good evening everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from nighttime not so sunny colorado but it's still warm always warm always sunny somewhere i uh just got done looking through camille rosso's book the infinite machine which is the first of several biographies coming out on the history of ethereum and it's a surreal experience if you ever experience it very few people do uh do go through something and it turn out to be in a book and uh to read about events that you lived like i read the red wedding chapter uh which had to deal with my departure from ethereum and uh several other chapters and it's uh been seven years and uh it still is uh it still is a hell of a thing you know i joined that project and i was in my mid-20s very ambitious very optimistic and really excited to do something interesting cryptocurrency space and when you're part of something like ethereum you just realize that there's something special there that the idea has legs and it's going to take off and it's going to change some things and it's going to create something that's going to affect a large group of people and the miami chapter in that book really does a good job of capturing that sense of excitement uh and the problem is that no one comes into that game uh perfect and no one comes into that game with the skill sets that they need to really rise to the occasion you just all do your best as vitalik did and i did and it ended up only being about six months of my life and after i was gone in june of 2014 i didn't really think the project was going to succeed i felt that because of the politics the way that they did things the the character assassination this other stuff the infighting would result in the destruction of the project the squandering of all the project money uh much to my surprise as ethereum somehow managed to get through all of that probably due to vitalik being a very strong leader and having the the character and the discipline to get through it and become a truly meaningful project to our entire industry and uh in space you see uh the real growth of charles hoskinson though occurred after ethereum being a ceo of a company for year after year after year and just going through the dogged minutia of that job the many hard days and things i've had to endure through it and the constant criticism that you endure in this industry where people go beyond saying you're wrong to saying you're a criminal you're a horrible human being the utter lack of empathy in this industry where you're judged by your worst days and that's assumed to be the standard it's a it's something that truly does build character and the hardest part is trying to maintain a lack of cynicism and trying to maintain optimism despite all of that you know recently we had a tussle on twitter where somebody from china decided to imply that our project was involved with a bunch of mlm ponzi scams in western china and that the only reason our price had gone up was because of that these are blatantly untrue and unfair allegations and any reasonable thinking person would realize how unfair and untrue they are and if i have the audacity to defend my community my project the integrity of our system uh then it leads to a twitter mob calling me an egomaniac you know and it's a difficult situation to be in where you can be criticized but can't reply to the criticism you can't defend yourself especially against unfair allegations uh and we live in a space where people are very tribal and they don't really like anyone who's not in their tribe and don't care to listen or understand what they're doing the magic of the company that i created and the people built is that we did things very differently we were a bit ahead of our time we thought carefully about things like peer review and we thought carefully about how to build a great science engine we did things a little differently on the development side and we made a lot of mistakes along the way you know we were too ambitious we tried to do too many things at the same time we used languages that were a bit too arcane and we paid a terrible price for that but you know what we never gave up the story that hasn't been told and it should be told one day is how a group of people got together and they had the resilience necessary to go try to do some of the hardest things that have ever been done in the history of not only this industry but in software development and they succeeded for the most part it's not an easy thing to say that we're just going to invent new science and then formalize that science and then put it into consumer products and release it to people all across the world while everybody's watching criticizing and trying to steal your money and break it and if you make any mistakes at all that becomes the only story and all the successes are forgotten and our team did that and i'm eternally grateful for their ability to do that in continuation of doing that it's not an easy thing to evaluate 10 years worth of history in our space and say certain parts of it is wrong even things that people hold to be right and have a difference of opinion have to justify that difference of opinion build a community around it explain the nuances and details especially when they're incredibly technical i spent more than five years of my life working on that five years that's a long time 10 times longer than when i was at ethereum and for the most part ethereum is over for me i haven't given it much thought you know it is what it is there's clearly people in that community who really hate me and don't think i'm anybody worth anybody's time they think i'm a bad actor and they uh clearly state their opinion on a daily basis about it or whatever asked but you know what i couldn't care less i really don't and now these books are coming out and it's resurrecting those memories in that time and it's a surreal experience in a certain respect good lessons to learn from it but it's left me with a profound sense of gratitude because as a consequence of those events i'm here today with you my community those who decided to go with the crazy ideas that we came up with together and invest in those ideas and build in those ideas and you know what we're all better for that the space is better for that it's better that there's cardano and ethereum instead of just ethereum and i think we have a lot to learn from each other especially after the emotions recede a little bit you know the other thing is that the whole experience taught me how ephemeral everything is we like to believe that things are permanent marriages life we all die everything comes to an end at some point and even if you're a ceo one day tomorrow you might not be even if you're the president tomorrow you might not be everything comes to an end and it's time so early in life if you have the misfortune or fortune of being fired or kicked around it gives you the ability to get back up and know that tomorrow will be better dust yourself off and you can still achieve great things if only you have the will to try and boy that's been that's been a great lesson for me and it's something that i've really treasured and taken to heart and i have to tell you my life today is better than anything i could have ever imagined to be i live in a beautiful place i have beautiful friends and family i get to do the things that i care to do i've been to 52 countries i've met heads of state you know i i've had a chance to interact with everybody you could ever imagine just the other day i was interacting with a world-famous ai researcher who wants to build on our platform and i remember reading in wired magazine about his android that he constructed and using his framework opencock and then also i remember years ago reading a new kind of science when i was studying mathematics and the fact that the author of that book would come to our conference and speak it's just a real experience i remember taking a networking course and reading about the history of tcpip and the textbook had a little panel with a picture of vincerf and bob khan in it and to have vincerf come to our conference it's truly an experience as one of a kind and it happened as a direct result of the events of ethereum so i've come to know know all of you because of the things that happened there and for that i am truly grateful and i'm very grateful for what we've accomplished in the coming days shelley's coming out followed soon by gogan and then we have this relentless experimentation of evil every six to eight weeks some voting event is going to happen money is going to start moving the dc will start flowing to you guys and in short order our ecosystem will start becoming more resilient diverse new thought leaders will materialize all kinds of crazy debates will form strong leadership will materialize in places we don't expect to see it and as a consequence cardano will become truly diverse and decentralized and at some point it'll become so diverse and decentralized just like ethereum i'll probably fade away either by choice or not by choice it doesn't particularly matter it always happens to founders even bill gates is no longer at microsoft but what leaves me with so much joy is the fact that what we have constructed is truly going to be around for a very long time i don't know if ethereum is going to be here forever it may become something like netscape or paypal and for its time established something and brought a lot of people up and really proved out how the world ought to work or it might end up becoming something that's here for a long time but i do know for fact cardano will be what we have laid here the community we've constructed here is unlike anything i've ever seen in the cryptocurrency space all of you matter and all of you care just as much as i do and the people at my company do and at the foundation do and the people at emergo do and all of you in your own way contribute in uh special ways it can be as simple as sending recipes for how to cook venison jerky it's as complicated as having a detailed opinion on how we need to motive modify our voting system so it's more effective and if everybody contributes then we'll all rise together you know the other reality is that we really have figured out how to do business within the developing world and it is inevitable that deal after deal will bring millions of users from the developing world into cardano and cardano will become the default platform for economic identity that's my dream that's my hope and that's my belief i strongly believe it and if that occurs we will achieve what i set out to do in that ted talk in 2014 in bermuda where i said we have two worlds the banked world and the unbanked world and it's about time we merge them and we have one it was a pipe dream back then and now just five years later i'm left with this extraordinary ah that we found the secret sauce to get there and get there with a movement and regardless of how hard it is how long it'll take there's a certain degree of inevitability about that so it while it is hard to look at the past especially looking at books like the uh infinite machine because it does remind me of the worst of times and it does remind me of how cruel and horrible people can be or how misguided people can be in their criticism it also reminds me of how far someone can rise after a fall and we all rose together so i suppose the great lesson to take from all of this is there's always a tomorrow you overestimate what you can do in a year but you always underestimate what you can do in 10. and i can't wait to spend the next five years and five years after that and five years after that with all of you continuing what we started here and continuing to build what we started here and i think our best days are ahead of us i really honestly do in any event it's really been some amazing work we probably could have picked a slightly easier road though maybe written in scala and used yellow and other things like that but we chose the hard road and um regardless of that i think that alone has earned enough respect to keep us around for a while so i just wanted to say that it's a surreal experience to read about yourself in a book and read about events that you lived i remember some things a little differently but that's always what happens with books and some creative license was taken here and there uh some things were fair some things were not so fair and i guess there's two more coming out this year so we'll see what everybody else has to say but overall all in all pretty neutral pretty fair i suppose and it was a good story nonetheless let's make the book written about cardano an even better one and let's make that book worth a thousand thanks for listening you all take care and i'll talk to you soon
