hi everybody this is charles hopkinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado so uh i was on the haskell reddit uh just a few hours ago and i noticed a piece written by a fairly well-known member of the haskell community who does yearly updates on the state of haskell and has worked in various different professions and then the financial industry and other places uh and the title of the article was the haskell elephant in the room and i'll probably post a link in this video if you guys are interested in it it was a very harsh critique of our industry and uh there was a basically the point of the article was to say that the association of haskell and cryptocurrencies is somehow bad or should introduce the degree of reluctance uh to the haskell community as if the money from my field is dirty or tainted and the point of what we do in our side the cryptocurrency side is to somehow borrow credibility from the haskell community um he specifically calls out well type tweak and fpcomplete as if these are firms that have taken dirty money um the core assumption is that cryptocurrencies are a ponzi scheme and uh this particular author apparently has emailed some members of my company uh telling them that they're participating in a ponzi scheme by working on cardano so obviously he's no friend to our ideas you know i will chalk this up to a failure of imagination and a fundamentally flawed understanding of where finance is at and how the the world financial system currently works rather than maliciousness or malice i remember years ago when i was in my early 20s i read a book from gh hardy called the mathematician's apology and hardy really enjoyed the fact that he was doing things that he considered to be useless in utility to society he took a very dim view of applied mathematics and a very uh rev a strong reverence to pure mathematics and yeah he took a special joy in that number theory at the time had really not been used for anything in uh the field of war of course this was shortly before we started using uh that field of science for cryptography amongst other things and the event of computers and obviously situations have changed since hardy's time but the reality is that some people fall in love with a field of study or an ecosystem and when someone starts using their ecosystem for certain applications uh if they happen to disagree with them then they feel like the ecosystem has been tainted and this particular author is quite skilled quite knowledgeable in the domain of haskell and computer science and great but let's be very clear about something cardano is not a scam it's self-evident that it's not and our industry is not a scam yes icos have been somewhat problematic but in defense of icos with just a few billion dollars of capital raised an entire industry was created and currently there are hundreds of thousands of people using if not millions and tens of thousands of people working with and at cryptocurrency companies throughout our entire industry and a global conversation about the fundamental reinvention of money is underway how regulation should work how money should work how property rights should work how online voting should be done the nature of privacy and how much of it should we have how to build a different type of data economy instead of a surveillance economy in the technology our industry builds is at the forefront of that discussion that's not a scam that's not a ponzi scheme that's just a reality we have to decide how the world is going to work in the 21st century and either it will be decided for us by people we've never met in dark rooms and the consequence of those decisions will be hyper centralization of power and algorithms deciding your worth as a human being as we see with social credit and that's undeniably the case for now 1.2 billion people perhaps more soon and what our industry is about is to give people a different option where they're in control of their financial life they're in control of their ability to work with people in this article he referred to this as right-wing extremism i'm not sure why you can view giving people freedom to choose how their money works how their vote works how their property works is right-wing extremism but if you take that particular view perhaps you'll have a very negative impact or a negative view on our industry but i take great enbridge to claiming that people who have worked tirelessly to create open source technology patent-free ideas both on the academic spectrum and the applied spectrum are somehow taking tainted money for having the audacity to work on a project that ultimately seeks to give economic identity to billions of people there is no room for this level of discourse and if this is what he wants to do great you can build a little moat around himself and sail away and go live in a pristine pure world where no one ever does anything for some reason he doesn't seem to complain that firms like galwa for example take lots of money from the united states department of defense u.s military certainly that institution has some blood on its hands and crimes it's committed in the past that's okay but people who want to give people economic identity and liberate people no that's apparently wrong because there are some bad actors in our industry there were many bad actors when wall street was constructing itself there were many boiler rooms in the 19th century there were many trusts that were created back during the 1880s and 1890s which led to the knickerbocker crisis there was rampant speculation in the 1920s that led to the great depression does this somehow invalidate all the accomplishments of wall street all the things we've learned about modern day banking about risk management the insurance markets every modern-day bank are these institutions only functional because of the beneficence of governments and regulations even though the vast majority of their actions are guided by self-regulation and when we have the audacity as an industry to recognize that the legacy industry has become ineffective corrupt and exclusive disenfranchising three billion people living on bailout to bail out failing every 10 years and having to have the american people the european people and others come together and basically pay for the excesses of these industries when we have the audacity to say that perhaps printing six trillion dollars in the united states out of thin air is morally wrong that we should have money with principles that's a ponzi scheme because some people did that some time ago or today because a scam exists it's an extraordinary statement it's always been an extraordinary statement and i understand that some people hold this view paul krugman once believed that the internet's impact on society would be equivalent to that of the fax machine have to ask yourself was paul right no and the modern monetary theorists seem to think that we can just print as much money as we want and as long as society accepts it that's a good idea and it's great for everybody is do you think that's a great idea to have an unlimited supply of money printed all the time no scarcity in the resource well some people think so some people think not it's okay to disagree it's okay to have a different opinion about how an economy should work or the principles behind a money supply and the market will ultimately decide the good ideas will be valuable and people will invest in them and hold them the bad ideas will ultimately run out of steam and die out if it takes a decade it takes a decade the laws of physics eventually will come into play the laws of economic physics and the invisible hand will eventually decide winners and losers based on merit over the long arc unless governments try desperately to prop bad ideas up and many do but even the soviet union collapsed it is not the place of any of us to tell the world how to work or what to do we have an opinion we can give that opinion but ultimately the world's going to figure out for itself and i've dedicated my life to giving billions of people economic identity to call that a scam is reprehensible to email my employees and tell them they're participating in a scam is disgusting conduct and to say the companies that have chosen to work with us to develop open source software patent-free software patent-free ideas and write academic papers to say that they're taking corrupt money is also reprehensible so i decided to make this video and say you know our existence is ultimately a good thing for the ecosystems we're in because we produce things for other people to use and they don't have to license them from us this is not about enrichment this is about changing the way the world works so it's better for all of us this has nothing to do with the ico of the week this has nothing to do with uh the the latest cash grab of the week or good idea or bad idea that people come up with and try to pitch it to the venture capitalist or the retail investor what have you this has everything to do with saying that we started from first principles telling the world what we wanted to accomplish we said we're going to build a system with billions of users that can be used to replicate what wall street does the insurance markets do what the governments do and give that to the poorest people in the world and let them use it to rise we spent years in africa and are still there and by the way we are the first company in our industry to go and teach people how to program in haskell in africa no one else did that we did and the people we train are right now working for us and others writing haskell code how is that a scam where's our payoff we're operating off of funding that we've already run out of my operations in my company come out of my pocket every single day millions of dollars every month of my money not the money i was paid back in 2015 to service this and we're still showing up every single day because we're mission oriented and we don't leave until the goddamn job is done so i understand there are scams in our industry there are scams in every industry paycheck protection program recently some guy in florida used it to buy himself a lamborghini made a bunch of stuff up and stole millions of dollars there's ponzi schemes every day the highest most regulated industry the wall street world bernie madoff existed every day there's fines and issues in the vc world with all the experts the great vc companies companies like theranos exist they raise hundreds of millions of dollars henry kissinger and general mattis on their board so what's your point because some of that exists kleiner perkins is a scam and drayson horowitz is a scam sequoia is a scam the whole industry is corrupted anybody who takes money from those institutions is now a scam google's a scam because they got money from some of them intel is a scam microsoft is a scam apple was a scam what's your point all the people that work with these companies and provide services to them are taking blood money because you disagree with the economic model and as for wall street jp morgan chased 19 billion dollars in fines over the last two decades so if you make a relationship with them develop code for them as a scam well barclays bank has certainly a huge amount of fines and other problems for misconduct throughout the years they have one of the largest haskell groups inside the banking world is that a scam now all those developers there they're taking blood money from that bank think before you write something and understand the consequences of the words that you author and what you suggest when you make blanket statements and call an entire industry that is seeking to liberate mankind from a dark wave that's coming the era of social credit the era of hyper centralization the dawn of surveillance capitalism where a small group of people get to control every aspect of our lives access to market the choices were allowed to make the products were allowed to buy the thoughts were allowed to think that's not right-winging extremism to say that's morally wrong to embrace a society that moves in that direction it's common [ __ ] sense and you perhaps disagree with that and because i guess you couldn't start a company that could profit from our industry now you have a very negative view on it please don't call the people that work with us who do great work every day and make great contributions to the haskell ecosystem people who take blood money takes scam money it's wrong it's absolutely wrong the particular author i do have a lot of respect for and i've read a lot of its blog posts and they're quite well written i have no idea why we're lumped in such a negative category and i have no idea why somebody would choose to write what they've written in that position or accuse the people that work with us to be bad actors now or naive and not understanding the consequences of what they're doing anyway that's that's all i have to say about it this one was a low blow and coming from the haskell ecosystem which we generally have a great relationship with and we make a lot of contributions as a company to tomorrow i have a meeting about supporting a haskell foundation giving it a grant we have great ambitions for how we can make it a better ecosystem and invest heavily in open source technology from the mysterious project for example where we are trying very hard to make sure that haskell compiled a web assembly and be useful in the web to the ghc jazz progress project to convert haskell to javascript to basically extending all the libraries so they have better windows support they're more performant the recent bingham article that we wrote to our contributions to haskell conferences to our contributions to the theory of functional programming especially pulling functional programming ideas into the cryptocurrency space and by the way if these things hold up a multi-trillion dollar ecosystem doesn't that necessarily mean that that'll create hundreds of thousands if not millions of haskell developers doesn't that necessarily mean that that's going to advance the entirety of functional programming to the next level more adoption more science more people considering it more people working in formal specification and verification better tools better libraries better sdks doesn't mean that isn't that what you want with an ecosystem but apparently because one coin exists and other things exist and ico mania exists which is predictable the 1990s we had the dot-com boom people got hundreds of millions of dollars on a business model that shipping 50 pound bags of dog food to people for free was profitable does that mean amazon doesn't exist it's a scam that google doesn't exist it's a scam facebook doesn't exist it's a scam because there was a couple of bad actors in the dot com boom i don't understand the argument i really don't but i take great offense to the consequences of the argument especially being made by a person like this so that is my rebuttal to the haskell elephant in the room whether you like it or not we're here to stay whether you like it or not firms like galwa are here to stay taking the money from the us government has to eat whether you like it or not people are going to use haskell for their projects and some you may agree with and some you may disagree with and don't tell me that just because you disagree with ours it's now tainting the language and as for borrowing credibility we don't need to borrow any credibility from haskell it's a great tool and it's great language and we have enormous admiration for it but we gain our credibility from the utilization of the scientific method and if you think any one of the 60 plus papers we've written that we've pushed through the academic process and have been cited thousands of times are not credible then you let us know which ones you let us know where they're wrong we'll be happy to have that conversation it's called credibility from first principles and if you ever could structure a proper argument perhaps you would utilize that yourself
