Afghanistan and Cryptocurrency

i'm broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado i wanted to make a video to add to clarify and in some cases be a little puzzled about some of the media reporting on some statements that i had so some articles have come out and obviously there's been some interviews and the articles are mostly related to an impression that i believe that somehow cryptocurrencies are going to go and save afghanistan never said it i was just commenting on a situation where there is a belief that because of the taliban's presence in afghanistan that more crypto adoption will occur especially amongst those who oppose the taliban because they need a parallel settlement system to avoid becoming victims of human rights violations also if you're a rebel fighting the taliban government they're going to need some sort of funding source to be able to manage that affair cash is of course always there but people take advantage of the mediums that they have and unlike the 1990s digital currencies now exist so of course there's a very strong possibility that that's going to become a very big component also it's a lot easier for the united states to support the northern alliance or their successors by simply sending them a digital asset than finding a way to move large pallets of cash to afghanistan so it makes a lot more sense for indirect assistance of these actors to do that and in general it's a great case study of seeing how will cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology be used offensively and defensively in nation-state-level conflicts especially where there is the presence of sanctions and aggressive lockdowns of the freedom of movement resources that was my only comment and yet somehow the media has transformed this into charles hoskinson said crypto will save afghanistan it's gotten a little bizarre lately the press coverage that's come out it's either one of two categories mad discussions about prices and appreciation to an extent where no one can even see things properly for example i think it was bitboy but it was some podcaster who took a giveaway scam video well actually it was based on first coin gape crypto game they took a a giveaway scam video with a fake headline that charles hoskinson says cardano's gonna hit 150 dollars ran an article on it with no fact checking and then these podcasters picked it up and and and started discussing and opining as if these are facts there's absolutely no fact checking or due diligence that's happening in these articles it's extraordinary and they're voluminous there's tons of them they're coming out all the time every day so do understand that we will never comment on price appreciation the price of ada whether it's undervalued overvalued it's not our place our focus is use and utility of the system and adoption of the system now from time to time of course i'm going to kick some people in the teeth paulie market for example we've had certain fun with but that's a tweet that has nothing to do with the prognostication of where value is going to be whether something's a good idea or not all i focus on is the utility of the system and how do we get there like smart contracts we're launching september 12th the other thing we've seen is incredible amounts of fud in strange misquotes and narratives that have just come out of nowhere for example coindesk running their cryptocolonialism article out of damn nowhere just in it oh well cardano can't build bridges and roads and this is just white guys going to ethiopia to screw them again it's like what where does this even come from this is this is nuts or for example recently this afghanistan stuff where they're saying we're saying we're saving the world now and then people just implicitly react to these things so i don't at this moment believe that any notion of reasonable balanced fair press is going to be coming in the next 30 60 days it's either irrationally or exuberant or not based on any grounding or reality or fake quotes or fake news or it's unnecessarily weirdly harsh and gruff coin telegraph for example running articles about how cardano's gonna collapse 90 percent misquoting somebody about it and no institutional love know this know that it's like why write these things this makes no sense so we've just seen a lot of that and this is one particular story where it was very clear what i said and there's tapes of what i said and they've just been taken to bizarre places by the media now i've often thought what is the solution for this in general we've tried as an ecosystem to be very precise in the way that we talk so we have cardano 360 every month and we try to make that a fair aggregation of the progress we're making the community is making and the protocol itself is making towards its goals we try to have events on a regular basis for example the cardano summit that's occurring september 25th at university wyoming and many other places i think over 30 plus thousand people have registered our goal is at least 50. so let's see if we get there we've tried to write blog posts on a on a regular basis we try to maintain multiple twitter accounts specifically for cardano related news the foundation also has its own media channels and it's been trying to upgrade those channels and continue their propagation i regularly appear on podcasts and i regularly appear on amas where we try to communicate we try to communicate but despite all of that we still are in a situation where people continue to fall for giveaway scams or continue to just read things at face value even if they're completely out there and they have no basis in reality or they violate common notions of of critical thinking just because something's in a book doesn't mean it's true just because something was written in a blog post doesn't mean it's true no due diligence at all is done on fact circumstances or author i think that at some point we need to as an ecosystem get to the get to a real tough series of questions about how do you create incentives and tools and techniques to vet information and what we need to do is have a list and a blacklist for information so whitelisted information is something that's gone through some notion of vetting and everything else we just assume is in the red zone it's it's not not credible until proven otherwise we have to get into a mental habit of that it used to be that we would just look at the journalistic organization and the brand of the organization and say oh well that's the new york times or that's the wall street journal or that's what a what coin desk coin telegraph they have real journalists and therefore they're doing the vetting so the things they're writing are at least somewhere in the ballpark of truthiness we're no longer there as an industry no matter what institutions writing things for some reason these institutions seem to be not getting it right a lot of times not all the time but a lot of times uncomfortably large amount of times and there seems to be agendas and narratives and subjectivity that has worked its way into the press and it's worked its way into the literature about this space in the history of this space so what i think we need to do is just say everything is in the gray zone the black zone the red zone whatever we want to call it an unverified grouping and we need to build tools to get them out of that bucket especially for things that are high value and that's going to be something in 2022 when we as a company have more time we're definitely going to engage in that i believe such a thing is the basis of a good social network twitter has a program they're exploring there are other companies looking into this as well i have no doubt some are going to be launched on cardano because we've already seen interest in the social media space and i've done several videos about how to improve the quality of information that we see i think first principles approaches need to be applied here there's about 20 years of good r d in history about de-radicalization and fake news that's come out of the war on terrorism and there's all kinds of other techniques that can be applied and there's looming threats on the horizon deep fakes in particular are super concerning because what they can do is create a reality where the things you hear and see although you perceive them to be legitimate are actually artifacts of ai driven algorithms so a story is for example the pizzagate where people said that hillary clinton was working with a cabal of of evil people and they were going into the basement of a pizza place to go murder children and suck out adrenaculum that's a crazy story and it's just so much has to happen for something like that to be true and the burden of proof is so incredibly high yet so many people believed it to the point where the i think the pizzeria was actually the owner of it was actually his life was threatened well could you imagine how devastating a story like that could be if you could use deep fakes to actually create a hidden video showing such an act and allowing that to propagate that is a world we're going to live in in five to ten years and we already are seeing the effects of persistent propaganda on people through these medians and platforms where even reasonable people are no longer able to divorce themselves from very emotionally charged beliefs and objectively look at reality as it is now for example i've made many videos on vaccinations and the pandemic and no matter what i say there's going to be a group of people who think that i'm just either co-opted by the new world order or i don't understand statistics and science or i just want grandma to die or i'm just a libertarian crazy person or an authoritarian who wants to control your life i'm apparently on all sides of this issue even though i've been saying consistently the same thing why because the people listening have been subjected to some degree of propaganda misinformation and it has become part of their thinking it's contaminated the thinking to a point where new ideas are cannot be accepted it's not just analyzed and debated it's they're the enemy and there's a visceral negative emotional reaction to them we're seeing that in politics we're seeing that in every dimension and as cryptocurrencies become and blockchains become a big part of our lives and they're already big part of my life big part a lot of people listening listening's life this is going to be one of the biggest battles we face we are already seeing people like paul krugman and john paulson and others say cryptocurrencies are rat poison they're useless they're going to zero they're a ponzi scheme they have no real use in utility even though there's overwhelming evidence of what cryptocurrencies can do for society and why they are in many cases superior to the legacy systems and when nobel laureates and billionaires who have very large footprints are saying these things they're not saying rational arguments they're engaging in propaganda to benefit a legacy system that they have gained enormous benefit from and trying to destroy a new system that they fear is going to remove that benefit from them or at least diminish their shining stars and the larger we get as an industry the more of this we're going to see and these new next generation tools that we see are certainly going to cause a lot of harm and heartache so just like privacy is a defensive measure resilience and decentralization is a defensive measure governance is a defensive measure spreading the propagation to as many people as possible getting as many users as possible strength in numbers is a defensive measure we now as an industry need to take a step back and realize the institutions we rely upon to filter and help information objective information flow are not working by design either by algorithmic optimization towards clicks in advertising or because they've been co-opted with protectionist agendas that are not in our best interest as an industry so we need to take a step back as an industry and realize that this is now our biggest problem moving into 2022-2023 especially as regulation is being written you have to look no further than the infrastructure bill in the united states there was an overwhelming amount of misinformation spread about something that was very simple somebody who didn't understand what they were doing put an overly broad definition in a bill with an attempt to get more tax compliance and it was very clear that that needed to be corrected ordinary legislative processes would have done so but for whatever reason those processes were not followed and we were in a situation where we needed to change something that should have been ubiquitous and universally supported yet we saw enormous amounts of misinformation and fud saying well people are just supporting tax evasion and this is just cow towing to a dangerous industry and cryptocurrencies are bad and these types of things from mainstream media and that's just a sample of what's to come and it's going to be dialed up every single year hereafter and it's not clear to me that we will get fair representation in any state so it's very important that we as an industry get it ourselves and build information systems and media systems that vet and validate information and create incentives to actually get to objective reality and truth and then hopefully we can get those systems installed in new media we can get those systems installed into government decision making and we can get those systems installed into corporate decision making now this is a long process it has to undo a lot of damage that the old system has but working together there's no reason we can't get that done in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years the alternative is the legacy system will continue to use misinformation to create bizarre narratives or damaging narratives with the intention of putting in unnecessary regulation restrictions and controls in our industry or to completely and outright ban the use and utility of this industry and strip it of its soul in order to continue to enforce a legacy system that is morally bankrupt and has no place in a global society where we'd like to be treated fairly and with honesty and transparency so that's the challenge before us and we're certainly in the cardano community experiencing it enduring it and we've gotten a huge share of it war is to come i have no doubt and especially as we grow in success you're going to see significant and harsh criticism of me of cardano of the ecosystem as a whole you're also going to see a lot of misinformation things that are objectively false for example there was a narrative that was being pushed on twitter very aggressively for over six months that there were double spends in cardano it's objectively verifiably false you can check and see it's never happened but yet it's been propagated there are narratives going around that extended utxo is a private blockchain system and that cardano is not decentralized that it's it's privately run and some people actually believe this there's narrative floating around that cardano has an infinite inflation monetary policy instead of a bitcoin like fixed monetary policy and it's actually believed by a lot of maximalists in the bitcoin community i don't know the origins of these things but i do know they spread like wildfire and it takes an enormous amount of effort to fight those fires and be able to put them out and then the next fire starts why do fires start because they have fuel and this environment how we communicate how we think how we react is creating a very dry forest with lots of biomass and no one's doing anything to kind of proactively clean that up and clear it out so that fires won't occur or they can't get good footholds and spread so i'm deeply concerned i also see a lot of authoritarianism in our social media communications for example for the first time in my life i'm not allowed to search for certain things on social media i'll get basically a stock answer like for example if you go to twitter and you say israel revokes vaccine passport in the search field i was looking for a particular tweet for a particular thing i get no results just information about about covid that twitter's decided and we're seeing this wholesale for dozens of topics and issues and facebook twitter and other social media so it's very clear that there's a there's a cabal of people within these companies that have decided what we deserve to see and what we don't and have decided that they're going to control the flow of information and the narratives that they want to control there is no reason why private companies can't on a whim form a larger cabal and decide that cryptocurrencies are now in the same category as anti-vaxxing or in the same category as any other topic they've decided is no longer vote and crack down on it unless it's part of the government-approved narrative i believe there is probably going to be a time in the next two or three years that there are chirons on my videos just like there are in the covid videos of when i do an ama say well this is fake news or for real information about cryptocurrencies go to this government website that's probably going to come and i have no reason to believe it won't because there's no law or objective standard that constrains these organizations or self-verifying way that we can agree to this conduct one of the biggest bedrock principles of cryptocurrencies has always been this doctrine of inclusive accountability you're not trusting people you're checking independently the history you're given so for example with bitcoin and ethereum and cardone any transaction you receive if you have a full node you have the ability to look at that and verify that that transaction exists those tokens exist and they have not been double spent you don't have to trust anybody you don't have to believe someone you don't have to just take it on faith you have the capacity this notion of inclusive accountability to do that this is not true when we talk about the flow of information the veracity of information and the censorship standards that are being used in social media and mainstream media for example the treatment of ibmectin i'm not a physician but i do have some competency with statistics and it's very clear when you look at a lot of meta-analysis that are floating around that there does seem to be some evidence of a reduction in mortality when ivermectin is used journalists who have no experience in medicine are comfortably proclaiming that this is a fake drug and it has no efficacy and it's equivalent to taking vitamin c or zinc or something else in treatment of virus meanwhile scientists are writing papers they are thinking about these things i don't actually know one way or the other what i do know is there is some data and evidence and that's undeniable and i can send you papers published by credible researchers credible institutions who have done analysis after analysis and shown some efficacy certainly more so than anything we've seen from rem deserver an fda emergency authorized drug that is commonly used and for the treatment of covet but yet there are people who proclaim such a thing as if they're an authority and it's an established well-known fact and only a conspiracy theorist would have a difference of opinion if we can't even have an honest conversation about these types of things and some group of people just get to arbitrarily decide based upon some institution that has not been entirely consistent that is not telling us how they're looking at things objectively then it deeply concerns me that that's going to be reapplied to every other dimension of society including who's a legitimate candidate to run for office and who's not including what is a legitimate solution to a problem and what's not what if you run a business and you're in the geothermal business and you've come up with a revolutionary new way of doing geothermal where you can do it everywhere instead of just in very small areas of the earth shouldn't you then be put into the conversation as a viable solution to the energy crisis before us but what if the media arbitrarily decides your technology doesn't work people have no experience in drilling or geothermal technologies they've just decided because some institution that they'll blindly accept has said so what if that institution is co-opted and controlled by a different lobby and they have a commercial interest in your technology failing but now you've been delegitimized and because of that the social media companies now will de-platform you and to list all your videos anybody who has the audacity to talk about your product will be blacklisted in society that's effectively what's happening for one area of society it now can be reused for any other area of society this is not a slippery slope fallacy this is a basic demand for asking what are the objective criteria for how information is going to be vetted processed and moved from unverified to verified and a realization that you are being told there are certain things you are not allowed to hear because those things are too dangerous for you that is not a free society in a free society we don't fear ideas we embrace them even wrong ones because we have the critical thinking capabilities individually and collectively to accommodate absorb and react accordingly in a society of totalitarianism and dictators you are not allowed to have free speech and free thought and be exposed to alternative ideas in the orthodoxy because those ideas may actually end up overthrowing the government may end up revealing corruption of government officials a counter narrative to the government narrative or the power bases narrative and as a consequence those ideas will delegitimize them and ultimately result in change in society only people who fear the ideas are the ones who want to censor them i happen to believe that we have within us the capability if we have the right incentives tools systems and structures to be able to sort out fact from fiction as long as we keep an open mind and as long as we're humble about what our own capabilities are and our own biases are intelligence is a godsend in this respect because it's a companion if it's built correctly to help us organize and sort out and think about the world and in some cases reveal that perhaps we can't objectively look at things collective structures in incentive structures like prediction markets and these types of things are another tool that can be potentially utilized and the focus of society should be if we wish to live in a free society not censoring and controlling the flow of information or deciding certain ideas are too dangerous for you to see should be on building tools to upgrade our software as people so that we can better handle the flow of ideas and sort out fact from fiction and become chronically skeptical about what we see in here so that's going to be a big priority as i grow older because i don't want to live in a society and i don't think anyone wants to live in a society where some group of people i've never met i didn't elect i have no influence or control over basically gets to decide at any given time what i know what i should know and what i think and if i step outside of their orthodoxy i become exiled from society that's not a free society and if we at any point in american history had embraced that as the status quo all the great things we take for granted now the revolution and the outcome there or the outcome of the civil war and the equality that that brought or the civil rights movement or the exposure of the central intelligence agency and the resulting church committee or the pentagon papers all of those things would have never happened they would have been silenced by the orthodoxy and the new tools of the orthodoxy and the status quo would have been maintained to preserve the power of the few that is so fundamentally un-american and so fundamentally against the dna of liberty and freedom we have to accept the risk of a risky idea and we have to accept that information needs to be vetted and we are primarily responsible and we have to trust each other that we have the capacity to do this if we doubt our capacity the discussion should be how do we upgrade that capacity not how do we protect people from these things so this has been the journey that i think we've all been on the last two years have been a very illuminating two years for me i was part of the ron paul movement back in 0.