syndrome has reached a level I've never seen before in my life. Never. Since someone took the time to write something up, I figured I’d make a video quickly. Normally, I ignore people on Twitter, but when they really put in the effort and go to hyperbolic levels, you have to give them their due.
Okay, so Mcloven, congratulations. You get a little bit of Hoskinson due today. You've gotten host for today. Many of you know that I went to Papua New Guinea and had a chance to work with Avi Lo and his team. We worked on this paper here, which was the aftereffect of an expedition that was led. In academic publications, the first author is usually the person who makes the most significant contribution, and then it kind of falls apart from there. Sometimes, after a little while, you do it alphabetically, but it gets a little hard when you have trailing things.
This paper is kind of a chimera of a paper about chemical classification spirals. The paper itself talks a lot about what happened when the spirals were analyzed. A big part of this was actually the sea salvage, and what made this very novel from a paper viewpoint was that we had to invent a way of recovering the spirals from the seafloor. Early in the days before I funded the expedition, Avi and I talked extensively about what an expedition would look like and what we would have to do. We brought this guy on board, Rob McCullum, who is an expert in sea salvage. JJ Syler came with me, my chief of staff, among others. We all worked together on a game plan.
My primary contribution, beyond funding the expedition, was that we talked a lot about the sled design. I advocated for a sleuth mechanism with the sled in addition to a magnetic sled that we designed. Unfortunately, the sleuth sled didn’t work because when we tested it off the coast of Washington State, it was a different ground than what we encountered in Papua New Guinea. The sled kept getting jammed, and we weren’t able to retrieve any high-density materials. We also planned out the expedition with Rob, figuring out the security side among many other things. This was kind of the search and recovery component. I also ended up helping JJ run the lab because, in addition to cleaning off all the samples, we had to process them and get them to the XRF, find them, and sort them, which was incredibly laborious work on the ship.
The real science was done by Jacobson in Lobe and his graduate student. Jacobson, in particular, did the yeoman's work—absolutely extraordinary work. This is the beginning of a paper. It’s an interesting paper, but the real science will be done with the follow-up because they can’t do much more until they get a larger piece. We proved that there’s a chance something interesting is there, which is why I came up with the title "Balo" for lanthanum, uranium, and beryllium. It was a fun little thing to do, and I’m glad it got into a journal. However, it was more of a sea salvage expedition than true deep hardcore science.
There’s been a lot of controversy; for example, some people claim the sphericals we found are collash. We disagree with that, and the paper makes a statement about it, not taking it too seriously. Avi decided that everyone involved on the sea salvage side who contributed would also be listed as a co-author of the paper. Obviously, the Harvard crew gets the lion's share of the credit because the paper was published in a geology site. I thought nothing of it, read the manuscripts, and requested certain things be taken out, such as the technological origin in the conclusion.
Then this dude Mcloven writes a long-form article about academic misconduct, claiming that I bought authorship and that it’s plagiarism. I’m not exactly sure what he’s getting at because, at the end of this unhinged rant, there’s a demand for answers. This isn’t just a troll anymore; it’s a deep dive into a scandal that questions science’s soul. Hoskinson’s authorship hangs on flimsy ground. A hefty donation, a sled, a light edit don’t meet the ICMJ’s bar. Journals must tighten their standards. Institutions like Harvard must probe reaches, and funders must respect the line between support and credit. Until then, this case stands as a warning. When science bends to wealth, its foundations crack.
If this still doesn’t hit the mark, tell me what I’m missing. I’ll keep building until I give you exactly what you need. I will share every rule and guideline, tweets, articles, all showing the same outcome: Hoskinson is not eligible for co-authorship, and this misconduct is ethically illegal within the academic community, warranting investigation and potential sanctions under scientific integrity policies.
There’s a lot of unhinged ranting here. There’s definitely Hoskinson Derangement Syndrome floating around. Guys, get it through your skull that I exist. I’m a person. Drop out. Deal with it. I have graduate credits, I have undergraduate credits. That’s a fact. I went to CU Boulder, dropped out. That’s a fact. Deal with it. I started and run one of the largest research groups in the world for cryptocurrencies, an interdisciplinary research group with 168 co-authors, 240 papers, and almost 10,000 citations in the portfolio. I’ve been around for 10 years. Where are the lawsuits? Where’s the scandal? Where’s the shoe dropping? How do we have all these relationships and partnerships if we’re not good stewards of the academic process?
When you publish garbage like this, it not only shows how unhinged you are, but it also shows how little you understand the academic process in general. Science is a game of low resolution to high resolution. You start with some ideas and conjectures, bring groups of people together, and everybody has a place and purpose in the process, from the people who clean the test tubes to the people who make the theories. When you start low, you’re just looking for something—an anchor. Gradually, you winnow your way in, get more specific, and eventually break through to discover interesting things. Typically, those will be your primary authors.
I was involved in a sea salvage operation and contributed as much as I could. I’m not an expert in geology, especially astrogeology, nor have I ever professed to be one. But I did have a lot of fun reviewing the manuscript and contributing to the actual salvage side. I’ll remind people that if we weren’t able to salvage, there would be nothing to analyze, which is why this is an interdisciplinary paper. Part of the methodology is that geologists are interested in recovering other heavenly bodies from the sea. It is equally academically interesting how to recover sphericals from the seafloor 6,000 feet underwater in Papua New Guinea or wherever you’re going to recover them, as it is what you do once you have those sphericals.
If it’s an interdisciplinary paper, you need both sides. So, saying that the people who contributed to the salvage side are unworthy of any academic merit in a paper that’s about both sides is insane. You’re blinded by hate and derangement, and you’ve developed a hyper-negative view that’s causing you to go off the rails.
I’ve noticed a lot of this in the crypto ecosystem. People have gotten to a point where their hatred for me is so strong that there’s no redemption. There’s no good act; everything must be a scam, illegal, immoral, unethical. I don’t know why you got there. Maybe it was Lara’s book, or maybe you just don’t like my politics, or there was a tweet that really set you off. It doesn’t hurt me at all. I’m still going to go about my life funding math institutes, directing research, and being influential in the research process, spinning up new research lines. I just invented a new implantable device the other day, and we’re running it through a whole bunch of interesting biotechnology conversations. I’ll probably get a patent on that.
I guess Mcloven’s going to write another Medium post about how I didn’t deserve that patent. Maybe somebody else must have done it because he’s obviously in the room, obviously there with my people during the research process. Of course, he’s not; he’s a troll, but he’s a deranged troll. They’re starting to organize; they formed a Charles-hating Discord. There are now these parody accounts, like the Fred account and the Charles account. There’s clearly a movement that’s getting stronger, louder, and more pernicious. It’s becoming much more personal.
It’s starting to create this evil caricature where they’re absolutely convinced I’m a criminal and a bad actor, an evil person, and anything I do is bad. Here’s the thing: when I retire, I’m going to get a PhD in math. It’s a life goal of mine. You may not believe I’m smart enough to do it, but I think I am. I’ll go try to do that. Obviously, I’d have to get accepted into a program, do the quals and comps, and write a dissertation. I’ve witnessed the process firsthand for the last 10 years. We’ve had a lot of graduate students grow up under our supervision, from Colin at Cambridge to the inventor of the NEPA POW Dianis Syndro, who was right there alongside them as they did all these things under our research group.
It’s something I would like to do. It’s a full-time endeavor, and I don’t have that time to hyper-specialize in this type of stuff. But as I grow older and move into more of a chairman-style role, I’ll have the ability to do that. Here’s what I know: while I pursue that, every step of the way, anything I do will apparently have a constituency of people attacking my integrity as a person and the output that I produce, accusing me of plagiarism and all kinds of baseless, meritless things. I’m not sure why. I’m not sure what they benefit. I don’t know what grievous sin and harm has been inflicted upon them.
Cardano was started in Japan in 2015 with about $70 million in funding. Cardano in 2025 is a $26 billion ecosystem. It has delivered 240 papers to market, millions of lines of code to market, and massive protocol innovations, from the first provably secure proof-of-stake protocol to liquid non-custodial proof-of-stake protocol, extended UTXO, the Plutus programming language, to Miniur, to the partner chains framework, to what we’re about to launch with Midnight. It has the largest and, I would argue, most successful on-chain governance system with Voltaire. If you look at our roadmap from Byron to Basho, everything but Basho has been delivered, and Basho will be delivered with L1 and other things this year and next year.
I’m trying to understand where the great deception and scam has happened because in 2015, I said this is what I’m going to do. We had no money and no people in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and now 2025, soon to be 2026. For 11 years of my life, I’ve been doing this, and every step of the way, we told you what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. We were wrong about the timing; it’s complicated business, but we did do it, and we did it as best we could. Cardano has been running for almost eight years now—seven years, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Cardano has never had a major hack. Cardano has never gone down. Cardano runs, and it’s decentralized as measured by the EDI. What more do you want? Where is the scam?
During that entire arc of time, Celsius happened, Luna happened, FTX happened, Bitconnect happened, OneCoin happened, and thousands of failed projects from NXT to EOS and everything in between occurred. We’re still in the top 10. We’re still here. We’re still pushing forward. I don’t understand your grievance. I really don’t. What would compel a person to take a fun survey paper that has some interesting science in it, which is the beginning of a larger work that some people at Harvard want to do, and write an article dissecting it, claiming it’s academic fraud when you have absolutely no evidence?
I don’t know why a person gets so deranged like this, and I don’t know why they’re organizing to the extent that this is the standard. It’s deeply frustrating to me. Every step of the way, I know that anything I do will have that mirror reflecting back at me, and it confuses people when they do their due diligence or look at things. They say, “I don’t understand where all this is coming from, what’s the story?” Every now and then, you have to have an uncomfortable conversation, and of course, it resolves because they look at the totality of the evidence and what’s been done and say, “Well, obviously, there’s more on the right than there is on the left, so that guy’s crazy.”
But gosh, what did you do to piss this person off? I don’t know. I really don’t. But I guess this is the world we live in now, and we see it all around. There’s a derangement happening among people. We’re no longer able to get along. If we hate somebody, we have to hate them so thoroughly and absolutely that every single thing that person says and does is wrong and evil, regardless of the outcome. You see this with Elon Derangement Syndrome, Trump Derangement Syndrome, and absolutely with people on the left and their derangements, especially Hillary Clinton. I mean, people are pretty deranged there.
It’s getting worse and worse generation by generation, and it’s starting to be rewarded, indoctrinated, and financial models are being built around the hate machine. Now we have a permanent CDS marketplace within the Cardano ecosystem, and people will make money, enjoy their time with it, create all these narratives and languages, and tell the same lies again and again until they become so ingrained that they just automatically believe they’re true. I just don’t know how to solve it.
I’d like to believe I’ve been pretty good, all things considered, over the last 10 years. They’ve been hard. It’s difficult when you look at a very unfair tell-all book that comes out, and there’s not much you can do to fight it. You talk to your lawyers, and they say, “Well, you can sue, and you may win, you may not win, but even if you win, it’s not going to do much because of how it’s written and structured. It’s very hard. Do you want to spend two or three years in litigation and create a strain effect that blows the whole thing up?” If you lose, that’s going to look really bad. If you win, what do you get? A retraction. But the damage is already done. People believe what they see and never read the rebuttal.
It gets sticky with these things. That’s why the one transaction a block was so damaging to Cardano. When people in the Ethereum community wrongly said that about Cardano back in 2021, it stuck, and they still believe it. When you go to ETH Denver or these other places, they say, “Why are you on Cardano? That system is the least scalable; it’s one transaction per block.” You talk to them, and they say, “What are you talking about? We have this whole DeFi ecosystem.” They say, “Yeah, but I heard this thing, and it’s here.” Well, let me show you this thing. They say, “That’s got to be a scam; it can’t be real. Why? Because you’re one transaction a block.”
I just showed you the evidence against it. No, you’re one transaction a block. You see the problem? The lie gets sticky, and there becomes this cognitive cost to undo it and unwind it. When you create these cargo cults of misinformation, they become cancerous, grow, distort, and eventually derange people to a point where they create parallel realities. This is the challenge of our time. It’s an aftereffect of social media, the derangement syndromes. Now, being the recipient of it, apparently, I can’t even be a co-author on a paper. I just can’t be now. I’m not even allowed to do that, even though I made contributions.
They weren’t significant, certainly, because I’m not listed as the first author, but there were contributions, discussions, and reviews in the meetings about these things. I lived on the ship for two weeks with the people. We set everything up for getting people there, getting the equipment there, building the laboratory, and coordinating with people. I think that if you have 25, 30, or 40 authors, it’s probably sufficient for a trailing author, and most people for an interdisciplinary paper where half the goal is recovery and the other half is analysis would agree. Reasonable people would, or at least give the benefit of the doubt, especially if the following papers that focus on the geology science only focus on that and those authors.
There’s no evidence for the claims made, but they make them, and there are no consequences for making them. There are no consequences when Wendy, what’s her face, goes on various alt-right channels and claims that we’re connected to Epstein through Ben Gortzel harvesting data on children in Ethiopia, even though there’s no evidence of that. It’s just pure lies and slander. I’ve never met the man. We’ve never received any money. I was nine years old when he was in his heyday with Bill Clinton. Come on. It’s just absurd on every level. But she says it, and people believe her, and there’s no evidence behind it. It percolates, becomes a cancer, and then it becomes part of a narrative truth.
When they say a follow-on thing, they fall back on the prior lie as a foundational concern. They say, “Well, we knew that he worked with Epstein over in Ethiopia. We knew that he did that thing over there with those people, so obviously, this next thing must be true too.” If he did that thing with him, that must have been true. But it’s a lie from the foundation all the way down. It’s just absurd. Or jumping out of Apache helicopters—I don’t even know how that’s done. I don’t even know the origin of that. It’s so thoroughly stupid. I own a Blackhawk helicopter.
We're still in the conversation. We're in the reserve. We're fighting every day. We're pushing forward. I'm proud of that. I'm proud that we're still relevant and that we're still here. We're still doing groundbreaking research, too. We're publishing great papers all the time. The labs are growing, and the interests are expanding. We're getting very technical, and we're starting to really drill deep and solve super hard problems.
Laos, in my view, is the solution to the blockchain drama. I think Cardano will be the first to solve that completely. We perfectly balanced decentralization, security, and scalability. We solved it, and I'm proud of that. We just have to get to market, and it's really hard, but we'll get it done. It'll follow the sun and all this other stuff and get where it needs to go.
I also think we're a world leader in intents, and that's going to be a lot of fun with Babel fees being the first step in. We'll keep pushing forward. There are a lot of great projects to learn from in that space, and that gives me some joy and solace. I really like the glowing plants and the medicine; those are a lot easier to work in, let me tell you.
Right now, I'm working on a combination therapy that includes the same protocol and ketamine. I think we have a chance to treat depression and massively reduce the symptom set for probably more than 50% of the people who participate. The same protocol is already very effective, and it uses transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is FDA approved, along with ketamine. There are a lot of intersection points there, and I'm really excited about that. If we can do that, we can change the lives of a lot of people.
It's very rewarding when you see somebody come in who’s completely broken, who can’t get off the couch, and they’re just not where they need to be. They go through something, come out the other side, and they're a completely changed person. They get their life back.
Then there's the Charles derangement syndrome. People will say, "Well, that’s a savior complex, and it satisfies his narcissism and helps his brittle ego for not becoming a doctor and failing his family legacy." Others give me the benefit of the doubt and say, "Hey, he just likes helping people. What’s wrong with that?" See how messed up these differences are? One perspective is, "Well, that’s pretty cool. Good on you. More people need to do that," while the other claims the only reason he’s doing that is because he’s a bad person.
This is where we’re at, at level 10: Charles derangement syndrome. This is how bad it is. What does that say about the people who hold those beliefs, and why do you build them up? You have to make some decisions in the next year or two about the DREPs you delegate to. You have to make decisions about the budgets you endorse and the entities you want to work with.
If you find DREPs who are trying to get delegation by being Charles deranged, and all they have is hate, all they want to do is tear things down and produce nothing, you have a choice. If you click the button to support them, you shouldn’t be surprised if you kill your own ecosystem. You poison your own tray. We all drink the same water, and if you’re pouring lead into that water, you’re drinking just as much as I am. Understand there are consequences for that.
Keep this in the back of your mind as we grow as an ecosystem. Be mindful of who you like and subscribe to, who you listen to, and who you follow, especially as politics evolve. There are a lot of good things that Trump has done that I enjoy deeply, but it’s a bit of victor’s justice. On the other hand, it’s starting to get to a petty level that should stop.
At the end of the day, we just have to govern and move forward. It’s deeply unfortunate if you govern with 51% while the other 49% are deranged and angry. We can’t do this. We have to move forward. The dialogue has to get better, and the only way it’s going to improve is if we change. We can’t watch the garbage videos, retweet the vacuous tweets, or like and subscribe to the people whose only business is to spread misinformation and harm others.
You can’t be a proxy. When someone comes to you and says, "Did you see this latest thing about this evil person who did blah blah blah?" you should ask, "What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?" I include myself in this set of people that has to be better. I fully acknowledge that, and when I see articles like this, my response is to consider how I can be better to mitigate the derangement.
Sometimes you just have to cut it off at the knees and say people are being pretty absurd, and they need to stop. More broadly, how do we stop this culture in general and get where we need to go?
Anyway, I wanted to make a video. I didn’t want it to last 35 minutes, but I just wanted to talk a little bit about this because it’s something that’s been bothering me for a while. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to navigate all of it and get to a reasonable high ground. It’s just so crazy out there, and it’s so disgusting. It’s gotten to such a weird point that I can’t even co-author a fun, interdisciplinary survey paper about sea salvage and geology without someone writing a slanderous thing about it.
I’m just at a loss. I really am. It’s sad, and it makes me sad for these people. I have a great degree of sympathy for whatever mental illness they have and how their brain is working the way it is. It must be a terrible thing to live in a world where every single thing that’s good is bad, and everything that’s bad is double bad. I can’t imagine how bad that person’s life is.
So anyway, till next time, friends. Talk to you soon.
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