A Few Quick Thoughts

Hey, everybody, Charles Hoskinson here, live from Warren County, Colorado. Just wanted to make a quick video with some quick thoughts about today's drama. What's the drama? Well, it's a little tweet that I made in response to a tweet that Brad Garlinghouse made about Black Lives Matter. for years, I've been talking about police brutality.

If you search my Twitter feed, you can see 2014, 2015, and on. I call them road pirates. I've spoken out against brutality, militarization, and civil asset forfeiture. This is something that the libertarian movement has been talking about for a long time, writes articles about all the time. Before it was trendy and fashionable in the liberal circles of Silicon Valley, there were real people waking up every day who thought it was immoral and wrong for a drywaller who's just been paid to be pulled over by a police officer and have the officer steal his money through a technique called civil asset forfeiture.

Sometimes people think it's wrong that when you do no-knock raids and you throw a flash bang grenade into a crib, permanently blinding a child, that there should be no recourse for that. This is not exclusively a racial issue. It's an economic issue, and it's an issue of statism and corporatism and oppression. There are private prisons, and there is an industry to keep things prohibited and illegal. There's no greater evil that's been inflicted on U.

S. society than the war on drugs, a trillion dollars spent, multi-generations of families broken apart, perverse financial incentives to the poor to commit nonviolent crimes, which in turn imprison them for the profit of others. And this is something that we've been talking about a long time. I supported the legalization of marijuana, for example, in the state of Colorado. And there, we were told by three former governors that if we did this, it would destroy the Colorado culture, economy, and our state, devastating us with unemployment, crime, and the destruction of our youth.

After we did it, the unemployment rate fell to the lowest in the nation. We actually had as huge spike in rent as people came. And lo and behold, a whole new industry was created that generated billions of tax dollars for education and socially beneficial things. And somehow our youth didn't collapse into chaos and anarchy. We keep being told by those in power and those who make decisions that the reason why society works the way it does is for our benefit.

And if we deviate from that, we're going to devastate things and destroy things, and the children will all be harmed. Then I see this movement, and it's like all Marxist movements, a rise from the ashes, and this is what they always do. They take real grievances that are highly emotional, things that are definitely wrong. For example, in the 1910s and 20s, people in Russia had a lot of grievances against the czar and his secret police, and all the horrible things the monarchy had done to people, and the shame that was brought on the nation in World War I. It's exactly the same for every time a Marxist comes.

In the 1950s, Cuba certainly had a huge amount of grievances against their dictator, and Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and others took advantage of those grievances. And the solution is always the same in their mind. Give us absolute power over the factors of production. Give us the control over the economy so we can make things fair, so we can embrace equality of outcome, and we can make sure that everybody gets justice, that they own those words � social justice, political justice, economic justice, fairness. These are the mantras.

And then they get in power in Venezuela, in North Korea. There are no counterexamples. Every communist state in the last 70 years, they get in power, and what's the first thing they do? They purge people, all the people they have grievances against, and then they murder millions and millions, collectively 100 million people in the 20th century were murdered under this philosophy and this system. And then, what happens?

The scholars and the philosophers, they wrap it all up and say, that wasn't pure communism, Marxism. No, no, no. It's going to be different the next time we do it. Those were evil people, but we'll be the good people. I'm sorry.

Hypercentralization of power never results in good outcomes. We gave the police lots of power to prosecute the war on drugs and other agendas that we had. And lo and behold, they militarized and started carrying less and less every year and protecting themselves instead of society. And now we're living the fruits of those labors. And I'm sorry, the solution is not increasing the control and power of the state and giving it even more control over the factors of production, even more control over the economy and our large corporations in your day-to-day life to ensure fairness, because what's going to happen?

The same thing that's happened all throughout the 20th century. And when a movement uses the same symbology as the Marxists trained with Marxists, all the leaders in that movement came up from that school of thought, they take pictures with Maduro and say he's a great leader and what he's done in Venezuela is a great thing. You have to call a spade a spade. And I don't appreciate when people wrap human suffering and trauma and legitimate grievances in a political philosophy that will only cause more harm. And I'm sickened that there's this trend amongst the corporations to just put a slogan on their website and pretend that they give a damn and care.

Where were they five years ago or 10 years ago or 15 years ago or 20 years ago when these things kept happening? Did Brad ever tweet about the drywaller who had his money stolen from civil asset forfeiture? Did Brad ever tweet about the kid who got blinded from the flashbang grenade or Tamir Rice when it happened? Often no, but now it's trendy, so let's go do that. And where will it result?

It will result in no change. It will result in the crease of government power and authority and it will result in more political control over everyday people. That's where this road goes. The whole point of the technology we build is decentralization and power to the edges. That's the whole point.

The whole point is you're your own bank. The whole point is that you actually have a voice. when you vote, your vote is properly counted and you don't have to rely on the government for that. that you're in control of your property rights. I've been to 52 countries in my life.

I've been to Eastern European countries. I've been all throughout the former Soviet bloc. Some of the people who lived under communism work at my company today. And, when they tell me the things they see and hear about these types of movements sound exactly the same as the things they saw and heard when they lived under that system, and I can see the symbology is the same, the statements are the same, the causes are the same, then it tells me that we're moving to the regressive past and we will not solve the problem. We're only going to inflict more pain and suffering on society.

Meanwhile, we're all sitting together with this amazing technology that actually has a chance to change the way the world works. Because here's the thing, a government cannot oppress you if a government is not powerful. Nobody in the world feels super oppressed by Switzerland right now. They don't even have a real president. They have a committee.

The government isn't really that powerful. The citizens have more power. Meanwhile, a lot of people just a few thousand miles away feel damn oppressed by Putin. And even closer feel damn oppressed in Belarus. What's the difference?

They have powerful central governments. So what do you do? You create a weaker government. You get the government out of the business of printing money. You get them out of the business of counting votes.

You get them out of the business of property rights. You use blockchain technology, the things that we've been building for the last 10 years to liberate people. Instead of we trust you and we hope you're moral, it's you can't lie. You can't steal. You can't take my things.

I have rights, rights enforced by things that human beings can't tinker with. Or we can just go with slogans, meaningless, vacuous slogans, highly politically charged with lots of emotions inside of them, standing on corpses of people who died by unfair conduct. And what the slogans do? They result in electoral victories for certain people who claim they're going to solve the problem. And what they do?

They make themselves rich. And the problem doesn't get solved. It never gets solved. The people who are willing to use lies and violence and regressive ideologies to empower themselves never are going to be your friends, because the minute they get the things they've asked for, they will put you in a camp sooner than solve your problem. We saw this for 70 years plus during the 20th century, and now it's going to be different with better technology?

Come on. It's insanity. I often say cryptocurrencies are politics. You can't separate the two, because at the end of the day, this whole movement exists because people have lost faith in the governance structures of the past. We would like to have a real republic.

We would like to have a real voice. And we're told we do. And then we're left with Biden versus Trump. And then we're left with violent protests in the streets and people killing each other. And then we're told this time will be different.

Just vote for one of these two bad choices, and somehow everything will get better. Everything will improve. We'll all make it magical. And it never does. And so we've gotten to the point where people are opting out.

They're losing faith, and they're going to different systems. We do a lot of work in the Eastern Bloc and in Africa and other places. Why? Because they've already decided that those systems are no good, and they're living the consequences of them in their logical extreme. And they want something different.

They want something where they're in control, not outside parties like China and the United States or European powers. And that's what we're doing, handing that with them side by side, working together, building these things so that they can use it to solve their own problems and rise up and no longer have to live in fear. That's the point of our industry. Not to kowtow to the central banks, not to kowtow to some political party or movement and just use a slogan and then pretend we're virtuous and moral. It's to wake up every single day and do the hard work, with or without praise, every single day and take the criticism and be told that we're crazy, every single day and be told that we're utopianists and nothing that we do will ever result in anything.

And what? We're winning. We absolutely are. We've gone from nothing in 2009 to a global movement with damn near a trillion dollars of economic power at our behest. And we have the funding as an industry to continue building this technology for decades.

And every single day, more and more of the young people, who will one day be the old people and the powerful people and the leaders, are believing in the things that we do as an industry. If we look to the past, we will see no answers to the future because the future is being guided by the technology of today. And let me tell you, this tech is weird. From Neuralink to genetic engineering to social credit, there's a lot of things coming. The dangers of AI.

And we cannot govern and manage these existential issues without an innovation on the governance side itself. And I'm sorry, communism is not the answer. It'll just absorb these technologies and become more dangerous and pernicious and destructive on humanity than it was during the 20th century. Always has, always will. Just like fascism is not the answer.

I was sickened at the Republican National Convention when I saw the flags behind Trump in the White House there. It was a still shot from The Triumph of Will, a Nazi propaganda film. Vote for me and I'll solve all of your problems. Vote for me and I'll make all the bad people go away. We will be strong as a nation by having our stormtroopers beat people down.

That's just as wrong as the choice of communism that's on the other side. We have to transcend all of this. And here's how we do it. By putting our money and our values and our principles and our time where our mouth is, and waking up every single day and building open source software, building an open movement and embracing what decentralization really means. No one is in charge because everyone is in charge.

And as a consequence, no one's powerful enough to harm another so significantly as they have done in the 20th century. That's what I believe. I will never apologize for that. And I will never apologize for calling a spade a spade. And I will never apologize for attacking and criticizing people who use the death and suffering of other people for their particular political movement.

It's wrong. You don't own the bodies in the ground. You don't. If you want to fight for change, then do that. But don't claim that you're morally superior and pure and only through following your vision and your ideology can we ever get to a nice society, and giving you power can we ever get to society.

Here's how we change things. By taking power away from the government. That simple. It's always been that simple. And you find a counterexample.

Point to one nation that's Switzerland-like, that's participated in purges, set up camps, mass-oppressed people. Point to one nation where there's a weak central government, strong rule of law, that everything's gone to hell and failed in society. Contrast that with all the nations that have hyper-powerful, hyper-centralized governments, and notice they have dark histories, always, no exceptions. This is a rare moment in history. It's a very rare moment where we finally get a choice to do things differently and rise to the occasion and embrace the wisdom of the crowds and build something where no one's in charge.

Or out of fear, emotion, propaganda, we regress back to the systems of the past. And the differences, the systems of the past enabled by the technology of the future will devastate humanity in ways we could never imagine. We saw this in the 20th century. The death tolls of those wars and conflicts and those governance systems were at scales no other century endured, and it will be an order of magnitude greater for this century if we regress. We cannot, as human beings who care about each other, allow ourselves to descend into this chaos.

Don't embrace it, no matter how tempting it is, and think for yourself, not what people tell you to think, but really think it through about how you want to be treated, the world you want to live in, and the level of control you want to have over yourself. And if anybody tries to take that from you, kick them in the teeth, especially people who virtue signal. Thank you for your time.