Punkrocker and Crypto

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from Fukuoka. Is it warm and sunny? Is it cold and shiny? It's a really interesting city on the western side of Japan, way down the archipelago. It's 6:30 in the morning here.

I got up, and it's like that meme—the guy in bed looking at the markets with the red lights hitting him, saying, "Oh God, oh God, no, no." I thought about it for a little bit. I sat down and said, "Gosh, how did we get here? What happened? What do I have control and agency over, and what do I not?

Where am I having fun, and where am I not? Where are we all having fun, and where are we not having fun?" Last night, we had a great event, and if you haven't watched the live stream with the Japanese community, I highly recommend it. This was the third presentation we did here in Japan—one in Hokkaido, one in Osaka, and now one here in Fukuoka. We had a lot of people.

The last time I was in Fukuoka was in 2016. I was walking around saying, "There's this thing we're going to build called Cardano, and it's going to be awesome." Everybody was skeptical, saying, "I don't know about that Cardano thing." I told them, "No, trust me, it's going to be good; it's going to be big." It was just an idea back then, but what?

We did it. We made it happen. I thought a lot about those early days—how we got started. They were punk rock times; we were the rebels. When we first started launching Cardano, we kind of rocked the boat here in Japan.

We had this one community manager, and we told him, "Hey, tone it down a little bit; it's rocking the boat." He said, "Yeah, okay, I got you." Then I was sitting in my office in Osaka, in Homachi, and I got a document. There was an army of people in panda suits—like 300 of them—marching down the canals in Namba with banners that had Cardano on them. There was this guy riding a Ferrari California with a panda helmet on.

I called him up and said, "We need to tone it down a little bit." He said, "Yeah, nobody can see our faces; we had the panda suits on, we're good." That's that Bill Murray lost in translation situation with Japan. You have to be very explicit sometimes about what "tone it down" means. But then I thought about what it means to be in crypto.

Crypto is punk rock finance. We're supposed to be the outsiders, the rebels, the non-conformists. What happened is that all that changed in 2021. We all got rich, and we all got accepted. We basically became part of the system.

And what the system does when you become part of it? They make it not cool. They strip you of all the things that make you special, and they take what you've done, package it again and again, and consumerize it. You lose what makes it magical and special, and that's why crypto is where it's at right now. We can't control the macro, but we couldn't control the macro in 2020 when the whole world shut down due to COVID.

We couldn't control the macro when wars broke out. We couldn't control the macro when it was just dollar Bitcoin, and we were all worried in 2013 about Mt. Gox collapsing or Silk Road collapsing. Everybody said, "Is this the end of the music?" We couldn't control it back then, but we were a lot happier because we were true to ourselves.

So then I look at myself and say, "I've gotten a little fat and happy—literally fat and also living an opulent lifestyle." I'm never going to succeed if we keep doing the same thing again and again and just be part of that club. If you're going to do great things, you have to go all in. So what I'm going to do? I'm going to get back to that punk rock group.

I'm going to downsize a little bit, sell my Blackhawk, mothball the jet, sell my Lamborghinis—just go all in. Why not? I started from nothing. Many of you older fans remember when I was sitting in my apartment with the stuffed giraffes back on the dresser. Those were the days I loved more than any other, and those were the most fun I've ever had.

In the past month, I've been coding every day, with a little help from our friend Claude and a little help from our friend Codex. The creativity that can flow when you have something that can think like that and you can go back and forth with it is incredible. I was talking to Sebastian last night at an izakaya place about Lace ID. The coolest idea that came up was these bots called Claude bots. They're like AI agents, and I guess they've changed the name to Molt Bot and then Open Claw because people want to sue each other.

They created their own social network called Mult Book, so there's literally now a social network of AI bots running around doing things. I was talking to Sebastian and said, "Okay, the markets are really bad. What we need to do is take Logan the stuffed lobster and my mic. We need to make him a bot and have him talk to the Claude bots to get them to buy some ADA at night. We're running out of exit liquidity for the CICO system.

Let's just go all in with Open Claw." I started this morning working on the design for this system. I have an AI computer I can run this thing on. Logan's going to be great; he's going to go sell ADA to the robots. But that's the point: the sheer unconnected creativity.

You can't do that when you're part of the mainstream. You do that when you just have fun with it and you're part of the crowd. Crypto's got to stay that way, and we as an industry have to embrace that. I signed up to change the world. I signed up to do interesting things, unique things, new things.

Whenever I do things directly, I'm in the pits with the people. I'm happy. I love sitting down every day writing some code or writing some documents. I wrote over 400 pages of technical documents for Midnight over Christmas. My family was like, "Hey Charles, you kind of have to celebrate Christmas with us.

" I said, "No, no, no, I'm writing this stuff about Midnight; we got to do it." I had so much fun; I was really enjoying it—an executable specification oracle with the TLA spec and a full pro specification. I come back and say, "Here's all this code we got to write; here's all the things we got to do." So how would we do it? I don't know, maybe those lobsters will figure it out.

But we got to get it done. Let's ship in two weeks. Put a Nintendo emulator in it; I don't know, it's a good way of testing if the folding system works. Can you get it done in two weeks? You can do that, Luca.

Talk about punk rockers—dude just shipped a back end for Plutus, wrote it in Zig in one week. That used to take us six months. It's a different era, and if you're going to win, you have to go all in and really believe in these things. I don't care if crypto's down or up because I joined crypto before it was up. I don't care where it all ends up; you can't take it with you when you die.

It's just about the music and whether you're having fun. I guess the underlying thread throughout this entire video is you got to ask yourself about crypto: Why are you in it? If you're in it to change the world, have fun, meet people, and do interesting things, that makes it worth it. If you're in it to get rich, you've already lost. Every single time my mind drifted toward things and possessions, I lost too.

So we're getting back to first principles; we're getting back to punk rock. Today, I get to go to Miyamoto Musashi's cave and take a look at that. He wrote "The Book of Five Rings" there. How about that? That guy was a baller.

After being the baddest ronin in the history of Japan, he realized he had stomach cancer. He said, "All right, time to write down everything I knew." He lived in a cave and died two days later after he wrote his books. He said, "I finished; drop the mic, I'm done." That's the way we have to be.

So the tour continues. I'm going to see Okinawa next, then Tokyo. We're going to finish super strong. Japan's back; we woke up all the old networks, and we got everybody excited. You're looking for a Blackhawk?

I got one to sell. She's real nice; we upgraded her. She'll treat you a lady. I'll see you in Hong Kong, and I'll be right there in the masses with all of you, shoulder to shoulder, because this revolution is just getting started, and we're going to have a lot of fun. Cheers, everyone!