Okay, it looks like we're live. Hi, everyone. This is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. It is December 23rd, 2020. This year just keeps on giving, and we're almost done. There are eight days left. I hope there are no more December surprises. At this point, I think the murder hornets are probably going to do something again. They're going to be with the mole people. What a year. It's been crazy.
For our industry, it's been an interesting year too. A lot of stuff got done. Bitcoin resurged, and we saw a lot of really beautiful technological progress. There's been so much good technology that has hit the market. For example, the other day, I read a wonderful paper from Dan Boneh over at Stanford. Dan's one of the top cryptographers in the world. It's called Halo Infinite. So we heard of Halo 1, Halo 2, and now Halo Infinite. Halo is a recursive SNARK construction, and a lot of really beautiful things are heating up there.
There's been a huge amount of work on the consensus side. We published Consensus Redux and Hydrip, both of which I think are really fabulous papers that push out the theory of proof of stake into Layer 2, and also proof of stake into recovering from dishonest majority. We saw a lot of really cool things in the industry, like Nakamoto proof of stake, which allows you to do Ouroboros on a block-by-block basis, not with an EPIC. There are a lot of cool things with Clocks. Kronos was one of our inventions, and Polkadot came to market with theirs.
There have been some big innovations on the network side and big innovations on smart contracts. A lot of people talk about formal verification of smart contracts, everything from FSTAR to stuff in the COQ space. There's some cool work that Pneumatic Labs has done with Tezos, and that's good to see. Of course, we do our work with Plutus, and we have a whole strategy there, with a lot of Agda work. We also have what we've been working on with Gregorian, Firefly, and Yela, and KVM, which has come to Cardano.
It's been a very satisfying year. We entered this year as Cardano, never shipping. We had Byron, which was wholesale unsatisfying, but we had the ITN, and everybody knew this was our year. We shipped Shelley, and we went from a static federated system to a dynamic and decentralized system. Now, 68% of the blocks are made by the community, and that'll close out in March. Everything's on rails. We went from a staking experience to a refined and beautiful staking experience in Q1 of next year. Governance is the same way.
Now we're starting to work on participation. With staking, we're at 63.5% of the ADA in circulation that is staked. We're only behind Polkadot in that respect, which is a tremendous level of participation, much higher than normal proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies. If that's any bellwether, I think we can definitely hit 70% or 80% by the end of next quarter if we keep this growth rate, especially when the user experience improves.
We see a lot more stake pool diversity and a lot more lore floating around. The operators are doing a great job running Cardano, probably the most complex cryptocurrency around. It took six months to train everybody. It was a lot of work, and we had to invent the hard fork combinator to get them where they needed to go, but we did. Hard work shows. We published 91 papers, and we'll probably get to 100 in the next quarter. That's going to be a good day.
The code bases definitely show progress, with releases every week to two weeks. When we entered the year, there was no way we could have predicted this. We were still kind of in development hell, retooling things, and we exited the year like a really lean, agile machine where we have story points and burn down charts, and the things that we think are going to happen actually happen. It's beautiful.
It's been a hard year logistically. The whole world shut down. The last international trip I took was to London in March for a PwC event with EMURGO, CF, and our company. Right after I got back, Trump announced that the world was shutting down. The world shut down, and it was extraordinary to see what happened. I never thought I'd live to see the world shut down, but we did, and we got through it.
We have 300 people in the company, and we work with so many people. It used to be that whenever we had a problem, we'd just all come together, fly somewhere, and have a little micro summit. Now, we actually have to have meetings over Hangouts. Our whole workflow had to be retooled and redone while we were growing and dealing with shipping.
Overall, I'd say this has been one of the better years for cryptocurrencies. 2018 was pretty dreary. 2019 had a lot of oomph behind it, and we all knew that 2020 was going to be exciting. Then everything happened to try to kill it, and it still is happening. But the enthusiasm is much better and stronger. I think going into 2021, that's going to be our year as an industry. We're going to grow faster and better.
The world kind of woke up. They saw that if the U.S. government can print $6 trillion out of thin air and no one respects the rule of law, it's about time we start talking about a new monetary system. That's understandably why we're starting to see a lot of regulatory pushback. It's not going to be easy. We didn't sign up for easy. If you signed up for easy, go do something else. This is crypto. Crypto is hard and stressful.
You get dragged through swamps filled with broken glass naked. That's what crypto is all about, and you have to deal with that every day. There are all kinds of eclectic people. A lot of growing up and maturing needs to be done. It took me a long time to mature. I was not exactly the most mature person in the world when I entered this industry. I was a young guy, still a pretty young guy. But I realized that there are collective themes where we fail together and win together. Recent events definitely showed that.
Isn't it funny? You have people say the reason their product exists is because they have to transcend the government and they don't trust it. But then the government does their dirty work for them. It shows you who is real and who is not real.
Now, let's look at your questions. From AI: Is Haskell code hard? Haskell is a lovely and beautiful language. It's not hard to write programs in Haskell. It's hard to write programs in a functional style that are performant, useful, and maintainable. But if you can, then they're usually far more concise and easier to verify than programs written in an imperative or procedural paradigm.
It's a mixed bag. There are hybrid languages like Scala and Clojure and F#. There are fully functional languages like Haskell or even super Haskell like Agda. I like Haskell a lot. I think it's a critical component of the programming bag.
Merry Christmas to you too, Eye of the King. I love your videos.
Charles Hoskinson, can we use Java? We do have case semantics for Java, and at some point, a compilation chain will be built for Java to Yela. That's something for the Cardano 2025 plan when we start planning out how we're going to grow Yela. We are also exploring a direct compilation of Scala to Plutus Core because I love Scala so much.
Was the Yela delay related to the rewrite required for Shelley? We had to deprioritize some things, and Yela was part of the stack of things we had to deprioritize. It was always something I wanted to add into the strategy, but it wasn't really required. After we got Shelley out, I said, let's get this done. So I called up Grigori, and we spent about two months negotiating, then we pulled it back into the pipeline. Good things happened, and we're going to keep chipping away at it. I love Yela, and I love Grigori. I love runtime verification. I think the whole K ecosystem is great. I think Plutus is really special too.
Give me something about the Ergo Summit in January. Well, of course, I'm coming to the Ergo Summit in January. Talk to Michael about the schedule.
What do you think caused the dump today? The number three cryptocurrency in the world was declared a security by a regulatory agency, which is going to create a liquidity crisis. Of course, it's a panic dump. Rising tides and falling tides create a collapse in the alt market. Fear drives out weak hands.
Congrats today on over 1,800 new wallets. I would love to start tracking some cool KPIs. In Q1, we're going to start discussing this with Fred, who is a PwC guy over at the foundation. He's very metric-driven. We’ll look at wallet volume, transaction volume, unique user count, dApps, and these types of things. It would be really cool to do a quarterly KPI set. We can set OKRs around improving those KPIs and see what we can do, perhaps even tether them to the DC fund.
The SEC just gave a statement on stablecoins. Stablecoin regulation will require either an act of Congress or the next administration to deal with it. I'm not worried at all about where stablecoin regulation sits. If they regulate them like they do securities, that's not as problematic, especially when you're talking about asset-backed stablecoins.
Guys, it's not a trustless system. If the only reason it's worth a dollar is because you're trusting a human being to store a dollar somewhere, you should be regulated. Every single time someone has not been regulated, it's been a disaster, starting with the Rothschilds in the 19th century and their gold certificates.
Charles, do you still hold any Bitcoin after all these years? Yes, Bitcoin is one of the few coins that I hold outside of ADA.
Who is your favorite philosopher? That would be Bertrand Russell, analytic philosophy. He did a little bit of logical positivism as well, but his essays on metaphysics were always delightful to read. Prior to being a philosopher, Russell was actually a logician in mathematics. He worked with Alfred North Whitehead and wrote a lovely book called The Principles of Mathematics that unified logic, set theory, and arithmetic.
You talk about nootropics and other health regimes. Have you ever read anything on celery juice? I do drink it from time to time. It helps with my gout and also helps me sleep, but I'm not aware of any nootropic properties for it.
Any good news on ETC? I think we're working with Lunatech on ETC, so we'll announce something soon. Mantis is out; people are playing with it and having fun, and we're productizing it. Next quarter is going to be a lot of fun.
When will paper wallets for Daedalus be available? My hope for paper wallets on Daedalus would be to have that in the Identity Center in Q1 of next year. I'm pushing very hard on the Daedalus team to do that. What I want, and I made a video about this two months ago, is to have a paper wallet that's encrypted with a QR code. You can print it out, store it somewhere, and as long as you have your PGP key, it's easy to decrypt the QR code. Restoration is very simple.
I'd like your PGP key to be on a hardware device, like a Ledger or a UV key. It's super easy to do that, and they support that. Then, easy encryption, easy decryption, super secure, and super easy to play around with. I'd also like to make sure that it's easy to delegate from cold wallets. There are a lot of business requirements that exist there, but it's a high priority for me.
If we get to that level of security, what I'll do is put a non-trivial amount of ADA on a paper wallet, maybe a few hundred thousand, maybe a million dollars, and I will publish the encrypted private key. I have that much confidence in it, and if you break it, you can have it. We'll talk about that later, and I've got to discuss it with legal about how to do it, but I think it's a good way to build confidence in the system and demonstrate that it works well.
Kind of reminds me of LifeLock, with the CEO and his social security number, although for him it didn't work out so well.
Would you go on the Rich Dad radio show with Kiyosaki? I read one of the Rich Dad books and once played his board game. Yeah, it'd be cool. I never get invited.
What is IOHK's vision for blockchain in India? Cardano is a decentralized ecosystem, and the beautiful thing about being decentralized is that there are certain areas that I care a lot about, like Africa, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe. There are other areas that other people care about, like Aetix, one of the firms that works on Cardano. More than 10 companies work on Cardano, so it's a very decentralized development ecosystem.
Aetix is based in Buenos Aires, and I care a lot about Latin American politics and South American politics. My PSG group, the head of which is based in Costa Rica, has people in Mexico. In the case of India, Manish Singh is the vice chairman of the Cardano Foundation, and I know he cares deeply about India. He's from there, and his parents were prominent diplomats in India, so he has a lot of business interest there.
The beautiful thing is that by having diversity in your community, people can divide and conquer and take care of things. I'm not a domain expert at all about India, and I don't do business there because I don't know how. But I do know people who do, and those people are quite interested in Cardano. Given that we have one of the best ways long-term to bring .NET and Java developers into the smart contract ecosystem, there's a very strong play that could be made with taking the large outsourced development shops and training them how to deploy smart contracts in our system.
Emurgo did this with Manmeet with a broader educational base, not just Cardano. They were also looking at Fabric and Ethereum, and I think that's going to pay big dividends in the long term.
That's the advantage of a decentralized ecosystem; everybody has their itch, and everyone is free to go and scratch those itches because it's an open system.
Charles, are you still planning on doing a COVID retreat with Wim Hof, the Iceman, someday? Yes, I am. I was actually planning to do it this year in March, but then the world shut down. I will do it next year, and not only will I do it, it will be televised. Wim and I will broadcast something together. We'll do an AMA in an ice bath and see how long I last. I'll do the entire AMA shirtless in an ice bath, and I'll just keep going until Wim tells me I'm going to die and need to leave. It'll be fun.
If you're ever in Highlands Ranch and want to try red light therapy, let me know. We have a red light bed and red light laser. Trade you some ADA knowledge. I don't know what red light therapy is, so send me an email about it. I'll definitely learn about that.
If you went on Joe Rogan, we'd be rich. I will go on Joe Rogan at some point.
This is an interesting one: Apple wants to produce cars in 2024. What do you think about it? Do you see blockchains being used in the car industry? I'll just comment on Apple real quickly. The difference between Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, in a nutshell, is this: Tim Cook got a phone call from Elon Musk, I think it was in 2008 or 2009, maybe a little later, around 2012. He got a call, and Elon said Tesla wasn't doing so well and wanted to sell Tesla to Apple. Apple didn't even give him the time of day.
Steve Jobs, by contrast, was following a DARPA project called Kalo as early as 2003, which was doing weird AI stuff. He was just waiting for the principals to create a company so he could buy them and bring them into Apple. The company they created was Siri, and he acquired them and turned it into Siri. Brilliant, innovative people have antennas and are always watching for things that you don't expect today but that are coming in five or ten years, asking themselves how to win in 2025, 2030, and so forth.
Musk does that, and Jobs certainly did that. I'd argue that Apple doesn't. Being a battery-powered car company in 2025, Apple adds nothing of material value to that particular industry. If they were really serious about getting into this, they should partner with an existing automobile manufacturer and create a product line for them, as opposed to building their own car. It took Musk about 14 years to learn how to do Tesla, but that's just one man's opinion.
Has your team noticed any major attacks on the network since Shelley launched? No. In fact, we've never had a really major attack. The protocols are well designed, knock on wood.
So, Charles, when will the percentage of blocks assigned to Cardano community pools be at 100%? That's when D equals zero, and it has persistent linear degradation. It'll occur in March. Plus, the full peer-to-peer implementation will fully decentralize all block production and the network.
It's not necessary. Technically, you guys could run 100% of the blocks, but it was a mechanism we put in place in case there was a catastrophic flaw for Ouroboros-Prowse, because Ouroboros-Prowse has never been used in a cryptocurrency before. It felt colossally irresponsible to just say, "Good luck, everybody." We wanted to have a mechanism as a worst-case scenario to recover the network and ensure things function properly.
We were overwhelmed by the quality of the stateful operators, the network quality, and how the network has managed to be resilient and self-sustaining. There are over 1,200 registered stateful operators. If I had a do-over, I probably would have set the D decay at a higher rate so that we would have reached D equals zero by December. But to be frank, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't affect rewards much, and the variance isn't too bad.
Currently, 68% of blocks, already a supermajority, are made by the community. The safety wheels are coming off. It's almost like checkpointing or merge mining to another blockchain when you're small and using that as a second security mechanism, and it all worked out. That's what happens when you plan things for years with brilliant people.
Could you explain shortly, in layman's terms, the difference between centralized XRP and decentralized
So what's going to happen with XRP is that if the Ripple team wins, it would probably make it much more difficult to just blanket call a cryptocurrency a security. It would strengthen the argument that proof of stake does not make your instrument a security because it would create a test that respects decentralization in addition to the other three pillars of the Howey test. If they lose, this doesn't automatically mean that everybody else gets hurt and they all get lumped together. But what it does do is indicate that the SEC is going to look at conduct as much as they do form and function. If conduct is bad, then they'll push the needle a bit on form and function to classify you as a security and regulate you accordingly so they have the ability to pursue enforcement. This is problematic for the industry because there are many factors at play. The investor gets hurt; principally, Ripple is down over 40 percent. It amazes me how emotionally immature some people in this space are, dancing on the grave of Ripple when it's not even dead. At the end of the day, the vast majority of people holding XRP are cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and there's nothing wrong with them. They're perfectly reasonable, legitimate people who just lost nearly half of their wealth because of a regulatory event, and they won't get any recourse at all. There's no right of rescission or anything like that. No one is going to cover that massive market cap loss. There has been enormous wealth destruction as a consequence of this event. The very people who are professed to be protected from this event are the ones who will be hurt the most.
That does not excuse principals taking $600 million. It just doesn't, especially for a central bank function. It's one thing if you get lucky and enter into a strategic partnership, like with a mining service, and you mine thousands of bitcoins in the early days, say 2010 or 2011, and then you divest those. Or you're like Charlie Lee, who mined a lot of Litecoin and then divested it. You got lucky; congratulations. But Ripple was different in that they gave themselves a central bank function and monetized their company through that function. That was intended for the growth and development of the ecosystem first, and should that succeed, then you can, of course, have a windfall later. They had the opportunity for that windfall through equity financing with venture capitalists in California, but they chose to sell the token to people. It's not pretty; it's not clean. I'm not a big fan of that conduct, and I think it is bad for the industry as a whole. There's a reason why Ripple has a bad reputation in certain circles, and people don't view them as a normal cryptocurrency, which is why Vitalik says what he says and so forth.
That said, I think we as an industry need to start working together because if we're divided, it's going to be very easy for us to be picked apart project by project and burned to the ground. It makes a lot more sense for us to identify common threads we have. The Howey test is overly broad; it doesn't work well in a functional regulation sense, especially when you have these financial stem cells. It's not a global thing, and it creates a lot of inconsistencies in the law. It is in everyone's best interest for that to be updated and modernized to meet our needs. We should work together on that. It's also in everyone's best interest for us to get past this proof of stake open question, not just from a regulatory viewpoint but also from a taxation viewpoint, because U.S. taxation is crazy with proof of stake at the moment, and it makes no sense. It needs to be changed.
For my part, I'll work very hard at trying to collaborate with others where it makes sense to create common knowledge, common threads, and common standards. We've had miracles of success in Wyoming, including the election of a U.S. senator who's very pro-crypto. So we're making progress; we really are. By no means doubt that. Also, changes are going to happen in the U.S. Treasury Department. Mnuchin is a scumbag, and he clearly hates our industry and wants to destroy it. He's going to be gone in less than 30 days, and his successor will probably be at least reasonable enough to have a conversation with. That's all we ask as an industry.
Is Goguen on track? Goguen is on track. No delays. Hi, Charles. Cheers from Chile. Hola, como esta. Actually, the CTO, Nico from Amerco, is from Chile. We have a lot of great Chileans in the Cardano community. Why does Brian Armstrong hate you? I don't think Brian Armstrong hates me at all. I've never met the man. Maybe we saw each other once at a conference or exchanged something over Twitter. But Brian's Brian, and I'm Charles. He knows of me, I know of him, and there's no bad blood between our organizations. Coinbase is very busy; they're going through an S1 filing right now. They've had a lot of events, from the New York Times article to some downsizing. Going from a private to a public-traded company is one of the most stressful things you can do, and I think this is Brian's first IPO. It is not easy; it's brutal, absolutely brutal. I don't know how John Doerr did it 192 times. It's hell.
So the last thing Coinbase is thinking about these days is Cardano, okay? We're very low on their list of things to talk about or think about. They have bigger fish to fry and more pressing concerns. All my interactions with Coinbase personnel have been positive and professional. We loved working on the integration of Rosetta. We reintegrated Rosetta, I think, 1.44, and we just recently launched the final version of that library. We're also working on a staking version of that library as well. That's all I can really say about it, but there's no bad blood or bad relationship.
Remember, guys, to us, Cardano is the most important thing in the world. For a different company like Coinbase, it's a five-minute conversation in a 24-hour day, if that. So you just have to be patient. That's why the world is diverse; some people give us more time of day. Patience is key. Good things happen to those who wait.
On a scale of 1 to 10, in your opinion, how bad is Ripple? Probably a seven at the moment. There's going to be 24 months, if not more, of litigation and litigation tail. They have a liquidity crisis and are probably scrambling to keep liquidity for XRP and convince exchanges not to delist them. The market price is going to continue collapsing until some backstop is placed. It makes sense why the SEC does this stuff because if it falls too low, they're trying to provoke class action lawsuits, pushing for rights of rescission. Those will come.
The SEC filing is not just the thing they have to worry about; there's going to be much more aggressive civil litigation from private holders, and perhaps even institutional litigation that occurs. If it gets shaken too badly, then the whistleblowing employees come, and people start jumping from the ship. There could be a bandwagon with other regulatory agencies. In a perverse, worst-case scenario, the CFTC could actually get involved and say, "Hey, we think you might also be a commodity." It could be both a security and a commodity. Go figure. But we think you could be a commodity, and yeah, we're going to charge you with market manipulation or something like that. Or the IRS gets involved, and there's tax kabuki or something. It's unlikely to happen, but it certainly could. Dogpiling is very common in large-scale governmental litigation, and that's a trick the government uses. They say, "Look, if you settle and give us a win, your life is easy. If you fight us, we're going to hammer you. We're going to hit you from all sides in the media and make you look terrible. We're going to hit you with complex litigation that takes a long time to resolve. It's very expensive. We'll try to freeze your accounts wherever we can. We're going to try to inject personal liability and strip you of the corporate veil in these things."
If this were just a normal securities case, I think Ripple would be in very strong hands. In the second video of the three videos I made on the matter, I did mention that. But after reading the 71-page lawsuit, it's clear that the regulator has a strong interest in Chris and Brad. Given that this exists, there needs to be a blood sacrifice at the end of the rainbow, and that's why I say seven. In the second video, I was at about a four or five; now I'm at a seven. It could go up; more facts may materialize.
Charles, how does JPMorgan get away with constant violations and nobody cares? Because JPMorgan has $3 trillion under management and at one point bailed out the U.S. government and helped create the Federal Reserve System. They kind of grandfathered in. That's one side of it. The other side is they do care, and they do get fined. They have paid $19 billion in fines, and people have gone to jail over the last 20 years. This has resulted in restructurings, layoffs, and all kinds of things. The regulator can't shut down the world's largest bank, so they have to use different tools for that. But they certainly can shut down a startup, and they've done that before, like with eGold and these other cases.
Do you think Ripple will settle? I don't even know if they'll have an option to settle. They made some claim that they could, but settlement could have created a situation where they admitted XRP was a security and effectively destroyed the ecosystem. I don't think, given the way the case has been presented and considering they're going after the founders, that it's possible to settle at this juncture. They're going to have to fight it out for a little bit, and both sides are going to have to show what they have before making a decision. Probably by the middle of next year, we'll get more clarity on whether that's a viable path or not. But it's going to get worse before it gets better for them.
Hi, Charles. What separates IOHK from a business operations standpoint compared to Ripple? Everything. We're a software company. We build cryptocurrencies, products, and offer services. We make our revenue from writing code. We don't make our revenue from doing ICOs or other things; it's always been the case. Cardano is a time and materials contract. We were paid in Bitcoin and other things to write software for five years. In that particular deal, I lost money because we went over budget and had to rewrite the software three times. That's okay. The custodial entity of Cardano is the Cardano Foundation, which is based in Switzerland. Then there's a commercialization entity, Amerco, that builds on it, as do others now. There are dozens of them floating around.
No, I've never been talked to or contacted. I'm not on anyone's radar at the moment. You see, I've been in this game for a long time, and I just try to be honest with people. Manage your expectations, raise what you need, tell people what you're going to do, and go do it. Don't leave halfway through and make it someone else's problem. Fight hard to get everything done. It's not easy. If somebody gets a raw deal, even if you don't have a legal obligation to clean that up, see what you can do to help them out. I've always approached business that way.
Like EOS, which raised $4 billion, they didn't need to. Cardano raised a total of $72 million, and Ethereum raised $18 million, and both of them are above EOS. Block.one has this enormous war chest, but they take this bizarre position of having no responsibility to anybody; they do whatever they want. I don't care if I have a contractual responsibility; there is a moral responsibility to ensure that certain things in Cardano get done. I'm not paid to do those things at this point, but I do them because I feel it's the best thing to do. I want a platform to build on for Africa, and there's an expectation that Cardano as an ecosystem should have these features. I created Cardano; I came up with the technology, the science, and I brought the people together to write the code. I feel a moral connection to it.
Smart contracts matter to me; getting good governance in place matters to me. I need to ensure that it's sustainable, stable, and scalable to a point where the whole ecosystem can use that to solve really interesting, cool things. I don't understand why people don't have craftsmanship anymore. When you build something, finish it. Have pride in what you do and the work that you do. This is not just an economic game; it's not just a fun thing to do. It's a lifestyle. Kodawari, the way of life, Reikigai, the relentless pursuit of perfection. When I look at Cardano, I see an opportunity to construct something that the world has never seen before, that didn't exist before. If we get it right, it could conceivably grow over the decades to a system with a billion users and change the way people live. Why would we take it to 70% and then say, "Okay, goodbye, go do something else"? What else am I going to do with my life that's more meaningful and interesting than this?
Now, obviously, economics have to work; you can't work for free in these types of things. That's the point of a treasury function and so forth. You have to get the system to a point where it can accommodate that. It's a decentralized ecosystem, so one vision may get consumed by another vision, and you have to be willing to walk away. I did that with Ethereum in 2014; I didn't create a hostile or contentious fork. I did that with Ethereum Classic in 2017 when it became clear that the treasury wasn't viable at that point. I have no problem letting the ecosystem go on and do its own thing.
With Cardano, there's a very clear expectation. We're dynamic and decentralized, and smart contracts are imminent. We're moving towards that, and you guys are already building things with the dev nets. Good governance is happening. Fund two is underway, and voting is underway. My goal is to get 50% of the people who are eligible to vote voting by the end of Q1. If we can somehow get there, then we can have meaningful participation in voting. Are we done? No, but we've gotten to a point where the community can decide where they want to go next. I'll have an opinion about it, and if you guys like it, we'll do it together. If you don't like it, then I can at least live with the fact that I created something that has self-determinism and the ability to decide where it wants to go and what it wants to do. I'll just keep building on that because it's good enough to get us where we need to go. I'll let you guys know where you can't, and I'll still file CIPs and other things to help us get in that direction. I really would like a billion users from Africa on this system so that they can have economic identity too. That's why we do the things we do.
I care; every line of code matters to me, every paper matters to me, every idea matters to me. In everything we do, I always ask, "Can we do it better? Why don't we have this?" I'm the least patient guy when it comes to that. I hate that we don't have partial delegation yet or hybrid wallets. I hate that I don't have paper wallets in the way I want them. I make videos on it, give explicit instructions, and put tasks down. If I'm left to my own devices, I'll have my guys work 16-hour days, seven days a week. This is why Tam is here, along with a dozen other people in the operations of the company, because they prevent me from burning people out. We have a lot of people over the last five years where I pushed them to the absolute maximum. They were just broken because we worked them so hard. Some loved it, some hated it. One thing I've had to learn is to moderate a little bit, slow it down a bit, and be more systematic. But I've never lost that drive. I want to win. I want something that's never been done before. I want to see something change the world. It's just how I operate; it's how our company operates. That's why we get such great people at this company because they know it's going to be the hardest job they've ever had, but it's also going to be the most rewarding job they've ever had.
Are you still friends with Justin Sun? I know of Justin Sun; I've met him, we've spent time together, and we've had dinner together. Every interaction I've had with Justin has been pleasant and cordial. He has been very nice to me, and I don't have bad interactions with his organization or the Tron ecosystem. So there's no problem there from an interpersonal side. I've never seen anything we could work on together that made sense, but I try to keep good relations with as many people as I can. If people are nice to me, I'll be nice to them. There's a reciprocal relationship there. Last time I saw him was at the Satoshi Roundtable that Bruce Fenton puts on in Mexico in January. I was actually there with William Shatner, of all people.
Are you concerned about quantum computing's effect on cryptocurrency? What's Cardano's plan to counter? We will have a post-quantum plan in 2025 for Cardano.
Could Goguen actually have a summit in person? I'd love to. That'd be a lot of fun. Vaccines, vaccines, vaccines. You guys don't want to hear me talk about vaccines anymore. It's a topic I know a lot about. I've read so much about them because they're kind of the MacGuffin that gets the world back to work, and I've become obsessed with them. But you guys don't like them, so I'll stop talking about them.
Do you think scaling out Ethereum will eventually be possible, or is it just too large a problem to solve? I think they're making a big dent with that too. They're just trying to do too much and, in my view, not in the best and most realistic of ways. They're going to have a lot of setbacks as a consequence. But it's a good setup; I have nothing materially wrong with Ethereum 2. It's just going to take them a few years to get it done. That's okay. I think our approach is much better.
No one go back to normal, Charles. I'm going to take a lot of time off next year and go protest if we don't get back to normal after we have a high vaccination rate. I'm sorry; there's no way they're going to have me wear a muzzle if 70% of the population is vaccinated. These vaccines provide sterilizing immunity. We'll play the game now, but we did our job. We got the vaccines out there, and if people take them, then there is no excuse from an epidemiological viewpoint for this to continue. It must end, and we will make it end.
Pfizer or the Moderna vaccine, which one would you take if you could get either one? The one I would get
If people know that decisions are being made not based on science, facts, and reason, but for political purposes, they become skeptical, especially if the politics of those making the decisions diverge from their own. I understand the hesitancy and fully appreciate it. I'm in a unique position where I can talk on a first-name basis with virologists, pharmaceutical executives, and doctors. I can read clinical data from trials and what's coming through the FDA, and it's not rosy. For example, in the Moderna vaccine trial, 13 people died—six from the vaccine group and seven from the placebo group. There were also three cases of Bell's palsy. In the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson trials, there were cases of transverse myelitis. This is not exactly something that makes you feel like it's as simple as taking an antacid or aspirin. There is certainly something there, and you have to dig through it, think about it, and work through it to understand what's going on. If you don't come from that culture or have that ability, you're likely to take a step back and say, "I'm going to wait."
The same people who told us it was perfectly safe to protest for racial justice but that going to a bar or restaurant would be dangerous are now telling us there's no problem at all with these vaccines and everything's fine. That's the rub, and that's why people are so skeptical and angry about this, leading to the flourishing of conspiracy theories. It means that the systems are broken, and institutional trust is damaged. We have to solve that problem before we can move forward. The good news is that, in my view, the vaccines are actually safe and effective. I do not believe they will cause many problems, and I think they will help break the pandemic, even if we only achieve a 50% or 60% uptake, which is likely given the dynamics at play. This will probably happen by April to June. I'm with Moncef Salawi and others; I'm a bit more optimistic than Vivek is. We'll see what happens, and then the burden is on us to get back to business.
This is a great point too. I find it interesting that there are no real government recommendations for a healthier diet. This is another reason why things are so politicized. Just consider vitamin D: 80% of the people who have died from COVID had vitamin D deficiencies. There is overwhelming evidence that vitamin D contributes to the problem, not just for COVID but for viral infections in general. So where are the recommendations for that? Insulin resistance is another huge problem, not just for COVID but for all the chronic ailments we're starting to see—Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, hypertension, heart disease, etc. Where are the diet recommendations to resolve that? Instead, we give people insulin when they're insulin resistant. That won't fix the problem. The single greatest sin is the dietary guidelines from the federal government. They are broken and outdated, an artifact of Ancel Keys from the 1950s, solidified in the 1970s. They've killed more people than anything else in America combined.
Charles, do you plan on doing any projects with Australia, or are you already? We have some developers in Australia, for example, Eric DeCastro, who does DV sync. I was in Canberra not too long ago, but I'll come back. The whole world got shut down, so we will be there. Did we lose the comment feed? I don't see any comments flowing through.
Alright, while we wait for comments to aggregate, I'll go ahead and throw in a joke. I think you guys are going to like this one. So, there's this guy driving his truck down the road in Kansas, going about 60 miles an hour. For you Europeans, that's about 80 or 90 kilometers an hour. He's cruising along when he sees a small animal in his rearview mirror. As it gets closer, he realizes it's a chicken. He notices it's a three-legged chicken, which he thinks is the craziest thing. Suddenly, the chicken passes him, and he thinks, "Wow, that chicken must be going fast." So, he speeds up a little and starts following the chicken because he's never seen a three-legged chicken before.
The chicken then darts off down a dirt road to the left. He thinks, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do," and decides to follow it. He drives down the dirt road until he finds an old farmhouse. He figures this is where the chicken lives. He gets out of the truck, walks over, and knocks on the ranch door. An old man answers. The truck driver says, "Sir, I'm sorry for bothering you, but I was driving down the road and saw a three-legged chicken come this way. I was curious if you had anything to do with that." The old man replies, "Oh, I sure do. I breed them."
The truck driver, taken aback, asks, "You breed three-legged chickens? Why in the world would you do that?" The old man says, "Well, I like the drumstick, and the wife likes the drumstick, and the kid likes the drumstick. I got so tired of fighting over them that I figured if I had a three-legged chicken, we'd all get a drumstick." The truck driver, still flabbergasted, eventually asks, "Well, how do they taste?" The old man replies, "I have no idea. I've never been able to catch one." I stole that one from Ronald Reagan.
Alright, I'm not getting any Facebook or YouTube comments, so I'll just go through the backlog and then we'll cut it there. Hi, Charles, how about season 2 of The Mandalorian? Star Wars has a new hope? As long as Kathleen Kennedy is there. I saw a report that Disney will only cast a person of color or a woman for the lead character in their new Star Wars series. It's woke wars. As long as Kathleen Kennedy is there, it's not about entertainment or story and narrative; it's about an agenda. They got lucky that Jon Favreau didn't get the memo and knew how to create a good Star Wars series, but I'm deeply concerned that this will just embolden Kathleen Kennedy to continue damaging Star Wars and pushing a radical social justice agenda instead of making entertaining content. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm not optimistic, and we'll see what happens. There's just no place for me in that ecosystem. After The Last Jedi, all my love for Star Wars died; it just died on the vine, and I was apathetic. I didn't even care about Rise of Skywalker. I was blown away by The Mandalorian; I thought it was great. We'll see if they keep building on that success with the new series coming out, but I am not optimistic because Kathleen Kennedy is still in control.
We're only getting the Twitter feed; I'm not getting the YouTube. Alright, well, we'll cut it here then. Thank you, everybody. This is a Christmas special. I had a lot of fun, and I hope you all did too. Until next time, have a wonderful day. I hope you all enjoy Christmas and the holidays with your families. Have a crazy Kwanzaa and a happy Hanukkah. I think there are 12 or 13 major holidays over this 60-day period. Then you Zoroastrians have a few ceremonies and festivals, so everybody have a good time. The most important thing, regardless of faith or culture, is family. Make sure you find a way to spend some time with loved ones. I know I will. Cheers.
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