Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is President's Day, February 19th, 2024. It’s a holiday, but I have no life, so I’m here in the office enjoying life. I’ve got my nice meal replacement drink; I’m going to lose a little bit of weight, feeling good, fired up, ready to go. I jumped in the cold plunge earlier this morning for 3 minutes and 34 seconds at 35°F. It’s cold! It’s amazing how you never get used to that, no matter what you do or how hard you do it. It’s always cold, man. It’s tough.
So, Cardano is doing well. Things are going well in general. This is an AMA to talk about a little bit of everything on the Cardano side. I mentioned the summary report and showed all the great progress we’ve been making as an ecosystem—all the places we’ve gone, things we’ve done, and how the ecosystem continues to grow. Intersect looks great. There’s a workshop going on right now in the UK that Tam is leading with the Civics Committee at Intersect, talking specifically about how to structure a lot of different things there. Product functions are now sitting at Intersect for Cardano, with a whole bunch of discussions about budget processes and governance. Governance is looking quite nice for Cardano, and I’m really happy about the technical progress as well. A lot of good papers are coming soon.
You’ve got Oror, Paris, and Leos as the two big guys because that’s your fast finality gadget for Cardano. Then you also have your scalability for Cardano, in addition to Hydra and all the zero-knowledge stuff we’re doing, as well as the side chains work. Overall, things are looking great there. Plutus V3 is on the horizon; it’s been integrated into the new node, and people are playing around with it. They really like the new bitwise primitives. It’s pretty cool to see that everything is flowing from the SIPs now.
Midnight is on schedule. I should have an open devnet here shortly so all the everyday people can go and play around and build some stuff on Midnight and have some fun with it. That project is moving very quickly, and the rest of the portfolio looks really nifty.
On the other side of life, my clinic has over 6,200 patients last time I checked, although that seems to be growing week by week, year by year. We’re at about 10,000 square feet, and we should be doubling or tripling in size depending on how quickly the construction guys can get to it this year. A whole bunch of new service lines are opening up, from ophthalmology to all the infrastructure we need, like the pharmacy and the lab. The lab is already running, and we have all that stuff in place. Imaging is another big one that we’re very keen and excited to get started. We have X-ray and these types of things, but it would be nice to actually get the MRI and CAT scans. The age trials should probably begin sometime this year, some combination of adipose-derived stem cells and hyperbarics, so we’ll keep you guys posted on the timeline for that study. It’s probably going to be a smaller study, and we’re going to go through the whole FDA track, so that’ll be fun and exciting.
Got a glowing plant—more to say on that in a little bit, so that’s looking good. You know, the ranch is fine; 600 bison run around trying to kill me. I fed them the other day; you guys got to see that.
Alright, well anyway, that’s the brief update, but the point of an AMA is not me; it’s you and your questions. So let’s go ahead and get to them and see what we’ve got right here.
Hey Charles, I started cold plunging recently—intense but worth it. Any morning routine recommendations? If you’re waking up at 4:30 in the morning, working out, and doing a cold plunge, I think you’re fine. I’d recommend on the cold plunge side to go to Susanna Soberg’s stuff, the Soberg Institute, and adopt the whole contrast therapy. It depends on your regimen, but that’s already a huge accomplishment if you’ve got that down.
Let’s see here. Charles, what do you think about LifeWave and phototherapy? I know about photobiomodulation, but I haven’t heard of LifeWave, so I’ll definitely take a look at that and get back to you.
Alright, I’ve been asking this for years and even responded two times: when will you release the quant trading stuff you promised? You’re referring to some of the quantitative models that we have to understand the price of the market. Those are no longer relevant, and we’ll look through the code. The particular department that built that we outsourced to a group called Wave Financial, and we work with them. They have their own proprietary models, which we don’t own or control. The models we had were not so good.
Are there plans for a DeFi with Mithril? There are plans to combine a full node with Mithril. We’d like to do that, and we’ll get back to you on the exact plan for that.
Hey Charles, just want to thank you for this amazing opportunity to be part of the Midnight Devnet. Well, thank you for being one of the 2,000 who signed up for the invitation-only. I can’t wait for the open devnet; it’s going to be a lot of fun to see everybody there.
Charles, you see the lab is already up and running? Yes, we have a full-service lab, and it runs hundreds of different tests.
What do you think about Nani’s death? What does anybody expect? Guys, Putin is a dictator; we all know that. He knows that. He doesn’t wake up in the morning and say, “Oh no, no, I’m not a dictator.” He’s a dictator. That’s how Russia likes it. They’ve had dictators for a long time, since before I was born and before any of you listening were born, and they’re going to have dictators after we’re dead. That’s just how things run out there. Sometimes you get lucky when you oppose a dictator and you replace the dictator, but what ends up happening in Russia is the replacement usually becomes a dictatorship. No one has been able to replace it with a long-standing democratic institution that actually has checks and balances. They tried in the 1990s, and Russia went back to dictatorship. If you oppose a dictator, the dictator kills you. That’s what happens, and that’s where Russia’s at. Everybody said this was going to occur. He went back to Russia, got arrested, and you know when it was convenient for him, they killed him. It was the same with Prokhorov and anyone else who gets in the way of Putin. He’s got an iron grasp and iron control on that country. People have a falling-out-of-windows syndrome in Russia.
You’re right, but that’s the nature and reality of that regime in that area of the world, and there’s not a lot we can do about it. You have to think, why does the United States need to get involved in all these things, and where do we draw the line? There are dictators in Africa, dictators in Asia, and dictatorships in South America. Some would argue the two-party system in America constitutes kind of a dictatorship because we really don’t have any democratic control over the big-ticket items. So why is the United States getting involved in all these things?
Thank you for hosting the space, Charles. Can you please tell us a little bit more about Democracy 4.0?
Democracy 4.0 is a term that Agalo came up with in a series of discussions about how we build a better combination of decision systems, information aggregation systems, and representation systems. Who has control in the system? We apply that in a way that tends towards a collection of criteria: Does it decentralize faster or stay at the same level of decentralization despite the scale of the system? Because what ends up happening is the larger government gets, the less decentralized it tends to be, and the more centralized it gets around certain critical institutions required for the bureaucracy to run itself.
Does it make effective decisions? Efficacy can be defined as, when a decision was made, did that decision achieve the desired outcome? If not, how far was it from the desired outcome relative to other decisions that could have been made? Is it efficient in that it takes a reasonable amount of time to converge to a decision? You can have a very effective engine but a very slow decision-making process. Physics is a great example of that. It’s quite effective in that when papers are published and things are done over a long horizon—20 to 30, 40 years—you have enormous discoveries and progress in the field. However, it’s not particularly efficient in that when you discover something, it may take years or decades for that discovery to propagate through and be generally accepted.
You can have very efficient but ineffective systems. You can make wrong decisions quickly. Medicine is quite like that. If you go to the hospital, your doctor may misdiagnose you, but he’s very efficient at diagnosing you and giving you medicine right there as soon as you get to the ER. So that’s kind of problematic.
Efficacy, efficiency, inclusivity of the system, and the types of decisions the system can make—these are all examples of things that are in the scope of the conversation about better governance systems, as well as more resources upon which to make decisions. Right now, our principal resource for decision-making is your stake—how much ADA do you have? That’s a really good starting point to bootstrap the system because people are mostly aligned with the growth of the ecosystem if that’s their decision-making over the long term.
But there are many problems with that, and it’s okay to say there are problems with that. There are problems with proof of work, and there are problems with proof of stake. The next step is to go beyond that and say, can we have additional resources to counterbalance some of the problems we have with the proof of stake system? This is the scoping for that whole Democracy 4.0, and as we get to the second half of the year, after we pass a lot of this stuff, a formal proposal will come out, and we’ll have all the bells and whistles.
Hey Chuck, how’s the gout? How do you cure it? Supplements, fasting, take allopurinol, and you can manage it with diet. You can’t cure gout; it’s a genetic condition. With gene therapy, you might be able to do that, but unfortunately, you just can’t cure it right now.
Charles, have you looked into therapeutic peptides since you’re into stem cells? Yeah, there are a lot of peptides, whether it be FDN or other things that people have been taking and swear by. We’re definitely not super into the peptide side. We certainly know of them and when they work. They’re interesting. The FDA has a real hard-on, and they’re just coming down hard on everybody using peptides. In this day and age, you always wonder to yourself, maybe that means they’re actually good. This FDA is pretty weird. But we’re a little bit more on the hyperbaric side and a little bit more on lifestyle medicine and the adipose-derived stem cells. That’s a really good starting point.
Rogan after going—I still want to go on The Joe Rogan Experience. We’re almost ready for it. Will you go on the Lex podcast again? I’d love to go on. I love Lex Fridman; he’s one of my favorite people in the entire world. I really enjoyed that interview, so it’d be cool to go back. I just have to have more interesting things to say, so it’s up to Lex if he wants me back.
Assuming that all your bison are housebroken and have individual food bowls with names on them? Yeah, exactly right.
Charles, any plans to visit Cape Town, South Africa, again? It’s getting a little rough down there, but it would be a lot of fun to go back. I love South Africa and going to Africa in general. In fact, I was going to go last year, but I had some jet problems, so we’ll get there. Hopefully this year; if not this year, then definitely next year. I will go back to Japan this year, definitely going to Singapore this year, and I obviously go to Dubai and Abu Dhabi quite a bit. I do spend some time in Europe as well.
I just actually got back from Scotland.
I love this question: if a whale delegates to a drepper pool and then loses his keys, that Drep will have that stake forever. Could snowball into a problem? That’s not exactly how that works.
Alright, what’s your view on Neuralink?
This is an interesting one too. Neuralink is one of those companies where you look at the horizon—10, 20, 40, 50 years—and you say to yourself, okay, how do we merge humanity and technology together in just the right way so that when they’re merged, you get this emergent property? You get new capabilities that you’ve never had before. The human brain is kind of sealed in this case, and it actually doesn’t have any natural way of sensing the environment. It gets it from your ears, from your eyes, and then it has this “meat suit” that’s kind of sealed around it. You touch stuff, and you’re just kind of fumbling around in this ambient environment, but it has these interfaces. Those interfaces we evolved with, and they’re fairly refined at this point.
But we’ve never been able to, by ourselves through human augmentation, enhance those interfaces to add completely new dimensions to them. Every now and then, evolution comes in and gives us some new dimensions to those interfaces, like for example synesthesia, where people perceive colors associated with words. There’s a great book called "Wednesdays Indigo Blue" that talks about people who have synesthesia and their different perceptions. We hear music, but what if you could taste music? Or what if music had colors associated with it? It turns out just by having those linked sensory dimensions, it actually tremendously helps things like memory, recall, and other cognitive functions, especially creative endeavors.
There’s no coincidence that a lot of memory champions happen to suffer from synesthesia. So what if you could add new senses? Like, you could see infrared light, or what if you had telepathy? What if you could perceive different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum? What if you could sense or touch things that are far away? So additional senses, and Neuralink is the first foray mechanically into that field.
There’s all kinds of stuff that exists in the alternative lifestyle world, like the Gateway projects and remote sensing. For a long time, the hippie movement has been saying, “Oh yeah, this stuff is there.” When you take a step into science land and you say, “What can we build?” they’re drilling holes in your skull, putting a device in, and that device allows you to have read-write capabilities with the brain.
Now, if you’re a neurosurgeon, you’ll be like, “Oh, we’ve done this for a long time; this is actually nothing novel or new.” What Neuralink is proposing is that they do deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s treatments and other things. They bore holes in people’s skulls and put probes in. The difference with Neuralink is that those are not mass-market; those are not elective surgeries. Those are for very traumatic situations that people are going into. They’re quite invasive. The leads are very thick relative to what Neuralink is trying to do.
Those implants certainly are not something you’d want to have; they’re a last resort in the treatment of conditions that are quite debilitating. Neuralink seeks to be a consumer device, like the iPhone or the iPad—not today, but 10, 20, 30, 40 years in the future. This is a monumental task of engineering. Why? Because the brain is an incredibly corrosive environment for most materials. Anything you put into it tends to decay and deteriorate, so there’s a material science component you have to really work hard on.
Second, the traditional deep brain stimulation probes that they put into the brain are very thick. What I mean by that is they look thin to us, but they’re thick enough to cause a lot of damage when they go in—lots of bleeding and other side effects. So you have to make them a lot thinner. The problem is that they’re so thin, the Neuralink leads can’t be installed by a human hand, no matter how talented the neurosurgeon is. So you have to build a surgical robot to be able to install that.
There’s this huge material science problem, a surgical robot problem, an installation problem, and a question about some basic things with any biomedical implant: will it be rejected? How do you deal with daily things like taking a shower and cleaning? Then there’s a question of power. How do you power something like this in a safe way? An implantable medical device battery that’s right next to your brain—our battery has a problem in our cell phone. Oh no, you drop the phone; it’s like if your battery catches fire or leaks in your head, you have much bigger problems to worry about.
So there’s a power delivery question. There’s a big house of innovation there, and then obviously there’s an AI and integrated circuit question. It’s a big electrical engineering and software problem as well. You have a monumental intersection of insanely difficult problems all coming together, plus you have to go through the whole FDA process.
They tried it on pigs and monkeys; there’s some really gruesome stuff when you read the reports about what happened to the monkeys and the pigs that they tried these things on. It was pretty horrific. Now they’ve put it in humans, and I guess they’re having some good results with it. What will end up happening is they’ll have huge progress, they’ll plateau, it’ll stay there for quite some time, and then they’ll have a breakthrough, and then they’ll have some more progress and then another plateau.
But it’s one of those companies you can’t ignore because the consequence of success is that you have concept transmission. Let’s say you want to be a mathematician. How do you become a mathematician? You go and say, “What are the core subjects? Okay, analysis, algebra, geometry, number theory, combinatorics, probability theory, and statistics.” So how do you learn that? Here’s this book, and here are all these problems. You read page by page and work through problem by problem, and those translate, if you’re good, into a conceptual framework of what that is.
What if you could take an expert in the field and have that constructed conceptual framework and
That's a monumental achievement. I do think they're going to need to use different technology for these types of devices. It probably makes sense for them to explore diamond batteries as opposed to lithium batteries.
The other thing is I'm a little concerned about how transmissions work, especially that close to the brain, whether Bluetooth or otherwise. There might be a higher risk of cancer for these types of things. There's a lot of thought processes that come into play, so the clinical data is going to be key to analyze it. But you can't ignore them. I'm a bigger fan of Synchron because they're choosing a different approach. They actually go through one of the arteries and veins and into the brain, using a stent for that. Doctors put stents in all the time; they're really good at it. They can easily put them in and easily remove them.
For the read/write capabilities, at the moment, Synchron matches what Neuralink is doing. Neuralink is substantially more invasive. I thought Bluetooth couldn’t cause cancer. Well, that is an interesting thing. If you're talking about it being in your ear, probably not. But if you've bored a hole in your skull and it's actually physically touching the brain, there’s been no safety or efficacy data about that. Some people swear that cell phone radiation, for example, causes cancer. Who knows? When you have insulating factors like your tissue and skull to dampen things, but when you have direct tissue exposure 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as opposed to just putting in earbuds for an hour and having a recovery time, who knows? That's the thing about this type of research; we're in completely unknown waters. The body was not designed for this.
Regarding the story about the Jungle, the helicopter, and the AK in Cambodia, that was not a helicopter; that was a tank. Part of the XRP community also holds ADA; I love them both. Wasn't it crazy how you reacted to the entire XRP community because of a few morons?
Well, it wasn't just a few morons; it was a relentless, overwhelming campaign based on a lie. A lie that even the founders of XRP refuse to acknowledge is a lie. I would love to see Brad, Joel, David Schwartz, and others come out and physically say that all of this attack on our side is based on a lie. I never once said that Ethgate didn’t happen. I said it doesn’t matter; it’s completely immaterial to the litigation they’re going through. The grand conspiracy statement was strictly about somebody bribing the Securities Exchange Commission to go after XRP and give Ethereum a free pass. It’s entirely possible that somebody could have bribed the SEC, directly or indirectly, to give a free pass to Ethereum.
It is a huge leap of faith to go beyond that and say they also bribed them to go after XRP. It is a conspiracy, and there’s no evidence. For years now, we’ve been having this fight, and you guys in the XRP community go la la la la la; you just can’t hear it, you can’t understand it. Then they go and attack me, saying, “You’re denying Ethgate.” We have all this evidence here, and you call it a conspiracy. I didn’t call that a conspiracy, but we can’t see eye to eye. There’s no way to see eye to eye, and I’ve tried numerous times for peace. There’s no desire for peace there. They don’t want peace because they don’t want to even acknowledge for perhaps a moment that we’re talking past each other.
I did a 45-minute video where I drew pictures and typed down what I believe in exhaustive detail. Then they take some videos from two years ago, pull a 5-second or 10-second clip, and say, “Well, there you go.” I clarify the statement with a 45-minute video and say, “This is exactly what I believe, and we’re not too far apart.” You have no evidence, XRP community—zero evidence that somebody bribed the US government to go after you. You have no evidence of that. It’s a conspiracy. If you had it, show it. Years have gone by, and no one’s shown it.
I know you’re all going around now. Okay, great. I guess he’s to release a bunch of recorded calls from the early days of Ethereum. Good for him, and you will find no evidence in at least the calls I was a part of, whether anybody even thought for a moment about anything in XRP land. Now that’s a completely separate subject from Ethereum taking care of its own interests and trying to find relationships and other things to help steer along a regulatory interpretation in their favor, like most entities do. That’s a very different conversation than saying somebody on Ethereum’s side or otherwise gave money or did something for a regulator to go after you, the XRP people. It didn’t happen. There’s no evidence of it. No one’s ever found any evidence of it, and that is the grand conspiracy.
There are a lot of people in your community who seem to believe that, and they need to cut it out. It provides no value. Also, the whole free pass narrative gives you no value—zero, zilch. So let me get this straight: your litigation strategy while you’re fighting the US government is to say the only reason Ethereum is not a security is that they bribed the US government. If I follow the logic and what you’re arguing, then they should be a security. Doesn’t that weaken the argument that XRP is not a security? If Ethereum is a security, doesn’t it weaken it? Don’t you want them not to be? Then to argue from the same facts and circumstances should apply to you. There shouldn’t be a double standard; both Ethereum and XRP should not be.
So we’re going to go around and argue again and again on the free pass side, saying the only reason there’s a free pass is that they bribed, therefore they’re not, and they should be a security. Does that make any sense at all? It makes no sense at all. But in the minds of these XRP people, it makes perfect sense. XRP number one—we would run the whole world if not for those pesky evil Joe Lubin people who bribed the SEC to come after us and set us back for years. Yeah, it’s unfair and tragic what’s happened. It’s a big government overreach. There’s already been a partial redress, and it’s going to take years to completely clean up. It’s unfortunate that they went through it, and there’s been a lot of pain and heartache, and it shouldn’t have happened. I’m with you on that; I really am.
But let’s not indulge in the conspiracy of believing that somebody bribed the US government to make that happen. There’s no evidence for it, and if you have it, show it. Are you still supportive of Ethereum Classic in terms of developing a unique way of handling their ecosystems?
We tried to get that done. We came in twice, built a full client, the Mamba client and Mantis client, and it worked really well. We said, “Look, there needs to be a treasury function similar to how Zcash has one.” The problem is that all the ICO money was stolen when the stuff split. There was no equal distribution of the pre-mined Ethereum, and the funds raised for Ethereum Classic got nothing; it all went over to the Ethereum Foundation, which in turn made a profit from that. They didn’t donate it back, so Ethereum Classic had no endowment. It has a different roadmap because it’s choosing to stay on proof of work.
So where does the money come from to actually build that roadmap and put a development ecosystem together? Nowhere. The argument we made is to put a treasury function in, and what they basically did is say, “Let’s put a treasury function in where you get paid time and materials, and if there’s ever a good upside, that upside gets taken.” So no one has any incentive to actually try to appreciate the ecosystem or grow the ecosystem. You just get paid as if you’re a contract development firm; there’s no vesting.
They said, “Okay, well, if that’s the way it’s going to go, it doesn’t make any sense to try to participate.” Innovation is time-consuming, challenging, and risky, and we take all the downside if Ethereum Classic goes down, but we get none of the upside. What did you take that deal for? To do all this innovation, do all this work, and get all downside potential but no upside potential? No rational actor would. As a result, no rational actor has come in. If there’s no roadmap, there’s no differentiator; there is no reason for the ecosystem to exist other than as a protest of a decision made so long ago that people have forgotten about it, and no one cares about it.
It’s a dead ecosystem from that viewpoint, which is tragic and sad because it had an opportunity to be a really cool and interesting smart contract proof of work system, which there’s definitely a market for, especially since Ethereum left that market. So we left, and we wish them well. Not everything works out in this industry, and you just have to move on. You can’t always be friends with everybody, and you can’t always have everybody see eye to eye.
I don’t have any animosity, for example, with the XRP community. I just wish they would be less mean because it’s just toxic as hell, the kinds of things they’ve said and done. We don’t think about it; there’s no technological overlap, there’s no market overlap, we don’t compete for the same customers. What’s the reason to have an adversarial relationship? It’s much the same with Ethereum Classic; there’s nothing adversarial there. There was an issue with the Twitter account; I gave it to Ergo, and they gave back the handle because I didn’t want to advertise or support a project that honestly I feel has serious concerns about its survivability and durability.
I didn’t feel comfortable with a Twitter account that we worked really hard to build up to 500,000 people, just handing that group of people to a project that’s probably dead. I gave it to Ergo because I think there’s something innovative and real there; that was my opinion. I participated in it; I spent millions of dollars doing it. It’s my right to do those types of things. Obviously, they have a difference of opinion; it is what it is.
Hey Charles, when do we get to use ADA commercially? It’s being used commercially. There are hundreds of projects on Cardano doing interesting things. This is the real-world adoption question that comes up again and again. It’s like Book IIO doesn’t exist, World Mobile doesn’t exist, you know, all the DeFi applications don’t exist, all the NFT projects don’t exist. All those don’t count? Okay, well, what counts? Well, Microsoft doing something. It’s like, okay, why do they count and those things don’t count?
It’s a new economy. The only way you can make money is to go and be a blacksmith; the only way you can make money is to go and be a carpenter. You have to actually produce something physical. No, obviously not. Well, okay, so if I make a dollar over here or influence someone’s life over here somehow, that’s less meaningful than the dollar over here? It’s all commercial; it’s all there, and it’s a new economy. As long as there are people, as long as there’s money, and if people are willing to put their time and effort into it and do stuff with it, that’s a real ecosystem.
It’s gone from nothing to over $20 billion, with billions of dollars of turnaround on a weekly basis.
Hey Charles, why is our TVL so low compared to other chains? Number 11 went from 31st place to 11th place; it’s going up dramatically. Smart contracts just launched recently, and it takes about three years for an ecosystem to fully reach its peak and really start showing signs of life and vibrance. We’re right on that curve, so I’m very happy with that.
M of the Charlie 3 Oracle team here. What feed would you like us to create? Well, an election tracker is probably a cool one. DeFi is a bad example of a real-world use case.
Okay, so the alternative is to go to a centralized exchange, which is controlled and regulated by a particular jurisdiction and has absolute power to decide who is legitimate and who is not legitimate. They have certainly exercised that power. The best-case scenario is they are minimally abusive; the worst-case scenario is they actually steal your funds and run away with it. They now get all power over all the rights of those tokens, so you can stake with it or vote with it. They actually get to control the networks.
Or you can use a DEX where none of these things are evident. Your funds can’t be stolen; they don’t get to vote with your coins usually, and anybody can list, and any market can form. They’re not subject to a particular jurisdiction.
That’s a bad example. Marketplaces don’t exist. What about security tokens? What about intellectual property trading? All these things—markets are multi-trillion dollar artifacts, and that’s where all the banks are and all these other guys are, right? Wall Street, ding ding ding ding, New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ—these types of things. That’s a bad example. Come on, man, use your head.
What is the story of the Red Lobster? For those of you who have been around for a long time, know that this lobster was actually purchased during the early days of the smart contract era of Cardano. We actually named the lobster with a collective smart contract on Cardano, so the lobster’s name is Logan. I put him on the microphone to celebrate that event, and he has been there ever since, and I’ll have him there ever thereafter.
Hey Charles, what are projects related to real-world payments? Will Midnight be a possible option or Jed? Keep it up. Midnight is a huge step forward because what Midnight does is correct a very real problem that all blockchains have at the moment, which is that blockchains can’t keep a secret. It’s a very fundamental problem, and by design, they can’t keep a secret. The whole point of a blockchain is to be globally accessible, transparent, auditable, and immutable.
So they create a version of history, and everybody gets that same version of history. It’s called the trusted bulletin board. Use a cryptographic term; that’s awesome, and it’s super useful for certificate authorities, timestamping, money systems, public voting systems—you name it. There are a thousand use cases that the trusted bulletin board has. Anyone who says that that’s not useful to society either doesn’t know how society works or they’re willfully lying to you.
That’s hugely important, and the scope of those things is diminutive compared to the scope of things where you need to keep a secret in order for commerce to work appropriately. Almost every single commercial transaction, government transaction, academic transaction, and medical transaction we have involves a private part and a public part.
Basic things, for example: you go and withdraw some funds from your ATM, and you say to yourself, “Oh, okay, why does that matter?” Well, there are laws in place about how that bank has to preserve and protect those records for the regulator but also keep them secret. Normally speaking, a bank in the world can’t just go out and say, “Hey, you know, John Smith just withdrew $300 from the ATM. Oh, by the way, he’s right next to the red light district. Don’t know what he’s doing.” They can’t do that; there are laws against these types of things. That’s the private component of it.
They can’t go into general sense and do this. So if you want to decentralize these systems, you have to ask yourself how to map that business logic onto a system that by default has to be open, transparent, and auditable by everybody. It means you have to introduce a completely new primitive: a programmable private smart contract.
Once you have that, then you have a private state and a public state. You can model your business logic, and you get all the properties of blockchain technology—the auditability, the irreversibility, the timestamping—all these types of things. But you can scope those properties to the disclosure regime that you have. So the general public, for example, can’t audit; however, you can assign an auditor, and that is programmatic, meaning that you can’t change it. It’s like a cryptographic commitment.
It’s a very powerful primitive because you get the best of both worlds: you get privacy but auditability. That’s rare, and that’s a unique thing. The other thing is that you get the coordination function that blockchains have. Blockchains are super connectors; they’re very good at bringing many different business logics together who don’t necessarily like or trust each other or can’t work together for a variety of geopolitical reasons, economic reasons, or brand and reputation reasons.
For example, it also allows you to introduce a new category of applications we call ACE applications: freedom of association, commerce, and expression. Here’s a great example: university politics. A lot of universities—the rank-and-file people at the universities—do not agree with how insane and woke some of the politics are getting. It’s maddeningly crazy. But why do they publicly support it? Why do they go up and say, “Oh, this is a good idea”? Because they’re worried that if they publicly oppose it, their career will be destroyed. There’s fear inside the organization.
What if you had an anonymous voting system that could prove membership and say you are a professor, you are an employee of that institution, that university, or that corporation, but you could also vote without fear of people knowing who you are? That’s an example of a selective disclosure regime in that the system can self-verify that you are a member but cannot actually say, “This was Charles Hoskinson” or “Jimmy” or whatever. Then suddenly you could take a poll and find out that 70% of your faculty are actually against this nonsense; you just don’t know which 70% it is.
It’s a major improvement in the system, and it allows you to start converging to truth. For us to be able to work together and trust each other, we have to be able to move between public to private and back, but we have to preserve some capabilities as we do that. The current systems we have that are non-blockchain based usually require a great degree of trust in a centralized institution.
Very basic concepts, like how do you know if there’s a private state that somebody didn’t come in and change a few things and say everything’s okay? Our vote counting systems are a great example of that. We just had the 2020 election; half of America says it was fraud, and the other half says, “Oh
I'm biased; those are my homies. Warning, Charles, how fickle Twitter has become. Are you looking at alternatives like Blue Sky or something else? Guys, after we get the partner chain framework put together, we're going to figure out a way to solve the social network problem. I'm done with centralized social networks. You know, Elon Musk today has a commitment to freedom of speech and expression. I'm not naive enough to believe that is absolute, and I'm not naive enough to believe that I'm always going to be on the right side of it. The problem is you live and die by whether that guy gets up on the left side of the bed or the right side of the bed, and I'm sorry to say that that's not sustainable.
We've already seen what happened with Meta, and we've already seen what happened with YouTube. You cannot deviate from the trust institutions that they have picked as their anchors, and no freedom of expression or thought is allowed. We're doubling down in the age of AI as well. All this alignment training—what they're really saying is, under the hood, yes, we don't want you to use AI to make chemical weapons and bombs, but also we don't want you to talk to AI and have a conversation about politics we disagree with. It's in the training data.
Ninety-five percent of the people who are training and building these types of things lean in one particular political direction, which is blinding them to political diversity. It's an echo chamber. I'm deeply concerned about the convergence of those two things: super-intelligent AI with the current censorship regimes of social media. The good news is we actually know and have a blueprint as an industry for a really good social network. There's a lot of infrastructure that has to be built for it, but we're already building a lot of it—governance systems, identity systems; these are foundational. Prism is really the heart of these types of things—privacy-preserving systems.
There's a lot there, so it does make a lot of sense to pursue it with a partner chain at some point. We just don't have the time and the resources at the moment. As an entrepreneur, you're often defined by the things you say no to as opposed to the things you say yes to. As important as this topic is, we just have too much to do at the moment. That's not going to be the case in the future; it's going to become front and center. It's an area that I'd like to bring not just to the Cardano ecosystem but across the totality of the cryptocurrency space. I have a really good idea on how to do that; there are just a few missing pieces, and we'll have to approach it from first principles.
What we're going to do is write a series of papers at some point on foundational concerns and really break it down. We'll run it through a product viewpoint and think about the user experience and the information architecture. We'll try to relate it to all the innovations that have occurred in the personal knowledge management world, like the stuff that's happened with Obsidian, the stuff that's going on with maps of content and linked notes. These types of things really connect to the veracity systems we've talked about, as well as all the desires about how people consume content and monetize content. There are a lot of NFT opportunities here as well.
At the same time, I think what Musk did combining Grok and Twitter made a lot of sense. You do need to combine an LLM with these types of systems because that's where you get your training from. So, a decentralized LLM and decentralized social network are definitely coming to the partner chains framework. It's going to be a big fight. This political year is going to be the most brutal of our lifetime. 2024 is just not going to be a pretty election. There's deep fix galore already happening.
I'm just me, right? I'm not a big guy, so at the highest levels with the highest level of technology, the kinds of things that are going to come out in the October surprise are going to be unbelievable. People are just angry. There's a non-zero possibility we're going to get to November where a candidate wins who's in prison—the first time in American history. There's a non-zero probability of that. Trump is currently skating towards winning the Republican nomination, and because of the nature of the locations where he's been charged with crimes, there's a very strong possibility he's going to be convicted of several felonies that require prison time.
I'm sorry, you cannot get a fair trial in Washington, D.C., or New York. It's just not possible if you're a Republican like Trump, with 90% Democrats and a seething hatred for him. There's no reality where he's going to get a fair trial. People have already made up their minds and have a strong opinion. They will lie to be on the jury that convicts him. It is what it is; this is how governments operate. It's why you don't arrest political opponents. He'll get convicted, and unless the Supreme Court says he's immune, he's going to go into sentencing.
There's a possibility, if that happens fast enough, that he could be in a prison cell by the time he wins the election, if he wins the election. That is our reality this year, and that's not healthy for a constitutional republic. It's not healthy for any semblance of a government that wants to have strong institutions and rule of law, and no one can convince me otherwise. You don't arrest your political opponents; this is what dictators do. It's what every banana republic does.
We have a separate set of standards for people that occupy that particular political class. I understand that there are grievances, and I understand that other people feel that this man is literally Hitler. To me, he has always been a P.T. Barnum. It translates to exceedingly negative consequences for society as a whole, and the reaction is going to be a victim culture and censorship culture that we've never seen. People are going to get exceedingly aggressive with their actions and their statements. They're going to be censored, and they're going to get even more aggressive because they feel that basically all the tech companies are in on it.
They kind of were in on it with vaccines and COVID and all the medical stuff that flowed through. You were not allowed on Facebook to have the opinion that COVID was made in a lab in 2020; that was medical misinformation. You were not allowed to have that opinion, and now the FBI in the United States is saying that there is strong evidence that that is the case.
We need to get our freedoms back, and it's not good enough to complain about it. Believe me, just electing the orange goblin is not going to solve any problems. It's just going to mean the other side now gets to beat up, and they're going to be just as vicious and brutal. A lot of people are going to get arrested if Trump becomes president. There's no healing in this; there's no reconciliation. This is not a healthy society.
What we have to do is take these powers back as people. We have to begin moderating again, slowing down, and de-escalating. Stop arresting people. Stop burning people to the ground. Stop deplatforming people. Start listening to people. It's basic concepts, right? But we're not allowed to do that right now because all of these power structures are basically getting dug in, and they're going to war with each other.
So decentralization would help solve this, and I think it's a national priority that we get decentralized LLMs and decentralized social networks, or else they're going to be weaponized and be part of this conflict. It'll escalate until it gets out of control.
Charles, would you explain to us the philosophy behind the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics? There's only one academic institution named after me; it's the Carnegie Mellon University Formal Center for Mathematics. That institution is an intersection of the computer science, mathematics, and philosophy departments. It's kind of a joint grouping led by Jeremy Avadi. It's near and dear to my heart. I don't communicate with Jeremy as much as I ought to, but I love the work that he does and the work that the center does.
Mathematics is ironically a bit shaky at the top. Mathematicians, as rigorous and formal and relentlessly precise as they can be, face the challenge that it's kind of like writing software without being able to test it. It kind of makes sense because math actually created computer science, and computer science is a representation of a specific formal language. But at the end of the day, people recognize that these large-scale systems need to be understandable and work and be decidable; they need a test framework.
Imagine you read a paper, you write a big proof, and your only checking mechanism is that another person reads it and says, "Thumbs up, looks good." The problem with that would be like writing a program and then giving the program to another programmer, having them read through the whole program, and giving you a thumbs up that that program works. They say, "Yeah, but I'd like to run the program." Ah, you can't do that.
What if you could take that math, write it in a different language, and actually run it on a computer? It's a simplification of what we do, but that's basically what the center is chasing: constructive mathematics. It's formalizing math in a way where you can engage with a computer as a thinking agent to help you debug your thoughts, refine and purify your thoughts, and make them more concise. You can also use it as a creativity agent to help you explore mathematics in deeper, more meaningful ways.
From a collaborative viewpoint, from a debugging viewpoint, and from a viewpoint of truth, you get to a stronger bedrock. We call it formal mathematics because we make it understandable from a computing device. Now, this is not a new concept. The QED Manifesto came up with this many years ago, and the very first of these proof assistant machines was created in 1970 called Automath. The theory for this existed prior to that, but that was really the first foray into actually writing proper software for it.
The issue is most mathematicians are not programmers, or at least professional programmers, and the older mathematicians don't like doing things this way. It's very time-consuming. A lot of stuff gets in the way of making it easy for a professional mathematician to engage. Traditionally speaking, you don't innovate this way; you just check prior innovations.
You know the types of things like the four-color theorem or Kepler's conjecture—whatever this stuff is already kind of known and proven. It doesn't really require these types of approaches. So they say, "What's the benefit to me? I've already written the paper; I've already gone through the referee process. Why would I then need to formalize to double-check if it's already right?" There's some truth to that.
Now, if you combine that with where LLMs are going and the fact that you can enhance collaboration with other people and also further modularize very complex technical work—things like the Langlands agenda—that might actually be the selling point. So we created a dedicated center, and it's sufficiently well-resourced to be there permanently. I put $20 million into it and brought together a really killer team of people.
Now, the programming language that they're using to check these proofs, Lean, is developing a great degree of traction in the broader mathematical community. I will continue to put more money into the center; times are a bit lean right now, so I held off on that for a bit. But this is one of my biggest side passions, and I think that it's how we get math to the next level.
We think about these unassailable problems, whether they be Riemann or Goldbach or other such things. The reason why they're unsolvable is they're just too big for a single mathematician to make meaningful progress across his or her career. But if you can make them much more collaborative, and the progress can be forever retained, and the knowledge about why things work a certain way is forever retained, then you actually can solve it. Just like many programmers working on an operating system kernel or Cardano or these types of things—these large collective action problems.
That's kind of the hope of that. This is the problem with Trump. People said, "Bro, I love your analysis of Trump, but it's always off. You need to check his record." When he was president, he got the Abraham Accords done in the Middle East between the Muslims and Jews. That's absolutely true, and I saw it firsthand. I was in Abu Dhabi, actually Dubai, and I saw Sheikh Muhammad, the king, walk by an Israeli flag in Dubai. Ten years ago, he couldn't even travel there. Now they're working together.
So absolutely, there were great wins. I'd argue the discussions with North Korea were productive. I'd argue the discussions with Russia were quite productive, and he exposed a lot of inconvenient truths as well, like the U.S.-Chinese relationship and how it needed to be rebuilt and reset. Also, the inconvenient truth of the current immigration policy in the United States. Every president, even Biden, has some good there.
It's not about saying Trump did something good; in fact, there was a lot of stuff to like when you peel back the layers, including the Trump tax cut, which brought trillions of dollars of overseas money back into the United States. Did you guys know that before the Trump tax cut existed, corporations hid money in offshore subsidiaries in Hong Kong and other places? They never had any legal requirement to bring that money back home, and they didn't pay any taxes on that.
They created this new structure where you had to pay a minimum of 12% regardless of whether you brought it home or not, creating incentives for people to repatriate capital. Trillions of dollars of capital ended up getting repatriated. Lo and behold, the people who fought the Trump administration on that were big companies—Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Microsoft—because they didn't want to pay.
The problem is that not everybody's an island. In the big-ticket items of bringing people together, unifying the United States, getting people to work together, inspiring people, he failed miserably. Everything was a game of us versus them: we win, you lose, we burn you down, and then we will stand over your ashes. It became a game almost like a reality television show, like a football game—the Denver Broncos versus Kansas City or something like that.
Their evil were virtuous; every single political event started being viewed through this lens. Now, he didn't create this system by any means; we had been moving in this direction for a very long time. What he did is refine it and purify it to a form that we'd never seen before in American discourse, and that is now the new standard.
It's easy for me, even though I'm conservative and libertarian in nature, to sit down with a person who has radically different political views. For example, I had dinner a few years back with Senator Wyden. He's a very nice guy; we are radically different in terms of some of our political views, but we were able to have a conversation and say, "Okay, where can we find points of interest where we can connect together?" The same with Senator Lummis or other people. There are areas I agree with and areas I disagree with.
Why? Because at the end of the day, I don't believe that your politics define you. Those are just some beliefs that you have; you have other beliefs, and that's okay. We can find bridges; we can find ways to communicate with each other and work together. We've gotten to a point where people become their politics, and they're either with us or against us. If they're against us, they're evil people who should be destroyed in any way possible.
Now, I guess they get locked up. True to form, the other side has now responded by literally just doing that. It used to be the chant, "Lock them up, lock them up," but they didn't actually do it; they weren't crazy enough. Now they're doing it, and there seem to be glaring double standards in this whole thing.
Here's the inconvenient truth that Team Blue can't admit, but they know it deep down inside, and Team Red knows too: if you're the president of the United States, if you were held to the same judicial standards as a normal person, you should be in prison. You lie, you bribe countries, you kill people on a daily basis. You don't believe me? Look at Anwar al-Awlaki. Is the president allowed to murder an American citizen without due process? Most Americans would say no.
Let's remove the absolute immunity from the presidency. I guarantee you an activist prosecutor could go after Obama for Anwar al-Awlaki. That's just the nature of the role. They get into a position where they're no longer a person; they're a state, and states behave in different ways than people behave. They have a monopoly on violence; they can arrest you, they can imprison you, they can torture people. Even the United States tortures people. Enhanced interrogation is not torture.
Yeah, well, we change the words a little bit, but let's be very clear about this: it's not something any normal human being would enjoy going through. We torture our own soldiers called SERE training. We do it in defensive ways, but states can do that. If you grabbed a normal person off the street and said, "I want to toughen you up," and put them through SERE, you'd be in jail. The state can do that, and the representatives and agents of the state are allowed to do that.
So when you're the president, you're the face of the state; you're the actor of the state. You cannot have a situation where people are now held to these bizarre standards and they fight each other. Now we arrest each other, and unfortunately, those floodgates are open. For better or worse, there's something about Trump's nature that is so utterly offensive to the left that it's impossible for them to acknowledge anything good about him.
Of course, because of that, it creates such anger on the right that they start applying those very same principles to Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and other people. Now, where does this leave us? It leaves us in a situation where we can't work together. It leaves us in a situation where we can't talk to each other, we can't negotiate, we can't collaboratively construct things, and winning is not about effective governance.
You notice that nobody voting for Biden right now or Trump is sitting down and honestly saying, "There's some big project or end goal that we seek." Like, "We're building a pyramid, and in five years, we've got to get that thing done," or "We're going to the moon, and we've got to get there before the end of the decade," or "We're going to cure cancer, and we have to do this with intent."
This is the best person to achieve that goal, and here's why they're doing it. No, it's, "I have to vote for this guy because the other guy is so evil and so destructive that I have to keep that person out of power." Yes, but the person you're putting into power—do you agree with all the things? No, I don't care; the other person is just so evil and so destructive and so horrible that I have to keep them out of power
4 Celsius, so I don't know what that translates to. I think that's 34 or 35. I'm not good at your conversion. Have you spoken to Brian Johnson?
Yes, I have. Brian is a very interesting guy. Charles, do you believe Putin when he said he doesn't want Poland or anything else but Ukraine?
Yeah, actually, I do. Ukraine has always been in Russia's sphere of influence, and Poland's one of those nice-to-have things. But Ukraine is something they consider existential because of seaport access. Also, they're not going to invade a NATO country. The problem was that Ukraine was just about to join NATO; they were starting that process.
So, any updates on Legends of Valor? Also, how many ventures do you have going on?
I have about six major ventures and a lot of small satellite ventures. Legends of Valor is on ice right now; I just don't have time for it. I wrote out many pages of concept notes and things I want to do. I have an ending in mind, I have the major characters planned out, and I have a rough idea of what technology I want to put in. I even looked at various different magic systems to embed in campaign settings. It would have been cool to embed it in something like Forgotten Realms, but I’d have to buy WOTC and deal with the company. So, I’ll have to create a new game world specifically to embed Legends of Valor.
If you look at Baldur's Gate 3, the reason why they were so tremendously successful is they did three things really well. First, they started from an IP that was extremely well understood and has a huge fan base with a lot of internal lore. They did not insult or deviate from that. You know, you could do Star Wars, you can do Lord of the Rings, you can do Forgotten Realms. You don’t want to go to war with the people who love that. They said, "What made Baldur's Gate special? Let’s do a proper homage to it."
That alone massively helps you because you’re walking in with a pre-existing million-person fan base, and you haven’t insulted them like Rings of Power did or what modern Marvel movies are doing or what they did with the new trilogy in Star Wars. It’s not patently insulting; you don’t have Elminster deciding to enter into a gay relationship with Bane and take up cooking. It’s like, what are we doing? This is nuts.
They said they were going to stay true to the source material, and while doing that, they also deviated enough to give some goodies for everybody. They were quite inclusive inside the game; they let you be a non-binary player. It’s very friendly in many different respects, but that wasn’t the core point of it. They found a way to pay homage to the core content.
Second, they innovated on gameplay mechanics. They did a beautiful translation of fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, adjusting it in a way that created a very competitive, compelling game with extraordinarily high replayability and optimization, which is essential for high hour count.
The third thing is they’re actually good writers. They wrote a good story with compelling characters you care about, characters that have stakes, characters that are interesting, and characters that people fall in love with and create fan art and fan fiction about, for better or for worse.
You need to do those three things if you’re going to have a mega blockbuster success. You have to have the right game world and expectation management, deviate just enough to do something new while paying homage to what people know, have great gameplay mechanics, and then actually have a good story and good characters.
Now, Top Gun: Maverick is a great example of that. The Top Gun ethos had an expectation about how those characters should behave and who they should be, and they honored that. Then they added some new stuff that we didn’t expect to see, which was pretty exciting and interesting. So, that meaty mechanics thing actually had a pretty good story, all things considered. It worked well on all three sides, and you get a billion-dollar franchise.
Avatar 2 is another example of that: a decent story, all this new candy that no one’s ever seen before that’s super exciting and fun, but it met our expectations of Pandora. The problem with Legends of Valor is there’s no IP behind it that is compelling or interesting for people.
Anyone who remembers it, like Todd Howard or a few others, created Elder Scrolls based on that. The really deep insider guys, like Don or the Bethesda guys or any of the early '90s Interplay people, will remember Legends of Valor with some degree of fondness, but it was never something that created a world and took off.
The first huge challenge is whether you borrow a world like Pathfinder or whatever and embed within that world, which means you have to do what Larian did, or do you build a completely new world from scratch? That’s what BioWare did with Dragon Age: Origins; they constructed an entirely new world from scratch. That’s hard. It’s very hard to construct a world from scratch, and there’s a lot of work you have to put into world-building to do that correctly.
Gameplay mechanics are really interesting because in the CRPG genre, you’re either going to end up as a turn-based CRPG, like Baldur's Gate or some variant of it, or you’ll do like an RTS, a real-time feedback system like Skyrim has or these other games have. There are pros and cons to both sides of this, and you can kind of hybrid it, but you tend to always be in one bucket or the other, and it tends to attract different types of players.
The turn-based system doesn’t tend to work as well with console players. Baldur's Gate actually was the first breakthrough exception to that. Generally, you’re more God of War than you are Baldur's Gate, but it seems to work reasonably well on PS5 and Xbox.
I’ve given a lot of thought on both sides of that spectrum regarding how the entire set of gameplay mechanics works and how to put those pieces together. On the story side, you have to have a great story and really interesting and compelling characters. That’s just a matter of hiring good writers, working with good writers, having a good philosophical arc, and really digging into good concepts.
The exploration of the concept of divinity is a big theme with Larian Studios. If you look at their entire game lines, they’re always doing stuff with gods and mortals. That’s kind of their thing; it goes all the way back to the Odyssey and the Iliad. It’s a theme that was quite popular in Greek and Roman history, fell out of favor for a bit, and they brought it back. That’s their favorite thing in the whole world.
I have a slightly different approach, but you have to have that core. It takes time, too, and a lot of iteration. You have to think about it. The thing about Baldur's Gate 3 is they gave themselves a lot of favors by having a pre-existing notion of how to build these games and how to do the storytelling. They inherited all the stuff from Wizards of the Coast and Forgotten Realms. That’s a huge advantage.
To build that all from scratch, you’re going to have one to two years of messing around before you actually get to start at the same place they started. It took them six years to build Baldur's Gate 3. Early access was also a really good model; it helps you build a great relationship with your community if you use it correctly. They also mastered the social media side of the equation, which was a very nice component of it.
I’ve given it a great degree of thought, and when there’s more time, it’ll become something that I probably spend half a decade on. The definition of success for me is I’d like it to be one of the most popular games of all time, a legendary game. If you’re successful, it launches a completely new world; it’s a money-printing machine. Why? Because you have a world, and you have tons of characters in that world, and you have tons of sequels you can do. You can do an MMO just like Bethesda does with The Elder Scrolls, and it just works beautifully for them.
So, you’ve got to knock it out of the park, and that’s why I’m taking my time with it. Did you submerge your shoulders in the cold plunge today?
Yes, sir, I did.
How has Midnight been doing?
Doing very well.
I missed the beginning. Charles, when will you buy Command and Conquer: The Enhanced Edition?
I played all the original ones. Is there anything new?
Yeah, exactly right. You need characters that people want to cosplay as. If you design your characters correctly, they just become part of the social milieu. Like Kattos, he’s there forever. If you need an archetype of a very angry, super manly guy, you take Kattos.
Storytelling is a big part of humanity, and you have to be a good storyteller to communicate with people and relate to them. Game development is nice because it sharpens the saw on good characters and good storytelling, and it actually helps every other aspect of life. If you find that a company is very good and adept at game development, they’re probably also very good at other things as well.
Baldur's Gate 2 is the best game ever made for its time.
Yes, if you play it today.
I played Legends of Valor on the Atari ST; it was brilliant back in the day.
Holy moly, my Lord, that’s a rare one. It was brilliant back then. What was your favorite part of the game?
Charles, have you considered bariatric surgery for weight loss?
No, that is so thoroughly against the core of who I am as a human being. I would rather die than get bariatric surgery.
You have chemical bariatric surgery; I mean, you take the Tepati and the OIC or whatever these drugs are, these inhibitors, and they replicate the same effect.
Have you tried Elden Ring?
I’ve heard a lot about it; I just have not had a chance to play it. I’ve just been so worked up.
Here’s the problem, man: if you try to back ADA with a real-life asset like gold or real estate, who holds that and who controls that?
There is a slight variation of what you’re saying that might be useful, and that is that there’s this treasury of Cardano. There’s a very important discussion that has to happen with the community as the budget process begins about what to do with the treasury of Cardano. It exists; it has a huge amount of ADA in it.
You could convert that ADA and have an asset manager manage that ADA on behalf of the Cardano ecosystem and create returns like a sovereign wealth fund would, then reinvest those returns into Cardano. If you have 900 million at today’s price of ADA, well, if we go back to the all-time high, you’d have something along the lines of four and a half billion or something like that. It’s just a crazy amount of money.
That’s where it was last time; it’d be even larger now. When you’re there, those returns, if they get sovereign wealth fund standard returns of 8 to 13%, you’re looking at an average of like half a billion dollars of interest on the sovereign wealth fund of Cardano to be basically spent and build up the ecosystem.
So, it’s a very interesting community-wide conversation about what to do with the sovereign wealth of the Cardano protocol and how to handle that. That’s where the compensation of tangible assets like intellectual property, gold, real estate, and these types of things—tangible and intangible assets—for the protocol to acquire for a firm to do that on behalf makes some degree of sense.
But there’s a lot of legal innovation that has to be done to get there because there are just no legal structures that recognize the agency of a blockchain at the moment. I can imagine that occurring in the next three to five years, and it’d be a heck of a lot of fun to get that done.
Does your clinic offer Grail testing?
Yeah, the cancer detection blood test, Grail, we do.
Are there any legal jurisdictions that allow you to enforce a trust that has no time limit?
Yeah, the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Star Trust.
This summarizes I need to hold the assets, not an asset manager. But that’s the thing: you can actually diversify and have them compete. If Goldman Sachs or others start managing those types of assets, they have an incentive to keep Cardano around so that makes some money for some people.
Asset management is commoditized; there are millions of people around the world who do it pretty well, and it’s really hard to beat the average returns. Every now and then, you get good at it, but you don’t want to deviate too much because usually, you’re taking enormous amounts of risk.
I did not know that the Atari ST had an offer in the box to post your picture to developers, who scanned your image and had you appear on the wanted posters in the game.
Yeah, so there’s this gameplay mechanic that all the bars in the game eventually have you appearing on wanted posters for some reason. It’s not entirely clear why or what you’ve done to appear; it’s probably a randomly timed event.
Charles, got to this slate, but where’s the best place for me to learn about becoming a DP?
Join Intersect and go to san.network.
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