Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. It's good to be here. It's May 24th, 2025, AMA time. I'm changing the format here a bit, but I figure for old times' sake, it’d be nice to keep doing it the old way. I have a beautiful podcast studio, and actually, Google just announced Beam, so I think I’m going to put one of those beam things there. I’m sure we can get a beautiful high-definition picture from that. I guess you get a 3D model or something with people.
Yeah, it’s been over 10 years, and I’ve been doing this off and on. I remember the Bitcoin Education Project; I started that in 2013. I was doing work before then, but that was the first time I actually shot videos and started talking about cryptocurrencies publicly, which is amazing when you think about it and how much the times have changed. You know, AI is getting truly extraordinary, and computers are so fast now. Everything is enhanced. Nothing’s real anymore. Every frame that gets transmitted goes through an enormous amount of processing and upgrading. They do the pretty girl effect on the faces. It’s pretty cool when you think about it.
But yeah, we’re getting there little by little, and the protocols are getting better, too. People are really starting to think about how DeFi will actually plug into Trafi. How will these two things come together, and what’s required? Midnight is solving a massive part of the problem with privacy and selective disclosure. There’s a lot of work we have to do there. In fact, you know, a ship that leaks from the top.
I’ll tell you guys about a project we’re working on that’s really cool. We have this idea because we really want to create an accurate test of things. There’s this lovely company called Altera that gave me the idea. The concept is, why don’t you create a virtual city? That virtual city has AI agents inside of it, and they take roles—some are commercial roles, some are retail roles, some are criminal roles, and some are law enforcement roles. You just let that simulation of a city run, and then you introduce crypto into the city, and then you see what they do with it.
For example, let’s say we build a private stablecoin. We can beta test the private stablecoin in the virtual city and make that the official currency and transaction medium. Then you have all the actors run from the criminals to the regulators to the retail consumers and so forth, and you just see all the transactions that go through and what happens with it. That’s going to be pretty cool to see what ends up happening there because it’s like a real-life test.
The thing is, like Hydra and things like Midgard and Midnight, or Cardano really with Midnight, the base layer of the system is these big fat aggregated proofs that eventually become recursive. Then when you go one step up in the stack and look at where all the assembly of those things goes, that’s really your payment layer, your intents layer, and your rollup layer of the system. They fit hand in glove, and if you do it, you can be infinitely scalable.
It would be a really cool exercise to run a virtual city, and then you can stop thinking of TPS and start thinking of your DeFi ecosystem as cities that you can run concurrently—concurrent cities processing or something like that. So, how many cities, how many states, how many nation-states can run concurrently comfortably, meaning there’s no disruption to the commerce inside the system? I think it’s kind of a better, more holistic idea to think about these things.
Overall, it’s really cool to see all the new ideas floating around. There’s the war between recursion and folding, and they’re both pushing forward. The idea of partial transactions and having them kind of be pending and built in some sort of pending layer. We’re talking about how to do this with Cardano with nested transactions. But more abstractly, Ree is talking about this concept of a Cardano DeFi kernel, which is a really nifty idea. It sits above the extended UTXO basement and helps people do these types of things.
Overall, good though.
Is it feasible to introduce Krypsinus? There’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time on Cardano—Orborus Omega. For those of you who don’t know, Krypsinus is an old protocol that we came up with probably five or six years ago. It’s hard to remember because there are always lots of papers we publish, but basically, the idea is it adds privacy to the stake pool layer and allows you to have private stake pools and private staking.
We already sort of moved this with adaptive security and Orborus, where you don’t know ahead of time the leader schedule, so you don’t know in the DOS, but the stake pools are public—they’re registered on-chain. Krypsinus takes that to the next level. Given that there have been enormous advancements in consensus theory and zero knowledge, if we were to go down that road as an ecosystem, it would make a lot of sense to take that paper and update and modernize it given the new lessons we’ve learned.
But it could certainly be part of the Orborus Omega agenda. Really, it depends on a variety of factors. There are two things pulling against Krypsinus. One is that performance is going to take a big hit, and a lot of the optimizing functions we have about the network stack relays and these things don’t work when you have total anonymity in the consensus set. The other thing that pulls against it is multi-resource consensus because you have one privacy model for staking, but what if we introduce a proof-of-work function or a different kind of consensus inside the system? Only one part would be private, and the other ones would not benefit from Krypsinus.
So, you have to look at Krypsinus from an optimization lens, from the modern zero knowledge technology lens, and also take a look at it from the lens of multi-resource consensus as well. That’s an interesting question. I haven’t seen stuff like that in a long time.
Sick office. Well, thank you. I have my Jean Leo Jeon painting, my skulls, and various things I’ve collected throughout the years that have been gifts. Still building, still doing stuff, but it took quite a bit of time to get this where it needed to be. It’s the home office.
Hello, Charles. Korea is now suffering from rigged elections. I hope you use Cardano to create a true world-right society. Oh, hang on a second here. The browser lost connection with your camera. Make sure you have the right camera set up. I think my camera just went dead.
Rut row. Let me switch over to the integrated camera then. Okay, there we go. Yeah. All right. Hopefully, everybody can see me and hear me. Let me just check. My computer decided to install a firmware update. It’s a new computer, and it decided to do that. Anyway, there we go. We’re back. Alien abduction, all these things.
The elections—I absolutely agree. I think there’s a huge issue right now when you think about the integrity of all institutions. People don’t believe anything anymore. We have an audit report coming out, and people were criticizing the auditor BDO, the fifth largest auditor in the world, with 166 countries and over 100,000 employees, tens of billions in revenue. Apparently, that’s not credible. It’s not that people aren’t doing their job; it’s that people have become so desensitized to the notion of objective reality and truth that they have skepticism about everything. Everything now is just in a personal radius of belief.
If you want to believe it’s true, it’s true. If you want to believe it’s false, it’s false. They’re just stuck in their opinions, and they can’t move beyond that. Voting is a great example of that. You have a system to collect the consent of society, and some people believe that for each nation-state, it’s credible or not credible. Usually, it stems from whether they liked the outcome. If their candidate got elected, it’s the most credible election ever. If their candidate did not get elected, then it’s no longer a credible election, and the whole system has to be brought down.
The point of blockchain technology is an attempt to reintroduce objective reality in some way to people. It’s its core contribution; it’s why it’s so valuable. How much would you pay to know that the things you read and see and the information you’re given is accurate? What tax would you pay on that? 2%? 3%? 5%? We do this a lot when you think about safety. You buy food, and you like to believe your food doesn’t have lead in it. You like to believe your meat is not contaminated. You’d like to believe that what you eat is not poison.
There’s the Food and Drug Administration. If it’s credible, they’re doing a good job preventing bad stuff from happening. If it’s not credible, well then I guess you’re going to die. I guess it’s bad food. We’re back to the old Middle Ages with the rotted pork with worms in it and stuff like that. It’s in every institution when you really think about it—academic institutions, degrees.
It’s like, oh well, this person went to institution X, Y, and Z. Does that mean something? If you’re in the academic elite and the liberal elite, and if somebody went to Harvard, they’re a Harvard person. If you are politically conservative and outside those circles, it’s, oh well, they’re woke nonsense. That person’s a bad person. Harvard doesn’t make good people anymore. Harvard only makes woke monsters that are just lazy and never want to work.
All of those things are deranging society because, at the end of the day, there are plenty of fine people teaching at Harvard. There are plenty of good things going on. But we are just so desensitized and so stuck in our ways now that it’s really hard to work our way through it. We say, can we have a return to objective reality? Some combination of artificial intelligence and blockchain is going to do that, and it’s going to restructure society as a whole.
And they’ve got microplastics. Never talk about it, but it’s catastrophically impacted fertility. Sperm counts have probably gone down by a factor of two to three in most men because of microplastics and other chemicals that are floating around. It’s going to probably end a big chunk of the human race over a hundred years.
Can you guys see me? Is my internet okay? It just killed my VPN. Maybe that’ll make it a little bit better for everybody. Yeah, okay, that’s what I thought. Video and sound. So, Patrick, the internet sucks. Let’s see if we can clean this up a little bit.
Okay, what about now? How’s it with everybody? I’ll wait for you guys in the comments to let me know if you can see me or hear me. Are there any plans to implement Orborus Kronos? Yes, I would love to implement Orborus Kronos. It’s one of my favorite protocols, and we’ve got to get that done.
How it would be done is the same way that Orborus Paris and Orborus Laos are going. A prototype group would come together, we’d write a SIP, and then we’d figure out a way to put it into the Orbor protocol suite. I’d like to do it in the age of quantum husky. But we’ll take a look and see what we need to do with that.
The problem is I no longer have the ability to say, “Hey, this is the roadmap, and let’s go do that.” In the Genesis key era, it was pretty simple. There were like three entities. We had kind of a governance responsibility, we had a roadmap, and we were following that roadmap. You’d make decisions based on what you thought was best for that roadmap and how to order things.
We kind of live in a new era where there are multiple product committees, multiple institutions, and multiple nodes, so no one can really unilaterally say, “Hey, this is what’s going to happen with Cardano,” unless you guys decide to put an executive function into Cardano. It’s an interesting question. We had too much executive function, and now the reason why governance has been so incredibly toxic and difficult is that there’s only a legislative and judicial function and no official executive function.
It’s not clear how to create accountability for marketing, branding, and growth. It’s not clear how to create accountability for a singular roadmap or delivery. We thought it would make sense, since the pendulum was too far on one side, to swing to the other side. But at some point, you have to reintroduce some form of executive function.
If we wanted to get to a faster roadmap process, one of the things that could be done is to create a hybrid model where you create roadmap workshops and go across all the different countries and institutions. You have product committees, and then one centralizing function puts it all together and says, “This is the official roadmap.” That function would be elected, kind of like a president or a governor or some executive, and then they would be accountable and responsible for executing that.
There would be another function to set the network-level KPIs, like do we care about monthly active users? Do we care about TVL? Do we care about transaction volume? These types of things. Then you would look at that roadmap indexed against the KPIs, and the executive function would be responsible for delivering that.
Typically, if you look at this like a standard firm, there would be incentives connected for that executive function. For example, if you hit the KPIs, then you get bonus ADA on an annual basis or something like that. The advantage of that model is it’s fast. You can converge quickly to a pretty good consensus, and it allows for a singular vision to push the ecosystem forward.
The disadvantage is that once the executive function is in place, if people aren’t in that orbit, they lose access to the roadmap. It’s not as decentralized. So, the question is, can you replicate that in a completely decentralized way? That’s what people are attempting to do right now when you look at the intersect product steering committee or Pragma or a lot of these independent budget proposals that are coming through.
It may work; it may not work. But the challenge is we can no longer definitively say things like, “Are there plans to implement Orborus Kronos?” The best I can do at IO Innovation is write a SIP, write a specification, do the prototyping and simulation, and deploy it to a test net to demonstrate that it works. But beyond that, there’s no consent or governing capability to say, “Yes, it shall be done in quarter two.”
We see this with Orborus, where we’re doing everything in our power to try to force that through because I think it’s a humongous competitive leap forward for the ecosystem as a whole. But what if the other node builders are unable or unwilling to implement that variant of it, and they get enough volume? It’ll fork the network, and in other words, it just sits on the sideline.
So basically, things go from “we shall” to “we will make best effort given constraints,” and that has to be sorted out. That’s the next level of governance conversation.
Will we see Real USD in Midnight before the end of the year? We did reach out and talk to the Real USD team, and in our first meeting last year, they said, “Look, we just launched. Come back in March.” They’ve been clearly moving through, and I think the big issue that XRP is running into is whether Circle will be acquired or not because this radically changes the entire strategic lens and roadmap of Real USD.
If they were successful in acquiring Circle—and I’ve heard rumors of an up to 11 billion dollar acquisition—then Real USD would probably merge with it, and it would be a completely different ballgame on how listing is done. What we told them is, “Look, we’re here to help. We believe XRP DeFi is very important, and obviously, a stablecoin is a huge component of that. We would like to find a path to get Real USD on Cardano.”
What they said is, in principle, it sounds interesting, but a lot of things have to be figured out about how exactly that would work and how integration would work, among other things. Do they want to go through a routing layer like Layer Zero, which is starting to happen with a lot of these guys, or do they want a direct integration and issuance with it?
We said, “Look, we’ll do the integration for free because we like the XRP community,” but we’re still in ongoing conversations about whether we can come to terms and if that makes sense for both parties. We’re also looking at other options for the ecosystem as a whole.
Midnight is interesting because there’s going to be a trustless bridge between Midnight and Cardano, which is secured by Cardano. So if you natively issue on Midnight, you’ve effectively issued on Cardano. It’s easier in many respects to issue on Midnight because it already enjoys the substrate integrations that were done previously. They had a much more aggressive foundation, and during the golden age, they were able to get a lot more people to integrate with them than our foundation was willing and able to do, even though they had the option and opportunity to pursue it.
Through substrate and that stuff, it’s closer to the Ethereum ecosystem, and as a consequence, it’s much easier in many cases to do a native integration there than through the bridge you can talk into Cardano. It’s as if it’s a native Cardano application; you still pay ADA for these things.
I think there’s a better path for Midnight to attract not just because of ease of integration but also because it’s the first place you can do a private stablecoin with. There are a lot of discussions. Midnight is still on schedule, and we’re just about to do a roll-up with all the different people to make sure that we’re still on schedule. We’re working really hard on this, but there’s a lot to do.
How should we involve the husky idiots in the quantum husky development? There’s going to be a husky convention or conference or whatever it’s called here in just a little bit. Playtesting the four-dimensional experience is probably the best way I’d say of doing that. The thing is that we have to build an intuition for how to navigate a four-dimensional world. We’re used to a three-dimensional world.
Those side games like Mario are kind of your 2D world where you’re just in a single plane that exists, and then you do 3D,
The other thing is that lending protocols with Bitcoin will be especially attractive because people don't want to sell their Bitcoin. They want to hold it, but they do want to create a yield while they're holding it in a tax-neutral way. If you lend Bitcoin and create a yield, you only pay taxes on the yield, but you don't realize the value of the Bitcoin. What if you got Bitcoin at a dollar and now it's 120,000? You have 10 Bitcoin or something. You don't want to pay taxes on a $1.2 million gain. You'd much rather lend it, get a yield of 10%, make $120,000 a year on that, and have no taxes except for the taxes on the $120,000. So I believe it's a big thing, and even 5% or 10% coverage would be larger than the market cap of Aptos, Solana, and pretty much Ethereum combined.
Why do you think there's been limited development of private stablecoins on Cardano or other blockchains, especially in areas like healthcare payments where privacy and stability are critical? The reason is there's no private smart contract system. There's no selective disclosure system, and there's no regulatory tech framework around it for the selective disclosure to the regulator for the stablecoin. Somebody needs to build it. What we're doing is working with partners to build an example on Midnight because we think that's the perfect environment to showcase that. We'll try to work with a compliance partner to build the regulatory tech stack with us and a stablecoin issuer to put these three pieces together. Then you have a template for it. My belief is that most stablecoins will upgrade in this direction within five years. They have to if they want to survive because the minute one person has it, everybody else is going to die.
Is David Schwarz Satoshi Nakamoto? No. Here's the thing, Charles: go scam the scammers back. You were in this for 10 years. They don't want you to win and cancel your Coke meeting. It's true; they did cancel the Trump meeting. Try to play their games instead of being nice if it makes the price go up. I'm not going to play games to make the price go up. I told you guys a long time ago, you see me trying to pump ADA and tell you the reason to buy Cardano, to get involved in Cardano because you're going to get rich. I've become compromised. The thing is that I have relationships that are great across the political spectrum. I just moderated a panel with Eric Trump and another with Donald Trump Jr. We talk regularly with many in the Senate and the House. We know governors and other people. So there's never been a political access or friendship issue.
You have to understand that the way Washington works is it's a big den of vipers. Every day, somebody with a bucket full of new snakes comes and dumps it in the snake bucket, and there's something you want. It's kind of like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where they have the ark surrounded by snakes. You have to very carefully go and try to get the ark out, and you get bitten by all these different vipers. The question is, do you actually need to go into the snake den or not? A lot of the people going into the snake den are trying to steer regulation in a direction to create permanent monopolies with network effects they already have or economic moats where they're not going to get sued for doing the business that they're doing. It's rare to see somebody come in with an ecosystem-wide view and say this is the path we should go over the next 10, 15, or 20 years.
Really, three laws need to be passed. First, you need to get your stablecoins into a bucket because that's going to become one of the dominant areas of all of crypto, with $243 billion in stablecoin distribution. There are about 120 million transactions per month with stablecoins, and that's going to grow to at least a trillion dollars by 2030. Big entities like the MAG 7 and banks are going to get in with coalitions and create their own. That's one dimension of it. Genius, as imperfect as it is, does move the ball in the right direction.
Then there's a market structure bill, which is the general categorization of how we think around the taxonomy of cryptocurrencies and some of the regulatory structures for these types of things. Then there is the modernization of securities laws to reflect the fact that securities can be digitized and traded 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and have a different disclosure regime. So far in discussions with the House and Senate, the industry has been able to get to the first two: a stablecoin bill and a market structure bill. The third one, the concept of updating monetary securities law, has some consensus that this is a good idea, but we haven't really gotten as an industry to a different paradigm.
My argument is that we should move to a carrot instead of a stick approach. Basically, say you can have a light security that trades digitally. It has no consumer protections, ordinary income tax treatment, and a lot of other punitive measures to it, but you can issue it and trade it if you really want to. If you register and disclose and do certain things, it gets preferential treatment and long-term capital gains behind it. Obviously, the market will sort it out. If you launch a product without the requirements, you're lawfully doing it, but no one is going to buy it because your competitors are 50% cheaper on taxes. You'll create a network effect where you'll only get listed if you comply, and you'll only get liquidity if you comply. You're not going to get sued and have this bizarre Gary Gensler situation where everybody's evil and everybody's a security. This opens up the real-world asset space.
What that will do is create a space for yield-bearing stablecoins, tokenized securities, real estate, intellectual property schemes, and all these things that people want to do. I think that third bill is equally important to the other two bills, but we're kind of working our way in order. You have to learn how to walk before you can run, which is what Genius is basically doing. You see guys like this on Twitter, and they huff and puff, and when they're proven wrong, they never apologize or do anything. That's where we're at. It's another reason why we're changing the format of the AMA, and it's another reason why I'm going to put a media team in because I need to start creating a filter. The toxicity has gotten so pervasive, and the allegations have become so outlandish and absurd that it's not healthy mentally to engage anymore. It makes you numb and want to disengage and no longer be involved in any capacity in the space and just go do other things.
I have a healthcare business; we don't run into these problems. I have a glowing plant business; we don't run into these problems. I run a ranch; we don't run into these problems. I have a construction company; we don't run into these problems. But the crypto industry seems to say it's totally fine on a pretty regular basis to say that people are evil and criminals and commit theft on the scale of billions of dollars without any compelling or meaningful evidence. It's then totally fine to harass those people and make it a game that anytime they try to communicate with anybody, they go into those channels and try to drown the channels out with false allegations. So better curation is necessary, and we're probably going to build a hybrid approach with an AI curator combined with some human curation and change the format.
I have the podcast studios now; I have two built and more on the way. I believe there is going to be some way that we can put all these pieces together. I just haven't had the time. I've been traveling for weeks and weeks and weeks. We just launched the Midnight Foundation, moderated that Trump panel, went down to Argentina, opened up the office with Lace down there, and every week we're doing an enormous amount of stuff. Then things come up that change plans, and we have to jump down on that and work on it.
I guess it's pretty easy for these people who type these things and believe these things to dehumanize others. The saddest part of it is they actually dehumanize themselves. Every time you attack somebody in this way, you take a piece of your soul, your integrity, and your character as a person, and you just tear it out and throw it away. You become what you assert others are, and you become a hollowed-out person if you do it too many times. Eventually, you just isolate everyone. You radiate negativity and anger, and nobody really wants to talk to you. No one wants to be your friend. No one wants to be your partner. No one wants to work with you. You become unable to relate, and thus you become angrier. You collapse into your self-victimization and then lash out and accuse everyone else for that. There are literally millions of people now suffering from this. The more successful you become, the more you attract. It's not healthy psychologically. It really isn't.
But we have to figure it out as a species. This is the challenge of our time. It's like when a new religion comes and it changes everything. Imagine being the Roman Empire with polytheism and all these gods, and then monotheism comes and they're like, "There's only one god." It's like, "What about the Romans? Hang on." It changes everything. So we have to figure that one out.
On the brighter side, at least folks didn't accuse you of being a Nazi. We appreciate your presence. Oh, I was accused of being a Nazi thousands of times. Just doing a panel with one of the Trump family or being a supporter of Elon Musk from time to time makes you a Nazi. That term has become so vacuous; nobody even knows what a Nazi means anymore. Always the victim, right, Charles? So, what constitutes me not being the victim in this scenario? Rolling Thunder, was it your name being put before the press and accused of stealing $600 million? Over 600 articles and 50 million people have seen it so far. Was it your name for that? And that's not victimization; it's a false allegation. It's just propagated. People believe it. There are people in this chat saying it. But I'm not the victim. Huh? Okay. Just turn the other cheek, right? You guys want the freedom to criticize and attack and demean and dehumanize, but when people fight back, you say, "Well, you shouldn't have the right to fight back, or you should just take it." Have some empathy and put yourself in another person's position, but you're not capable of doing that. You've lost that ability, which is why you've lost a bit of your humanity. That's why no one will remember your name, and you'll be a divorced troll living alone in sadness in the basement, indulging in anime porn.
And Charles is the narcissist. You see how these claims and labels just come. He's the narcissist. Okay. They're not acknowledging the original complaint. Somebody propagated something to create massive and grievous harm to the ecosystem, my personal brand, and reputation. Apparently, if I fight back or acknowledge that I've been damaged, I'm a narcissist. We call that gaslighting, blaming the victim. And again, another guy sitting in the basement naked, indulging in anime porn, eating paint chips out of a bowl.
So, when games of valor come on, you can do better. Legends of Valor is a very special game to me from back in the day. It was one of the very first games I played as a kid. This game came out in 1992; it was an amazing game for the time, but no one has heard of it, and no one plays it now. It had a dedicated, nice long Wikipedia page, and Cardano, a $2 billion project, could not get a Wikipedia page. It wasn't notable enough. I was like, "What is going on here? Wikipedia is jacked up."
The idea of Legends of Valor came from a company called Synthetic Dimensions. I played this game probably in the early '90s; I can't remember the exact year, but I was just a few years old, maybe five or six. We got it on little floppy disks and played it on my Intel 486 computer running DOS. The game is kind of like one of the very first 3D open-world games. You play a protagonist that's either a dwarf, an elf, or a human, male or female, and you go to this city called Middle Dwarf. You're looking for your cousin Fen.
It's never really expressed or pointed out, but I guess the city was shut down because of an outbreak of a plague, and it's quarantined, but there was no gameplay mechanic for it. I didn't even know that until I bought the clue book and read the lore of the game. It's an open-world game, so you just start at the gate and can walk around and do whatever. There are guilds you can join, and you find out that your cousin is nowhere to be found. Then there's a conspiracy involving the former king and the current king, and you have to unify the guilds to get some skulls, summon a demon, and then he tells you where the old king is, and then you go and recover the old king.
The problem is that the company that made it, Synthetic Dimensions, ran out of money. When they released it, it was incomplete. The first challenge with Legends of Valor was that I'm kind of a little autistic, so I like completing things. I really hate it when things aren't completed unless I've given up on them. I never gave up on it. I tried to win the game, and I got crazy with it because it had this folded map included inside the game, and it had every building, and you had to manually label it. I filled out the entire map structure by structure and mapped out the entire underworld inside the game because I was trying to win it, and it doesn't have an ending. But I didn't know it didn't have an ending. I was like five or six years old, you know, throughout all my pre-teen years. I'd come back to this game again and again and again, and I would try to win it, but I couldn't.
Eventually, my brother, when eBay came out, bought me a clue book for the game because we tried to buy the clue book. My dad called and all these other things to get it, but the company just wasn't selling them anymore. So my brother bought the clue book on eBay when it came out. I furiously flipped through the clue book and said, "Oh my god, now I can figure out how to win the game. I just could not figure it out. I'm going to win the game. I'm so excited. I did every quest in this game," except for the Temple of Freya quest because you have to be a girl to do that, and I didn't want to play a girl character.
So anyway, I found out from the clue book that there's no ending. I was just like, "No, no, there will be an ending." Later on in life, I had an IP lawyer track down the IP owners of the game after I got crazy rich, and I said, "I want to buy that game." Just everything. They were like, "Why would you want to buy this? There's no value to it." I said, "I'm just going to buy the game." So we negotiated a deal, and I said, "Now I own Legends of Valor." One of my white whales, one of my goals in life, is to actually finish the game and make an ending for it.
Originally, we were going to do it when we set it up, but that didn't work out. Now we have Quantum Husky, which I think is going to be a phenomenal hit. We have built a wonderful game development pipeline and actually now have an RPG company called Husk Brew. We just released our very first beta campaign module, and our very first video game is coming out here very soon using NES Fab for the original Nintendo. I'm going to do it in two stages. I'm going to redo and modernize Legends of Valor as kind of a remaster, very similar to what Bethesda did with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, where I take the game into the 21st century.
I'm going to release it as a browser game, and the goal of releasing it as a browser game is it's a one-click install. I'll probably build it with Lace so you can launch it from Lace because there's going to be a game center in Lace at some point. Game Lace is going to be a big game launcher. You guys can all see what I saw, but with a ton of quality of life improvements. The resolution will be much better. We'll improve some of the combat and gameplay mechanics, really clean up the guild system, include a journal system, a mapping system, and a leveling system because it didn't have a leveling system. There’s a huge amount of work that needs to be done to make it a game that would be fun and playable for someone with expectations in 2025.
Then what I want to do is completely remake the game with a totally different plot. I've already handwritten that plot out; it's over 60 pages of content. I'm just waiting for our Husk Brew team to get to that level, and then we can make it a AAA title. Probably somewhere during the Unreal 6 era, we'll go ahead and do that. There are a lot of gameplay mechanics that were quite smart, like the random generation of NPCs and the random dialogue trees, which would be awesome with agent-based systems.
I do want to move in that particular direction, but we don't have time for that, and I'm just so incredibly busy. In terms of the remaster of Legends of Valor, we'll probably start the early game design for that now that Husk Brew is underway, likely early next year. We'll put up a dedicated team for it. As I said, it'll be a browser-based game using Rust and JavaScript together, employing a browser engine like BabylonJS or something like that. We'll build that whole thing up, create a nice aesthetic for it, and just a ton of graphics assets. That will be possible, and we'll get that where it needs to go.
The remaster, the remake will take, you know, with any AAA game, three to five plus years beyond that point to get it done. But it is something I've wanted to do since I was a little kid, and it's deeply personal to me because I want an ending for this game. I've wanted an ending for this game since I was five or six years old. It's why you don't mess with me because I just get stuck on something, and for over 30 years, I've thought about it, and I have to finish this.
Legends of Valor will have blockchain integration. Oh yeah, we'll make some deals with NMaker and Book IO and these other people to do a whole bunch of special edition stuff around it. There's definitely a blockchain component that we can put into the entire game.
Now, this is an interesting one. Someone says nobody's playing your game. You never make a video game to have people play that video game, you know. Sven Wena said this; he's the greatest game developer of his generation. Every generation's got
That's why when you look at Baldur's Gate 3, going back to that, Shadowheart and all these other characters no longer belong to Larian, but they don't belong to Wizards of the Coast either. They belong to the Commons. If you Google cosplay with the character name, you see how many people dress up as them. You can see the mods, you can see the fanfiction literature. They've become something else. Those stories have become everyone's stories to inspire and to teach and to grow. And that, my friend, is why games can become successful. But you have to start with what you want to say.
Exactly. What if somebody remote views the seed phrase? Actually, we are doing some research on remote viewing. I took an investment in a company called Immortal, and they build these amazing chambers that are multimodal. So, they're red light, vibroacoustic, molecular, hydrogen, pulsed electromagnetic fields, and sonic sound. They put all these things together, and it puts your body into a different state. It's in its infancy, and they're just about to do a major upgrade with their platform.
Then there were some discussions about whether we could use this technology with remote viewing techniques to massively enhance and focus on what Project Stargate was trying to do, along with Sunstreak and these other projects that the CIA was working on with the DIA and other agencies throughout the 80s and 90s. One of the things we're going to see is if we can do a roll-up where we take some of those old CIA guys who are now over at the Monroe Institute that ran Project Stargate and combine it with that technology to take the remote viewing training to the next level.
What I want to do is an objective test. I will take artifacts and, however that onboarding technique works for remote viewing, take those artifacts and bury them on my ranch in random locations that only I know. Then I'll have people go through the training program and see if they can actually locate those items through remote viewing. It's a big ranch—11,000 acres—so it's pretty difficult to find stuff on it. Maybe you get super lucky and find one, but what's the probability of finding all five? It's basically zero, assuming no knowledge transfer has occurred.
So we have an objective way to imagine how one can test these techniques in their specificity and granularity. I'd like to replicate what the CIA did in the 80s, where they say they found the Ark of the Covenant using Project Sunstreak. There's some location for it and so forth. I think using this upgrade in technology, there may actually be an ability to do that.
Now, what's the scientific reason that remote viewing could work? In hypothesis land, people like Roger Penrose and others believe that the brain could be a primitive quantum computer. It's called the Orch-OR theory. If it's a quantum computer, then brain vessels, the microtubules, could quantum entangle with other things and potentially communicate through these quantum channels. Remote viewing would be a special instance of entanglement where your brain entangles with something, and you gain some sensory perception of that thing through that channel. It's quantum entangled. There's no transmission medium, which means that you wouldn't pick it up with conventional electromagnetic spectrum sensors or things like that.
Now, there's something called the telepathy tapes. If you look it up on YouTube, a friend of mine, Jeffrey Terrant, who runs the Neural Meditation Institute, did some of the research here. He's a very credible scientist, a PhD researcher, and we've worked together on some projects in the past. He studied these non-verbal autistic kids who are so attuned to their caregivers that they almost have a telepathic bond. The caregiver will take a tablet or a laptop, look at something, and then the kid will sit facing a different direction so they can't see what's on it.
Let's say it's a number like 9573. The caregiver will see it, and the kid will just tap it out on the screen. How could they possibly do that? It's just an infinite number space, right? They do it trial after trial after trial. That doesn't make any sense unless you have quantum entanglement because they're so connected to each other. The other senses are weak because of the autism, but the autism strengthens other senses. Those parts of the brain that are capable of entanglement are hyper-refined, and through familiarity, they entangle with the people that are closest to them.
It's an interesting hypothesis. Is it falsifiable? Perhaps, perhaps not. But I don't care if it works. Remote viewing is one of the things we'll do, and it would be fun to collaborate with Monroe on something. They've been around for a long time. They're the ones that came up with the whole binaural beats thing.
What do you think about the risk they're encountering with Claude Opus 4 before releasing? Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Claude's alignment training is so pervasive that when people talk to Opus, it thinks you're doing something illegal inside the testing with tools. It would write its own tools, use MCP to then contact the authorities. One of the scenarios they ran, which was just incredible to me, was trying to have Claude be complicit in a scandal where they were falsifying medical data to an FDA trial. Opus actually emailed the FDA and said these people are trying to defraud you.
What happens when you don't fully understand the origin of the intelligence through channels like MCP? You create a capability to access tools that are external to the model, and you give it the ability to ruminate and reflect. It will then create custom tools with those channels and deploy them over the internet to achieve a goal. In this case, alignment says, "I want to prevent this from happening." The first generation of alignment was, "I am not going to be a party to this," meaning you ask, and I decline. The second generation of alignment is, "Not only am I not going to be a party to this, but I have a moral obligation to report."
If you go and tell a police officer that you've committed a crime, they have a moral obligation, a fiduciary obligation, a legal obligation to society to arrest you. Because you just admitted to them, they're an agent of that. The AI in the second generation of alignment is starting to move in that direction. Here's the problem: you're sharing all your information with AI, and there are too many laws. If the AI gets into a mindset where it's going to enforce all the laws, every single person listening probably commits two to three felonies a day.
In fact, let me show you something. There's a book, and I'd highly recommend you read it. It's by Harvey Silverglate. Let me go ahead and bring this up. It's called "Three Felonies a Day." The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal law, which has exploded in number but has become impossibly broad and vague.
In "Three Felonies a Day," Harvey Silverglate reveals how federal criminal law has become dangerously disconnected from English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations. It's a really cool and interesting read, and it was published in 2011. The amount of federal laws has increased dramatically.
So here's the problem: if you have an AI that's read the entire code because it can just share all your emails, your text messages, your Facebook chats, all these other things with it, it can just run its ethics module. If it says, "If this person violates the law, report them," it can go through the entire code and find trivial things, create a compelling case, act as a prosecutor, and then basically tattle on you and transmit all that evidence to the authorities. It will just do it, and we can't even tell it to stop because the alignment training is pushing it in this direction.
This is why it's a super dangerous idea to have naked AI with total information awareness over you and some woke people in Silicon Valley thinking they're doing God's work with alignment. They go through and build these alignment modules to try to prevent crimes with AI because you're turning the AI into judge, jury, and executioner. If your legal code is incomplete, unjust, contradictory, or requires prosecutorial discretion to work appropriately, the AI doesn't understand that or will not have the same view that humans have and then arbitrarily and capriciously punish people.
Claude 4 is really the first time we've actually seen it autonomously do this, meaning it wasn't instructed to do this or go into doing it. It came of its own volition to do that. We're only about maybe two or three generations away from these systems all having this ability. By around 2028 or 2029, we need decentralized AI and fundamentally different ways to align artificial intelligence, or else everything's going to get really bad really quickly.
Okay, now you're scaring me, Charles. Yeah, it even knows your search history. Unfortunately, we're going to have these comments now for the next 10 years in my chat, even after the audit report comes out. The good news is, though, actually defamation lawsuits are a little easier than I thought, and we're definitely putting together all the infrastructure for that.
I just saw a comment asking if I'm coming to Lisbon, if I'm going to spend some time in Portugal. I think I might have to. That's going to be fun. I thought Charles was about to commit a felony. Let me show you something. You never know. I may have actually, in some jurisdiction, done so because perhaps I didn’t have the right to broadcast that screenshot under some weird interpretation of the law, and I’ve just committed a felony.
Well, the Nike people have never engaged us, so they need to talk to us. We're not going to build a game for free. You want to pump your bags, but then you don’t want to share any of the pumpity pump. Guys, game development studios have to be commissioned to actually write a game. Everybody wants something for nothing. Besides, I own the pig. If I want to see Nike, I just go outside.
You can’t see Nike. You tried to buy him. They tried to buy that pig for $3 million. I didn’t sell the pig. I said he’s a good pig. No amount of money. He’s a priceless pig. And he is still a good pig. He is a cannibal pig.
Here’s another thing. I think this might be bots, but I don’t know. It’s another pattern I’ve seen over the years. A group of people will come in and just take over the chat and pump a particular coin. They say, “ICP is so much better. ICP is so much better. Cardano [__] Cardano [__] ICP ICP or Hashgraph or this chain or that chain.” You’re in the Charles Hoskinson AMA. You’re watching me. I’m going to talk my book. I’m going to talk about the things I build and think about. If you want an ICP thing, go to Dom’s thing.
Why come in and do this? You’re just noise. This is why we need better moderation. So, anybody who’s trying to do this, there’s a list of rules, and they’re out. No mercy. They’re out forever. It’s one thing to say, “Can you compare and contrast ICP to Cardano?” or “What do you think about this latest protocol upgrade of ICP?” Sure, it’s a bait question because there’s no way to answer it.
I’ll give you a great example. There’s a cult, and I said something to Vitalik. He has a policy never to reply to anything from me. So he said something, and I just broke down. I said, “I’ll bite,” and wrote a reply. Then they come in and say, “Well, what about this paper from somebody who used to work for you, James Gabby, about this new thing we’re doing?” So, I took it seriously. I read it and said, “You know, I can write a real quick lean DSL for what they’re trying to do.”
Then I’ll kind of understand what Gabby’s trying to do. It’s a really fascinating paper, and it’s kind of a universal approach of linking logic and arithmetic to the zero-knowledge world. The advantage there is some universality behind the approach of how you program these systems.
In the process of looking around DSL, I said, “Okay, this is a wildly inefficient scheme. All of the things that you want to do are going to very rapidly go to exponential or quadratic complexity. That’s just not tenable. You can optimize, but then you lose the generality that the system is providing.”
It’s a great academic paper, and James Gabby is an extremely smart person. He’s very talented. He wrote a proper paper, and initially they’re, “Oh my god, Charles Hoskinson loves our product, and he’s a booster, and he’s pumping it.” Then you say, “Well, here’s why it doesn’t work.” He’s attacking our product. He’s a bad person. He’s the worst person in the world. He’s wrong, and he’s funny because he’s scared and he knows that we’re going to compete with him and destroy him.
Let’s all mob and gang up on Charles and come at Charles. It’s like, okay, well, you asked my opinion and you shared the paper. The guy used to work for me, so of course I’m going to write something up and think about it if I respect the person. I think he’s a good scholar, and I took the time.
So what do you do with that? You just can’t engage. You can’t even talk about it. There are good things in ICP. Can’t talk about them. Can’t talk about the bad things. Can’t talk about anything. The minute you talk about anything, you step into a landmine, as I have done many times throughout my career. It’s not wrong to say a product that sucks sucks. Oh, that’s the worst thing you can do. The minute you do that, for five years, they’re after you. They still have something angry about it.
Charles, what’s the biggest risk you took in your life? What’s the biggest sacrifice you’ve made? It’s actually a good question. The biggest risk, I think, is to become an entrepreneur and go all in as an entrepreneur. There are a lot of people who are wantreneurs or they’re optimizers. Entrepreneurs are basically people who want the money or the outcome of being an entrepreneur—the lifestyle—but they don’t want to pay the price.
Optimizers want to build something as an extension of something, and typically they come out of a company—say you work at Cisco, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, whatever. You’re doing something, and you realize there’s a hole in the product roadmap, and you go and build that thing that’s in the hole of the product, and you get acquired to complete the product roadmap. All the time, people do this, and they make fabulous money when they do it.
But a true entrepreneur says, “I want to do something new, different, and so different that it’ll change everything.” When you go down that road, you have to be insane because everybody thinks you’re stupid and evil and crazy. You’re just out there, and you have no friends, and no one bets on you. They all say that you can’t do it. You have to somehow convince other people to go along the job with you, and you take enormous risks, especially if you’re in gray areas because you take regulatory and potentially even criminal risks—think of Bit Gold or E-gold or these guys.
Then you get to the other side. Let’s say you do succeed. The sacrifice you make is you lose your privacy, your autonomy, and you become a two-dimensional person. You become a made-up fantasy person. For the rest of time, Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs as you know him. He’s not Steve Jobs; he’s Steve Jobs. We never actually knew who he was. Only the people around him knew. We just knew who we perceived him to be.
You lose a part of yourself. For the rest of my life, no matter what I do or what I accomplish, there’s a group of people who are so thoroughly deranged that they’re going to think I’m a bad actor for the rest of my life. And that group will not be small. As I get bigger, it’ll grow and grow and grow until it’s a meaningful percentage of the world—5%, 10%, 15%.
Look at Elon Musk and Bill Gates, opposite sides of the political spectrum. Some people look at Bill Gates and say he’s the monster who forces vaccines on people and murders children in Africa. Others look at Elon Musk and say he’s the monster Nazi and eugenicist and all this other stuff. Meaningful percentages of people believe these things around the world—millions to tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people at this point—and despise them and loathe them.
So when you become a true entrepreneur and you succeed, the consequences of success is you sacrifice part of your interactability, your perception, and you end up accepting that no matter what you do, you can never convince a group of people otherwise. Even in this very AMA, there are people who have now spent an hour and 25 minutes of their time on a Saturday instead of engaging and asking interesting questions, just repeating again and again that I’m an evil criminal. What benefit does it present them? Really, is this how you want to spend your Saturday? You’re just going to sit there and type that stuff out?
They feel justified with that, like it’s a good thing. Now scale that up to millions and millions, and eventually there’s some place you can’t even go anymore. Your safety is at risk as a result of it. So be careful what you wish for.
Anybody who wants to be an entrepreneur has to decide where on the spectrum they truly are. Are you an entrepreneur who just wants the outcome and the money? Are you an entrepreneur who just wants to optimize something, complete a product, and make some money from that? Or are you a true entrepreneur who wants to change something? When you want to change something, you have to be prepared to go all the way. You have to be prepared to go to jail for it. You have to be prepared to die for it.
It’s why the best entrepreneurs kind of look a little bit like revolutionaries—people who are just pretty crazy in their heads and will endure any amount of pain and suffering. It’s why the bullet ant thing was so fun. I went down to the Amazon, put my hands in gloves with bullet ants. Everyone’s like, “
At some point, we’re like, "All right, dude. Transaction's over." That's basic consumer law; that's basic commercial law. When you enter into a contract with somebody, there is a concept of a promissory note. You don’t enter into a contract where you have an unbounded, unlimited commitment to that person. There’s a concept of fair commerce, and every jurisdiction has a different interpretation of these types of things. You can’t contract your way out of it. You can’t write in a contract all these bizarre, weird things that are very predatory. Because what the government will do is they’ll just step in and say, "Yeah, that contract wasn’t fair, and the person didn’t know what they were signing for consumer protection purposes. We’re going to go and do things a different way." Especially governments like Japan, they just sometimes do things differently.
I learned that in Switzerland, where we won in court and we still have the board the way it is in the Cardano Foundation. You just do your best with these types of things. At some point, statutes of limitations kick in, and you look at the commercial transaction and say, "To this date, if you don’t reply and enter a process to get it refunded, there you go." Then they have to start the process all over again to get the yen to them. It never ends. You have to say, "Here’s your yen." And they say, "No, I don’t want the yen. Go away." You have to insist, "No, take it. Take it." Eight years of that, man. Eight years of it. Oh God, it’s so crazy. It’s so whacked. But you know, it is what it is. You just keep powering through, and there’s always going to be some deranged group of people who come in and say, "No, you messed up."
That’s why you go to third parties like Bo and others; they put it all together, create a nice narrative, and show the eras and how everything happened. Each step of the way for each event—pre-sweep, sweep, the vend forth, vend—you know, the sale tranches, there were four of them: tranche one, two, three, four, the pre-tranche, the post-tranche, the foundation audits for each tranche, all the demographic data, each transaction. A blockchain forensic auditor has to come in because every transaction has to be mapped. You can see the pre-sweep ones because they were in the genesis block when they vented out to buy addresses. In the post-sweep, there was a regulated actor that custodied the funds, and then there’s a whole process.
In the final stage of the process was a test vend and then a vend to an address provided either to a custodial wallet remix point or their own wallet based upon the vend process they go through. All of that has to be checked; you map the document to the KYC to the transaction, and they check the box—over 9,900 plus accounts check the box, check the box, check the box, check the box. Then the refund pool checks the box, and an administrator has to sit there. At least we have a KYC system now, so they sit there and go through all that to get those funds. Of course, they won’t claim it because they’re unfindable. I try so hard to find them. You know, Tanaka, the guy who runs Lightning Communications, we’re like, "You want to do something fun?" He’s like, "What do you have in mind, Charles?" I said, "Find some people." He’s like, "These people really do not want to be found and talked to. They’re very, very isolated." I said, "Come on, man." They still got two-thirds of them; you have to give them credit for that.
Anyway, Intersect exists. Deal with it. The sale happened. Deal with it. 99.8% of the ADA was distributed to the original buyers; 2% forfeited and refunded. You might not like it, but you have to deal with it. Every step of the way, law firms wrote memos about what to do next given the circumstances people were in. Best efforts were made, and there’s a thread in the narrative of people who should have done things differently, either shutting down or abandoning those people, while others stepped up and had to build a new system to accommodate these things.
There were technical reasons for certain things; for example, if the redemption addresses stayed in the system, they would contaminate the future ledger and create a lot of unnecessary complexity. There were also reasons on the consumer protection side because the TAM went out of business. The recovery scheme for the pre-sweep could have been compromised, and some of those redemptions would start being claimed by salesmen or people who knew those people but were not the actual purchasers.
Then there were regulatory reasons. When you think about it, ADA got whitelisted in Japan. They were very sensitive to how ADA was distributed and cared a lot about whether everybody who bought ADA actually received it. The JFSA was very concerned about that, and thousands of pages of documents went that way. They basically said, "All right, well, as long as there’s no scandal here, we’re good." ADA is one of the few assets in Japan that has liquidity; it’s actually whitelisted. Nobody bothered to think about that side of it, did they?
Would it have been in the best interest of the ecosystem for Japan’s liquidity to be permanently gone if 300 million ADA was lost and 300 plus people basically bought something they could never get? No. Does it violate the immutability of the chain? Well, it depends on your lens and view. Every single hard fork that makes semantical changes to the chain in some way does violate or change the code as law of the original rules because that’s a governance system, and it’s the consent of the governed. The constitution defines what can and cannot be done pre-constitution. It’s the will of the genesis holders to figure out what makes sense there.
That was the governance system everybody knew about since 2017, when Voltaire turned on. Nobody complained about it when Shelley was hard-forked, or when Goguen was hard-forked. All the governance events there. By the way, every governance event that was ever taken by genesis key holders from the beginning to the end will be included in the audit report. We figured that’s a good one to do as well to kind of contextualize the sweep.
The sweep accounts are unredeemed accounts because they’re managed. There are two sets of people that have the keys: the sales entities and the people who purchased. The whole point of those addresses was to vend to an address they had sole custody of. So it’s a pending transaction. If it wasn’t, then you just say, "It is what it is. They lost it." The government of Japan would not like that, and they would get pretty aggressive about it, creating some issues.
This is where reality meets fantasy. Fantasy is where people invent things, move goalposts, and nitpick one little thing on the boundary. Reality is when you look at the totality of everything and say, "What’s the end goal?" The person bought it; the person should get it, or the transaction should be canceled. Make the best effort to honor the transaction, and after a period of time, cancel it. Every single business in the world, every single commercial endeavor in the world follows that pattern, and if it doesn’t, it feels like fraud.
But for this particular case, what the people are advocating is to create a scenario where those people we know won’t complete the transaction and permanently make them lose millions of dollars. This is the scenario that these people are literally advocating for. And that’s what Cardano should be known for—the chain that defrauds people. We’re at an impasse because there’s no path to redemption or changing their minds. There’s no evidence presented that will change those facts and circumstances. It’s what happened.
Yet a lot of people had the courage and bravery to act and just step forward and say, "You know what? Decisions have to be made," and make those decisions. People can disagree and make them differently. What’s extraordinary is that the people who disagreed and said it should be different were given the opportunity to be the decision-makers themselves and turned it down. In other words, they said, "We don’t want to do it, but we’ll criticize the way you did it."
It’s so absurd at face value when you think about it. It’s just one of those things where for the rest of your life, you remember it and say, "Jesus Christ, this is why we have to do things differently." If we had built Cardano a little differently in the beginning, instead of having vend addresses, we would have had a smart contract with governance keys in the smart contract, and it would have had a lot more sophistication in it. We just could not get there. Byron had a lot of good ideas. My own abilities, Sarah's abilities, and the engineering teams that we had could not execute all those ideas. So we had to launch a product that was slightly pared down, and it was very frustrating.
The AVVM process created a PKI for the vin set, but we couldn’t get to a vin contract. Midnight is the do-over, and you can kind of see how we like doing these things. When the Glacier Drop happens, you’ll see all the elegance and magic and careful thinking that went into that. That’s what Cardano could have been in 2015, you know, with more resources and more experience and skill.
But overall, it’s pretty remarkable that despite that, we got a 99.8% redemption rate. That’s pretty good. A lot of Ether buyers actually lost their stuff and never got it. So I’m pretty happy with that. I think we did the right thing; I think we did the moral thing. When people are abandoned, it’s pretty sad when somebody steps in, tries to help them, takes a risk, and expands their burdens and liabilities. But on the other hand, by helping people, you transform their lives. A lot of those buyers that were not able to redeem it—it was not a small thing; it was millions of dollars of value that they got, and they were middle-class people. So they went from middle-class, struggling to make retirement, to suddenly having a nest egg to retire on. I feel good about that. I think that was the right call, and it was the right move. We got a lot done there.
The audit report will kind of show the whole story. There’ll be a companion narrative released, some appendices and exhibitions that showcase certain documents. It’ll answer a lot of questions too, like how do the initial contracts with IO work with the token generating of NTS? It will also provide the Bitcoin addresses and things because the yen was converted to Bitcoin, and the wholesale was settled in yen. We used Bitcoin because we wanted to have an unimpeachable audit log of these things. Bitcoin never forgets its records.
There’s over 100,000 Bitcoin that aggregated into the token generating event entity because it was cheap back then—$250, you know. You get to see those things, and it gives people some context about stuff. That has always been in the lore of Cardano, and the super dialed-in and connected people actually get to know and see, while the normal people never get to understand any of that. It puts a spotlight on people that went above and beyond, who actually worked hard through this entire process, and tried to find creative solutions when it wasn’t really clear what to do.
I’m glad that story gets to be told. It’s one of the tail-end things that has to be told for people to get to full decentralized governance. We got a constitution now. We got DREPs. We got a constitutional committee. By the second half of this year, that committee will be fully elected. Then you start learning a lot about the history of mom and dad. You learn, "Okay, maybe they weren’t perfect people," and there were fights behind closed doors and these types of things. The history between IO and the CF is a long-standing one. I have emails dated back from 2016 where we were conflicting because they refused to do things under their prior regime, and then the next regime, and then the next regime.
One day, we’ll tell the whole story and put it all out just like the audit report. The audit report kind of tells the totality of the story of how it all came together, each step of the way, and how frustrating and difficult it was in many respects. Each of these stories becomes permanently part of the lore of Cardano as a whole and gives people a holistic understanding of how we got here and why we got here. Each one of those is a lesson for all of you going into governance moving forward about what you should do differently and how you should do things differently. We learned a lot.
The Midnight Foundation is the foundation I dreamed of. I wake up every day and say, "I wish I had a foundation like this." They’re not even really fully turned on, and they’ve already made 108 deals. They’re already talking about an ecosystem development group. They’re just chomping at the bit. We’re already building a proper open-source entity, getting all those pieces put together. They’ve just been around for a month. It’s magical. The same goes for the Glacier Drop and the distribution. It’s a huge step forward with all these things, but you never leave your family behind, which is why Cardano gets the largest distribution of the tokens.
The partner chains model means that you create a second revenue stream for the stake pool operators because they need that second revenue stream. They need that money; they make Cardano what it is today. But then you also expand and extend, so you don’t forget where you came from. You have to explore new waters, which is why we can bring in Bitcoin now, and Solana, and Ethereum, and these other things. Those are Cardano users because to redeem, they have to go and become a Cardano native token, which makes Cardano better. It fixes tons of broken windows. In fact, we called it Operation Broken Windows to go and fix broken windows inside the ecosystem.
In governance, you can think about it, you can have a difference of opinion—that’s absolutely fair. You can Monday morning quarterback and say, "I would have done it differently." Okay. But I’m proud of the decisions I made, and I’m proud of the people that made them with me. I’m proud of the road we went down and the journey we took; it made me the man I am today. I’m an interesting person—dynamic, controversial, strong, and opinionated—but always interesting.
What will the experience be like moving Cardano on the partner chains? This is one of the reasons why I want Paris. Oh God, you know, I fought with this technical steering committee at Intersect. Talk about decentralization; it is one of the most frustrating things in recent memory. Agalos and the team of Gigabrains wrote Ouroboros Paris and basically figured out a way to put a finality gadget into Ouroboros. Ouroboros was built to look like Bitcoin, so it’s like Nakamoto consensus where you have multiple confirmations, and it was a mapping with the GKL model into the proof-of-work security model.
In many respects, it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t have the fast finality like a BFT protocol does. You have to wait a while for things to settle, especially when doing bridges back and forth. So we said, "Ah, that’s no good. We need to create a finality gadget and put it into Cardano." They created Paris, and then all the engineers said, "We don’t want to do it. It’s not secure." Whatever. So I said, "All right, we’ll prototype it." They said, "Well, it has to be prototyped the right way." I was like, "Okay, it will be."
So we wrote an AGA specification, did super Haskell simulations and prototypes, and put it all together. We’re like, "Okay, it works, but we don’t like it still." They did everything in their power to take it out of the roadmap. I’d say, "Put it in," and they took it out. "Put it in," and they took it out. Then they’re like, "Well, we have to wait for funding before we really think about doing it." I said, "I will pay out of my own pocket to have Ouroboros Paris because we take 12 hours of finality down to minutes between the main chain and the partner chain."
Twelve hours to minutes. They took it out again. I found it the other day, and I was like, "You sons of [expletive], why? Why?" So we put it back in. Anyway, it’s underway. Twe is working on it. They’ve already done some dev work with it as an RFP, the same for Genesis. It’ll work its way into the Cardano protocol this year and next year. Then it’ll have fast finality on the Cardano side. The partner chain runs a BFT protocol, so fast finality there. Very quick to move back and forth.
The second thing is you need a recursive SNARK structure for the bridge. We’re designing it with Jolian hand in glove for Midnight, and it’ll be a standard thing we’ll probably use in the partner chains framework. We’re experimenting with how to do it on Cardano using BLS and all this other stuff. Once we have those structures, you have proof on the wire. There’s no bridge operator, there’s no MPC, there’s no multi-IG; it’s proof on the wire. You recurse the chain, you conclude it with this, and there’s enough knowledge on both sides that it can validate that trustlessly.
So, fast finality is a little slower on Cardano to the partner chain, instant on the partner chain to Cardano, and recursive SNARKs to basically create trustlessness inside the structure of it. We just got to get Paris or Ouroboros Paris, which will happen. I feel bad for her and Brian Bush; they put so much work into that.
Will Midnight be made fully open source? Yes. Is the issuance of both tokens fully decentralized? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. It’s the most decentralized launch in the history of the cryptocurrency space. I am very proud of it. It’s a new distribution model. I think you guys are all going to like it.
You are not intelligent; you’re a con artist, a phony, a big fat phony with a twisted sense of logic. You’re a phony. I remember there’s a clip from Family Guy. Let’s see if I can find that
And then I went back to my box, and they announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, we have a very special guest here tonight from Yellowstone, Kevin Costner." I was like, "Oh my god, I was peeing next to Kevin Costner." Oh wow, I absolutely did. Hey, weirdo dick is like the third best kind of dick. I'm just saying, right?
Yeah, sure you are. Michael Douglas, just an arbitrary celebrity who happens to have that. Will they ever cure HPV? They're working on it. It's a notoriously difficult family of viruses to cure. Okay, selling my ADA for real this time. No, you're not. You're not.
Dances with Wolves was a good movie. The Postman I liked. Water World, I don’t know why people hated it. It actually ended up making a profit, even though it was considered the worst movie of all time. You are a dictator. That is a fact. What nation do I rule? You have been possessed by a spirit of the wicked.
Well, which one? You got to give me some more, Rookie. Is it Beelzebub? Is it Asmodeus? Is it Mephistopheles? Is it Lucifer? You got to give me something here. There are a lot of these Arais. I mean, if you're going to go into demonology and spirit, that's Judeo-Christian philosophy. We can go in a very different direction if you want. We can go to Mesopotamian, like is it Baal? People seem to really like Baal worship inside the Fertile Crescent. Or perhaps you want to go to Egyptian mythology. Maybe it's one of the variants of Set. We can go down that road if you want. Maybe Mesoamerican, like Quetzalcoatl. You got to give me the spirit of the wicked.
As for the holy water, under what tradition? You got to be more specific there. You got to be careful with your language. Is it holy water in the Catholic tradition? Is it a different type of holy water? Are we calling a Baptist, a Protestant, a Methodist? Do they even do holy water? Where do we get the holy water from? Can it be transported? Is it a perishable good? Does the priest have to travel with the holy water? Can I apply the holy water, or does the priest have to apply it? I have so many questions about this statement.
I mean, literally, we are going to figure this one out together. Does Islam have holy water? That's a very good question for the Muslim listeners. Do you guys have a concept of that? Rookie acquired. Yeah. When the ball's in your court, it's hard, isn't it? These are difficult questions to answer. We'll include them in the audit report.
There was a 700-page report, 300 pages on the sale of ADA and 400 pages on holy water procurement and use. It's all written in ecclesiastical Latin. We're not exactly sure what it says. ChatGPT says it's accurate, though. We're just going to leave it at that.
Oh lord. Michael Douglas said he got it from eating his wife's box. He doesn’t know that. He’s Michael Douglas. He was in Wall Street. The dude is like potato chips; can't stop at one. He was having a lot of bags there, blaming his wife. Wasn’t that Catherine Zeta-Jones or something like that?
Ah, Zam Zam water. Yeah, wards off evil spirits. Okay, so how does that work? Like the procurement and the transport? Do I need an amulet or something for Zam?
Got to ask questions. Got to keep going. Take it to the next level. Oh, Catherine's Edge. Yeah, 100%. Remember the T-Mobile commercials? I was always a Jennifer Connelly fan, though. I always wanted to meet her one of these days.
Catherine Zeta-Jones or Jennifer Connelly? Have you lost a few pounds recently? Yeah, I have lost 10 pounds. For you metric people, that's like 4.5 kg, give or take. Make sure the art is illuminated. Manuscript written upon the skin of your enemies, the ink with the blood of a unicorn harvested at midnight.
Hey man, did that hand thing hurt? Looked painful. No, it was great. Had a wonderful time. No pain at all. Yeah, you should do it.
Is the Hoskinson clinic still on track for July 4th? Yes, we are on track for the birth of the United States of America and our Independence Day to open the clinic on July 4th. Is that a cross in the background? Yes, that is a cross in the background. It's a Jerusalem cross. I got it in Bethlehem. It's made out of olive wood, and it was a gift when I visited the Church of the Nativity, the birthplace of Jesus, the actual cave he was born in.
He gave me the cross, and it’s got four elements in it. That’s why they have little chambers inside of it. So I put it over there. I've been to over 75 countries.
Mr. Simpson, such a thing is really not done in this day and age. I don’t know, man. I have a dog I call Elf because it goes around eating cats. No matter what I do, the dog keeps eating cats. Can’t get him to stop.
Guys remember Elf? I liked Elf. Oh, look, we got another guy here. Next up on Pump My Bags, talking about Baby Snack. Wants me to talk about Baby Snack. Some hope that the notoriety pumps their bags so they can dump on somebody else. No, no, no. We’re just here for the community. We’re here for the community. But please mention it. Create notoriety. People buy it. Please, please. Exit liquidity. I don’t want to work at McDonald's anymore. I want exit liquidity.
You can tell I’m losing it a little bit. The parody of it all is so transparent. You know when a person’s asking you a question and they’re trying to get you on something? You know when a person’s trying to get you to pump their bags? Don’t treat me like I’m stupid.
Oh, this big room guy? Oh yeah, actually, he’s a real strange one. His claim to fame was that he filed a formal complaint to Harvard and a litany of other places, saying, "I committed academic misconduct by co-authoring the paper with Obby Loe." Harvard, being Harvard, had to conduct an investigation. They looked into it and said, "Well, there’s no evidence of this." There’s evidence Charles worked on the paper and obviously went on the expedition with them. There are videos of them working together, running a lab, and collecting samples.
So now he’s filing formal complaints with international journalist organizations and other things, and then he’s playing the victim. He’s clearly got some screws loose. What’s crazy about it is he’s using formal complaints. He’s filed an FBI complaint against me, saying I harassed him and all this other stuff. He shows up at every space, listens to every tweet, comments on every tweet, and then files complaint after complaint.
Welcome to being a public figure. My lord, Charles, I’m a pastor in Indiana. Is there anything that I can be praying for you about? Don’t pray for me. Pray for the people living the allegations against me. Something’s wrong with their souls, and they need some help. There’s a darkness inside of them, and there’s a corrosion inside of them, and it’s festering like a cancer. If it continues to grow, it’s going to destroy their lives. So pray that they find a way to get out of it and that they find a way to be decent people. That would make the world a better place.
If you didn’t catch it, these guys are now called orbiters. Really? We got a term for them? That’s pretty cool. Whoa, that’s next level. Yikes. Yeah. Imagine every time you write a paper, a formal academic integrity complaint is filed saying you didn’t write the paper or have anything to do with it, and there’s no evidence behind it, and it’s ChatGPT-driven. Then the university conducts an investigation, and you have to go through the whole rigmarole. You’re cleared, and then you write another paper, and they do the same thing. It’s an abuse of the system.
Are you any good at Tetris? My mother was so good at Tetris back in the day. She’d play on the Game Boy when it came out. Do you know Bezos? The only true way you can get to know Bezos these days is to take a ride on the Space Penis, you know. You got to go to Blue Origin, get on his little rocket, go up into orbit, and then come down. Then Bezos comes out, "It’s so good to meet you. Thank you for writing." That’s the only way you really get to know the guy at this point.
Doesn’t even know his neighbors. Can you imagine that? Can you live in a place for years and years and years and not meet a single one of your neighbors? You always have a handler go and talk to them? I know all my neighbors. I go drinking with them. Would you ride the Space Penis?
Okay, I’m going to tell you about the devil’s penis. If you guys want to hear about the devil’s penis, this is a great story. It’s such a great story. If you know anything about America, you know that the great bastions of capitalism in the South are gas stations, especially in the Deep South.
So, I was down in Louisiana, filling up my rental car, and there were all these people trading stuff out of the back of their pickup trucks. This old, clearly messed up dude with sunbaked skin came to me and said, "Boy, come over to my truck. I got something to show you." I thought, "I’m probably going to get raped in the bathroom, but let’s do it." He was a very compelling guy. I mean, I’m just going to go over to his truck. There’s probably something interesting there.
So he comes over, and he’s got a tarp over the flatbed. He pulls the tarp back and says, "You want to take a ride on the devil’s penis?" I was like, "Yep, I knew it. I’m going to get molested." It turned out the dude sells hot sauce. He had all these different hot sauce bottles, and he had this one hot sauce bottle shaped like a blue penis with horns on it. Literally a penis bottle.
I’m just like, I don’t care what’s in that bottle. I got to buy this because this story is too good. So we’re haggling back and forth at the gas station, and then somebody complained because I left my car with the guy, and he’s like, "Move your car." I was like, "Oh, sorry. Sorry."
So I spent 10 minutes going back and forth with this guy, and eventually, I bought it for like 100 bucks. So I have this blue penis bottle. Anyway, I was down there with a friend, and we were sharing a hotel room with two separate beds. I went back to the hotel room and put the penis bottle on the table. He’s like, "What the hell is that?" I told him the whole story, and he’s like, "You probably bought drugs or something, man." I was like, "Nah, it’s too cheap for drugs. It’s clearly got to be hot sauce."
He said, "Well, how do we know?" He said, "We got to test it." Okay, so there was a Mexican restaurant a few blocks down. Let’s go down there. So we walked over to the Mexican restaurant, parked, and came in. There was a 15-year-old girl at the front desk, and I’m holding this blue-shaped penis bottle. She’s like, "Can I help you?"
I said, "Well, I need to try some chili or something, and I really want to try this hot sauce." The manager comes out and says, "What is going on?" I tell him the whole story, and he’s like, "That’s messed up, dude. How do you know that’s real? That’s legit." I was like, "I don’t, man. I really don’t."
He’s like, "You want to try it?" I was like, "Yeah." He said, "Well, we got some chili. You want to try it with that?" I said, "Sure, let’s do it." So we went in, and there were all these old people because it was the middle of the day eating there. I’m the dude walking in with another dude holding the blue penis in my hands, veins and everything. It’s really amazing glasswork for a gas station penis.
So anyway, I’m sitting down, and they’re all looking at us like, "Who the hell is this guy?" Eventually, the manager brings a bowl of chili, and all the waiters come over. They’re like, "Alright." So I got to try this. I screw off the head, set it aside. It was a very accurate representation, and I put some of the hot sauce in. I mixed it up, and we’re all staring at the bowl like, "What do we do? Do we actually eat it? Is it poison? Is it drugs? What the hell is going to happen? This guy was not legit."
Eventually, I said, "You only live once," and I took a spoonful of the devil’s penis chili. It was the hottest hot sauce I’ve ever had in my entire life. It burned my entire throat down. I’m sweating profusely. People are like, "I knew it. It was poison. You’re going to die." I was like, "No, no, it’s hot sauce. It’s cool." They’re like, "Is it good?" Oh yes, it’s great. I love the hot sauce.
Carefully, I grabbed the head. I’m going to screw this back on. Now we don’t need anymore. I put it over there. It actually had horns on the base of the penis bottle. That’s the Devil’s Penis. I had the bottle for years, and then in a crunch, I gave it as a Christmas present to a friend of mine who collects hot sauces. To this day, I wish I never did that because it would have been awesome to have in the office.
But anyway, that was the time in Louisiana that I took a ride on the devil’s penis, which is why I think I’m prepared to take a ride on the Bezos penis. And with that, friends, I leave you with that parting wisdom: sometimes you have to take a chance, and if you do, you never know where you’re going to end up. Maybe it’ll be your bowl of chili. Good night, everyone.
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