The Social Consequences of Constant Criticism

Hi everyone, Charles Hoskinson broadcasting from warm, sunny Colorado. I wanted to make a video to talk about a tweet that came out from Northpool. He’s a good friend of mine and has done amazing work over the last two years. Let me just read this off: "Thinking about leaving the Cardano community for good. So tired.

I worked my ass off for two years and sacrificed a lot. I have been writing rationales for the ICC in the hospital with my son. What I see on Twitter is that the constitution is crap and CF lawyers could have done it better. Now I see a sentiment that Civics should likely have no budget. It seems governance is of no value these days—just a clap on the shoulder, 'Good job, now we’ll take it from here.

' In any case, I will forfeit my current obligations and make a peaceful transition. So good luck, guys. For the record, I’ve been here since 2018, through thick and thin, but there’s a limit to how much someone can take before they break. Criticism is fine, but please, for the love of God, come up with an alternative and don’t just say you would have done it better. If your alternative was presented and got fewer votes, maybe, just maybe, there was some quality in the constitution that got more votes.

Budget-wise, cut it down if that’s what you want, and don’t come complaining to me when you realize that it had economic impact and value that you are now severely missing, and competitors will be leapfrogging you." It is not healthy for an ecosystem to take people who have been working in it since 2018, who’ve been with us through all the ups and downs, and criticize that person, their work, and the work of many others again and again to the point where they just don’t see any value in staying and continuing. That’s a fact. I’ve seen a lot of people criticize the constitution. They say it’s poorly written, the language is bad, and we should hire lawyers to fix it.

A bunch of amateurs spent the last two years on this, and no lawyers were involved. People who wrote constitutions for nation-states were involved. People spent hours arguing over small pieces of language—1,800 people from 50 different countries. It’s not a perfect document; it’s a consensus document, and ambiguity was left in on purpose because it needs to leave room for interpretation. By no means is this a final document, and it’s the same with the budget.

It’s the same with people saying that no one should be compensated, and it’s the same when people say that all the work that other people have done means nothing. This was my concern and why I got so angry when there wasn’t unity among the core entities about the process. I knew exactly what would happen: it would spill over into the volunteers who devoted their lives for the last two years, working really hard to try to make this a reality. It is not okay to criticize nakedly and say what you’ve done is worthless. Anyone doing that should not be part of the conversation.

You have no place in the conversation. If you’re going to criticize, you have an obligation to present an alternative and argue why that alternative is superior, and then you let them compete. Otherwise, we won’t get anywhere. No matter what you do in a human endeavor, there will be a flaw with it. No matter how good your performance is—99.

9%—if the conversation is on the 0.1% that wasn’t good, then there you have it. It’s not that you won the gold medal; it’s, 'How come you didn’t break a world record at the same time?' You broke the world record, but what? You could have run faster.

You stumbled a little bit there halfway through. That’s our standard. That’s how we’re going to win. Well, you just saw the consequences of that. A good friend of mine, who’s been in the ecosystem for seven years, is now bowing out because the sacrifices he made meant nothing to those who criticize.

And for those who criticize, know that those are the consequences. It doesn’t give you a better system; it doesn’t produce value; it destroys value. Those are the social consequences of constant, unrelenting naked criticism. A lot of very good people sacrificed a lot—time, effort, money—to get us to where we are today, whether you want to acknowledge that or not, or you think some unelected Swiss bureaucrats could have pulled something out of their hat far better because they’re just so much smarter than everybody else. Great, then let it compete.

Let people vote on it. Let people argue one way or the other. That’s the only way this works as a decentralized government. Never take people who are putting the time in and want this to work and beat them until they don’t see any value anymore and want to quit, or else you won’t get anywhere. In the coming months, we’re going to be discussing the roadmap and the budget.

The roadmap that has been presented is something I feel, and many people feel, will leapfrog the competition and get us where we need to go. We’ll be faster than Solana or as fast, but we’ll keep our principles and integrity along the way. We’re far more decentralized and far more resilient. It’ll give us new markets to expand into, from everything the partnership gives us to Bitcoin OS—Bitcoin DeFi, I should say. That whole thing—getting Bitcoin into Cardano—and many other things, quality of life alongside all the things we need to do to keep the ecosystem going.

Now, is it perfect? No. Should there be criticism? Absolutely. Should there be alternative proposals?

Of course. When you look at a budget, it’s a pie chart, and each of those slices we should discuss. Who else needs to be included for that to be comprehensive? Are we getting good value there? But here’s what’s going to happen: there are going to be a lot of people who will come, and they will nitpick.

They’re going to spend the entire time nitpicking at small details here and there, and while they do that, they gum up the entire process. The rest of the industry is moving forward. You want Cardano to go from 25 billion to 50 to 100 to 200? Okay, well, you’ve got to invest in Cardano, and that’s what the budget is doing. It’s got to build the ecosystem up.

If we nitpick the fine details and nothing gets accomplished, and the people that are building leave out of frustration, you will watch 25 turn to 15, turn to 10, and the ecosystem die. Just being real with you, that’s what happens. So it’s up to you. There’s a constructive way to engage. Don’t assume everything.

Give people the benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t mean you trust them, but it does mean you ask them clarifying questions instead of immediately criticizing people. Also, be willing to accept that not everything is going to work out so well. Some things will just fail, and that’s okay. Walmart opens their doors every day knowing that some of their inventory that day is going to be stolen, yet somehow, someway, they’re still the largest retailer in the United States and wildly profitable, even though bad things happen.

That’s going to happen to us. Should we be tolerant of it? Well, that’s why you have a loss prevention department. There can be audit and oversight, and there can be all these other people, but if you’re so obsessed with what could go wrong, you never focus on where you want to go and how you want to get there. We spent two years as an ecosystem in an enormous amount of effort talking about governance and a constitution, and we finally get there, and the people who got you there are starting to quit because of the naked criticism they’re receiving, which doesn’t provide any value.

That doesn’t get us anywhere. That’s not healthy, and that’s the canary in the coal mine for more complex and controversial things as we enter into the budget process. If that behavior continues, we just won’t get what we want. What will end up happening is people with no business experience, people who have never built anything, will get in charge, and what they’ll do is mandate unrealistic things. For example, I saw some people on Twitter saying we should put the entire books of a company receiving treasury funding on a blockchain.

Do you understand how fantasy that is? You receive a grant to build something, and the entire company has to go on the blockchain? We’ll hold that standard to a company that’s publicly traded with tens of thousands of developers and billions of dollars going through? We’ll hold that standard to a company like Modus Create, which has hundreds of customers who are not Cardano, and now they have to expose all of their business operations and their financial operations to the general public? They have to go into a standard above being a publicly traded company?

Microsoft, who may actually come in and collaborate with us, they’re now going to have to rebuild their entire financial operating system? Oh no, they all get exclusions. Well then, who has to do that? New people? Old people?

Or is it just IO? Or is it Mergo? Is it a CF? It’s an absurd statement. You should have an expectation of what value you’re going to get and an audit and oversight function to ensure that that value was delivered and recourse in the event that it wasn’t.

But then to reach into an entity receiving a grant or compensation and say that their entire business system has to be subject to community oversight is absurd. Yet there are some people reflexively demanding that who have never run a business and don’t know how businesses operate, and they’re trying to push that through. That’s just one of dozens of absurd demands that are working their way into this process. So this is your canary in the coal mine, and there are social consequences to the criticism you levy. It’s my job to be a shepherd and kind of show you different ways you can go.

As we close out the Voltaire workstream and finish it off, you all have to make some decisions. DS listening, constitutional committee members listening—what type of ecosystem do we want to be, and what type of behavior do we tolerate? What’s reasonable and what’s unreasonable? If we make unreasonable demands, we shouldn’t be so surprised to see unreasonable outcomes. If we treat each other poorly, we shouldn’t be surprised to see that good people leave—people who were my friends, who fought with me shoulder-to-shoulder for these years to get us to where we are.

I’m pretty upset. I really am. It’s not okay; it’s not fair to burn these people out after they made sacrifices for all of us. This conduct has to stop, and the people we should listen to are the people who don’t engage in these types of things. Otherwise, the ecosystem as a whole will not get where it needs to go.

So let’s talk about product this month, and next month we’ll talk about budget. To those who are pumping on Twitter leaked budgets from Intersect, pushing salacious scandals—honestly, what do you want to achieve and accomplish with this? You’re creating this false reality that people went into a dark room, decided who’s going to get paid, and then it’s just a formality that things get signed. Why would anybody even go and do AMAs if that was the case? Why would we even involve ourselves in the fiction of government if that was the case?

It’s not true; it’s not true. But you lie to people, and then to reinforce your false reality, you take intermediate work products, which are discussion points, and then you leak them to Twitter as if they’ve already been decided. How is that fair to anyone, and how does that invite a process that will result in a good outcome? Nobody can have a conversation anymore. The minute you put anything in a spreadsheet, you’re terrified that because it’s in the spreadsheet, people will just assume it’s going to happen and immediately start criticizing you.

So before you do anything or say anything, you have to check it 45 ways to make sure that it can’t be criticized. You have to have a whole plan for a spreadsheet. That’s why there needs to be a period of time for people to discuss things, brainstorm things, and put a package together, and then present a final package for people to consider and compete with and discuss. Leaking intermediate forms is shameful; it achieves nothing. It harms the ecosystem, doesn’t give anybody anything, and invites criticism for the sake of criticism.

It’s a destructive process, and everyone who engaged in it—shame on you. You achieved nothing, and you hurt the ecosystem for it. At the end of the day, there is no budget until it is decided by the DS. And when the DS gets together, absolutely, they have to get together, and then you criticize the DS for trying to get together as some sort of exclusive Bilderberg event. “Oh, it’s invitation only.

” No, I’ll tell you, they were voted on by you, the people. If somebody has 20% of the power, it’s because you decided it—the ADA holders. For them to communicate with each other is a good thing. For them to have a discussion is a good thing. You’d rather they not, but they’ll exclude people?

Well then, you tell me who should be included. All DS? Great. Should they all come together in person? Great.

Who pays for that? I paid five million-plus dollars last year on the Voltaire workstream out of my own pocket. Should I pay for that? We don’t have the budget approved, so there’s no funding for that. Should Intersect pay for that?

You criticize them and say they’re worthless, bureaucratic, achieve nothing, and shouldn’t be paid, but then they should pay with some money somewhere from someone else to get all these people to come together? Have you thought that through at all? Well, digitally then, okay, great. And what that means? Grandstanding.

That’s all it is—grandstanding. You ever watch a Senate hearing? Is anything meaningfully ever discussed in a Senate hearing? Is any real business done in a Senate hearing when a senator is talking to the witness on the stand? Are they really having a meaningful, engaging, Joe Rogan-style adult conversation, hours long, about nuanced things?

Or is it, “These are my political beliefs, and shame on you,” and then the witness saying, “Well, I didn’t do that,” and then they say, “Oh, but you did, shame on you.” That’s what it turns into. It becomes a spectator sport. Then you go to companies and say, “Would you like to get involved in this?” Oh no, I don’t because I’ll just be in the crucible of criticism and I’ll be burned and attacked.

I don’t want to get involved in this. I’m just going to submit a budget proposal out there, and I don’t want to be in the politics at all. I don’t want to be connected to it. Actually, I don’t even want to submit a budget proposal. So we’re not allowed to meet, and if it has to be theater and politics and grandstanding, and everybody has to meet, even the guy with 0%.