Addiction to Bad Faith; the evil of algorithms

Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is December 10th, 10:48 p.m. Just about to go to bed, but I figured I’d make a quick video to talk about some of my thoughts from the last 48 hours. I did an AI AR this morning, and it was a good time.

We’re making great progress, and all things considered, this is exactly what I was hoping for with the launch of Cardano. You have an asset that brings a lot of interest and excitement. It’s something new and different, something for the industry as a whole to coalesce around. Already, there’s a tale of two cities that exist. Depending on who you ask, some say, “Wow, within 48 hours, an asset was launched on Cardano that had a higher market cap and more trading volume than Algorand.

” That’s really remarkable for Cardano as an ecosystem, which many in the industry say is dead, that its best days are behind it, and that it’s falling apart. It’s capable of launching an asset at that scale, creating this kind of hype and excitement, and getting people legitimately fired up about the future. On the other side, there are people who have a pathological addiction to bad faith. They ask, “Where’s the DEX liquidity? Where did this happen?

” Every step of the way, when they’re proven wrong or realize that things are being done in stages, they just move on to the next thing to complain about. It’s gotten so pathological that it seems they’re utterly incapable of accepting a win, feeling joy, or advancing at all. They move from one crisis to another, one bad faith interpretation to another. Honestly speaking, it’s not only psychologically exhausting; it makes your heart hurt. You can imagine that this neurosis doesn’t just stay confined to the internet.

It must leak into every dimension of their life. They must be standing in line at Starbucks thinking, “When I order this drink, they’re going to get it wrong.” They think, “I’m going to order it with whipped cream, and I’m going to say it’s lactose-free because I’m lactose intolerant, and they’re going to put lactose in it.” Then they move on to the next thing, “When I park here, even though I’ve paid the meter, they’re still going to give me a ticket.” It’s driving everybody insane.

We had two ways to interpret today. I chose the former. I said, “Wow, it’s amazing that we were able to get a win in a year like this. It’s been a really hard year, and everybody worked so long to make this day happen.” A lot of people joined that interpretation, and they felt that win; it was a really great experience.

But then you go to this Twitter thing, and it’s causing mass neurosis. It’s getting worse, not better. It’s exacerbating, and people just move on from one thing. I’m old enough to remember the ADA voucher scandal, the fake Fred stuff, the soft fork, and all this other stuff—one thing after another. Every comment gets twisted and manipulated.

We just have to start opting out as a society, and I have to start with myself. I thought about what we can do differently next year. My way of communicating with everybody is predominantly on X, and there are a million people there who love me. It’s so much fun, and I really do enjoy it. On the other hand, every time you want to see your friends, you have to put on a suit and swim through a river of [__].

It’s got [__] hippos in it, and the [__] hippos are trying to eat you while you’re swimming through this river. People say, “Well, just ignore all of it.” It’s hard to ignore when 50, 60, 70, or 80 comments are all negative or bad faith. It’s one after another every single day, consistently bombarding me. If I ignore all of it, I also ignore the good comments.

So either I have to read them all to see which ones are real and good, or I read none of them. If I read none of them, I’m not engaging with you. Then I have to pay people to read it, which is almost like when Facebook pays its moderators. They have to decide what content to censor and what not to, and they spend half their time watching horrible things. They get psychologically messed up for $15 an hour as they moderate things and see how bad humanity can be.

I guess I can outsource it to them. That’s where we’re at. I like my friends. I enjoy hanging out with them. I really enjoy engaging.

On the other hand, I’m exhausted and swimming in this river of [__] with the [__] hippos. I’m really tired of people saying I’m obese and overweight. Yeah, I have the courage to take my shirt off on the internet. Do you? I’m really tired of people saying all these horrible things about me every single day.

It’s nothing but a river of [__] with [__] hippos. At some point, you just have to say enough is enough. It’s torture. I have to do something different, but I can’t lose the engagement because that’s valuable to the ecosystem, to my company, and to all of you. Here’s what we’re going to do: Since there’s no meaningful way to surf that river safely, starting next year, I’m going to create a digital twin of myself.

I’m going to partially turn over my Twitter to that digital twin, and I’m going to work with some of our AI people. We’re going to call it Project Simulacra. It’s going to mostly run and moderate my X account. I’m going to try as hard as I can to extract as much value as possible, all the love, well-wishes, and meaningful productive conversation, and move it to another channel that has more curation and doesn’t have the [__] hippos. I’m going to spend a lot of time in targeted discussions.

I’ll be in the Midnight Discord extensively, starting with the Midnight Ambassadors, and then I’ll do regular events in the Midnight Discord. In that Discord, I’ll really enjoy being able to engage with people one-on-one because, in person or over audio, for the most part, people are respectful and engaged. Even if they disagree with you, they at least want to have a dialogue. There are certain people who are still [__], but typically the rest of the people shout them out when they come in because they realize how rude they’re being. This is not the case on Twitter.

If I punch back, I get attacked, and I’m labeled a bad actor for defending myself. That becomes the story. So, we’re going to create that digital Simulacra. I’m going to gradually migrate most of my communications off Twitter, and then I’ll find paths to link the conversation from Twitter into different channels. Hopefully, we can create better-moderated channels.

It’s sad because I really do enjoy Twitter. It’s great for getting news. It’s awesome. But there are different ways to do that, and I think it’s going to be psychologically a lot healthier. To everyone else on Twitter, I encourage you to find a way to do the same.

It’s not healthy. This is doing something to humanity. I don’t think psychiatrists and psychologists fully understand it, but it’s giving everyone a license to treat each other in a way that, if they did it in person, they’d honestly get the [__] kicked out of them. Would you walk up to someone at a supermarket and say, “You are [__], overweight, ugly, evil, a sociopath, a terrible human being, a thief, and a monster”? If you did that ten times, how many times could you do it before that person just hits you in the face?

But you do it online because you’re a coward, and the algorithms are built to make you want to do that. They’re designed to make people excited about it so they can watch you do it. In many ways, we’re being puppeteered by math, creating a social dynamic where we live in a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde psychology.

The problem is our brains were never designed for that. We treat both encounters psychologically the same, whether online or in person. Even if intellectually we think it’s different, the lizard brain and the hippocampus treat it the same. That’s just what the literature says. So, we have to put a stop to it.

After the launch of Midnight, I was excited, expecting to see a lot of support, especially within the Cardano ecosystem. There certainly is support, but some things have just gotten so boring and tiring. There’s also a group of people who are seriously deranged about me. They’ve decided in their hearts that I am an evil person, and they will never be convinced otherwise. Any engagement with them is counterproductive.

They’re a cult—an anti-Charles cult. They collect themselves in little cabals. It used to be the fake Fred cabal, which got disbanded, but they’re not gone. They have this seething passion and have never been able to articulate the grand scam or the grand issue. They cite my credentials, past events with Ethereum, and former employees in the organization.

Every single interpretation of their fact pattern is built in the worst possible way. No counterfactual information will break their narrative. They say, “This man is evil, and it is my divine duty to destroy him.” They will follow me to any platform I go. You see them on YouTube, in this very video, and on X.

Wherever I go, those people exist, which is why I’m going to have to move to increasingly moderated platforms. When they come to my YouTube channel, I can click a button and that person is gone. I can’t do that on other mediums, and I just don’t have time for the derangement. There’s no engagement with a person who has decided you’re evil because they’ve already made up their mind that your only purpose in life is to harm them, manipulate them, steal from them, and cause damage to others. You can’t negotiate with that person.

There’s no difference of opinion or dialogue. They have reached a radical derangement. You see this a lot in politics now; it’s promoted and exacerbated to levels we’ve never seen before as a species. Again, I believe it’s the algorithms. If any of these people spent real meaningful time with me, they’d probably start developing a different opinion.

There’s this one journalist—I won’t mention his name—who interviewed me. I’ve only met him once, about seven years ago. I’ll never forget that day because we had used a new media organization, and I had an interview with Yahoo News. They said, “Hey, why don’t you fly to New York and come to our studio?” I said, “Sure, that sounds a lot of fun.

” We set up a media tour in New York, and I flew out. Yahoo said, “Here’s the time slot you’re supposed to be on.” I went to the studio an hour and a half early. They had me go through makeup and did the whole rigmarole. I literally flew to New York just for this interview.

I was sitting in a chair, and I saw the newscasters broadcasting. I was literally the next person up. When they went to the commercial break, I got up, walked five feet, and sat down in the camera’s view. Instead, they decided to bump me for the emerging news of some IPO. I was just like, “You invited me here.

I flew all the way to New York. I’m literally sitting inside the studio. I’m in a suit. I rarely wear one. You’ve done makeup.

I had to get up at 5:00 a.m. to be in the studio at this time. I’m ten feet away from the newscasters, and you bump me for a non-story.” I was like, “What are we doing here?

This is nuts.” They said, “Well, this happens. Maybe we’ll get you back on the schedule.” I said, “Okay.” Right after that, I had lunch scheduled with the reporter.

I went, a little flustered, and explained the story to him. He spent seven years on a vendetta, writing a negative article about me. He uses that Yahoo bump as an example of my extreme narcissism and all these other things. It’s a bizarre derangement that some people have. I don’t know where these preconceived notions come from.

It’s not your business, my psychology. You can speculate, but it’s almost as if people just want to be right about whether I’m a good man or an evil man. All I want to do is build stuff. At the end of the day, all I want to do is build stuff. Is that not self-evident to you after being here for 15 years?

At some point, you just do something else if you don’t want to build things. I built BitShares because I was really interested in solving the two biggest problems that I thought the cryptocurrency space had. There was a thread on Bitcoin Talk that I created back in 2013 called Project Invictus. My thought process was that you needed to do two things to make cryptocurrencies undefeatable after the old Invictus poem. One is, at the time, we were all worried about Mt.

Gox, so we needed decentralized exchanges. This was in 2013. The second was that everybody was worried about volatility—Bitcoin going way up and way down—so we needed an algorithmic stablecoin. This was before Tether or anything else. I created, with Dan Larimer, the first algorithmic stablecoin and the first exchange called BitShares.

I also created the Bitcoin Education Project and brought 70,000 people into the cryptocurrency space. Then I realized we needed programmable transactions. So, Vitalik and I and others teamed up and created Ethereum. After that, I went my own way because we all had differences of opinion. This happens in business.

There are eight founders, and people are going to go their own way. Gavin created Polkadot; I created Cardano. It’s our right to do that. Cardano has been around for ten years. We’ve done a lot of firsts: the first provably secure proof of stake, the first extended UTXO at scale, and the first real use of a functional programming language with formal methods.

We were the first two to bring that to market at scale. We did all these things, and then I created Vindai because I was really interested in privacy and selective disclosure. Every step of the way, we wrote academic peer-reviewed papers, wrote code, and told everybody what we were going to do. I built and built and built. I wear my heart on my sleeve and give the same speech again and again.

If you review the transcripts of all my presentations and put them into an LLM, you’ll see an 11-year consistency. It’s hard to be a pathological liar and say the same thing for 11 years straight while doing the same thing. You do that because you love what you do and genuinely enjoy building these types of things and solving hard problems. I wear my heart on my sleeve because I’m a passionate guy. Maybe it’s because I was under-socialized as a homeschooler or because I had a rough go of things when I first went to college at 15 years old.

But here’s the thing: I’m happy with what I do. I love my life and the things I do. I genuinely enjoy my days. There are hard days, but there’s no path to do this if it’s all about ego and greed. The only way I’m willing to get up every morning, even when I don’t have to, is because I care and want these things to work.

The most hurtful thing about all this algorithmic stuff is that it doesn’t come through, either because people can’t see it or they choose to believe it’s all some sort of elaborate act. They revert to a preconceived attack pattern that feels old after years and years. It’s like hearing the attacks on Trump; I don’t care if you love him or hate him. He’s been in the public eye for so long, and it’s just old. We get it; he’s orange and says weird things.

I’ve personally had to endure some of his insanity this year. People keep repeating it as if, somehow, when they say it for the nine millionth time, it’s going to make a difference. But really, are we going to think about it differently? Yet these people repeat it again and again. It’s exhausting.

We all want to move on. We want to grow and get to the next level as a species, as a society, and as projects. I refuse to believe this is the standard. I endure it because I love what I do and love building, and I accept that this is just the necessary evil and cost of doing business. But 99.

9% of people won’t because they don’t share that passion and aren’t willing to endure this type of punishment. There are plenty of people willing to explore frontiers, fight snakes, mountain lions, and bears to see beautiful mountain vistas. But nobody’s going to move to live there until you build the roads and infrastructure to keep them safe and secure. Our job as pioneers is to settle. We have to conquer new lands, make new ideas safe, and make them accessible.

That’s not possible if all we have to offer is toxicity. It doesn’t do anything for anyone. We have to find new places to host that dialogue. To the social media companies, you’ve done some of the most beneficial and some of the worst damage to humanity in a contradictory way. You’ve created a reality where we can all talk to each other and know everything about each other, which has never been the case in human history.

At the same time, you’ve created an incentive for us to focus only on the worst parts of each other. Think about what kind of utopia we could live in if we focused on the best parts of each other and worked together to make those parts even better. As the people who created these platforms continue to count their untold billions of dollars and think there’s nothing wrong, they’re literally investing those billions into artificial intelligence to propagate this to the next level. People talk a lot about AI doomers and how AI is going to destroy society. The real death of society is making humanity unrecognizable and the culture of the future so alien that it doesn’t feel like humanity anymore.

Blockchain can’t solve everything, but it can solve a lot of things. One of the things it can solve is giving us different ways to talk to and collaborate with each other. It’s become blatantly clear that we absolutely have to build a social network. It has to get done. We need new media and When I wake up every day, I try to put a lot of thought, care, and consideration into how we can make these things awesome for everybody.

How do we make them usable? How do we create great experiences? Ultimately, how do we make these things with love that perpetuates? I honestly want these protocols to be beloved so people will take care of them. I don’t want products.

This is a product. I use it every day. And what? It’s an S25. This time last year, it was an S24, and the year before that, it was an S23.

What do I do with the S24 and the S23? They’re sitting in a drawer, and I haven’t thought about them. That’s a product. It’s important for today, and then it’s discarded. On the other hand, things that you love, you don’t discard.

You take care of them. You preserve them. You protect them. You treasure them. I care for and love Midnight.

I care for and love Cardano. These are like my kids. I want to build things that have that same emotional impact and draw on all of you. I want things that, when you look at them, you say, “I care about that. I love that.

That matters to me. It’s something special to me.” Because then I know that 20 years down the road, 30 years down the road, 100 years down the road, that will still be around. They’re going to find a way to make it persevere. This comes from my love of history.

The things that we admire and respect in history, we remember and treasure. The stories we admire and respect, we tell them again and again. Hollywood has made a whole business out of telling the same 15 stories repeatedly. You go to Egypt, and you see these structures, some 4,000 years old, if not older, that people pay to visit. We treasure the things we love.

We protect them. I don’t want products; I want Midnight and Cardano to be here forever, and I want all the time and effort that we all put together to be meaningful. In addition to focusing on the experience and UX, understand that it’s not just me but the team at Input Output—our engineers, our scientists. For the vast majority of them, this is not just a job. It’s too hard to be just a job for most of them.

It’s a passion, too. They love the fact that they’ve built something with exotic technology that actually works. They’ve created new protocols and built something that looks at the world a little differently. They’re able to protect it, treasure it, and let it grow and thrive. All the things we said would happen have happened.

That’s pretty magical when you see all of that. That’s another reason why we get a little defensive. What do you do when people attack your loved ones? What do you do when people try to destroy the things you love and care for? If it was just a phone, does it really matter if I lose it?

It gets damaged; you just go buy another one and transfer your data. It’s a fungible good. You’re annoyed by the inconvenience and the lost money, but at the end of the day, we all know how the story ends. It’s going to end up in a box when the new one comes out. But when it’s something you love and it’s destroyed, you can’t replace it.

All of that effort that went into it is gone. There’s an unusually high level of passion for the architects, for the engineers, and for all the other people involved. That’s another reason why I love what I do—because I get to work with people who have souls, who care, who actually put in the work, and who have craftsmanship. That’s special. Have you ever worked with someone who genuinely loves their job?

It’s infectious. Have you ever worked with someone who gets to build beautiful things? Just listen to them talk about it. It doesn’t matter if they’re a ramen chef, a cobbler, or whatever the job is. The fact that they love what they build is pretty amazing when you think about it.

Every day is an opportunity to be better. I figure I just don’t opine on all this. Thank you for making today a good day, and thank you for all the well-wishing. I understand the other side of it and where people are coming from. I understand how we make things move forward.

We’ll see more people in the Discord, and next year will be a different year. It’ll be a nice reset, and I’m looking forward to doing things in a new way. I’ll still do the live streams, but I’m going to try to do them in a more structured way. I’m probably going to start having some moderation in the comments and have someone with me. I’ll try to announce a time slot instead of doing surprise AMAs, doing them with some degree of regularity.

I’m going to try to funnel as much traffic into the Discord because we want to build that population up. I’ll probably do a relay, and if you want to engage, you have to be in the Discord. You can just watch from these types of channels. We’ll figure out all those techniques. I’m pulling the social media team together for that.

I have a nice studio over there that I’m supposed to set up, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. I have another studio up in Gillette that has the same thing, and we’re supposed to build one in the office, but we didn’t finish it yet because we’ve been busy traveling over 260 days a year. That’s a priority for Q1, and obviously, there will be a lot more moderation for all these things. I’m sorry if it makes me a little more distant and there’s less engagement, but know that the time and engagement will be spent building Midnight, Cardano, RealFi, and other things. I’m still going to some conferences.

I’m going to try to at least do the big four, and I’ll always make time for the community because you all matter. I’ll make time to talk to people, and I’ll try to find opportunities to talk to smaller groups from time to time. There will be less engagement on Twitter because it simply won’t be there. If you get a reply, it’s from a robot, not from me. If you reply back, the robot will aggregate everything together, give me sentiment scores, and show me the top 10 comments, filtering out all the junk.

I’ll still be able to read a lot of your well-wishes, so it’s not a wasted endeavor. It’s a different medium, and unfortunately, that’s just where we’re at because I don’t want to swim in the [__] river anymore. I’ve been bitten by too many [__] hippos. Honestly, there’s no value or fun in it anymore, and I have better things to do in life and better things to build. Thanks for listening to my Midnight rant.

If you haven’t checked it out, go to midnight.network. It’s pretty cool. Join the Discord, become an ambassador. I’m going to keep saying it for 90 days.

I’ll see everybody in Hong Kong at Consensus if you have a chance to make it there. If not, there’s the Japan tour. I’ll be in Hokkaido all the way down to Okinawa. We’re getting all the dates set up in time, and it’ll be before Hong Kong. There will be lots of announcements and cool things.

Japan’s liquidity hasn’t even opened yet in the markets, so that’s going to be very fun. I’m glad to see that we had a win this year; we really needed one for the ecosystem as a whole. I look forward to 2026. It’s the dawn of Hydra. You’ve got Laos, you’ve got Starstream.

Now that Midnight’s out, it’s just going to get better and better. You’ve got Reali, and we get to finally do that banked unbanked. It’s all coming together. The whole Cardano vision is finally fitting together. We finally have the foundation we need to change the world.

That’s what I’m going to focus on. Thanks, everyone.