Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny. Sometimes Colorado.
So, I woke up this morning and it's like the Jimmy wake-up meme. You take your phone and see all the red hitting you, and you're like, "Oh God. All right, which one is this one? Oh, where are we getting the butt plug today?" Ah, it's the carried interest in Japan. Okay, those Japanese bond prices are the highest they've been since like 2006. Shit's getting real, isn't it? It's getting real. It's tough out there. It's hard, and the markets just keep doing that. Everybody's looking for a savior, and everybody says, "Ah man, you know, somebody's got to come in and make all this work." Well, there's no savior coming. None. Zero. Zilch.
This started as a retail movement, and it's only going to succeed if we keep making it a retail movement. We lost retail in 2021. We lost it. You know what happened? This industry started selling pictures of bananas for 1.5 million dollars as an NFT. It started selling tweets—not even the real tweet, just an NFT representing a tweet—for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I even mockingly sold my "Do you know who I am?" tweet and donated the money to a girl in Nigeria. We lost our way as an industry. We screwed retail as an industry, and they very rightfully said, "F*** you," and left.
Then the industry made fun of the whole notion of crypto with meme coins. They said, "Ah, you know what? We're going to invest in things, buy things that, by their very construction, have no utility." A parody of the industry. And they say, "You know what? The institutions are going to come, and they're going to save us." They're not here to save us. They're here to make themselves trillions of dollars. They're here to use what we've built for themselves and their business models. They're not going to come. The U.S. government isn't going to come on a white horse. We tried that with Trump, didn't we? Didn't work out. I got excited about it. I said, "Oh my God, the U.S. government." And you know what they did? They did what they always do. They say they're here to help, and then they f*** you.
So, we have two choices. We can either pack up shop and say it's over—the entire revolution's done. Let's just go home and sit at home and wait for the economic collapse. Or we can pick our sorry asses up and get back to the work we had in 2020, where we were making real and meaningful progress and make this a retail revolution. There is no reason we can't get to a billion people in crypto, but we get there by building real things for real people, solving real problems. We don't get there with this nonsense of 10x every week. We don't.
On red days like this, they're reflection moments. They really are. They give us a chance to take a step back and say, "Why are we here? Why are we doing what we do? What's the outcome? Where do we want to go?" For 15 years, I've been in this industry. I've said again and again, "I'm here to change the economic, political, and social systems of the world. I'm here to make things better for everyone everywhere, to make the systems of the world better for everyone everywhere." I believe that at my core. I believe in the science of it. I believe in the mathematics of it. I believe in the engineering of it. I see and know how it would work. I can, on a cell phone, build a voting system that I can vote on my phone, and it's secure. I can check my vote and check the integrity of the system. You tell me what that's worth to society—to restore integrity in democracy.
I can, on a phone, run an entire economy. This is your bank. This is your payment system. No middleman required. You tell me what that's worth to the billions of unbanked and underbanked people. What the hell is the legacy system offering us? 50-year mortgages? 10% inflation rates? Negative interest rates? $338 trillion in global debt that is physically impossible to repay? Real estate prices for a piece of s*** home in California that's got termites inside of it and a crazy homeless guy living in the attic cost you 1.5 million dollars because you have to buy it from private equity. Did you know there are more private equity companies in the United States than McDonald's? There are 19,000 of them. There are 14,000 McDonald's. That's what they're offering us.
There's two economies now: the rich people's economy and everybody else's economy. The rich people's economy is the top 10 million, and they're spending like drunken sailors. Life is great, and it looks like the GDP's going up. Meanwhile, for everybody else, wages are stagnant. They've only gone up 20% in the last 40 years. Meanwhile, the price of housing has gone up by a factor of eight. The price of education has gone up by a factor of 10. The price of healthcare has gone beyond that. None of this has kept up with wages at all. So, that's a big problem.
And then, you know what they're doing? They say, "Let's spend 1% of our GDP, maybe up to 5%, on AI so we can fire all of the bottom 200 million and continue mass wealth aggregation to the top." Robots will just displace all of them, and AI will displace all the knowledge workers. That's why Nvidia is worth 5 trillion dollars right now—5 trillion, which is more than the countries of Canada and Australia combined. One f***ing company. Think about that. One company. I liked Jensen's alligator getup thingy when he's in Vegas, all shiny, holding his thing, but maybe, just maybe, the people of Canada and Australia are worth a little bit more than him. That's the madness of this—like when the emperor's palace was worth more than California back in the heyday of Japan. It's a bubble. It's a big-ass bubble.
So, if you're retail, you see all this garbage and say, "You know what we should do? Let's run back to the old money system that's made us all slaves." But we don't get retail unless we, as an ecosystem—the whole cryptocurrency space—offers something better: economic agency and identity, self-custody, sound money, real interest rates, a real economy. You are your own bank. You own your own identity. You own your own data. That's what we have to offer them, and we have to have a return to those principles—not 100x. Not if it doesn't work, McDonald's meme. Otherwise, it's a scam, guys. We're no better than the legacy system we sought to displace.
So, we lost our way in 2021 as an industry. We did. And everybody has some sins and blood on the table for it. We have to make some choices. What do we do about it? Do we return to first principles and get back to the business of onboarding people into crypto, back to the philosophy of crypto, or do we beg for a bailout? Do we beg for the U.S. government to save us? Do we beg for BlackRock to save us? Do we beg for some MacGuffin to swoop in and make everything better? Because those are the people that architected the perpetual debt—the $338 trillion of global debt. Those are the people that are just about to go to war with Venezuela. Those are the people that don't really care about anything other than the raw calculus of how to maintain control over the masses. And those are the people that are going to throw you away for robots in 5 to 10 years. Those are the people that gave you Lyme disease. Those are the people that made COVID. Those are the people that force-vaccinated billions of people. They don't care about you. They've never cared about you. They don't have your best interests at heart. They don't want you to have agency and power as a human being. They never have. And no political movement, like MAGA or anything else, is going to save you. We are beyond the era of trusting human beings. We are beyond the era of some savior coming in on a white horse and saving us. They're not going to show up.
It's a red day, but red days are needed to make green days. And how you make green days is you bring retail back. Then we're not beholden to the madness of the markets. You think this red day is bad? When the AI bubble bursts, you know what that means for crypto? Right now, we're treated as a luxury financial asset for rich people, and poor people like to gamble and speculate on the potential of winning the lottery and getting a 10x. We're not treated as a new economy.
So, I, for one, have made my choice, and it might bankrupt me. I'm heavy into crypto, and I want crypto to work because I believe it's going to rebuild the economic, political, and social systems of the world. But that only works if retail shows up, and we have to bring them back. It's a teachable moment. It really is. I think our best days are ahead of us, but we all have to return to first principles. Return to decentralization, return to self-custody, return to decentralized identity. Return to the principles that made crypto great.
Now, we're missing some capabilities; we're missing privacy, and in 7 days' time, midnight launches. And you know what? We did everything opposite—no VC involvement, no ICO, none of this stuff. We just gave it away. We said, "Return to what Satoshi did." That's a return to first principles. Maybe it works; maybe it doesn't work, but at least I put my money where my mouth was and said, "Let's go for it. Let's try it." Let's create a retail army of people and get them excited about the prospect of not only owning their own identity but having agency over their privacy, so they can have freedom of association, commerce, and expression.
And my challenge to every other ecosystem is to do the same. Find a path for this. Find a mechanism to get there. Bring in the next 500 million people. Let's do it, and let's get them inculcated in the philosophy of what made things great and restart this movement. We lost it. We need to bring it back, one way or the other. I can't promise you that tomorrow's going to be easier. Probably it's going to get worse before it gets better. But I can promise you that if you return to first principles and actually have a reason for doing what you do in the long term, not only do you win, you change the world. It's just that simple.
We've gotten too addicted to the drama. We've gotten too addicted to the easy road out, too addicted to demanding somebody come in and save us, and we've forgotten our way. We, as an ecosystem—the cryptocurrency ecosystem—need to return to where we started. We know how good it can be. We know how to bring everybody together. We have the technology, we have the knowledge, we have the capabilities, and frankly speaking, we've earned the right to have a seat at the table. There's enough value here to get this done. Or we can just continue down this dark road of hoping for a bailout and handing everything special to Wall Street, handing everything special to big governments and big agencies—the very same ones that have burdened the entire world with a perma-debt that they can't repay, forcing us to go to war with each other on an ongoing and regular basis.
There's just no sustainability there, especially given the fact that most of us are going to be displaced by robots and AI in the next 10 or 20 years. And their ghoulish calculus—what do you do with all the surplus people? Well, they probably won't be around to find out. That's not a world I want to live in. So, we have to take our voice back, we have to take our economic agency back, and we have to make choosing crypto the only option. Teach people about sound money, teach people about self-custody, get people into crypto for the long term, get their assets in so that they can be safe against the coming storms. But don't invite the vampires in. Thanks, everyone.
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