Resilience and the Other Side

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Buenos Aires, whatever the fuck we're going to call it. It's been a goddamn two weeks, hasn't it? I've been on the road for a while. I started in Gillette. Well, actually, there was some small town I was at in Eastern Wyoming where I spoke at a graduation for Eastern Wyoming College.

Went up to Gillette, did a bunch of Gillette stuff, then went up to Consensus in Toronto and had a lot of fun there, and then flew down here to Buenos Aires to open up our office. It's a beautiful office. It's got a ton of room for 100 people. Google used to have it. It's one of the nicest areas of Buenos Aires.

You have a beautiful view of the water, the icebreakers in the distance. Holy moly, it's just been wild. Maybe my expectations are too high of the industry as a whole and the maturity of the industry as a whole. I thought maybe, just maybe, we could escape what has become of our political discourse. When I was growing up, you had to have some momentum before you'd accuse someone of being a criminal.

Now in political discourse, it's so easy that it just is like breathing air. Every person you don't like is evil, is a Nazi. Every person you have a disagreement with is a criminal and has done something wrong and must be destroyed. And then when you say these allegations and they turn out not to be true, then there's no consequences. You just move on.

And then you switch the topic. You move the goalposts. It used to be that people actually took these things seriously. They cared about these things. And not anymore.

And what we see is a storm in the teacup. It's a small ephemeral thing. It's going to cost a lot of money and time to clean all this garbage up. What I regret the most is the lost momentum and time for our ecosystem. This is one of the best times in the history of the Cardano project.

We have builders, independent of IOs, stepping up, making meaningful and significant contributions to the protocol as a whole. StarStream is a technological marvel, bringing folding and co-routines to layer one. That's fantasy shit. And it's achievable. You can taste it.

Stanford Phil's work with Midgard, that's one of the most consequential, unique and interesting protocol advancements I've seen in a long time. And it fits hand in glove with what we had envisioned with Hydra and the whole layer two ecosystem. I was just in a meeting with Sergio Lerner, who I've known for over 10 years. He's got created Rootstock and he's the guy who figured out how much Bitcoin Satoshi has. He's been around for a long time.

He's the OG of OGs, talking about BitVMX and how we bring that to Cardano, what we're going to do with it and the demo that we're going to have at Bitcoin 2025. Looking at Brian Bush's work with the prototyping team on Orbore's LAOS and the amazing performance data that they have and taking a look at all the really cool stuff about how that basically makes Cardano the fastest blockchain around and we solve the blockchain for Lemma. Looking at governance and yes, it's been hard. Oh my God, it's been hard. The memes are true, but it should be because people care.

You got all these de-reps and these constitutional committee members and there's conflict. Oh my Lord, the conflict between the CF and us. They're so passive aggressive that they can't even bring themselves to have a tweet unless it's been snarkified in some way because they're butthurt about where they're at. And yet we move forward and we push forward, we get it done. The regulatory progress has been extraordinary.

The Genius Act will pass. The United States of America went from every cryptocurrency is illegal and should be banned and blacklisted to we're now passing pro-crypto legislation. Market structure next. Think about that. Think about the progress in just 12 months throughout the entire world with respect to crypto.

A bit tired of all this. I really am. I for years talked about the need for veracity bonds. I look at CoinMarketCap to the CEO of CoinMarketCap. Get your dogs under control, honestly.

Just come on. You're publishing things where there's no victim that's come forward, no lawsuit that's been levied, no regulatory body stepping in and no arrest. An allegation of 600 million dollars of theft. And you didn't even come to reach out to us for comment before you just propagated it. Do you have any journalistic integrity?

You have any standards at all? Did you vet the source of the allegation and ask what material connection that source had? Just been announced the fifth largest auditor in the world is auditing the sale. Perhaps maybe just maybe you talk to our media people before you propagate something. But you don't take any responsibility.

Why? You don't have a mechanism to force you to be responsible. So why should I complain about your malfeasance, your incompetence and your just cesspool journalism? Got to build a better system. Veracity bonds.

How much money are you prepared to put on the table to lose if those articles are false? A thousand dollars, a million dollars, Cointelegraph, you just also did the same thing. How much do you stand behind your journalists? How much would you be prepared to lose if it turns out that you propagated a false narrative? Ten thousand dollars, a hundred thousand dollars, a million dollars.

We should create a market for this. Let's solve the problem with crypto, the whole concept of prediction markets and veracity bonds. And what? If you're not willing to put anything at stake and stand behind the people that are propagating your fake news, why should we listen to you? Why should we take you seriously?

Your entire system is broken. You're broken people pushing gossip and slander and whatever muck comes from the bucket that you can shovel down the throats of people to click as more and more people evade you by using AI to summarize a lie within a lie within a lie. How can you live with yourself? Honestly, when you go to your cocktail parties and you talk about how fucking special you are and how your job means something, deep down inside you're nothing. You're empty, hollow vessels picking at table scraps.

This space has to grow up. How can we assert we're the inheritors of the economic, political, and social systems of the world when we embrace such base chicanery and nonsense? When we step aside from basic notions of human dignity, when we dehumanize every single person, but yet we're the ones who are going to transform society, you say it so you can launch a token and dump on some unsuspecting person. And then you go and complain when the government regulates you. How are you any different from the carnival barkers of the 19th century?

Shame on all of you, honestly, shame. I've seen so much in my time and I've tolerated so much in my time. And now this is where we're at in 2025. As if after an audit report comes out, we can all be friends again and forgive and forget and just move on like nothing happened until the next thing comes and then we can go back through this cycle. The wheel has to be broken at some point.

It starts with people taking accountability. It starts with people saying we're different. And if you're unable and unwilling to do that, then we have to opt out of the system as a whole and create a new one. Social media has failed humanity. It's taken the id of mankind and it's turned it into a monster we have never seen before.

And it's made us so comfortable with the suffering and plight of others that it's become a sport akin to gladiators fighting in a coliseum for our entertainment as bread is thrown to us by leaders who rob us. That is what it's made us. That's the spectacle. That's what we are now as a species. Long time ago, I joined this industry because I honestly believed that the technology of this industry could liberate us, believed in the better angels of our nature.

I said, despite the fact that we can be evil, despite the fact that we can be cynical and wrong and broken, there's some kernel of us that wants something better and different and unique and new. There's something redeemable about all of this. And I still do believe that, despite all that's happened. Because there are some people that aren't infected with this madness who I have had a chance to meet. And there's some people that still love knowledge.

There's some people that still love creativity. They still enjoy building. They still enjoy helping others. It's tough. I'm not going to lie that it's been tough.

It's probably the toughest week I've had in a long time. Just knowing what's going to happen, knowing who you are and how virality works, years of studying social network theory, knowing how contagion works, knowing how super connectors will just lower the diameter of a network and will propagate the six degrees of Kevin Bacon of misinformation, and watching it go from one rung in the ladder to the next rung of the ladder to the next rung of the ladder. It's a movie I've already watched. At some point it'll stop, but there won't be any accountability now, will there? There won't be any people to apologize at the end, or even if they do, it doesn't really matter.

It's like apologizing after you've set a house on fire and you've destroyed so much, priceless artifacts ruined. Well, it is what it is. I just didn't know that knocking over a candle on the rug could have such extreme consequences. Well, now we do, don't we? I still believe in all of you.

I do. And what? We know what to do. Done our job. People come out and fight the good fight, and we'll get past this storm in the teacup.

And I'm going to work with the willing, and we'll just try to build a better system. It's become clear to me that crypto media is absolutely unredeemable, and it has to be burned to the ground and completely replaced from the ground up. So that's what we'll do. At some point, we'll launch some form of new way of doing things. And I have a lot of good ideas.

And I know a lot of you listening are just as frustrated as I am. And I believe that a lot of you, when we have a call to action, will rally up and we'll work together to solve that problem. Then at least we've inoculated ourselves from one aspect of this shitstorm that has become humanity. But we need to do better. And there needs to be an emotional and social evolution in all of us.

Late-stage capitalism has made all of us so hyper-transactional that our worth is completely in reference to how much we either entertain or enrich others. Spiritually, we have to grow as a species. We have to find the inner space. We have to work within that. We have to find a way to get enlightened as people.

We have to grow somehow. Not sure how. Meditated myself. I've studied the ancient wisdom traditions. Had chances to meet a lot of very special people throughout my travels to 75 countries.

But there's no silver bullet that's been discovered yet. Reading this lovely book from a man named Steve Taylor called Time Expansion Experiences. It came from a story I heard about salvia, where people taking it would hallucinate. They would disembody for a few minutes. But in some cases, they'd live 10 years of another person's life.

Can you imagine that? You take a drug. It's two minutes long. But you perceive and experience something for 10 years. You come out the other side, your entire concept of reality is broken.

You have no idea what's real, what's not real. What's the real world? What's the fake world? So people study it. They think about it.

They understand it. Shows that there's more to what we perceive than what's around us. I don't believe that people are happy with where we've ended up. If we got a do over, it's 1999 turning to the year 2000. And they said, would you the 25 years that we got?

Would you like them to be different? I think the vast majority of people would probably say, can we have them a little different? Throughout my entire adult life, I've lived from Bush v. Gore to 9-11 to GWAT, the financial crisis of 2008, Occupy Wall Street, the Obama administration, all the chicanery and horrible stuff there, the first Trump administration, all the bullshit there, the Biden administration, the next Trump administration is cut to so bad, the former president of the United States has metastatic stage four prostate cancer. You don't understand anything about prostate cancer.

Statistically speaking, he had it for several years, if not his entire presidency. But apparently it was just missed, along with the dementia and all the other stuff. And no one even bothers to ask who are the puppet masters behind that. The last 25 years, the lies have become so brazen, so pervasive. It's corroded our very definition of truth.

I long for the days when we had institutions we could trust. I long for the days when we had some concept of objective reality, even if it was a fantasy. Even if it was something that wasn't real, at least we acted it was real. A grand cave fable would be better than this nonsense and madness. We have people running around who are former admirals saying there's aliens amongst us and no one cares.

We don't even know reality anymore. Half the people are drugged up thinking we live in a simulation and that all of this is so meaningless. Think about it. An AI has become so incredibly convincing that within a generation, the majority of men will probably date an AI girlfriend instead of a real woman. It's shocking when you think about it, that we've gotten here.

And we have to get out of this, we really do. We have to get out of this. I don't know how as a society, but we're all suffering madness from these things. And I'm a spectator at the highest level of it. The privilege of my economic class, the friends I have, is that I get to rub shoulders with the people behind the curtains.

And I can tell you right now, those people are just as clueless as the people on the other side. When I was a kid, I always believed they knew what was going on. But the reality is they don't. No one does. And there's legitimately a group of people that are just hoping that an artificial general superintelligence comes about and just takes over.

And honestly speaking, at this point, they call it the P-Doom risk. I can't really disagree with them. What mandate or right do we have as a species to continue with our hands at the steering wheel? We can't even agree on basic reality anymore. And whether it be God or a machine, something needs to come in and change all of this.

Maybe it's because I'm in the blockchain space and we're so thoroughly distrustful of institutions at the moment that we don't trust humans anymore. And we just want everything to be on the blockchain. And I had some hope that this industry as a whole would at least coordinate, cooperate in ways towards that common goal and mission. And perhaps they will. That's the core thesis of Midnight.

It's a chain of optimism instead of cynicism, cooperative economics instead of adversarial economics. I'm not sure. But I'm a resilient person. Went down to the Amazon, put my hands in gloves with bullet ants in them that I collected myself that stung me over 1,000 times and enjoyed the neurotoxin spreading throughout my body, making it feel I'd been lit on fire for hours and hours and hours and hours. It's a good experience.

You should try it sometime because it at least teaches you no matter how bad it gets, it can always be worse, and how painful it is, it can always be worse. And that no matter what's thrown at you, you can overcome it. So I show up to work every day. Keep pushing forward. And I know a lot of you listening, it's the same for you, whether you're a police officer or a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, in the military, a tradesman, trucker, driving a truck, doing a long haul, falling behind schedule, having to pull a double shift to get somewhere, back's all jacked up, but yet you're still expected to unload the flatbed, trailer, plumber, got two kids at home, another one you're paying for that you never get to see, pipe breaks, covered in shit, you just got to fix it, clean yourself off, go back home, deal with all the drama there.

A lot of you have a hard lot in life. And I don't think you're listening for Charles Hoskinson to have a sob story about how hard it is for me. I'm one of the luckiest men in the world because I get to know all of you. And I'm one of the luckiest men in the world because I've been given a great privilege to lead in a movement where we actually have a seat at the table to change everything. What's happened recently is kind of a teachable moment.

Whenever it boils over and whenever it gets to a point where things are just at their most extreme, you take a moment to disengage and say, what could we do differently? For my own part, I definitely have to change the way that I engage with social media because the reality is that I've gotten too big, a million Twitter followers, global notion, people recognize me everywhere, public figure now. I resisted it for a really, really long time because I want to be part of the crowd. I've never viewed myself as particularly special or unique or different. I don't relish and enjoy being the guy on the throne.

I just love being in the arena. I love seeing all of you. I love interacting with all of you. And you see it, it's hard to hide that. When I go to events and conferences, I love people and I enjoy people.

I love hearing your stories and shaking your hands and taking pictures and engaging in lively debate and just getting to know people. And you meet so many cool and interesting people along the way. And Twitter and these other social networks were always an opportunity to engage in an extended way because of these platforms. I've met so many people I'd never have a chance or an opportunity to see and touch and get to hear their stories, good and bad, and help. On the other hand, by being that open, it exposes you to pretty much every single attack you can imagine.

And at some point, the benefits are outweighed by the consequences of it. So the engagement has to change. So I have to change the way I do AMAs. I have to change the way I use Twitter and hire a media team and have them come in. And it breaks my heart because it means that I no longer have that closeness that I have with all of you right now.

The alternative is just keep doing what I'm doing. And unfortunately, it'll become a liability at some point because there's just simply now too many people on the other side of it whose only intent is to burn things down for shits and giggles. They don't even particularly care who, they just want to do it because they enjoy watching the world burn the Joker standing on a giant pile of immolated money. So that's something we'll figure out on the back of all of this. Another thing is that social systems, as I said, have to evolve the inner space and the outer space.

Next year, we'll spin up a team to start thinking about new media and new social media and the people who are tired, especially the journalists who don't want to be part of this, but are. We'll migrate over and little by little we'll win that and perhaps objectivity and truth will win the day. And I'll invest on the inner space side and try to discover more about what people have discovered about enlightenment, stoicism, and other such things. And every day is a new opportunity to wake up and just keep pushing forward. A lot of cleanup has to be done.

Verdado was an exceedingly hard project to launch and a lot of people left us at the altar in many different ways. And I was always the one stoically standing there saying, well, no matter how messy it gets, I'll sweep up the mess. It's difficult as a person when you're that kind of person to then be told you didn't and have to defend yourself. I can't take it personally because, again, that's just where humanity is at. Why do you blame a lion for biting you if you put your hand in the cage?

I chose to be in the lion's den. I'm in the arena. I'm a public figure and this is my lot in life. I just get defensive when the lion gets out of the cage and starts attacking people who didn't choose to be in it. The livelihood of many people who are building on Cardano and have invested their time, effort, and money and branded reputation is harmed by what's been happening.

They deserve more and they deserve better and anyone who asserts to be a custodian of the goodwill of those people ought to realize that their petty squabbles don't matter in light of that and step forward and take care of them. They don't. Well, I don't need to point it out. People will remember who was real and who wasn't real and that's not something you forgive or forget easily. So clean up that mess.

But I don't believe for a moment our best days are behind us. I do believe that they are in front of us. I really do. And there's going to be a lot of beautiful peaks to stand on in the coming days, weeks, and months. We'll see that with the launch of Midnight.

We'll see that with the publication of a SIP for Laos. We had the great fortune of having dinner at Fogon yesterday with Santiago and the TX Pipe team, talked a lot about Project Blueprint, talked a lot about the Laos prototyping and them contributing to the SIP, and hopefully Blink will and Harmonic will as well. So every single node builder's ready to go when that SIP is published and we can just talk about how we're going to get it done. And that's what we hope, the ecosystem, whether it's a governance debate or this nonsense or these other things, that's what we hope. Dogs bark, caravan moves on.

In an hour or two, I think I'm going to the office here to celebrate the grand opening. Cardano is the only major cryptocurrency to have a tier one development firm open up a dedicated office in Argentina of this size and scale. It means that the input output office will be the hub for all cryptocurrency meetups, hackathons, regardless of chain, in Argentina, in Buenos Aires. And what? If you are part of Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, BNB, Ripple, Cardano, all are welcome.

Every month we want people to come. Every two weeks we want a hackathon and if you hold an event, you can have your after party for free at our office because that's what you got to do. You got to open the door and remember that we're all supposed to be here for the same mission and Twitter is not reality. The psychosis and madness of social media, it will recede. That is the way.

In Argentina, it's going to be one of those countries we read about 10 years from now that made a big difference. There's a revolution going on here. This is the first country that I've seen that has a real shot to get rid of its central bank and have private money. This is the first country at scale that I've seen that really believes in Bitcoin and blockchain, that really believes in crypto, that actually would embrace it, not pretend embrace it like Shivo and El Salvador, where they say a few kind words and then the leader takes over the country, but actually embrace it, meaning everybody has power pushed to the edges and they have a real choice in their identity, their money, their voice. We have that.

It's a window. I'm not going to let that go. I really am not. We just need one country and then we have the world and this, I think, is one of those one countries. We tried before in other places, but we've never had an environment like this.

That's why we opened up our largest office here at the ends of the earth that most people don't pay attention to, but everybody's going to remember the name. That's why I still fight. That's the other side of resilience. You have to have a why. You have to have a mission.

You have to have a unifying belief that you can get to it. You have to have something to rally behind, something to fight for, something to believe in, and I do. I honestly believe as shitty as all this is, it's worth it. I'll get to the other side of it, and on the other side, it's not for me. I don't really care if I get there.

It doesn't matter. It's for humanity because we deserve it. We built so much. We achieved so much. We stood on the moon.

We've written symphonies of unbelievable beauty. There's been so many selfless acts of compassion, which proved that we can transcend our base nature and be better than what we were born as. So maybe, just maybe, we can give it a shot that when we get to the other side, we can leave something behind that is greater than ourselves and what we found. That I hope is the reason why the cryptocurrency industry exists as a whole, and that's why despite the fact that I'm tired and clearly worn down, and it's been a very difficult ride and it continues to get more difficult, I show up every single day, overweight, got a torn tendon in my right foot, hair's been falling out, haven't been sleeping well, been traveling nonstop. I'm still here, and I'm still going to have the same amount of passion tomorrow when I wake up as I did this morning and the day before.

I hope you do too, and I hope you keep the faith despite all of this. So thanks for listening, and I thought maybe, just maybe, some encouraging words would be useful right now. I sure as hell needed to listen to them. Thanks everyone.