We as AzureADA SPO watch all the videos by Charles Hoskinson. These videos are not only great news on Cardano development and ecosystem, but very often a source of inspiration. The video with the name “Rough Days” streamed live on September 4, 2020 is really a historical speech, that’s why we decided to transcribe for everyone who prefers to read rather than to watch and listen.
The video you can watch here:
And here is the text version.
Hi everybody
Charles Hoskinson here live from warm sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. And I got my Massey Ferguson hat on. Take that off, see my hair's all messed up. One of these days and we'll lose all that hair.
It’s a rough day today and that markets are terrible. down 20 percent for most people. And every now and then I talk about price, I rarely do, but in general, let's talk about the macro.
Crypto is a unique phenomenon, it's a unique thing and these are crazy times. I remember just a few months back when coronavirus first came out and we saw basically everything just bottom out, everybody went crazy they went to cash all asset classes just went to hell in a handbasket. And I did a video and I said: «Guys, our best days are ahead of us as an ecosystem and as an industry. And what happened? Everything got better over time. People started getting more optimistic. You know, the reality is that we are seeing an old industry die right now, the legacy financial system.
I just read Biden's tax plan. He wants to treat capital gains as ordinary income and put another 12,5% on top of that. And at the end of the day, all these new taxes amount to a trillion or so extra dollars, I think, per year in income. Takes six years from the make back what they printed out of thin air for coronavirus and are willing to print again. Which begs the question why do we even pay taxes anymore if we can just print money out of thin air. And we have a whole movement of people, the AOC crowd, wake up every day and they say: «Modern monetary theory: the actual supply doesn't matter. All that matters is how much can we print and get away with it."
This is where we're at as an economy right now. And globally speaking, a lot of other nations agree with this. So given that the whole world, the leadership of the world is talking about negative interest rates, they’re talking about predatory financial systems hyperinflation, just print money modern monetary theory, just print as much cash as you want. And we look to the cryptocurrency industry and, God, we got a lot of problems.
I think this collapse is probably because one of the most prominent exchanges in South Korea got hit. They got shut down by the South Korean government. They, at one time, were responsible for a big part of the kimchi premium. And you know what? Korean government might shut down a few more Korean exchanges. And usually the market base these things in. We got crazy yield farming weird stuff going on in the DeFi space. All these other local events and their blips, they don't really matter that much. Just like corona in the long term won’t matter too much. In terms of the markets what matters is the trend and where are we going.
I had a meeting with some people this morning and we talked about revolutionizing the healthcare industry and getting things better in terms of supply chains. I had another meeting with a soon-to-be former Wyoming state representative about how we're going to get governments to adopt blockchain technology. I talk every day to governors, heads of states congressmen, senators, mayors, some cities, sometimes very large cities with millions of people. They all say the same thing: «We need help, we need solutions, we’re damn tired of the way that the old system is running». And you know what? If we don't solve it - a lot of people are going to get hurt or continue to be hurt. The common theme that we all have is - no one's happy.
Look at the black lives matters protests. Taking their philosophy of the organization aside
the ranking file people are there not because they love marxism they're there because they're unhappy with the way society is. And why shouldn't they be?
When my grandfather got his first job on my mom's side out of the Korean war, he was a lineman. And he made enough money from that job to have seven kids and have his wife stay at home. No college degree fresh out of high school, fresh out of marine demolitions and alignment five boys and two girls. And he could take care of that family and save money every month, have a car and a house and that was his standard of living. How many people in the middle-class today in the United States or Europe for that matter have the ability on a single person’s salary to raise seven children and have the wife or the husband stay at home?
How many people? Not many. Why? Because our monetary system has failed us. The inflationary policy has created a situation where the Jeff Bezos can have 200 billion dollars and make windfall profits every year regardless of how bad the economy is and the everyday people they don't get a pay increase, so a lot of cases they don't get keep their job and their money deteriorates in value a lot more than three 3% per year.
Our industry has principles in that we worship the math and the protocols and the stable monetary policy, these types of things. And as corrupt as some of the exchanges can be and some of the bad actors are: all movements suffer from these warts. And they're finite and temporary. You run out of them at some point. Self-regulation kicks in or standards kick in and these bad actors flush out. And what's left behind is a crucible that contains the truth of the matter, which is: we're going to win as an industry.
There's just no doubt in my mind. You have bad days in the market, you have damn good days in the market. You get addicted to the good ones and you hate the bad ones but at the end of the day, it's only going in one direction which is: crypto is going to eat the world.
Every voting system, every property registration system, every monetary system the next 25 to 50 years is going to be running on the tech we build and others build. And running with the principles of power to the edges. This is the great challenge of our time: to do it in a way that it's fair, transparent, open, and doesn't allow a government to co-opt it. It's gonna be a lot of fights here the least of our concerns and matters are a red day. And every now and then I like making these videos to remind people why I’m here and why you should be here too. As toxic as the trolls could be and these other people can be - none of them really matter. Markets don’t really matter. What matters are the principles and the purpose behind what we do. And you have to ask yourself: - Are you happy with the way that society is? Are you happy with the money in your pocket? Are you happy with the political leadership representing your nations? Are you happy with your future and do you honestly believe if we keep doing the things that we did and continue to do that the future is going to be better? Or do you think it's going to be worse or stagnant?
I think too many people have woken up and they realize that if we continue doing the things that we do, the future is going to be a bad place. And they don't want that to happen. And so we're voting with our wallets, we’re voting with our feet and we as a collective industry are waking up and figuring out how to build something better. And there's some good days and bad days along the way. Today's a bad one, but there are going to be good days tomorrow. Just like I told you back when corona made everything go into free fall. And I told you before. And I warned you about with ICO mania. We're in a DeFi bubble right now. There’s no doubt in my mind about that. I saw it in 2017 with ICO mania, I see it here. And there's probably going to be worse days ahead in that respect. But the trend is always the same and never forget that. And never forget that real people are actually adopting these systems and using them. And every day we see more and more and every day that movement grows.
What's so humbling is that I know a lot of you are here with me. It used to be pretty lonely space to be in a few years back. You know, the conferences, they didn't have many people. My first bitcoin meetup group in 2011 in Colorado is at the gypsy house cafe, I think I was 13th in Pearl over Capitol hill in Denver. And I registered for the event, I showed up. Two people registered: myself and another
guy. And the other guy didn't show up so I had coffee with myself. Compare that with the Shelley summit that we had in July of 2020: 10 000 attendees. Ten thousands from all across the world. Compare that to where we are at today just nine years later. Pretty amazing if you think about how fast things have grown and how many fertile beautiful ideas exist in this industry and what this industry is doing for the world as a whole. And that is why we're going to win. Because at the end of the day who can argue against freedom? Who can argue against liberty? Who can argue against putting people in control? The only way you can is when you believe people are stupid, people are evil, people are incapable. And I suppose that's a philosophical difference between those who currently lead and the people who want to replace them.
The people in charge right now of the world, the big banks, the Fortune 500 companies, the media, Hollywood, these things - they're very cynical people who believe in the worst in us. They look at everyday people with sustain and disgust and say: «These people if left to their own devices will be chaos. These people if left to govern themselves will burn everything to the ground and destroy everything.». And every single time I have ever seen a bad event happen, what the news doesn’t show you and what those people don't talk about is how we come together and help each other out. Someone gets injured in the streets more often than not people show up and help them. People need a helping hand someone always shows up more often than not. And this is no different.
I don't believe the political process is effective anymore in any modern democracy. They've all been co-opted, perhaps they always were. But what I do believe is that we can come together and change things economically, which is what we're doing. And it's messy. Building our own money is messy, building our own industry is messy. We make a lot of mistakes along the way, we lose a lot along the way. We collect some scars too while we're at it. But progress every year keeps being made. The technology every year keeps getting better.
Today, right here, right now provably secure proof of stake protocols are in circulation. They were a fantasy five years ago, now they're a fact of life.
Today, right here, right now snarks have evolved by an order of magnitude in every category from validation time to efficiency to proof size. In all favorable ways which opens up all kinds of new applications and scalability and privacy.
Today, right here, right now layer 2 protocols are more advanced than they have ever been in our industry's history. giving us the ability to build payment systems that scale to billions of people.
Today, right here, right now we are seeing massive innovations in governance and a fertile environment for things like approval voting, threshold voting, preference voting, quadratic voting that will enable us to build all kinds of new treasuries and governance systems that eventually will scale to nation-states.
As the politicians of today argue whether the post office can properly count paper ballots that people mail, we are building voting systems with state-of-the-art cryptography living on phones where you can vote with just a tap of a button and enjoy more security than we have ever imagined before.
That is the future. This movement is enabling humanity. Money flowing at the speed of thought and the speed of thought making new money.
How can you compete with that? You can’t, unless you bring people down with cynicism and disdain. And ultimately what competing vision do they offer? That you all should be in chains.
That we should just be wage slaves. We should just accept that every year our money deteriorates in value. That we should just accept that the rich will get richer the poor get poorer. And every now and then they throw us table scraps. And when we get real angry - they usurp the movements and then install their own leadership to basically take those movements from us. As we've seen so many times before and we will see it again.
I'm sorry that's not a road I want to walk down. And I'm willing to ride rocky waters, crazy markets crazy people in unlimited flood and trolling. But I will never apologize for believing in the best in people. And I will never apologize for believing that if only we give everyone around us the tools to save themselves and society that they can do it. They don't need great leaders and charisma. No one needs someone to tell them what to do. We all know what to do. We all know how to make the world a better place. We just have to be trusted enough to do it ourselves.
You know what? For the first time ever we did with Bitcoin. And then we did it again with Ethereum. And now we're doing it again with Cardano. And we, as a movement, will continue to do it.
So I believe our best days are ahead of us and every day I wake up and there's more people marching with me in that respect. And one day it'll be millions. And one day it'll be billions. And one day all those cynics will be gone. Replaced with optimists who once again believe that tomorrow is going to be better than today. and that we're going to leave the world just a little bit better than the way we found it.
So every now and then on a tough day I like making a little message and letting you guys all know it's going to be better and you know what it will be. Just have to have faith that it will be. So hold the line, hold strong, and have faith in each other and go do something. Build something. Start something. Got a lot of podcasts on the way. A lot of things coming down the pipe for the DC fund. A lot of opportunities to actually innovate. Multi-assets are coming soon. Plutus is coming soon. Guys are going to be able to build a lot.
Start thinking today what's the business plan. What would you like to change? Small or large. You don't complain about voting - change voting! Your own organization. Maybe you belong to a club - do a blockchain-based voting system. Maybe you have some political influence. Have a primary democrat or republican or your local primary in your country for selecting candidates done with blockchain-based voting. Maybe you want to build a new financial product. Think about it! Figure it out! There's so much there! It’s all there! It's ready to go, it's for you to take and build and innovate with.
Every day I wake up I try to make the platforms better. I try to push the technology a little further along. I try to hire great people and bring them into our industry. Cardano brought the Haskell industry into the cryptocurrency space. Cardano brought a lot of academics, who had never thought about cryptocurrencies, into the cryptocurrency space and we made our problems their problems and as a consequence, they started solving them in ways we could have never done before.
But most importantly Cardano brought a lot of YOU into the cryptocurrency space and you never thought you'd have this level of control and freedom over the fabric of society in the direction of the human race. Don't let that slip through your fingers. Figure out what you want to do with that superpower. Might be small, might be big. I dreamed big. You can dream big too. Even if you want to just dream small: every person counts every action counts. Up to the hill. Y'all matter. To me and to each other and we're all in this together. Never forget that. So, hard day, rough day. Tomorrow will be a better one. The day after will even be better.
See you guys soon
Take care!
