Marketing and Adoption

hi this is Charles Hoskinson live from warm sunny Colorado it's 11 o'clock at night but it's still always warm and it's still always sunny I just got blinds these are pretty cool actually they're controlled with the remote control you guys can't see the ones in the windows here and those ones are manual but the rest of them are automated I have a little cool thing here it's from Hunter Douglas they make good blinds I got new windows for the home and I'd say I want to be nice to upgrade the blinds at the same time and I'm very impressed with them so what's new with you guys well I'll tell you what's new with me I was just on telegram having a lovely conversation and there was a particular user that kept repeating the same question over and over again he said let's talk about marketing let's talk about marketing adoption what are we going to do as a project to get people to adopt Cardno what are we going to do as a project to get people to use the protocol there's two kinds of people who asked this question there is the majority and then there's the minority the majority of the people who ask this question are people who care about one thing one thing only I want the value of the token to go up I've bought it at price point X and I wanted to go to play and the only way that's going to happen is by getting adoption that's I'm willing to wager there's a lot of people floating around who live in that category who asked that question and there is not a damn thing I which K or any of my people are going to do in that respect because we're engineers we're scientists we build stuff our day job is to build great technology and build a very useful protocol now the second group of people the minority who asked that question they asked that question because they're legitimately curious about why do these systems matter what what can these systems do that's useful that is distinctly different from systems that we already have we get asked a lot why don't you just use a database we get asked a lot why do people even need blockchain or open systems and open networks and those people are legitimately interested of well two things one first you the burden is upon us as an industry as a whole to make the case that there our unique value propositions unique selling points for the technology that we produce there are things we can do that no one else can do and these have to be socially beneficial I mean either for good they're not for money laundering they're not for drug purchases they're not for evading capital controls they are things that natively add new capabilities to society as a whole and then the burden is not going from just a theoretical because it's entirely possible to win the argument it's entirely possible to say yeah I get it if we lived in a utopia ideal world we would use these things but demonstrate real-world use cases where these things are actually in deployment planned to deployment people are doing things with them and demonstrate how you're going to get that adoption now it turns out that the minority will achieve the same ends of the majority should these systems be successful because the underlying tokens that govern these systems if the systems gained adoption naturally appreciate because they become more valuable to society they do a lot for all of us and that's a finite collective resource so it certainly appreciates in price by supply and demand mechanics but that's not the intent that's the happy after effect it's just like saying if you want to build a beautiful park your secondary consequence of that is that he starts becoming a crowded Park because many people come to see the beauty and by the way if you happen to be deciding where you want to put your hot dog stand probably want to put it in the crowded park because you have a better chance of sales right but it wasn't the intent of the people who are building the system it's just an economic consequence of supply and demand so let's talk about the minority let's talk about first those two points basically what can we do that's fundamentally different from what a centralized database can do what can we do that's fundamentally different from the legacy solutions why would people even want to adopt these types of systems so I often say the philosophical core of our industry as a whole is this concept of brokering trust amongst people who in basically do not trust each other in the greatest example that we all have on our mind right now is frankly the Cova to Christ why because this is a great example it's probably the best example and we'll blatant example we are ever going to get of the human race with a situation where we need to trust and work with each other for the greater good because if we don't it's clear people will die we can debate on how many but it's clear that people will die and in the aftermath of this there's going to be a lot to clean up and again if we don't people will die so for the greater good of us all for the greater good of our employment for the greater good of global supply chains for the greater good of nation-states it's really States versus the federal government private industry versus the public industry we have philosophical divides anti-vaxxers versus vac sirs anti-sea science versus science experts versus the laymen there are so many things that are dividing us and these cause disruptions on solutions and the nation-state plant we have China versus the world we have the European Union having fracturing within its own set up European states are conflicting with each other over their response Sweden is not locking down others are even the global flow of trade and commerce Travel is in a dreary State and so you'd say well hang on a second here don't we need to work together to establish the supply chains of PPE the flow of medicine allocating research resources deciding who gets what where and don't we need to kind of trust each other but the numbers that we're reporting are accurate so we can make policy based on those numbers the models that are coming out are accurate so this is a great example of a collective problem that we all can agree needs to be solved because if it doesn't get solved a lot of people are gonna die and there are other problems global problems just simply the flow of people the flow of money the flow of consent the flow of resources existential problems the rise of AI existential problems like bioengineering of diseases these things do need some notion of regulation but how do you build a global regulatory layer the simple way of doing it is an empire kill everybody who disagrees and have one standard the proposed solution is to build a transnational Regulatory Leviathan and have a wave of unelected bureaucrats in force synthetic world government and again nobody really likes that because it leads to Social Credit and other things it's pretty terrible so perhaps we could have a different system in your own life there are many things you can look at like for example avoding in the United States we have this problem of when do we open when do we open and we have all these governors floating around and they've been given this terrible choice because of the way the media has set things up they're basically told that if you open your state too early and it's never clear when that means too early every single person who dies is blood on your hands as a governor so no governor actually really wants to make that decision if they don't have to because they know they'll be blamed fairly or unfairly for death so in cases like this that require political courage it's sometimes better to have a direct referendum for the people themselves yet we have no facility to actually have an impromptu vote and get a super majority of the American people to consent to something and in general this capability does not exist and most established democracies so we can again see why a blockchain system would make sense because we don't trust each other because we don't exactly want to work together and because we've lost faith in centralized institutions who should have the right to count everybody's vote should it be California should it be Colorado all these things how do we know that they're counting these things correctly how do we know that these systems haven't been perverted by a private interest many documentaries have been written about voting machines not working so well are being easy to hack paper ballots being lost the legitimacy of these systems is at an all-time low or at least the percent omission based system being audible time stamped immutable transnational not really controlled by central authorities people can instantly start getting a board in agreeing to these things we've even seen the government having so much difficulty doing a master tribution of money to its citizens so we have a situation where we want to mail checks $1,200 to each US citizen to basically buy them off for a while so that they'll agree with the quarantine well how do you do that in fact it's no coincidence and the bills that were proposed to do this there was an attempt to create a digital dollar a blockchain based money system issued by the Federal Reserve System to make it easier to manage direct payments to people so on the theoretical side we can kind of start seeing some clarity you have option a amongst many actors who have to trust each other work together for a greater good a common good or mutual benefit the co-operative equilibria you either have the option of entrusting one or consortium of them to form a centralized entity to broker the relationships which then becomes an oligarchy or absolute Archy or you have an option of using the native technology of our industry to do that now the applied case is much more interesting so the question of well where is this actually being used who is actually deploying these systems yes charles's is all academic but there's no adoption and that couldn't be further from the truth year by year we see more and more companies fortune 500 and otherwise actually building blockchain based systems mostly on the federated side and the permission side but we actually do see real-life adoption of permissionless systems as well we see government's in companies issuing securities on watchings mercedes-benz for example did this on the etherium blockchain we see supply chain systems like with Walmart deploying hyper ledger fabric where and they're even mandating that people in their supply chain have to use this permission ledger technology I see many RFPs from many governments all over the world requesting both permissioned and permissionless systems from everything as exotic as academic credential verification to as mundane as voter registration so there are definitely hundreds of pilots that are occurring with real life use cases being asked for by the Fortune 1000 fortune 500 and by the governmental entities in my own domain what I'm probably most excited about is in the agricultural industry the agricultural technology a because this touches the poorest amongst us be if we get this wrong as our population continues to grow we'll continue running into the same pervasive problems of the past where when disruptions occur millions of people starve to death in fact this kovat crisis the United Nations is estimating that 260 million people will fall into acute starvation basically they're in a position where they have our very real percent of potential if even a small percentage of them say 5% of starve to death as a consequence of this that would be 13 million people which is twice the amount of people who died during the Holocaust from a singular event mostly due to inefficiencies because the reality is the world produces more food than it needs yet because of the way things are structured we just simply can't get it to people so I'm very keen and curious to get these types of systems in and also because systems are so pervasively interconnected to each other so a great example would be something as simple earth fertilizer vouchers to farmers it's something I'm very passionate about there are many programs all throughout Africa that do this basically the concept is you want farmers to increase their output make more money so you give them basic tools to do that education and things like crop rotation ways to properly manage their farm better ways the water and irrigate you give them bait or supplies so fertilizer is definitely a component and you have to give them the right fertilizer for their soil and some cases mechanization or a shared mechanization so instead of doing things manually they do things with machines and you information and sustenance farming to thriving and actually being able to make real money but then how do you actually distribute a supply chain for that how do you make sure that what they buy they can repay and year after year there's sustainability in these things the very same tools and techniques you would use to do this in a federated capacity can be reapplied to do this to build an identity system and actually start creating economic agency for those people on a scale of millions and then once they have that identity you can build a reputation system you can build micro marketplaces you can have better price discovery you can have collective decision-making where people start negotiating and bartering how they're going to rotate their crops and which farms are going to produce what and all of this can be done without centralized Authority in a completely decentralized way and it doesn't even require any government participation furthermore it allows us to create kinds of new financial products that can dramatically enhance the lives of the poorest amongst us while enriching developing nations for example what if I told you that fertilizer vouchers have an incredibly high repayment rate and that repayment rate could be fifteen to twenty five percent returns for the people who take the risk well then we could bundle and tranche these into assets that could be sold and regulated financial markets and guaranteed by sovereign entities and because the default rate is so low just the FDIC with bank accounts or other sovereign guarantees the actual out-of-pocket for that risk mitigation would be very low meanwhile we suddenly have in a time when we have negative interest rates well we have very low bond yields very low interest rates on on money on lending an avenue to do microcredit at a 15 to 20 percent return greed would compel investors to literally put billions if not hundreds of billions of dollars of available capital into these products translating to one of the largest wealth transfers in the history of humanity from the developed to the developing world to build up infrastructure it's not charity its investment and that investment collectively will rise people out of poverty so these are examples of things that can be done with the technology that we have and people see the writing on the wall they actually understand that this is coming policymakers in these countries they don't have an option globalization is forcing them to change if they don't they simply lose market access when Starbucks says things we're only going to buy Fairtrade coffee when Starbucks says things we were only going to buy coffee from sustainable farming sources these aren't just environmentalist propaganda or liberal ideology the reality is that these have profound market consequences because if farmers cannot prove these things they simply cannot sell to the largest consumers and as a consequence they have to sell to substandard market places and they get considerably less money for the so if they want to maintain social order policymakers in these countries have to somehow upgrade millions of people amongst the farmers I mentioned in Ethiopia the smallholder ones only 2% of them have cell phone penetration so this is among one of the greatest challenges that we have the consequences of globalization are forcing the poorest amongst us to have to rapidly upgrade and update themselves in order to stay competitive and maintain market access but they are among the least able to adopt the legacy systems that we currently use in the developed world so then the question remains how do we upgrade them and therein lies the greatest opportunity for us as an industry this is why I often don't say or talk about much our competitors how will we beat Tasos how will we beat aetherium how will we beat us to be completely Frank I could not care less about their success and their stability within the existing crypto markets it makes no difference to me if they have a twenty five billion dollar market cap because they've convinced rich people in California to buy their token and frankly we're playing different games what our project has always been about is saying can we build a new financial operating system a new social operating system a new way of looking at social finance within the world of the have-nots can we build a new system for everybody and that system will enable these people to be lifted out of poverty as a consequence of the system's operation and produce value for everybody so I am looking for the three billion unbanked customers I am looking for the people who are suffering from the consequences of globalization and inviting them into something new in giving them the tools that they need to build interesting things and we put our money where our mouth was we have had people in Africa now for several years in my own company in places like Addis Ababa I personally traveled all throughout Africa my director of African operations has been to nearly two dozen countries in Africa and lives there full-time he has a house in Ethiopia that he rents we have trained African developers and will continue to do so I myself I'm probably going to even open up a game development studio in Rwanda I love doing business in this continent because you find some of the most exciting opportunities and some of the youngest people that you could do business with Ethiopia for example 70% of the population is at or under the age of 30 and their internet aware and enabled and very excited about the prospect of change this is where the opportunities lie not in places where everybody's a bit older thinking is ossified and markets are rigged and regulated out of competition these are places begging for new systems so we frankly don't have to be yo stays osa aetherium we don't have to go grab the latest top 5 defy app developers and bring them into the cardinal ecosystem what we do have to do is inspire people in these jurisdictions to solve local problems and make sure that they have the resources necessary to try and you do that through public-private partnerships you do that through grants we do that through the Treasury system that we're deploying and you do that by leading by example which is why we're there we're bidding on projects when they come up and as we construct them they bring people organically into our ecosystem and the lifetime value of these people is not super high when it begins but let's be honest here there was a time when nobody really took the United States seriously nobody wanted to sell financial products into the United States nobody wanted to buy our debt this was especially true when George Peabody was around and he had to do most of his business in England and it was very difficult to sell sovereign bonds because the English had a very negative view of the United States just 50 years later the US economy was the most powerful in the world and the most investable in the world so things change very quickly the world changes very quickly those who are powerful today may not be powerful tomorrow much the Bob Dylan song and so when we look to the future we have to plan for the things that come after us not the things that are before us today we have to look and ask ourselves where is the world going to go what are the trends and why would this technology be useful to them there will be a pan-african currency within the next 30 years much the euro in the European Union and there is a very high probability that this will be the first pan currency of many nation states which is a crypto currency and there's a very good possibility if we get in early today that that currency could live on the card auto ecosystem it just depends on how we lay our roots the face of those endeavors and the projects that we build it would simply be an afterthought like saying well which Internet should we connect to a proprietary one that we construct ourselves with exotic new protocols or tcp/ip well obviously tcp/ip because that's just the standard that's where the world is going to be and ask yourself what would the value of network effect be for a billion plus people living in that continent we would have a massive wealth transfer and of the fastest-growing economies in billions of transactions every day for just one thing to exist there and should it exist there what about the defy portfolio that we construct around it what new innovations could we make and finance new types of securities new types of stock markets new types of insurance this is the final frontier this is the work of a lifetime and it's not easy it takes decades it's not it's not simple there are enormous logistical challenges there are so many things you have to overcome there are frustrations there's regressions as a consequence of Coos in the abandonment of the rule of law global economies collapsing mean that there is a regression towards tyrannical government's total tellurian ISM the faults and you have to tolerate all these setbacks much the people who saw the promise of America in the 19th century and realized that there was something special about a nation that could cleve itself into to mend itself and within just a few decades restore all of its capacity and then some and invested in us despite these differences and reap the windfall profits similarly we see this when we look to the future so our path to adoption is not going to be achieved by hiring a particular marketing firm it's not going to be achieved by a particular video or a wonderful press release it's not going to be achieved by appearing on a podcast the Joe Rogan experience it's going to be achieved like all great things on the backs of millions of people waking up every day and working hard towards a principle better future and the key is can we grow to have that army and as long as our principles and our Tegrity are strong as long as we maintain a sustainable growth model and as long as we can actually solve the problems we claim that we can solve it is inevitable and incentives will drive people into our system and in many cases not because they want to be good actors but because they want to get rich because they want to build a business because they want to survive and thrive very few people go and work for free even volunteers usually have ulterior motives in many cases to gain experience in an industry for example so that they can later on perfuse sue of vocation for example many young children young teenagers early college students volunteer in the healthcare industry not because they want to go helps own in a retirement home or work at a hospital but because they want to be a doctor and they're trying to get something out their resume so altruism perhaps does exist but more often than not we follow our self-interest the greatest systems ever constructed the greatest things that humanity has ever built are things that produce good for all of us by relying on the greed of all of us by relying on our own self-interest to have an invisible hand guide us towards a better future so that's how we're going to achieve broad scale adoption by maintaining our commitment to our principles the peer-review process the way we write code the decentralized brain that designs our protocols living in the Academy as opposed to any particular scientist the Treasury system replenishing the resources for the smallest to largest and giving us sustainable funding to keep the protocol growing and going and getting more capabilities by focusing on real-world use cases in places like Georgia Southeast Asia Africa and using these as opportunities to bring in great network effect training ambassadors so that they can propagate that wisdom and propagate those principles to others and they can really emphasize why are we trying to do what we do and then making sure that people truly understand that at the end of the day this system has nothing to do with money this system has everything to do with the society that we'd like to live in for the 21st century in closing a long time ago over 13 years ago I was a member of the Ron Paul campaign and people often asked us well what is his political philosophy and it was very simple to stake because we only had three pillars and they were easy to understand and repeat which is exactly what you want when you want to grow from a movement we went from a few thousand people to two million people in a very short period of time and changed all of America's politics especially on the right but it was basically a humble foreign policy so we didn't like things like Iraq and Afghanistan we didn't the wars we said maybe we shouldn't do that we said sound money we didn't the fact that we were printing tons of money in our national debt kept growing at the time I believe was six or seven trillion dollars now it's over 23 trillion and we said choose Liberty follow the Constitution every single person has god-given rights don't take it from them let them have them and will flourish the problem with our movement was that while we had the philosophy we actually didn't have a vehicle to execute you often cannot solve the problems of the system within the system you have to go outside of the system and build a bigger one a better one a different one to do that in the point of our industry the blockchain industry is frankly the vehicle to get us to those three pillars it gives us sound money we can create it with these systems it gives us the ability to regulate our societies in healthy way and allow those bureaucrats to do the things they must do but hold them accountable and very a transparent auditable and immutable ways and remove them when they violate the social trust in a way that they can't resist and finally it gives us the ability to endow Liberty to everybody because it means that we are all treated by the same rules and there are no exceptions to that and we're all given a voice no matter how small we happen to be where we happen to be born and that frankly is the reason why I'm still in this space and why I still feel so passionate and why I think our success as an industry is inevitable and it's also why I don't think much about our competitors because frankly if they're focused on how do we get the market cap higher how do we get a few more defy developers they're asking the wrong questions they don't understand the philosophical core and the reality of our technology and before anyone says well hang on a second here that's not a business strategy I will remind you that the least advanced the least capable the worst technology in our space Bitcoin is still King they exists because of a dogged focus on their principles and that's why they succeed every single person at Bitcoin can spend hours listing all of the problems it's very easy on Cardno to send transactions in a matter of seconds that settle and have great finality on Bitcoin you have to wait at least an hour they spend more energy than countries like Switzerland to maintain their network with us we use 10 kilowatts of power and that's after we have all these stake pools deployed they don't have smart contracts that mean anything it's so difficult to develop things on that platform if the areum and others and soon Cardinal will have rich development experiences that allow you to do unimaginable things from Bitcoin yet Bitcoin is larger than all of them because no one has ever once questioned the integrity of the system the principles of the system no one has ever once questioned that Bitcoin stays true to its original intent and why it exists if we ever as an ecosystem want to reach that stability scale and Trust we too must stay true to the principles we were founded on and because our principles enable more things they enable sound money they enable liberty they enable us to live in a better society that doesn't require social credit that can solve X essential problems then we too will grow as they have grown and exceed them at some point because we can do more now there are many tactical things we will do in the coming weeks and months there are of course new websites coming new documentation coming all kinds of creative programs to broaden the tent and improve the utility of the platform super excited about developers coming and of course we'll do everything that we can a tie which K at the foundation of the MER go to try to make Cardno as visible as possible and of course this is done through the media it's done through all the standard techniques but it's important to always remember where we are today and where the past has led us and who has succeeded and who will be around I have no doubt that Bitcoin will be around 10 years from now and if we adhere to our principles the same way they have done and never forget why this protocol exists or who this protocol is for then we too will be around in ten years and we too will grow just as they have grown and the consequences of us growing will be a better world for everyone a fairer world for everyone and something that we all collectively own that we have given as a gift for those who come after so thank you so much for listening I always appreciate it especially this late at night keep the faith Shelley's coming soon and our best days are ahead of us Cheers [Music]