Reading is Hard

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is May 11th, 2024, and I'm making a video talking about our favorite thing: politics. There is an article from our good friends at Blockworks, a nice little editorial by Molly Jane Zuckerman, titled "Only a Fool Would Vote on Crypto Alone." It's your standard "orange man bad" narrative, suggesting that Trump is not pro-crypto, while promoting a left-wing agenda. Whenever someone writes this kind of garbage, I tweet about it because I enjoy Twitter.

This one surprised me a little. I commented on the article, saying, "I’m on the left and understand that 20% of America that holds crypto is pretty pissed that Biden caused massive harm to our entire industry arbitrarily and capriciously. Still, we can’t let the orange man back in, so vote for Biden anyway, even though he wants to put you out of business." That's where we're at. You could be pro-crypto but so captured by a political ideology that you're willing to go out of business and accept terrible downstream consequences.

The reality is, and I’m sorry, Blockworks, that you don’t get this, is that if you don’t support crypto, what you support are CBDCs. You support unlimited financial surveillance and the ability to deplatform anyone from society economically. They can just push a button and turn your money off at any time. You support the idea that all information flows should be curated and controlled. You don’t want any social mobility because if you destroy all the industries that create social mobility and turn them over to government control, people can’t move up the food chain, and power flows to the top forever.

We witness transnational control of most nations these days, whether it be the WHO, the World Trade Organization, or the BIS. These transnational bodies dictate how to run your life, especially for smaller nations that can’t resist. Articles like this are written by people who don’t understand the implications or don’t think they can happen, even though they’re happening right now. We see it with overwhelming regulation and regulatory capture. Everything has to be AML, KYC.

Non-custodial wallets should be banned and completely controlled by centralized actors, and you should have to ask permission to use your own money. We build an industry without asking for permission. We say we’re going to create a different economic system. We’re not going to ask for money or for you to pass laws. We’re just going to voluntarily come together as an industry, and 53 million Americans did so.

We all came together and said we are going to build an industry for ourselves so we have economic identity and agency, and the free flow of information. We can vote for our own leaders, do our own things, and be our own bank. Now, Robinhood has been hit with a Wells notice, Coinbase has been hit with a Wells notice, Kraken is being sued, Binance is being sued, Uniswap is being sued, Ripple is being sued, and Consensus is being sued with MetaMask. Soon, probably the Ethereum Foundation itself will be sued. For what crime?

The regulated businesses that are following all the regulations as money service businesses and facilitating well-ordered regulated markets for trading on registered securities, when there’s zero clarity on what that even means or how that works. It’s completely divergent from the rest of the world, and there’s no path to even register. Why? Because this administration wants to kill this industry. It’s that simple.

If you’re not paying attention, maybe you missed it. I’m sorry, Molly, but you have to ask a fundamental question: why do they want to kill the industry? Is it because they don’t understand it, in which case they’re now qualified to regulate quantum computers, AI, synthetic biology, and all the other emerging technologies? Or is it because they do understand it and realize the consequences? You can’t have unlimited financial surveillance.

You can’t spend tens of trillions of dollars that you don’t have. You can’t lie to people daily. You can’t manipulate the ballot. You’re actually constrained by algorithmic law, and if you lie, cheat, or are dishonest, maybe you’ll be caught. I think they understand it.

I think there are smart people in that administration, even if the guy at the top is a little wonky. They’re terrified that 53 million Americans have access to technology that makes large chunks of the federal government irrelevant. They realize that if that number turns to 100, 150, or 200 million, maybe that government monopoly on the printing of money and consent will go away, and the social contract will change. You on the left seem to preach about equality, but then you hand power to people who care the least about equality. Tell me, who does resisting inflation and having equal access to financial systems help?

Rich, powerful white people like me, or minorities and the underclasses who are currently excluded from the systems? How are these systems racist at their core? You care so much about that, but how can they discriminate when they don’t even know who’s using them? As the founder of a cryptocurrency, I have the same access to Cardano that everyone else does. There’s no special backdoor for Charles Hoskinson.

It’s the same for Vitalik Buterin in Ethereum, the same for Satoshi Nakamoto with Bitcoin, and the same for any legitimate cryptocurrency. Doesn’t that seem more intrinsically fair? Doesn’t that seem we’re actually pushing toward true equality? Shouldn’t money, credit, identity, data, and contractual rights work that way? It goes from "don’t be evil" to "can’t be evil.

" But then you have the audacity to say we should vote for people who want to rob us of that and hand it to the same government that has $34 trillion in debt, wars everywhere, and massive complexes—the education industrial, the military industrial, and the health industrial complexes. This is the same government that can lie repeatedly. When we finally get some documents on COVID, a 143-page document gets released under FOIA with 143 pages of redactions. But we should just trust them wholesale and give them more power? All of us suffer from inflation.

All of us have to cut the budget and live within our means, but then they propose a budget for $7.3 trillion. It’s the only thing that never has to decrease, the only thing that never has to live within its means. This budget again and again bankrupts us all. It’s lawlessness—absolute abject lawlessness.

But lecture us on how we should vote for crypto. Crypto is the antidote. It saves America. It makes us all better. It restores integrity, balances the budget, and allows each and every American to live in the world we want, where we’re all free and equal.

It guarantees those rights. If you’re a politician and you oppose those rights, I don’t care if you’re a Republican, a Democrat, or anyone else—you’re on the wrong side of history. You are fighting all of us in the industry and trying to put us all in chains. You’re trying to tell us that there are special people out there who should have more rights than others. You’re trying to say that you want to live in a world of no accountability and darkness, where we’re systematically stripped of our dignity, human rights, and agency.

That’s what you’re saying, and I’m sorry, but you should not be rewarded with more power or reelection. It’s not a partisan issue at its core. I couldn’t care less what Trump says or what RFK says. I care about what they do. As a member of this industry, I’ve watched good friends go to jail who didn’t need to.

I’ve watched people be unbanked. I’ve seen a lack of regulatory clarity transform into an all-out war, with an unapologetic stance saying we’re criminals for asking for freedom. 53 million Americans are not criminals. We’re Americans who love freedom and liberty and just want to be left alone to pursue our own devices. For some reason, for people like this, that doesn’t matter because their favorite set of issues happen to be plated.

Those issues don’t matter because the underbelly of all of them is a desire for fairness and freedom. Guess what? It’s being taken from you step by step. Just because you think that right now you’re a winner doesn’t mean you will be. Never give unlimited power and no accountability to the people at the top.

Never remove the checks and balances. Never reward people who declare war on your ability to have economic agency with more power because they promise you they’ll give a little bit back. This is an important election. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve endorsed RFK. I’m not telling you who to vote for, but I will tell you what to vote against.

If a politician is anti-crypto, regardless of whether they’re Republican or Democrat, vote against them. Vote your conscience. We have a small window of time, and if America shuts this industry down, here’s what’s going to happen: we will have CBDCs, unlimited financial surveillance, instant deplatforming of people, and no economic mobility. The people in power right now have turned 53 million Americans into criminals. That’s what they did.

It’s wrong, and it always will be wrong. We can’t tolerate it. Whenever we see articles like this, we have to accept that some people are too far gone, propagandized, or simply don’t understand or care about what we’re trying to do. But we can remind them of who we are and what we’re doing. America was a nation born from a very risky maneuver.

We declared independence from the most powerful country in the world and fought for years without shoes, without ammo, and in brutal winters. We overcame that empire just so we would have a chance to give freedom to the masses. We picked our own leaders; they didn’t pick us, and they worked for us. We didn’t work for them. We wanted representation that only exists as long as the American people wake up and fight for it.

It’s not something you inherit; it’s guaranteed. It’s something that has to be renewed and refreshed generation after generation. As long as we still have a voice, and it’s dubious if we actually do, we should always fight to renew that. This election is about that. If we put crypto on the ballot, they’ll understand there are consequences for going after the cryptocurrency industry.

Then we’ll do the rest. As long as they get out of the way, it’s inevitable that this technology will permeate and take over every dimension of society—from how you vote to how your banks work, to how your money moves, to how you get paid, to how value itself is structured. We have it all within our hands to create a world that is finally fair, a world that preserves and protects your god-given liberty. It’s right here; it’s in our hands. The technology is almost there.

We’ve been building as an industry for 15 years, and we’ve gone from nothing to a multi-trillion dollar industry with hundreds of millions of people. This technology is almost ready for prime time. We just need a little bit more, and it’s permeating its way into every element—your browser, your phone. If it’s given just a few more years to grow, it’ll become inevitable and unstoppable. It will win because it’s better, faster, and cheaper.

At its core, it has integrity. Frankly speaking, that’s what the world deserves and needs so badly in this age. If we elect the other guys, though, and let them into power, what they’ll do is rob it from us, rip it out, and replace it with something AI-driven and dystopian. We see it every day in China with social credit and CBDCs. That’s the blueprint envied by the Klaus Schwabs of the world.

There are people right here in America who want that. Don’t reward those people with power. This is a crypto election. Vote crypto. That’s all you have to do.

The industry as a whole, all of us together—the 53 million here in the United States and the hundreds of millions abroad—we’ll get it done one way or the other. It won’t be clean; there will be a lot of mistakes along the way. Absolutely, there are bad actors, just as there were in the oil and gas industry, the automobile industry, the aerospace industry, the rise of Silicon Valley, and the personal computer revolution. Of course, there are bad actors. But does that mean all the planes, trains, automobiles, and computers we have and enjoy are all scams?

No. The core is pure, and the intent is pure. If we vote pro-crypto and get policies on the books to leave this industry alone, give us five years, ten years, fifteen years—we will get it done. In every aspect of the global commons, we will finally have government systems that have integrity by design, liberty by design, and freedom by design. We’re in charge of our own money, our own credit, our own markets, our own data, our own identity, and our own voting systems.

In a click of a button, you can verify that the entire system is not corrupt for the first time in human history. That is what crypto is. It’s not CoinMarketCap, it’s not meme coins, it’s not NFTs. It’s your ability to inclusively be accountable and understand that everything you rely on to live in liberty and freedom has integrity. It’s not manipulated, not controlled, and fair at its core.

When you vote against crypto, what you’re saying is that’s not necessary. The only reasons you would believe that are because you’re ignorant or corrupt. Don’t let ignorant people or corrupt people into power. It’s that simple. I don’t care who you vote for, but vote crypto.

That’s all I ask, and that’s all the industry asks. I don’t want to lose this window. I don’t want to see a war. I don’t want to see everything fall apart. I don’t want to see America collapse.

We’re so close to it. Everybody’s so angry; our institutions are battered and damaged; our debt is so high. Things are not good here; they’re really not. We’re falling apart, and we’re not asking the government to be wise, amazing, or even effective anymore. We’re just saying, let us, the American people, fix it.

There’s only one system we need to do that: blockchain and cryptocurrency technology. At the end of the day, it’s all about money—the creation of it, the storage of it, the remittance of it, how you get paid, how you transact. 90% of all of this is about that. If we, the American people, control that for ourselves, we can fix it because we care to fix it. We love our neighbors; we love the people around us.

We want our families and our children to grow up in a better world. But if you take it from us and hand it to the very same people who caused all the problems, are you really going to look at me with a straight face and say they’re going to fix it? They created this mess unapologetically. Finally, we made progress. After 15 years of hard work, we’re almost there.

This administration wants to steal that from us. That is why we vote crypto. That’s why I vote crypto. That’s why I support candidates who believe in that. If you can’t understand that, then you can’t understand where the world is going and what’s going to happen.

Liberty only exists as long as we choose to invest in it, build it, preserve it, and fight for it. 2024 is about that. I hope we win. I really do. Even if we don’t, we’ll still keep fighting.

It’ll be harder, it’ll be darker, and it’ll be less American. But maybe that’s the way it’s going to be. Biden cannot kill crypto. You can’t kill freedom. You can’t kill the concepts of liberty.

Even in the darkest halls of the KGB and the Stasi, they were unable to extinguish the human spirit. They tried really hard, but they couldn’t do it. Unfortunately, a lot of people had to go through a lot of pain for them to even have a chance to get out of it. Unfortunately, they can regress back into it, as we’ve seen. This just means the crypto industry will move to other nations.

They’ll enjoy the prosperity, the liberty, and the freedom, and they’ll become the safe harbors against totalitarianism. I honestly believe the United States will collapse—not immediately, but in the decades to come—because we’ve lost the future. The innovators will leave, and the markets that will overcome the markets we have will be built in other countries. We’ll watch trillions of dollars of value leak out of the American economy, and the best and brightest among us will go abroad. Little by little, that dims the light, and eventually, we’ll be overcome by our debt and succumb to hyperinflation, as we’ve witnessed in Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and many others.

We survive as long as we reinforce the things that matter. We were founded on simple principles that are hard to adhere to, and we’ve gotten too far away from those principles. Crypto is the return to them. It is the ultimate revolution. It is saying that we should be our own banks and in charge of our own lives, not the government.

what? We figured out how to make it work in 15 years. It took a century to build a modern world. We’re doing pretty well as an industry. So, in 2024, vote crypto.