Africa Special Wrap-up

hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado so today is april 29th 2021 and we are now on the other side of the africa special ratings are coming in almost a hundred thousand people i think watched it or knew about it today and we had a very high peak watch rate there were a lot of watching parties that happened so we'll stitch together the numbers but it's really amazing to see this is our most popular show we've ever done in the history of cardano we receive well wishing everything from former heads of state to ambassadors to ministries and really just absolutely amazing to see the the outpouring of support and love as well as well wishing for the mission and for the activities so that's just incredible and i have a heartfelt thank you to the entire team that put the production of the africa special together they had very limited time less than three weeks to put that show together and they had to coordinate filming people throughout africa rwanda and tanzania cape town south africa ethiopia and the time of cove getting camera crews around getting people scheduled synchronized was just extraordinary so thank you so much dominic hicks and adam bates and tim harrison and danelle patel and john o'connor and the many others who came together to get this done i'm just so incredibly proud of them and the community obviously loved it it's great david orr is going to do a mini card africa special so five ten minutes long and highlighting all the announcements and the various things that were done for those of you who don't want to spend the two hours of time looking through the whole thing although i highly recommend if you have two hours do it long form is great media response was incredible as well we were interviewed by financial times we coined telegraph my lord they actually covered it and there's good city am new york times and dozens of others and more news will come trickling out notably absent i can't see it right now i don't know if i'm gonna cover or not i didn't check my media list with his coin desk in fact the deputy managing editor had a very strange tweet i got it right here where he said we exist in a market where the new york times is less scrupulous about crypto partnership news than the industry publications and that's zach seaward apparently having the minister appear on camera talking about the relationship the official government channels tweeting about the relationship and major publications like new york times is not good enough for this editor at the at coindesk for an official announcement of a relationship we did have a press release as well and i believe april 6 the agency we use probably did reach out to coindesk maybe he just wasn't aware because coindisk is such a large important organization that this deal had happened and the nature of it and decided just to talk about it on twitter it's part of a broader problem in the cryptocurrency space there's really this bizarre juxtaposition where there are some who are very polite and treat us with respect and dignity and those are normal well-functioning human beings and when we talk to the economist or the new york times or the financial times or large corporations we get treated with respect and dignity and we have great productive conversations not always converging to some understanding or a deal but we at the very least treat each other like humans then there are some people in the cryptocurrency space who in the face of overwhelming evidence have decided to respond to that by treating us like dirt i'm sorry that to assert that we would lie about a relationship like this as a news agency and a representative of that 5 million people is not a small commitment sir that's larger than the population of a lot of small countries that's largely the population of a lot of u.s states that's a big deal and that's going to grow over time and this is the first country to do something like this didn't happen in the united states it didn't happen in germany happen of all places ethiopia which is a tremendous piece of news for the adoption of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency you might not it because you think i'm an or cardano is in some way inferior technology to ethereum but it is newsworthy and the only response is to assert that we've lied as if we're a drive by night operation even though we've been around for a long time have big community to have people appear on prominent podcasts and say nothing has been done or accomplished again you might not the project or think the things that we've spent our time on are substandard or not worth that time but to assert that nothing was done or that car cardano's a blatant scam it's bizarre and this is not how a normal industry works apple doesn't wake up and say the products microsoft builds are fraudulent or scams they say that our products are better google doesn't wake up and say that the products that apple and microsoft make are fraudulent or they're scams or the ceos of those companies are criminals they say our products are better and here's why yet the people who compete with us or could partner with us in this nascent industry have decided to now cross that threshold in the face of overwhelming evidence and accuse us of being criminals accuse us of being dishonest in some cases representatives of media agencies i've never worked in an industry where this is the case and it just makes me wonder if the people who maintain these positions are qualified to hold them and truly understand the magnitude of the allegations they levy we go to work every day it's hard work and there if you watch the africa special you'll see the passion the excitement and the profound amount of investment that has gone in to these endeavors now it's a commercial enterprise with a social good behind it we believe the path we're taking is going to be successful but there's always a chance of failure that said everybody who's involved has signed up for the long haul including our community and there's good will there and what we have done with this africa special is announced to the entire blockchain world that five million people will be given decentralized identifiers dids interoperable with the dead standards that are being deployed on ethereum bitcoin and other systems in addition to cardano we just brought five million people into our industry this is good for us all whether you like me or not you think i'm a piece of human trash but yet the response by people who occupy prominent roles in certain places in this industry are to pretend it didn't happen diminish it attack it grow up have some maturity i say harsh things on twitter from time to time i tell people to go themselves from time to time especially when i feel that those people have been blatantly unfair and dishonest i never do it to defend myself if a person goes to say i'm fat ugly and horrible human being great good for them you'll notice i only do it to defend others or the cardano project or my company especially in matters of where people have made tremendous personal sacrifice to accomplish the things that we've done you don't know how many lost weekends missed birthdays missed anniversaries over time work over the last several years has gone into the creation of cardano and the things that we've done commercially than deals we've negotiated each and every one of those people who went the extra mile deserves better than some person who is in our industry who should occupy some degree of humility and respect to be shit-posted and told that the totality of the things that they've done in the public domain is nothing it's not we're hiding all this it's not we're claiming that there's some secret place where all the code gets committed and all the papers are written and trust us one day it's going to be released you just go to our website and look at the paper library you go to eprint and search for the scientists last names you go to google you go to github and do a basic search and look at the 300 repositories you go to cardanoupdates.com and see how we're number one for github commits this is all done in the open domain for everyone to see and that doesn't matter by these purported experts and i hold journalists to a higher standard i hold project founders to a higher standard because they control the minds and capital and attention of many innocent people who are just trying to sort out fact from fiction and when these lies happen what do you do about it people say turn the other cheek but that can be very damaging to a project because a perception will develop and then that perception becomes reality people believe that it's a ghost chain people believe that nothing's been done it's very hard to change people's minds if someone hears that election fraud has happened or a vaccine has a quantum dot and mercury in it and even though it doesn't they'll just believe it and then they'll tell all their friends that and the amount of damage that does commercially to the adoption of the project the growth of the project is catastrophic just look at the dominion voting company they're right now suing the people who spent months for 1.