Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is February 2nd, 2025. It's a good day, a lovely day, the best day, a huge day, an incredible day. February is going to be a really good month.
First off, it is the month my mother was born; she was born on February 27th, so we’ll all wish her a happy birthday on that day. It is the shortest month, but often one of the busiest months because people start waking up from January and realize they have actual work to do. Everybody is back in the full swing of things. They stop going to the gym too, although I’m working out every day, really pushing hard. I’ve got to lose some of this weight. I keep saying it, and I keep getting busy, but I have something coming up in April that’s quite dangerous, and I need to be in the best shape to be able to do it. It will be fun.
We’re still working on some of the deals that are under NDA, so I can’t say anything yet, but there’s some momentum on it. We’re broadening the scope a little bit and having some fun with it. We’ll see where it takes us. There’s no huge urgency, but we’re getting it done. I’m meeting a very special person towards the end of the month. I can’t say who it is, but I’m just getting things set up for that. February is going to be a good month; we’re getting things done.
Overall, I’m really proud of this year. We got the Bluenom hard fork out, and almost immediately, people started participating in governance. There are three big things we have to get done, and those three big things are essential for the self-determination and integrity of Cardano. Now that we have a full on-chain government, we have a mechanism to get the consent of the governed, and that consent has to be applied towards fundamental rights, strategy, and execution.
Fundamental rights is the Constitution that’s beginning the process. Throughout this month, there will be a ton of debate and dialogue, but the Constitution is already a pretty good consensus document, as evidenced by two years of work, 65 workshops, and participation from 50 countries. The convention of consensus is the strategy and execution. The strategy is the roadmap: where do we want to go as a product? We worked with Intersect and published a roadmap that we think is a pretty good consensus of the community as a whole.
The next step is for people to read it, for the DAOs to come on board and get their feet wet. I’m happy to have engaging conversations with them, and we need to get an info action to get the roadmap ratified. Then it becomes the roadmap as consented by the government. What will happen is that people will add things and take things out. The budget is the same artifact. Intersect is going to be publishing a budget, and many entities are likely to publish budgets as well. The DAOs will have to form a working group with the institutions and discuss consolidation.
This is what happens in a normal budget process. When you look at the Ways and Means Committee or other things in big governments, one group of people takes the first crack at it, and they get it in the neighborhood. The current budget is about 84 pages, and there’s a lot of discussion about how oversight is going to work and what’s going to happen. That’s in the neighborhood of correctness, but there are almost certainly some people who won’t be happy. Those who aren’t happy will propose their own budgets, and then there will be a consolidation of that.
I fully expect that process to take about two to three months, but once it’s done, we have a process, and we can begin that process in the fourth quarter of this year for next year. This means we can get a budget approved annually and push it through. It’s the same for the roadmap. One of the line items I recommended to Intersect was continuing the workshops we did because I wanted to make sure that people were consulted everywhere, regardless of how much ADA they have or if they speak English or not.
The constitutional convention was the product of 50 countries; you saw all the flags there and all the representatives. It’s very important that the workshops come to your country to talk about the product roadmap, the budget, and the strategy of Cardano as a whole. These types of things will help the consensus percolate up and be aggregated together through a budget reconciliation process on an annual basis.
A lot of hot topics are being discussed. For example, Patrick Tobler brought up the idea of using smart contracts for the budget process. I think it’s a great idea, and we can innovate a little bit. It’ll take some time, but the ADA side will already be done. When vendors get paid, they can choose to accept ADA or stablecoins issued in the Cardano ecosystem. Both of those are assets in the Cardano ecosystem.
After the budget comes through, it makes sense to put those funds in a smart contract and have those smart contracts autopay in increments for the work done. We can also have governance keys that allow that to be turned off in the event of an audit or oversight issue. You can put both USDM and USDA, as well as ADA, in that type of contract. You let the firm decide if they want to take the volatility risk or not and be bullish or bearish on ADA, or maybe they’re just not in the financial position to do so.
The advantage of this is that if there are any funds left over in the smart contract at the end of the year, we already have a feature to donate ADA back to the treasury. The smart contract can just sweep the remaining balance into the treasury to be reused. This also guarantees that the ADA can’t be used for staking or governance participation.
We could also add a feature to let people donate Cardano native assets to the treasury as well. Conceivably, the treasury can actually hold stablecoins or Bitcoin or other assets. It’s an interesting conversation to start. Intersect was set up to facilitate these types of things, and there are other entities that can facilitate them, like Brevan Howard, for example.
There are dozens of administrators, and even a multisig group could be selected. That’s kind of the discussion in the reconciliation consolidation: what is the governance in oversight, the amount, the quantity of people being paid, scopes of work, how do they get paid, is it monthly or quarterly, do they get paid in ADA or stablecoin, and what stablecoins to use? It’s a lot of details, and that has to be derived from a strategy. The strategy will be the product roadmap, and the product roadmap also has to be ratified through info action.
I also put a poll out recently asking if people would be okay with converting a percentage of the treasury, perhaps income, maybe five or ten percent, into stablecoins and having an external firm manage that. This would improve stablecoin liquidity. When I say external firm, I mean one that actively participates in Cardano DeFi and actually achieves TVL.
The advantage of this is that if there are profits made, those profits could then be converted to ADA and donated back to the treasury. This would also increase the amount of minted stablecoins in the Cardano ecosystem and the amount of activity with TVL and liquidity in the ecosystem, making it much easier to argue that CNT should be listed on exchanges.
That’s something up for debate; it hasn’t been proposed in the Intersect budget or any other place. But if you guys are very interested in it and people actually want to talk about it, I’m more than happy to have a workshop and bring people from the community together to see how something like that would work and be appropriate. Just let JJ Syler know, my chief of staff, and we can absolutely set up a summit at the University of Wyoming or at the office here in Longmont. People can fly out, and we can talk about it for a few days and make a proposal to the community.
It’s important to understand that when I say we’re governed now, we are. The DAOs are in charge, and the constitutional committee is in charge. Cardano has a government, and the DAOs are starting to really realize that. Some of them privately reached out to me and said, “Hey, wow, I actually have a vote. I think I have too much power.” I said, “Don’t worry about it; you’ll do fine.”
That’s an exciting thing because for the first time ever, we really, as founding entities, have counterparties to talk to and negotiate with. We can say, “Okay, here’s what we think you should do,” and they can say, “Actually, no, I think we should go this way.” If you’re delegating to DAOs, we’re starting a precedent now about your expectations as delegators for communication and explanation. It should be the case that the people you delegate to communicate with you on a regular basis and are accountable to you.
When they do things, whether you agree or disagree with them, they owe you an explanation for why they voted one way or the other. That’s fine, and however they choose to do that is up to your taste and preference. The magic of this is that there’s no central authority that says this is the way they must behave; everything is voluntary and standards-based, which is really powerful. We’re learning as we go.
I love the workshops because they bring people together. I think we can do them perpetually for improving the Constitution for future versions, for improving the roadmap, improving the product function, and improving the budget function. How much of the budget should we spend annually for this continuous quality improvement and inclusivity? We can bring everybody along—1% of the budget, 5% of the budget, 10% of the budget. This is the kind of stuff that has to be discussed.
Incumbent in the recommendations that will come out of Intersect, which we worked on among many others, is a recommendation of what those percentages should be. But by no means is that the final say. The DAOs now get a say, and you elected them. They’re going to be very direct in many cases about their preferences or umbrage with the process, and we fully expect that.
As long as we can disagree without being disagreeable and push the ball along, I believe there is a very strong possibility that within 90 to 120 days, we will have a ratified Constitution, roadmap, and budget, and a process upon which to improve the 2026 stuff. We’re moving along.
When you look at the roadmap that we published, it includes pretty much everything you guys want: Midgard and Laos, making Laos a first-class citizen. In fact, I told the dev teams, “Let’s try to find a way with Laos to implement it after prototype—24 hours a day, 7 days a week.” This means we’ll have stacked dev teams, some working the day shift, some working the night shift, and some working weekends—night and day. So, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the code is being written. This has never been done before in the history of a cryptocurrency project, but I think it conveys the seriousness with which we need that protocol because it will basically make us one of the fastest cryptocurrencies in the world.
With Midgard and rollups, that will also give us the fastest layer 2 ecosystem and a much superior layer 2 ecosystem to the one from Ethereum because of extended UTXO unique security properties. I think we’re really tracking the right thing. Anastasia is working very hard; they’re scaling up to 15 full-time people, and I think they have a real good shot of getting something to mainnet this year.
Hydra continues to grow; we’re going to have a lot of Hydra goodies on mainnet come Rare Evo. We’re also exploring how to merge Hydra with the Lightning Network and create Lightning Hydra so that that Bitcoin relationship strengthens. We’re also looking at Bitcoin DeFi as a first-class citizen, whether the roadmap passes or not. I’m just going to do that because I think that’s cool, and it’s a good idea, and we can get that done. We’ll have our first demo in May at Bitcoin 2025, so a lot of stuff is happening.
A few more things: the Wyoming stablecoin issue. As you know, I started a PAC, we started staffing it, and we’re getting involved. We had a great reception with about two dozen lawmakers, give or take, and they were quite surprised about what happened. Some were quite disgusted about what happened. Wyoming does not have a place for corruption. I still believe that Wyoming is a great state to incorporate a business in, but I know that sometimes when vigilance isn’t there and character isn’t there, bad things happen and sneak their way in.
Lawmakers were quite surprised, for example, that they only allocated $5.8 million for the state to compete against Tether, which just announced that they made $13 billion last year and are on more than 200 exchanges. Circle, which made about the same, is on the same liquidity. It doesn’t seem very wise to pick a fight with such giants and do so in a competitive model where every time the executive director needs anything, he has to go and get a law passed or a new budget allocated, which might take months to years to get done. That’s not really a competitive endeavor.
In fact, the University of Wyoming just published a report saying that they believe the stablecoin will lose money, notwithstanding the nepotistic corrupt process that was followed, which excluded Bitcoin. Tether just announced they’re launching the stablecoin on XRP, which just launched real USD regulated by the NYDFS. Obviously, Cardano, Hashgraph, ALR, ICP, and thousands of others were excluded. The only ones included were Ethereum, the layer 2 ecosystem there, and some of the things touched by the Circle ecosystem, like U for example, which they just launched on, and Stellar, which started as a fork of Ripple. It’s pretty curious how Stellar qualifies and Ripple does not. I thought XRP has been around longer, and they’re certainly meeting with the president, so it won’t stand.
Procurement has to change; that’s the core of it. The agreement wasn’t followed. For those who weren’t following this, to remind you, we were told again and again it would be an open process, the requirements would be publicly published, and we would build demos and demonstrate we satisfied to qualify. Instead, the opposite happened. The requirements were kept hidden; we didn’t know what was disqualifying versus qualifying. We were given no opportunity to build or demo anything. The executive director, who was a former employee of ConsenSys, decided to work and rate all of us. He said that Cardano didn’t have fundamental capabilities.
Not only do we have those capabilities, freeze and CES, they’re implemented as a smart contract through CIP-113. It’s a smart contract; it does not require a hard fork. It’s code, just like ERC-20 does not require a hard fork. We demoed with the University of Wyoming on the 31st this capability. The executive director was in the audience. Instead of conceding that he got it wrong, he seemed to imply that the demo was a fraud and we were lying. It just shows a profound level of ignorance about how basic cryptocurrency things work, and it’s pretty sad that the people of Wyoming now have to lose money on this project with such incredibly poor leadership.
I do firmly believe that the lawmakers will do the right thing and defund this project and start over. I fundamentally believe that it’s not in the interest of the people of Wyoming to build because of the criteria and the rollout of what is a functional CBDC. Every transaction will be tracked and monitored; the government can freeze and seize your assets at any time. It’s a state issuing it. Doesn’t that feel like a CBDC to you? Our current president has said no, we’re not going to do that, and signed an executive order banning it.
I don’t know why the state thinks it’s a good idea to build a CBDC, but we’re going to remind everybody in the state in a very short period of time that that’s functionally what they’ve done. Now, because of procurement, a CBDC where the code will be written by people in Singapore, China, California, New York, and perhaps some places in Europe. Okay, I guess that’s what the people of Wyoming voted for, although I don’t think they knew that they were voting for that.
We’ll take that message to them and, on the back of that, also change procurement in the state so this never happens again. The reality is that over the next 10 years, the state of Wyoming is going to be buying AI systems, synthetic biology systems, biotechnology systems, autonomous systems, and humanoid robots. I don’t really feel comfortable with Sam Altman coming into the state and basically just setting up a no-bid contract for OpenAI to decide all of that. I don’t really feel comfortable with Bill Gates coming into the state and, with very little oversight, building molten salt new nuclear reactors in a small town that’s not equipped to regulate or oversee that construction. I don’t think the people of Wyoming feel very comfortable about that.
Procurement is about making sure we don’t get screwed. Why do I care above and beyond Cardano? Cardano was never given a fair shake. We weren’t even allowed to bid. So when people on that side say that we’re a disgruntled vendor, we aren’t a vendor because we weren’t allowed to be a vendor. We were not allowed to bid. That’s the process. We didn’t lose an RFP; we didn’t miss something. We were disqualified without appeal for a feature we actually have. Just get that through your head because that’s a lie. If they say anything else, that’s what happened.
I’m concerned because I’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars into the state. My clinic up in Gillette, Wyoming, and my construction company there employ a combined over 250 people. At the end of this year, we’ll have over 120,000 square feet of buildings we constructed, from a state-of-the-art biotechnology lab to a clinic with over 11,000 patients, growing to 15,000 patients. This is not a fly-by-night operation; I incorporated yesterday and I have a single software engineer and a rental lawyer. We are creating jobs in Wyoming, and we have spent six years investing in Wyoming. But according to this commission, we’re not even qualified to compete.
Cardano is considered “crap,” so saith ConsenSys and Ethereum, whose Joe Lubin did meet with the executive director. That’s a publicly known fact that he admits himself, as did BlackRock with the governor and Circle with the governor, whose general counsel is now one of the commissioners.
5 billion dollar revenue company. They’re great citizens in the state, and I have great admiration and respect for Jesse and his people. They’re wonderful people. The point of the 40 laws that were passed was to be a neutral body where people could come in and get things done. A lot of people answered that call, but it’s a very competitive reality. When Wyoming missteps, people second-guess whether they should incorporate their crypto business there or take their jobs and business to Texas. It also makes me wonder whether I should continue investing in the state if corruption is allowed to come in.
For example, we’re considering building a medical school around 2030 to 2035 in Gillette. I need to work with the state to do that. I wonder if that will actually happen or if corrupt interests from out of town will come into play and co-opt that process. Maybe I should build it somewhere else, like Montana or South Dakota, where there is rule of law. Right now, we don’t have that. If I have these doubts living there and putting hundreds of millions of dollars into my bison ranch, I can’t imagine what people who don’t have that kind of investment connection to the state feel.
We need to change it, and this cancer needs to be cut out. That’s why I set up the Integrity PAC. We’re going to make the case, and I firmly believe that the voters of Wyoming will not stand for this. I believe that a lot of lawmakers, once they realize what happened, will not stand for this either. I firmly believe the strongest possible rebuke will occur, and it’s not going to just stop at defunding a stablecoin. There absolutely needs to be investigations into how we got here and a fundamental change in the procurement process as a whole. I’m going to support governor candidates in 2020 who support that line of thinking. I’ll support lawmakers who support that line of thinking in every single race in the state. I don’t care if I have to spend $10 million or $30 million. I’ve already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on my infrastructure in the state. I live there, and I cannot permit corruption and dishonesty to take over the process.
Keep you guys in the loop—there are a lot of great people there, like Ken and Karen and others who have a long legacy in the state. They’re real bright, some young and some old, and they’re fully prepared to travel. We’re going to be at every rodeo, we’re going to be in every kitchen, and you’ll see some television ads and radio ads. We’ll get everybody rallied up. I have yet to begin to fight. At 37 years old and worth a lot of billions of dollars, if this is my personal mission, every year during fighting season, we’ll do it. It might take 10 years, it might take 20 years. I don’t give a damn. I really don’t. I have no patience and tolerance for corruption. I have no patience and tolerance for the state weaponizing its procurement to give money to people who live in Singapore, California, or New York for something they were told they should endeavor to use people from the state.
So there you have it. If people want to read more about it, more will be out there. There’s actually already a crowdsourced response that the Cardano community is putting together. I would like to remind all the other ecosystems that you were disqualified too, and you have standing for a class action lawsuit. The last resort will be to see if legislatively things can be better. We just need to move on, and there has to be an admission that they got this one wrong. If they do, then I think it makes the case that Wyoming is the best place to incorporate your business because they can change bad behavior.
People hate government because when government does something wrong, we all make mistakes, but government never admits that it made a mistake. They just push on and pretend like they have no accountability. Every now and then, people get so frustrated, just like babies with diapers—they have to change them. Politicians are the same.
All right, we’ll get to your questions now. Wow, ADA is plummeting. You know, every single AMA I get this question. So here’s what we’re going to do in real time: I am going to go to CoinMarketCap. Let’s take a look here. So here is Cardano. We are down 12%, 18% for the week. Dogecoin is down 22% for the week. BNB is down 9%. Solana is down 20%. Cardano is outperforming BNB and Solana. XRP is down about the same. Ethereum and Bitcoin have more trading inside of them, so they tend to be a little bit more stunted, but they’re down 10% and 7%. Ten percent of a market cap of that size is the entire market cap of Cardano that the Ethereum holders lost.
So Cardano is really down so much. We’re really losing. You know what it is? It is a market condition. Markets got very excited about Donald Trump being president, and they overbought with this insane belief that somehow everything will instantly go to a quarter million dollars overnight for Bitcoin. It will grow, and stuff has to happen. Conversations have to be had, policies have to pass, but it’s going to take months to years for that to be fully realized.
The long arc trajectory is that the crypto markets are going to be very strong, but there are ups and downs. That’s what we’ve dealt with again and again. People just like to single out, “Well, today’s not doing so well, so that must mean everything’s falling apart.” You’ve got to widen the aperture and realize that the US government is going to be, in the next five years, one of the largest procurers of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. It’s entirely possible that our voting systems, our government procurement systems, our payment systems, our identity systems, and our central bank functions, as well as how the US government works with its citizens, will all have some form of blockchain connection within five years because of this government. That’s the promise. If the US does it, everybody’s got to be interoperable with it. By extension, 20 to 50 countries will adopt the same.
We’re also talking about a strategic Bitcoin reserve. The US government already holds 212,000 Bitcoin. Did you know that? We hold it through civil asset forfeiture. Normally, we sell it, but what if we held it? That’s what Senator Lummis is fighting so hard for, and we’re going to support her and try to get that done because a strategic Bitcoin reserve is a national priority.
So yeah, we get that done. By the way, if the US government has a strategic Bitcoin reserve, maybe, just maybe, they’re going to want to have some DeFi Bitcoin, and Cardano is here to help.
306 days pass. What’s going on with the NDA? Still talking about identity systems with a thumbs down. I would much prefer a decentralized self-sovereign identity system with a non-credential that guarantees you own your own identity and data than the current system where the NSA has everything, and the FBI has everything. They collect all of it through Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and these other guys. You know, so many people say they want privacy. I like, “Well, do you own a cell phone?” “Yes, I do.” “So you have a recording device you carry with you that tracks everywhere you go, everything you say, and every communication you have is archived and documented and will be used against you for law enforcement purposes at some point in the future if you do anything wrong or if there’s the perception of it.”
“Well, no, I didn’t mean that.” “Oh, but you have it. Do you use Google?” “Yeah, I use Google.” “Do you use Facebook?” “Yeah, I guess I have a Facebook account.” “Well, do you use X?” “Yeah, I guess I do.” “Do you use YouTube?” I know you guys use these things because I’m broadcasting to you. It’s the only way you can reach me. Do you know they track you? They have all your data. You start a self-sovereign identity movement, and you have to consent to them seeing something, and you can revoke that consent. Think about that. That’s why we’ve got to take it back.
You talked with Brian Johnson? I know Brian. I’ve had calls with him before. He’s interested in some token stuff. We’ll see if he’s serious and what he wants to do, whether it’s a short-term or long-term project and if there’s something of real value there. If it’s real value, I’m more than happy to work with him because I just like what he does. I’m actually one of the very few guys in the crypto space that does serious longevity and serious crypto. Most people dabble, but we actually do foundational research with it, so it’d be fun to work with him.
How does the paper wallet work? Do you scan the QR code with your mobile phone? You have a webcam, and when we have the mobile client, it’ll be your mobile phone. You can just take your phone or your webcam and scan it. If you have your PGP key, you can decrypt it. That’s the PGP encrypted one. You can also do password-protected QR codes, and it’ll restore the wallet as well. There are kind of two flows that exist there. We’re working on both flows, and we’re working to add layers of hardware, like for example, U2F key support, because I think that would massively improve the security and user experience as well.
I want to get to the world where all your commercial interactions are tapping a button and you have a piece of hardware to facilitate that with a backup, with a PIN and a biometric, so you have three-factor authentication: something you have, something you know, and something you are. Super easy, right? One fingerprint tap, boom, done.
Would you say there could have been more done in Africa? We’re still in Africa. You know, this is the thing about the space. Ethiopia wasn’t the best situation. We learned a lot, we did a lot, we got Hyperledger Dentists out of it, and boy, did we master a lot of stuff. We’ve transferred that all into an actual company called Realy, and it’s in Kenya right now. The CEO lives there, the people live there, and we’ve already deployed $5 million for real-world assets for actual microfinance products. Those products will be wired in and use Cardano stablecoins, Cardano identity systems, and settle on Cardano rails. Eventually, they’ll work their way into Lace wallet and all the other Cardano wallets where you can click a button and make high yields. That’s going to bring a lot of liquidity to Cardano, and it required all those relationships we built in Africa to make that happen.
So we’re still there. It’s just that we realize that government contracting in Africa is not the way to go. When we entered Ethiopia, it was a promising nation that was deregulating. It was going to end all the government monopolies, open its borders, and get rid of capital controls. The Prime Minister had just won a Nobel Peace Prize. Fast forward five years later, all those promises evaporated, and the government was getting allegations of genocide, among other things, with the TPLF. That’s what happened. We stuck by it; we tried really hard to build something for the kids, and we wrote a long blog post about what happened there. We learned a lot along the way, and we were able to deploy for tens of thousands, but not for the five million. The government just ghosted us; it became not a priority at all the minute the conflict broke out.
That’s what happens with unstable governments and government contracting in these types of places. So what you’ve got to do is move to the private sector—fast-moving consumer goods and microfinance credit systems. These are kind of the killer apps of Africa, and that’s what we did. Realy is touching the microfinance market, and it’s going to spread across the whole continent. It’s going to be in Nigeria, it’s going to be in Ghana. We’re going to be all around. It’ll take some time; that’s why it started in Kenya. But we’re very keen to continue the growth of it and get crypto rails wired in. It’s one of the reasons we built Lace, and it’s one of the reasons we built Hyperledger Dentists. We never give up. That’s the thing you guys don’t get. I’ve been at this for 10 years. Look at my TED Talk—I was a lot younger. We just keep going, we just keep pushing, we just keep building, and so we’re not giving up.
How is Nike? Nike is doing well; he’s a good pig.
So this is a good question: when can we wrap Bitcoin ADA with Midnight? When Midnight launches, it’ll have that ability for CNTS and ADA, which translates to basically being able to get privacy capabilities. I believe in a crypto triad. When we talk about Doge procuring things, what I’ve been advocating for is this: imagine you have a black disk, you have the Cardano dots on that in white, and a Bitcoin logo in the center. All three technologies together—there’s an unbeatable combination: private smart contracts, built-in identity system, the world’s best smart contract system that’s going to be ultra-high throughput, and Bitcoin’s legendary durability, auditability, and value carry. How do you beat that? All those three systems together make the triad for it.
We’re going to push for that concept of, say, let us deploy a multi-chain application. We talked about government procurement, payment systems, and all these other things. That is the gold standard, and all three will be fully decentralized. No one’s in control.
Hey Charles, regarding the paper wallet, why back up the wallet with PGP when you could derive the wallet from PGP keys in the first place? It’s about infrastructure. You can derive from anything, but first off, PGP does not do that type of derivation. You need elliptic curve crypto for an HD wallet. More importantly, the point of PGP is that there already exist hardware devices. For example, I’ll show you one. This is a U2F key. These devices store PGP keys, and they’re super easy to use. You can plug them into your phone, into your laptop, or into your desktop computer. You plug it in and tap it.
In the case of PGP, you plug it in and tap it in or enter a pin code. Your PGP key is securely stored here, so your ability to restore your wallet is then connected to the same thing that gives you two-factor authentication for getting into your email accounts and all these other things. You have a great user experience; it’s literally plug and tap.
The flow that I always recommend is you generate it, store your backup of your PGP key on an encrypted flash drive like an IronKey or one of those Acorns, and you just put that in your safe. It has a little hardware pin code on it, and you know if you enter it wrong 10 times, it destroys it. So it’s a very secure device. Then you have a U2F key, and basically, this becomes your login device. This plus a passport, maybe biometric as well, and they even sell these with biometric sensors, like a fingerprint.
When you want to restore your wallet, you can just print out a paper wallet, have your email, whatever, and scan it with your monitor. Click it in, you push a button, and you’re stored. Now, coupling from PGP as the derivation infrastructure means that you can use any cryptocurrency and you can use any signature system because what PGP is doing is what it does best: it’s taking a payload and encrypting that payload. That’s how the entire Internet security works at the moment.
What’s nice about that too is that these hardware keys are a reusable pattern, and the next generation of them will have post-quantum capabilities. We’re going to add, at some point, post-quantum algorithms that give you the ability to back up your wallet in a way that can’t be broken by quantum computers as the cryptocurrency space moves in that direction. You have end-to-end security on all things, and I think that’s pretty awesome when you really start putting all those pieces together.
Charles, never answered my questions. What’s your question?
Sleeping B, any updates on the Midnight airdrop? They’re getting close to it. They’re working real hard right now.
Hey Charles, how was the Quantum HOSY meetup at the ranch? The workshop was tremendously successful. A lot of wonderful things were talked about—hyper-voxel AI civilizations. It was really special, actually, and a lot of wonderful people came in. Trim is going to write up the output of that due by February 15th. Internally, if we like it, we are going to kick off a three-month innovation sprint, and based on that, we’ll make the go/no-go decision on whether we actually want to go all in. If we want to go all in, then we’ll start discussing how we’re going to turn it into a partner chain and all these other things, but it’ll come after Midnight. We’re making great progress on it, and that was one of those things where we said, “You know, unless everybody in the room loves it, we kill it,” and everybody loved it, so we’re going to keep going.
Will there be nodes for Midnight? Of course, it’s its own network.
What are your thoughts on the cognitive theoretic model of the universe? I think it’s that one from that 200 IQ dude. I don’t know enough about it; I need to look into it. There’s a lot of panpsychism that’s leaking its way back into discourse. It’s kind of getting a second set of legs.
Charles, got any birds up your sleeves? Oh man, I got something that’s going to make you guys [__] your pants, but you’ll find out towards the end of the month, you Degen bastards. You’ll love it.
Was Plutus always going to be Turing complete? Can you speak to the history here? I need a citation for my paper.
It was a pleasure meeting you in Buenos Aires. The original intent was actually for Plutus to be a DSL and for the Cardano settlement layer to minimize expressiveness. It’s almost like a quasi-fixed function ledger. This is why we did Marlowe at the same time as Plutus. The idea was that we would have had a Turing complete side chain where all the computations would be run, and we could bootstrap a fast BFT
1 trillion dollars of investments into the United States, about half from Saudi Arabia and half from the Stargate project with OpenAI, Larry, and the other guys. That's an amazing thing when you think about it. You say, "Oh wow, it's bringing money into America." Any CEO of a business would see it that way. CEOs have their exits and their entrances. Now, we’re a constitutional republic; America is not a business. But it's been run for so long like one that we have invited in a culture of absolute mediocrity and no service culture in the federal government.
I don’t feel comfortable, and I think the vast majority of Americans don’t feel comfortable with a situation where some administrative agencies have only 6% of their employees showing up for work—6%! And they’re all working remotely. When you audit it, it’s really hard to even know if they’re watching porn or whatever. They tell you the only remedy is to not do anything about that but raise taxes and increase the size of government.
Sometimes you need somebody to come in and reevaluate the geopolitics, be a rough hand, kick the crap out of the government, cut it, and start over. You need to reevaluate those relationships. It’s not permanent; it’s uncomfortable as hell, it’s scary, and a lot of plates are broken along the way. You don’t respond to that by saying, "Well, the only reason this person’s doing that is because this person’s an evil dictator, and his sole goal is to commit genocide and murder millions of people." They literally say he’s Hitler or Mussolini, and it’s just so far out there.
I’ve met Ivanka Trump, I’ve met Jared Kushner, I’ve met a lot of people. Don Jr. flew on our Blackhawk. They’re not these people; they really aren’t. They just have an opinion about America, which some people may disagree with—many people do—but they feel that they’re Americans, and their worldview is that America is being screwed. It’s hard to argue that when you see the Iron Dome shooting anti-aircraft and anti-missile ammunition and rockets going up from Hamas. The United States of America paid for both sides of that. Those rockets were laundered through Iran and Turkey and came from Ukraine. That was American taxpayer money spent there, and the ammunition for the Iron Dome—we paid for that.
We see that as private citizens and say, "What the hell is going on?" We see Afghanistan, and after 20 years of fighting and an entire generation going to war, those people are suffering, many coming back with their limbs blown off, permanent damage, which we clean up as best we can at our clinic from TBIs and other things. In many cases, you can’t fix that. We see that, and the outcome is we handed the country back to the Taliban. China now owns Bagram Air Force Base. That’s the outcome. We say, "Gosh, who’s accountable for that? Who gets fired for that? What’s the remedy for this situation?"
The people who aren’t fascists are saying, "Shut the [expletive] up, get in the corner. If you complain about it, you’re an alt-right conspiracy theorist. We’re going to deplatform you." Oh, and by the way, we’re going to arrest you. I’m sorry, but if you’re on the left, you have to take a step back from your propaganda and acknowledge the fact that it was not Donald Trump and his regime who used the Department of Justice to prosecute Hillary Clinton. It was the Biden regime that used the Department of Justice to prosecute a former US president running for office again, who won, so obviously he was a credible candidate. They got him arrested and convicted on a non-crime—34 felonies for what? Paying off a porn star? According to them, that’s a misdemeanor that was upgraded to a felony. It’s going to be overturned on appeal. The majority of the jury—not unanimous—voted for that. We’re not really sure what the crime was, and it’s a federal crime because it’s a US federal election. But the US Attorney’s office passed, so we had a state prosecutor who campaigned on, "I’m going to be the guy who puts Trump in jail."
Then you have to ask yourself, who’s the victim? Who lost money? Who was harmed? We have people in New York City literally setting people on fire in the subway, dousing them in fuel and setting them on fire as people watch. That’s less of a priority than prosecuting a business documents misdemeanor crime that costs millions of dollars just so that you can label this person a felon. Was that the left or the right that did that? It was the left. Is there any acknowledgment that that was wrong?
Even further, they went after Donald Trump for classified documents. Every president in the United States after they leave office—in my entire lifetime, your entire lifetime, and before—maintains their security clearance and has access to classified information. They have given briefings on a regular basis about what’s going on in the world, and they continue to act as an informal apparatus of the state. Don’t believe me? Go to YouTube and listen to the recorded phone calls of Eisenhower talking to JFK. Bush would regularly call Bill Clinton and ask him for advice. When you have a presidential library, you have millions of classified documents, and it takes decades for those documents to all work their way through and get sorted out.
Mar-a-Lago is a skiff; it was built that way. For four years, the president operated there. They made it a secure facility to store classified information. But President Biden made a decision: "You know what? I’m just going to screw my predecessor and kick him out, and we’re going to try him for having classified documents because somehow that’s an impact on national security." The person that just a blink ago we trusted with our nuclear weapons and our secrets, who this nation just reelected, who is currently the president of the United States—we’re going to go after him for possessing classified information? I don’t know how you can feel comfortable with that and say that it was not politically motivated.
Yet people label him a fascist. But then the other side, had they won, Trump would currently be in prison. The other side, had they won, we would not have free speech, and there would be criminal investigations into Elon Musk and an unraveling of his entire business empire for the audacity of voting against them. But they’re not the fascists; they’re honest, amazing people. They’re just honest authoritarians.
So then you say, "Well, he’s got to be beneficent and nice and kind and not retaliatory and not do anything about any of this stuff." Okay, that’s just not his personality. The guy is going to come in, and he’s just going to break the whole wheel and rebuild the whole government. You know what? There’ll be a reset in 2028. If you are politically on the left, look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, how did you get to Kamala Harris? Did you decide that? Did you even really decide Biden in 2024? Will you accept that your political party took those choices from you?
You forget that I endorsed Robert Kennedy, and I endorsed Robert Kennedy before he was an independent. I was absolutely pushing for something new and different, for us to turn the page in America. That was stolen from Robert; that was stolen from the Democrat Party; that was stolen from the American people. You talk about investigations—this is the first time in American history that we had a coup, and you all just accepted it. You all just took it and drank it out of a cup. The president of the United States, the nominee of the Democrat Party, was put in a room, and a cabal came in and told him that if he didn’t abdicate and hand his nomination to someone else, they would remove him from office with the 25th Amendment. I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or Republican; that is treason to overthrow a democratically elected president. You just took it because you thought it gave you a better chance of beating the orange man.
Then, when Kamala, with nobody voting for her, became the party nominee, you just took it because you thought it gave you a good chance to beat the orange man. Now you’ve lost to him. You see, the only reason we lost was racism and sexism and America’s love of strong men and fascists and evil people. Maybe, just maybe, the majority of Americans just don’t like the lawfare. Maybe, just maybe, the majority of Americans don’t like that we don’t seem to have rule of law in a lot of our towns, and we’re letting all kinds of people just run roughshod over us. Maybe, just maybe, we didn’t like the loss in Afghanistan or these proxy wars that have now killed 1.
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