Division

Hey everyone, Charles Hoskinson here, live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is November 11th, so it's 11-11, 2020. Apparently murder hornets are abreast. The nest that they captured had over 200 queens in it. Go figure.

That's a terrifying thought. And it's a gout day, moved up from my toe to my ankle. First time it's done that. God, it's painful. Anyway, I wanted to make a quick video as I see that people are still raw and bitter about this election.

And I even have some members of our community going to Twitter and saying I'm biased and one-sided. Guys, the biggest sack of shit that's ever been sold to the American people, the biggest lie that's been pushed upon you guys, is that there are two sides. No, there are two artificial sides that were manufactured for political power. And mass media and social media work together to propagandize you into believing there are only two sides. My company has people in over 40 countries.

I've personally been to 52 countries. I regularly deal with the laws of at least a dozen or more countries. Tell me, what political party do I belong to when traditionally I travel 200-250 days a year and deal with so many different legal systems, healthcare systems, retirement systems, financial systems, regulatory systems? Tell me which one. There aren't two sides.

The world is really, really nuanced and complicated. And every single thing you can solve in a hundred different ways. And what's happening now is everything is becoming political. It used to be there were politics and then law. And we kept them separated.

We'd have a big political fight and then we'd be friends. Now there's politics and that's it. It's in sports now. Can't watch football anymore. It's in everything.

Every company now has to take political positions and have slogans and make commercials about how woke they are. It's infiltrated every aspect of our lives to a point that people seem to feel it's a good idea to excommunicate friends and family based upon their political beliefs. And then I ask, why are you so passionate about these things? Honestly, no matter who won the election in the United States of America, you still have to go to work tomorrow? Still got rent to pay or mortgage to pay?

You still have to drive somewhere? Still have to eat? Still have to pay your bills? Did your life magically change overnight for the better or for the worse because somebody got elected? 100% of the political problems your life has been caused have been caused by Republicans and Democrats in the United States, if you're in the United States.

One or both of the parties did something to screw you, if there's a political system that exists. And this is where we're at. To the extent that they say, if this person doesn't believe the things I believe, everything that they touch must be corrupted. Cardano has a protocol, must be a partisan biased protocol. But no one can explain how or why or where.

Tell me where in the code do you have to put your political affiliation and you get special or restricted access based on that. We have systems like that. It's called social credit in China, not cryptocurrency protocols. So why do we wade into politics at all? Well, first, because everything's political now.

You can't avoid it. Even if you choose not to take a political opinion, look at Coinbase. They lost 5% of their employees over that. Second, cryptocurrencies have a political ideology baked into them. There's no way to escape that.

There's no way to get out of that. Guys, by holding a cryptocurrency, you are making philosophical statements about your belief on how money should work. You might not be aware of those statements, just you're probably not aware of the end user license agreement of Facebook and Twitter and these other places that surveil you. You are making that philosophical decision to remove yourself from one system and go into another system. My entire point along the way, and I keep making these videos, think for yourself, recognize the symptoms of propaganda, realize the world is nuanced, realize you have to work with people that you disagree with on a regular basis.

I keep saying these things. And then every now and then I'll tweet something that you dislike politically and then you assume I'm a Trump voter or a Biden voter, a liberal or a conservative, and then everybody else in the world is we don't even know what's going on about that because, well, that's an American thing. Guys, I didn't vote for either of them. I don't care about these people. It's a broken, horrible system.

The whole reason our industry exists is because it's a broken, horrible system that has to come to an end. 71 million Americans are probably going to exit this election feeling that the election system is rigged and broken. In 2000, the people who voted for Al Gore felt exactly the same way. There's bipartisan agreement that our electoral system needs to change. But you notice something.

It's easy to identify the problems. For example, we all knew going into this pandemic there was going to be a lot of challenges in November with the voting. We knew this in March. So where was the committee of people to come together to try to fix this, the legislation, try to ameliorate this, the extra checks and balances and controls that would be put in? And what the partisans do?

Oh, it's Trump's fault or it's Nancy Pelosi's fault. It's both of their faults. They can't communicate and work together and solve problems. And what they do is they get you angry through mass media and make you believe that the other side is responsible for all your problems. And if only you give them absolute power, they can solve everything.

It's a lie. It's always been a lie because we've run the experiment. We gave Obama absolute power in 2009, came into office, was a super majority in the Senate and the Congress and the White House. He could have, on a party line vote, voted for anything. And what happened to Wall Street?

Got bigger, more consolidated, more powerful. That's not a partisan thing to say. It's facts. It's reality. And Trump comes into power with all government unified behind him.

Couldn't even get Obamacare repeal. Why? Because these people don't solve problems. They're actors and their job is to entertain and divide and they enjoy the power and control. But they have no desire to actually figure out how to make the world a better place.

So we in the private industry, we step up. When there's an energy crisis and we're reaching peak oil, we invent fracking and find a way to resolve that. When NASA can't even get their hands off their ass, suddenly SpaceX and Blue Origin and all these other companies come together and lo and behold, we have now a vibrant private space industry, which is growing at a much faster pace than any government initiative. And lo and behold, we hate the financial system. So we created the cryptocurrency space.

That is the compensation for the fact that the government is incompetent in the United States. So pointing that out is not partisan. And if you get angry about that or think we're going to lose people about that, I got news for you. Whatever politics you have, I'm willing to wager there's a much larger set of people who are fed up, who are tired, who just say enough and I'm done with the bullshit. I'm done with family members yelling at me who I used to get along with for no other reason than the fact that I don't support the things that they support.

I'm done with every time we turn on the television, everything is just bombastic slogans here and there of things that I may or may not agree with. And everything is contaminated from Star Wars to other such things. It all has to be woke now. Everything has to be political now. I'm willing to wager, at least in the United States, there's a hell of a lot of people, far more than the partisans at this point, who are angry in general at the way that society has devolved and divided.

And I, for one, would just like to get back to the business of unification. And at times I will say things because, guess what, humor is the best antidote. Mockery is the best antidote. Being able to overcome and laugh at yourself and others is the best way of showing the craziness that society has gone to. And yeah, the tools that we build are open access.

They're open platforms. And the point is that they're yours as much as mine so that you too can go and build things to opt out of these systems. Now we're going to try to solve problems where we can, like blockchain-based voting and identity systems and these types of things. And yeah, I'm really passionate about a lot of stuff. Algorithmic law, for example.

I live in a society that has made everything illegal at some point and it says the ignorance of the law is no excuse for not following it, which means the poor and vulnerable inadvertently are criminals. There's even books about this. I think Ten Felonies a Day is one. Over and over again, no matter how hard you try to follow, it's impossible to follow and you have to go pay lawyers $600 an hour to tell you it depends. My God, we need to mechanize our laws and introduce AI and other things so we can ask simple questions of, is what I'm doing legal and lawful?

It's so hard as a business today. I've spent 10 years in this industry, I can't get clarity on basic things about whether something is a security or not, something is a commodity or not, can we get a bank account or not, what's the tax rate? My God, it's so hard and I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees every year just to navigate these waters. How do normal people do that? And everybody seems to think that that's okay.

No, it's not. I'm damn tired of all this too, but I'm tired for different reasons because the things that are happening are hurting people and I have no patience for partisanship and I have no patience at all for people who are propagandized. You are bots. You are part of the problem. Look at yourself deeply in the mirror and ask, why are you angry about something?

Are you angry because those things actually hurt you and you have real life examples to point to of where you've been hurt? And there are plenty of people who have that, whose land has been taken, eminent domain, or there's been a government injustice or perhaps themselves or a family member was imprisoned and they turned out to be innocent. Plenty of people have every right to be angry at a particular thing, but that's usually a small group of actors who were responsible for that or one bureaucracy that was responsible for that. And yeah, those injustices should be addressed. If you're angry in general and think half of your country are evil because they didn't vote for the person you voted for or that the entire electoral system is rigged in a scam because your candidate lost, there's a serious problem here and it's propaganda.

And you need to wake up, calm down, and take a deep breath and we need to look to what is going to unify us. What do we have that's in common instead of what's dividing us? Where do we agree? How can we get along? And if you can't do that, then it's already lost.

Because here's where this goes. It keeps getting more political, you keep getting more hate, and we see violence. And eventually it's a civil war. We're already seeing violence. We see it in the streets.

Right-wing militias try to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Left-wing extremists take over part of a city in the United States and create something called CHAZ. That's the beginning. These are the little itsy-bitsy things that start lighting the fuse that eventually travels up to the powder keg to outright war. People aren't listening to each other anymore.

And we have a limited window of time to stop it and stop the things that divide us and punish the people who focus on dividing us by not listening to them anymore. If anybody comes out and tells you you should hate another person because of their political beliefs, just stop listening to that person. Change the channel. Turn them off. If they tell you that all the problems of your life were caused by this other person, all you need to do is give that person power, and then somehow it'll all get better.

They're a demagogue and a propagandist. Our entire industry is about solutions. Our entire industry is about trying to get us out of this and allowing people to think for themselves. And none of these tools work if people are propagandized. Because while you have the capacity for self-autonomy, guess what?

If you're subject to propaganda, you're just simply going to hand all your personal power to a demagogue, and then they'll just run the whole show. So who cares if it's decentralized? You've basically thrown the system away. So my life's work is for nothing if we as a society can't get out of this miasma and find higher grounds and find common grounds with each other. So I don't want to hear it anymore.

And if you want to complain about it over Twitter, about how partisan I am or how I voted for this person or that person, I'm just going to block you from here on out. I don't care who the hell you are. You can be a stake pool operator. You can be a developer in our ecosystem. It's an insta-block.

Because I have a job to do, and my job is to build a system for everyone. I'm not here to prescribe to one political ideology over another, but I sure as hell will point out hypocrisy, and I sure as hell will point out when people are behaving in ways that are contrary to freedom. That, and of course, it's my opinion. It's my Twitter account. It's my YouTube page.

It's not my company's page. And even if I block you on those channels, you still have access to Cardano. It's just that simple. If you don't it, tough lemons, go find another ecosystem then. That's a fair compromise.

I'm just done with all of this, and I'm tired of the toxicity, and what? I'm looking at the rest of this year and next year. No matter what happens, everybody's going to be angry. Someone's going to be made president January 20th, most likely Biden, the way that things look, and there's going to be a lot of people angry with that. And I'm going to hear about it every fucking day.

Every day. And then there's probably going to be a red wave in 2022 with a lot of Republicans retaking the House and the Senate, and then there's just going to be craziness and insanity again. I'm thinking, God, how does society get along and move along with this type of stuff? It can't. We can't solve any problems.

We can't pass bills to get proper definitions for cryptocurrencies. We can't change the way the banking system works. We can't get e-voting in. We can't get rights for digital signatures. At some point, we're going to have to hold a constitutional convention to completely replace the federal government because it's going to be so gridlocked and bottlenecked.

I'm sorry. I cannot allow my nation to go down this road. And if you're a partisan, you're part of this problem too. You honestly are. And you've been rewarding people who keep doing this.

So stop it.