Humility

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is May 17th, 2024. I'm making a video to talk about one of our favorite topics—humility. There's an interesting Reddit post concerning Hoskinson and humility. Constructive criticism is hard to give to a genius, but I believe it is in the best interest of the Cardano community and the future of the protocol to help Charles Hoskinson understand the nature, importance, and value of humility.

First, let's not confuse humility with decency. Charles Hoskinson is a decent person; he is civil and gives credit where credit is due. He deserves tremendous credit for his role in formulating, guiding, and developing the Cardano protocol. However, humility is something different. It is the ability to admit that viewpoints other than one's own may have merit.

He continually runs into trouble on this score. He has a mathematical mind that treats all points of view as having a logical basis, which leads to the misconception that different points of view are always logically comparable. He then applies his formidable reasoning ability to arrive at the "truth." However, life, the physical world, and politics are not math. The real world is messy, and often different perspectives lead to different conclusions.

For example, to me, having guns in the house means an increased risk of accidental death to someone in my household. That's a true statement. To Charles, responsible gun ownership is a right and a symbol of individual freedom. That's also a true statement. These two viewpoints cannot be boiled down to a single logical comparison; they are different ways of perceiving the same physical world.

It is incredibly important not to confuse our idea of the world with the way the world actually is. The first involves perception and perspective, while the second is impossible to know with certainty. Science and math help us prefer some ideas about the world as being more accurate than others, but still leave plenty of room for different points of view. Charles Hoskinson is not just some guy with the right to speak his mind. While that is true, he is also the person that people look to in order to understand not just the Cardano protocol but the points of view that motivate and hold the Cardano community together.

This role demands a greater degree of humility—the understanding that no one, including myself, is exempt from the possibility of misperceived reality. Instead of drawing on humility to acknowledge and lay out different points of view for discussion, when Cardano meets with political headwinds from ill-informed policymakers, he often goes on the offensive. This is the crux of it: ill-informed policymakers. In response to my video about Biden, Hoskinson immediately goes on the offensive, stating, "That's actually not true," and seeks to prove he is right and they are wrong. This is a problem for the entire Cardano community because it paints the whole project as a bunch of stubborn children who believe they know better.

Instead of seeing the value in Hoskinson's arguments, others tend to see only an apparent temper tantrum. I don’t expect Hoskinson to listen to me, but perhaps he could at least heed the words of the great American author Samuel Clemens, who once said, "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you; it’s what for sure that just ain’t so." Let’s talk about this with respect to the Biden Administration and the Democrats that follow it. Our industry has spent years engaging with them—talking to the White House, the chairman of the CFTC, commissioners of the SEC, and speaking before Congress. We’ve had dozens of open letters, policy meetings, and private dinners with senators and congressmen.

While all of those discussions were happening, we had Operation Showdown 2.0, a systematic effort to unbank cryptocurrency companies. Robinhood, Coinbase, Uniswap, Kraken, and Binance all received Wells notices. Notice the trend here, guys. They’re not misinformed.

When Biden was running for president in 2020, he made a deal with Elizabeth Warren for her to drop out in exchange for control of domestic treasury policy. Many of the people in the Treasury Department and the agencies running it were handpicked by Elizabeth Warren, who is fervently anti-crypto. There’s no negotiation, no conversation, and no enlightenment. We’ve tried as an industry to engage with these people in the most humble way possible, discussing issues like banking the unbanked, equity, race relations, discrimination, and fairness. These are bread-and-butter issues that matter a lot to rank-and-file Democrats.

We’ve talked about housing discrimination, credit discrimination, financial transparency, holding financial institutions accountable, triple-entry accounting, cybersecurity in the United States, and the necessity of embracing this industry for that purpose. Reasonable people, the 60 senators who recently voted for a resolution rebuking the SEC, actually do listen. However, this administration, because of the deals it has made, has decided to take a position that crypto is fundamentally harmful to the American people. It has decided that 53 million Americans, regardless of their politics and preferences, are basically soft criminals engaging in illegal activity. Many of my friends, whom I’ve known for years, are under scrutiny now.

Roger Ver, a friend of mine, is probably going to go to prison because of a tax issue from ten years ago after he renounced his U.S. citizenship. CZ is another friend of mine who is in prison, and there are others. It’s not a game.

It’s not about whether we can convince people or be reasonable. The Biden Administration is the unreasonable party here; it has made up its mind and is being duplicitous. They say with a smile that they’re willing to negotiate, to come in and register, to talk to us, to engage with us. Yet, in action, there’s no way to register, no way to engage, and the goal is to offshore the entire industry and label everyone as a criminal, handing the entire industry to the banks like BlackRock and others. This is not an issue of humility; it’s not about humbling oneself or understanding that there are multiple sides to an issue.

This is about the leader of one of the two major political parties in the United States making a conscious policy decision to go to war with one of the most important industries in the country. There are many people listening who hate Trump, who are Democrats, who think Trump is a fundamental threat to the United States and that if reelected, he will become turbo Hitler. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the political cost for a politician for being anti-crypto. If you poll young people, the majority of them are liberal.

The majority of Gen Z and Millennials lean left, and they are overwhelmingly pro-crypto. So here’s the harsh political reality: if there are consequences for supporting a policy position—pro- or anti-gun, pro- or anti-abortion, pro- or anti-Israel, whatever it might be—and those consequences result in losing an election, then your successors will moderate their stances. After four years of constant engagement, watching good friends go to prison, and seeing all the exchanges in our industry, now the DeFi space is served with costly lawsuits that they’ll have to run through regardless of whether they win or lose, still paying hundreds of millions of dollars. Watching the SEC in some cases actually get rebuked by judges for misconduct, and the Senate and Congress rebuke them, while this President says that regardless of what they do, he’ll veto it—after witnessing all these things, at what point is it a humility issue versus a policy issue that’s immutable? If this president loses his job and crypto is the decider, no Democrat running in 2028 will be anti-crypto.

That is a fact. Now, who knows who he will lose it to—RFK, Trump? That’s not what we’re talking about here. When I speak about politics, I’m not talking about social issues, gun ownership, tax policy, real estate, or geopolitics. I don’t talk about these things.

What I talk about from this microphone is crypto because this is the industry that liberates humanity. At the end of the day, we have an election coming up where one party has made a decision that crypto should be destroyed in the American system. They are actively working to shut crypto down, and if you can’t see it or think it was the same under the Trump Administration, you’re just not paying attention, and your personal political biases are getting in the way of your objectivity. You can look at the anti-clarity, the hostility, the volume of lawsuits, and the fact that many American businesses are leaving and going abroad. You can see that all attempts to unify and bring people together on a bipartisan basis have been squashed by an overreaching executive branch.

If that branch loses the election because of this policy stance, both parties will understand that the young demand crypto, and to betray that public trust translates to losing elections. I fully admit and agree that this is the most challenging election in my lifetime. You have two presidents running—a former president and a current president—both of whom are very old, very controversial, and not fit for office. That’s why I endorsed RFK; the American people deserve something different—anything different. We can’t talk about the lesser of two evils anymore; we ought to talk about healing the nation instead of harming it.

The presidential debates are likely going to be at the end of June; I think they agreed on June 27th. There’s a strong possibility that Trump’s trial will conclude the week before, and he may actually be a convicted felon in a prison cell during the debate. Growing up, political opponents were arrested during elections, typically what Russia, China, and banana republics do. But that’s just where we’re at as a nation. It’s not a comfortable situation.

Everybody’s angry, and people are saying incredibly divisive things. They are overstating positions. We lived through four years of the Trump Administration, and the United States didn’t die. Now we’re almost through four years of the Biden Administration, and the United States has yet to die. Both administrations have done harm to the United States in terms of national debt, foreign policy, safety and security, and overall prosperity.

These are facts—objective realities. We, the American people, deserve better leadership and better systems. At a time when all of us have to cut the budget and tighten our belts, we shouldn’t allow the government to propose a $7.3 trillion budget where every administrative agency increases its budget year after year instead of trying to live within its means. We shouldn’t finance all this adventurism, yet both candidates will continue doing this if they win.

So I don’t have much choice about it. I can vote for RFK, and I will donate money to him. We’ll see what happens. But if Trump or Biden wins, as a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who employs almost a thousand people around the world and wants to create jobs in the United States, I have to ask what’s best for my industry. Under the Trump Administration, we founded and built Cardano.

Under the Biden Administration, the entire industry is at war with the U.S. government. That’s the difference. So obviously, I have preferences here, and I would rather not see a second Biden Administration unless and until he reverses the policies that have been so disastrous for us.

But he won’t do so because he doesn’t think there’s a political cost or consequence to it. The point is, if we create a political cost and consequence in that he loses one of his core bases that he needs to win reelection, he’ll realize he has to moderate his stance. He’ll realize that bipartisan legislation helping create regulatory clarity for the cryptocurrency industry is necessary, and he needs to be part of getting that done so we can return to normalcy and get back to the business of building the future. He’ll realize that his positions are costing the United States trillions of dollars. Now, you can say these things with humility, and we have as an industry for years.

An open letter just got submitted to Speaker Johnson and Minority Leader Jeff outlining house resolution specifically to create a comprehensive legislative framework for the cryptocurrency industry. Sixty companies, from Circle to Coinbase and everyone in between, were signers of that open letter in support of common-sense legislation. That’s the humility component. Good people wake up every day making the case, showing the numbers, educating people, and fighting for it. The non-humility component is, despite all of that, to say that every transaction in crypto is basically Hamas being funded, which was implied by Elizabeth Warren.

It’s disingenuous to say, “Come in and register,” when there’s no path or clarity to do so. Whenever clarity is created, it’s taken away from the industry, like Ethereum being a security and then not a security. That’s anti-clarity, and that is the lack of humility. I understand that some may be willing to excuse that behavior because they think there are other policy positions in this election that are more important. But as a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who believes that this technology is the single most important technology to liberate humanity from the chains we are currently in and protect us from the global governance being inflicted upon us, I’m a one-issue voter.

I don’t think the U.S. government is going to solve our problems anymore. I just don’t think they’re capable of doing so. The best-case scenario is that they stay out of our way as citizens while we solve them ourselves.

Our industry was born on those libertarian principles: we’ll go our own way, we’ll make our own money, we’ll be our own bank, and we will succeed together. Every single person here is not because they have a gun to their head or were forced to be here; they’re here because they chose to be here and believe that together we can build a better world. That’s what we did. All we asked of the government wasn’t for money or subsidies; we just said, “Get out of our way and let us as an industry do what we need to do so we can build something that has integrity for once.” Instead, what they’ve done is not only get in our way but also say that 53 million Americans who believe in this are criminals and should just shut up, get in the corner, and turn the keys over to somebody else—the very people we were trying to get rid of to begin with.

That’s perhaps the greatest robbery that America has ever committed, even beyond the COVID issues where trillions of dollars were transferred from the poor to the rich. That’s a robbery of all our collective futures and what remains of our dignity and liberty as people. That’s what this election functionally means. Whether Trump gets in or not, we’re so divisive that the U.S.

government is going to grind to a halt. The big difference will be whether the executive branch continues to be weaponized against the cryptocurrency industry or will lighten up a bit to give us the critical time we need to take 53 million Americans and turn them into 200 million Americans. The next generation of congressmen, senators, and presidents will be crypto natives, and it’ll be unthinkable to turn off this technology—just like each and every one of you listening today would think it’s impossible for the U.S. government to pass a law to get rid of the internet and exile it from the United States.

But there was a time in the early '90s when these debates were held about the NSF and other such things because the people running the show back then didn’t understand or care or think there were political consequences to attacking a network like this. Today, we have it so deeply ingrained in our lives that we can’t imagine a life without it. That is the task of this industry, and all we need is time and for people to get off our backs. So in 2024, all I ask is to vote crypto. That’s it.

If it’s a pro-crypto candidate, it doesn’t matter if they’re a Democrat, Republican, or Independent—just vote for them. If they’re anti-crypto, vote against them and make it known that what you care about is a better future for America. Make it known that what you care about is money with integrity. Make it known that you care about owning your own data and your own identity, to actually have your own wallet. You just want the government out of the system that we built.

If enough of you do that and the consequences are great enough, every single politician will hear you loud and clear. Guess what will happen? They will get off your back because they understand the consequences of being on it. If that’s not humility, well, I’m sorry, but somebody has to have the courage to say it. Somebody has to have the courage to fight for it.

Believe me, this is not easy. It’s not to my benefit; it puts a target on my back and harms me professionally and personally. But some things in life are worth fighting for. I’ve lived enough life and been to enough places to see a world without freedom and a world with it. Regardless of the personal and professional consequences of speaking out and telling people your mind, you should never be afraid to fight for liberty and never be afraid to fight for freedom.

That’s what we’re doing here, and we do it in our own way—with code, with protocols, with the community. So come 2024, vote crypto. That’s all I ask. Thank you so much.