YouSaid · the spoken record

Charles Hoskinson

lines on the record: 392
first: 2021-06-16
most recent: 2021-06-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Right around the two week mark, you know, I fainted for a little bit in a chair and I was like, okay, maybe I should start eating again. But then I was legitimately worried about like refeeding syndrome and this stuff. Like, okay, how do I take care of that? So my brother's a doctor, and I called him and I said. Hey, Wooie, you know, I haven't eaten in two weeks. How do I start eating again? And he's like, what?”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so normally when I do an extended fast, it's about three, four days, because that's the sweet spot before you start losing muscle mass and other things start happening. And there's people know so much more about this than I do. But I just feel pretty good. And you kind of get addicted to the fast high. You don't have to eat, you have no downtime Just going, your energy never dips. And so I used to do like three, five days, maybe three, four was the sweet spot. But then after about a week, I was like, how long can I make this go? And so I started talking to some people. I said, well, Angus Barbary did 384 days. Of course, I'm not as fat as Angus. So I said, I can do two weeks. So I just kept going and kept going and kept going and kept going.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But anyway, yes, the day in the life of Charles. I fast. I try to do intermittent fasting 16 8. The longest fast I ever did for a long-term fast was two weeks, which was just crazy. Oh my God, I was.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, you know, it's really crazy if you go to Aspen and see the bar he used to go to. I actually met a waitress who knew him really well and he'd go in there like two, three times a day and she's like, yeah, he'd do cocaine right here on the table and he'd come in with lots of pills. Just put them all out on the table. and be taking them at different hours, and they were all clearly illegal substances, but we just give them coffee or whatever you wanted. He's a great guy.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the computer. Well, first off, you do a wet year and a dry year. That's what prevents you from becoming an alcoholic. So unfortunately, the way that schedule worked, 2020 was my dry year. I didn't drink the entire year, not with single sip of alcohol. Yeah. You do a dry year and then you do a wet year”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what my dad told me, and other people told me, and it was because it's like, look at where we came from the Liberty Dollar, Eagold, all these things. Anybody tries to innovate the monetary system, either end up like Gaddafi or they end up in prison or they end up like nepotistic corrupt banker or something like that. And so financial regulations are not built for rapid innovation. They're not built for Bitcoin. There's reason Toshi was anonymous. It wasn't because he enjoyed it anonymity. There was legitimate criminal risk for this type of activity. So the fact that I've gotten this far and I'm doing pretty good, that's a win. You know, you take that. Life is good.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You delegate, and somebody fights the eagle and other people takes care of that and this, that, and the other. You just do the best you can. You're in the arena. You fight as hard as you can. You leave nothing for home. You put it all on the field. And then when you go home, you have pride in what you've done. And you know that you've at least made a slight difference. You know, one person can make a huge difference. Look at Norman Borlong. I mean, just wonder the whole world teaching people how to grow crops. He saved a billion lives over the course of his life. Billion people didn't starve to death because of one guy. It's amazing the asymmetry and the returns on that type of a thing just for the knowledge transfer of all things. And yet not a household name. So that's the other side of it of the burdens. People always want something for something. So they say, oh, if I endured all these burdens, I should be given something. I entered into this space fully expecting”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, you'd just be grievously wounded on the ground and the eagle's like slowly devouring you. Yeah, don't go down that way.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody brings the Hast Eagle back and it kills me, you know. So it could happen. They're bringing the Woolly Mammoth back. Talk to George Church about that.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life has gotten considerably better when I learned how to delegate and trust. And even if people screw up and fail, it's worth the risk, because ultimately you're amplifying yourself. The other thing is that it's okay not to get all the way. You want to, you want to push there, but make sure whatever the hell you do, you leave something for somebody else to pick up and carry on. That's why we care so much about the publication process and open source because we'll never file a patent in our entire history. Because whatever we do, it's yours as much as it is mine. And maybe I can only get you 70% of the way and I'll plop over dead from a heart attack or get killed by an eagle or something like that. Maybe somebody brings the hat.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you always feel the burden, especially in my own company. I mean, I have all these people work for me and, you know, they eat because I pay them, right? So if I can't pay them, then that's my fault. So you have to, as a leader, you always have to be cognizant that there's all these people who've signed up for your crazy vision. And you have to be larger than life. You always have to be good. You're not allowed to have a bad day. You're not allowed to feel like shit. You always have to show up. You always have to be pushing for it. And so that's a huge burden in many respects because there's Charles the person and then Charles the CEO. And these are very different things in terms of expectations at the very least. And so it's heavy in that respect. That said, what gives you solace is that you're not in it alone. You know, it's lonely, but you're not alone. You have so many amazing people around you that are willing to help and actually take some of that burden.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to talk to people and say, look, it's not about communism or socialism versus capitalism. It's not about, hey, let's donate and save the world or try to be charity and make things better. It's all about how do you use the fact that we have a better toolkit to create a different system, a different incentive model where the default configuration of the system is long-term thinking. The default consideration of the system is get rid of all these negative externalities that marketplaces have and judge the success of society not by how the greatest of society are doing, but by how the least of society are doing. HDI, not GDP, this kind of thinking. And I think crypto can actually be the vanguard that kind of pushes us there. And the first countries to adopt that are going to be just significantly better places to live.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And cryptocurrency spaces, the only economic system where that's actually possible You can create a tokenomic scheme where doing things that are beneficial for people you'll never meet because you're long dead actually makes you money today. You can't do that in a legacy financial system and so forth. So I think that that's the real impact capital conversation that has to be had as you explore these things is”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the name of the game is to maximize that or balance that with what you get in the short term. And then suddenly you're saying to yourself, well, if I'm doing things that are good for me today but compromising then, I make less money. So, capitalism as an engine is okay. The problem is it's misparameterized”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Else. If we get this stuff into Africa 1.2 billion people will be living in a considerably better system than the rest of the world. And then everybody else will look at that and say, why the hell are those guys so rich? Why are those guys making the money? Why are those guys doing so well? It's not satisfying here. Well, Africa is just better. No one's going to say that. They're going to say, okay, yeah, yeah, it's nepotism and corruption and a lack of transparency and these types of things. So I think absolutely it has the potential to improve the human condition. But humans have to get out of the way. Humans have ingrained in themselves selfishness and it is a desire to maximize for themselves and their family and not think in systems. And so we have to evolve capitalism at the same time. And what I mean by that is right now you're trying to maximize the amount of resources you get today. What we need to do is start thinking about how do we create future versions of ourselves in 2100 and create a resource for that time period.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, what world are you living in? You have fractional reserves, sometimes like 2% assets on the ballot sheet. And then you're worried that the guys who actually have a dollar for every dollar they say they have are the ones that are going to collapse. It's like the 1984 level double speak when you see in the system and negative interest rates and all these other things. And so I absolutely believe the direction course of this industry is to make things more honest and fair and also by its very existence it exposes double standards hypocrisy and corruption. Just the fact that it's there because it's one thing to say that, well, it just can't be because of the nature of global finance. There's no way to do it otherwise. It's another thing to see it there as an example and say, well, that thing is doing it. Why can't you guys be this way? That's why I'm so passionate about Africa because they don't like the systems they have and everybody's really young and they are going to throw all the systems out in the next 20 years and they're going to replace them with something.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fair, that's all we want. That's all we've ever wanted. There's no coincidence that Bitcoin was created right around the same time as the 2008 financial crisis. It's not like these were just unrelated events. They're highly correlated to each other. I'd say perhaps even causal. Go figure. And everything we've done as an industry from that moment And it's gotten so insane that you have these things in Wyoming called speedy bags where your full reserve banks, they have 100% of their balance sheet is accounted for. They don't lend. And then you have the people in the banking community saying, well, those are a risk to banking. We were scared that these speedy banks are going to default.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on who you ask. I made a video a little while. I said, you know, our industry is an industry of frustration. It exists because we weren't the industry that charged 85% interest to the poorest people in the world for loans. We weren't the industry that charged 15% to move money for a maid sending money home to mom in Manila. We weren't the industry that laundered hundreds of billions of dollars of drug money and funded arms dealers in Africa and all these things or permitted oil for food to exist and so forth. And the people who did these things aren't in jail. They're rich. They're billionaires. They fly private jets. So our industry is the antidote to these types of things. We say, guys, we want a system that's fair. That's it. And we want everybody to be treated equally. That doesn't mean it's everybody's going to win. It doesn't mean that when you lose, you know, somebody's going to come on a white horse and bail you out. You're going to have winners and losers.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an inevitability to the victory of our industry. The challenge is, how do we deal with this with the squabbling of superpowers? China wants to be the new world standard. America wants to preserve that. And the rest of the world is trying to figure out how do we create something that's a bit more fair and balanced. And so crypto comes in and it potentially is both an ally and a competitor to those desires. Because if you do too much crypto, you don't need a nation state anymore. If you do too little crypto, well, you know, it's China or America. So what's that sweet spot?”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The concept of a digital currency, you're saying all five of those things are programmable. And so they could be like library driven. You say, oh, I want to be in compliance with Eritrea. Okay, pull up the Eritrean library. Now you are. It's built into the transaction. Previously, it's like, go hire some lawyers and go figure out the entire code and translate some things. And it's crazy. So just the orders of magnitude efficiency gains that you get in the increased liquidity you get and the fact that you can now represent all assets with a universal way, that financial stem cell.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, probably. I mean, you can do just so much more with programmable finance. Transactions in general have five properties. You have the asset that runs on the rail. That's what we always think about. And you can transact that. And then you have the identity, and you transact that either one to one, one to many, many to one, or many to many. And then you have metadata. So that's the story of the transactions. Like, where did it take place, these types of things? And then you have the contractual relationship. So that's the smart contract component. And then you embed that within regulation. So transactions always live within jurisdictions. This is relevant to the conversation will digital currencies take over because those things are right now done separately in a very fragmented and fractured way. And they're not completely globalized. And so super expensive to hoist up this entire system and automate things like compliance. It's usually a huge part of every bank's balance sheet. So when you look at the”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's the China case, right? They started realizing this was a legitimate threat to capital controls and to the autocratic system that they've constructed there. And then suddenly China started to build its own People's Bank of China blockchain. And Bitcoin is now the red-headed stepchild. They didn't really care too much because it was great for corruption. You could evade capital controls. And so all the well-connected people, there's, oh, yeah, Bitcoin's bad. But then they'd have Bitcoin of their own and they could use it to send money around. But now the government's gotten very serious about it. They're saying like, okay, we want to control and dominate this whole thing. And it's a threat to our plan for the digital yuan to become the world standard to displace the dollar.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Systems, you're pushing a lot of power to the edges. So there's a world of difference between optics and actual commitment. And actual commitment is I'm prepared to accept the consequences that the state is going to lose a lot of power along the way. And the problem is it's not clear to me some of these politicians who are pro-blockchain, and I'm not making a statement of El Salvador in particular, I'm just saying in general, are fully aware of that reality. A lot of them seem to think that somehow they can contain the blockchain genie in the bottle and blockchain their whole country, but stay president for life. That doesn't work once they have that power, they're gone.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That didn't work out so well. But now El Salvador is actually playing the game, and that's a real country. It's got like 5 million people and so forth. So we know the president's brother, and we've had some conversations there. So maybe we'll go in the next few months and see what's going on there and do a state visit and talk to the president. But it's an interesting development. And it's one of those things that it can't quite be ignored because a nation state's doing it. On the other hand, you have to manage expectations. It's the central bank taking a position in Bitcoin. You know, are they actually switching over to a cryptocurrency as their unit of account? Are they now getting off of BIS and they're all using the settlement rails of central banks? Are they actually blockchaining the entire country and they have some broad ambitious agenda to go and do all that? That remains to be seen. And so it really is a commitment there. The other thing is that if you're autocratic, these systems are not so good for you because the minute you adopt these types of...”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into the League of Nations. And actually, we had this crazy hair-brained idea years ago. We were down in Mexico at the Satoshi Roundtable, and we're like, hey, let's go buy a country. Let's go to Tuvalu and get them to do something with cryptocurrency because they sell everything in Tuvalu, like the.tv extension and their phishing rights and Taiwan pays them money to recognize them and so forth. So I'm like, man, maybe we can convince Tuvalu to do something with crypto.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they're both right. The critics and the pro people. So the critics are saying this is a nothing burger and it's just a publicity event. When a country issues a currency, other countries honor that usually, and it trades on forex exchanges. So if like Bitcoin becomes a recognized currency of a country, then it may be the case that United States and European Union others can't actually stop them from trading on Forex exchanges and being treated as a currency from a regulatory perspective. So it was like a really clever backdoor.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. That's the one good thing about the craziness of Trump. He made like half of America think the election system is completely airparably broken. So you walk in, it's like, we're going to go kill Dominion. And they're like, yay, that's great. Let's go do that. Whether you believe that or not, it created a market opportunity, created a lack of faith and credibility in the system.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you get a government in a box that you could parametrize any way you want. And similarly, when a government does something with Cardano, not only do they get all this amazing infrastructure, but wait, there's more. They actually get this amazing voting system that they can use for smaller, large-scale decisions that they want to do. On the U.S. side, we're thinking about trying to roll something like this out in the state of Wyoming. There's been tons of laws that are passed. It's a very friendly crypto place. At the very least, it'd be fun to see if we can do the Republican Democrat primaries with preference voting and voter registration this way. And do it completely online with an e voting system. So that's something we'll be pursuing in 2022.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he's a really bright guy, and he's written this beautiful agenda called Digital Ethiopia 2025. And one of his things in the agenda is digital identity. He wants every person in the country to have a digital identity by 2025, and he wants to implement an e-voting system at some point for that. So when you ask about governance, all these governance tools that we're constructing for Cardano are completely reusable for nation state, accompany, and by the way, if you create a Cardano application, will eventually be reusable for you. Because if you have a DeFi protocol, you need a voting system, why the fuck do you have to re-implement that? Native multi-asset, anything that works on ADA works with a native multi-asset. You can use our voting system for your asset.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Age of 21, that kind of stuff, and then eventually it could be used to link into a cryptocurrency system. In this case, we built it for Cardano. So Atala Prism is the framework we're using for it. Every student will get one. And then those students will be able to use those credentials in the Cardano ecosystem, eventually for DeFi, like lending and so forth. So it's the largest blockchain deal of its kind, and it probably will grow to 20 million people over the next 24 months. The other beautiful thing about Ethiopia that people don't know is the prime minister is a cryptographer. He's in his 40s, 50s, young guy, and he can actually read the papers.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really love Ethiopia. It's a beautiful country. So we spent four years, we trained a whole cohort of developers, and then we started a relationship with the Ministry of Education. And they care a lot about proper credentials. One of the biggest problems they have is when someone graduates, it's really hard for them to prove the quality of the credentials that they have, and it's really hard for them to prove the knowledge that they have. So if you want to be an ICT outsourcer, how does somebody know that this is a real programmer or how does somebody really know that this is a real doctor or whatever the hell you're outsourcing? So they said, can you come and build a digital identity system for credentials? So every student in the country at some point will get a did, a decentralized identifier, and then you can prove all sorts of things about them, like GPA or what particular diploma they hold or blah, blah, blah. And then the beautiful thing is the way we designed it is it's extensible to include payments extensible to include proofs about themselves. Like are you over the”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we spent four years in Ethiopia. I went there in 2017 and shook a lot of hands, kissed a lot of babies, and they said, oh, yeah, we'll have it all done in six months. Everything is a lot of fun there, but it takes a little bit longer than you'd think to get anything done. And that's okay.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, like the Ethiopia deal, for example, we have five million people that we brought in with the DID system there. That's going to follow them throughout their whole life. Right now they're high school students, but when they're in their 20s, 30s, they're going to want to use that for e-voting and for payments and so forth.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And turn the reference code into like a formal specification, a formal blueprint, and then have that change management be completely decentralized. The core developers are actually voted on and the SIP process is used to change that. And then some way of proving that your client follows the specification as use of the protocol”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, keep adding to that pile of 105 papers. This is great. And that doesn't need Charles Hoskinson. It doesn't need IOHK funding or anything like that. They're on. We're already seeing unfunded derivative work from people who are completely disconnected from us writing papers about stuff in our ecosystem. So just continue to develop that, but that's looking good. Decentralized development, we're working on that as well. Our goal is sometime in the next few years to make sure there's at least three independent clients, so three completely independent dev teams and code bases, and also to get a separation of the commercial clients from the reference code.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have fully decentralized the brain of the protocol, the peer review academic process means that there's now an academic incentive for graduate students, postdocs, and professors to spend enormous amounts of time writing papers in our ecosystem because they want tenure. And we showed that you can get it. There's been a lot of people who've gotten great academic careers from working with us.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Duche versus Turret South Park. So if it's ranked order or preference voting, you never have that situation because you always pick your favorite and you get a lot more diversity on the ballot. But then you have Arrows paradox and all these other things that come up. So there's no perfect system. And really, you have to be comfortable with governance in a game of inches. And you start by some guiding principles. And the guiding principles is more is better and productive interactions are better than destructive interactions. And you have to be able to quantify those things. As long as you have an engine that allows you to grow in those directions, then you have a lot more people along for the ride when you actually start talking about these bigger and bigger things. The other challenge was that we had to decentralize development of the protocol and the brain of the protocol.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love them so much, especially for political diversity, because this whole concept of throwing your vote away, if it's Alice or Bob, you're always going to get a self-park did at best, right?”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because what people would have done the initial stage and all the horrors of Brexit would have been broadcast to society. And there would have been some reluctance and buyers' remorse on it, and then the second round would have failed or something like that. But because it was just a single year event, it's like they passed it now. British are all passive-aggressive about it with no sign. Very well, we shall remove from Europe. And so your voting system has a lot to do with the outcome you get. The other thing is, what type of voting is it just an absolute or is it preference voting? So, you know, you pick your favorite sip, follow your second favorite sip or something like that. So Condorse or Borda are two examples of. Are you a fan of those?”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indirectly or implicitly, where there's some social process outside of the system where you eventually approve a SIP, or you can do it explicitly where you directly vote or some representative democracy, some group of representatives directly votes. And then once you've decided it's there, the constitution is necessary because you need to know the decision threshold. Is it super majority or majority? And also the voting process. Like a lot of policy experts believe that if Brexit was a multi-stage vote, it would have never passed.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's SIP 007. And there's actually a lot of conversation, and people are thinking about it. It's just stunning for me because to understand how to write a SIP like this, you actually have to read like 100 pages of mathematical prose in the formal specification. So the guys who wrote it, I was like, fuck yeah, this is great. That's an example of a sip, but that's one thing, but it can be as big as hey, I want to add quantum resistance to the system. And here's how you do that, you know, like quantum VRF and I want to put XMSS and all this other stuff. So there's a lot you can do. And you can do it.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is that? Yeah, so basically, it just has to do with the pledge. So pledge is a certain amount of ADA that a stake pool operator will set aside and connect to his pool in order to be listed in the registry and actually it's connected to how much income you make as a pool operator. So if you set it too high, you have a consolidation and you have lots of pools. If you set it too low, what will happen is larger pools will tend to fragment and actually run multiple instances of themselves. And so this is delicate parameter that you have to tweak. And so we have a formula for it in our formal specification that's quite involved. And so one of the community members came and said, well, I think we can massively simplify this design and actually get a better result for smaller stakeful operators.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eventually, but that's not necessary for the system in the short term. It's good enough just to have an annoyed a winner and say the Haskell client is that, and then what you basically do is you vote on a SIP and then once it's approved, then you go and implement that. And there's some mechanism to trigger the update system to update the reference client.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything is as old as new again. We were talking about Lojbahn back in the day, right? So there's definitely formal languages you can use to express these things. This is why I'm so interested in things like Idris and Coch and ECTA and theorem proving, because that's exactly what you're attempting to do is to express some concept or desire or construction in a language that's machine understandable and manipulatable. In particular, how does a system know its own design? So what is the reference of a cryptocurrency? Usually it's a canonical code base. Like, you know, here's Bitcoin Core. C++ code is that is the canonical code base. But actually, that's not right. You should have specifications, blueprints, that are implementation agnostic as your canonical code base. And can your system know those specifications, understand those specifications, and can your change management system be for that? And then can you provide a proof that your client is bisimilar to that specification? So that's 10 years in the future.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a huge social experiment. And we're learning an enormous amount, and then our goal is by the end of the year to have meaningful percentage of the entire Cardano population inside of it, like 40-50%. And then once you're at that threshold, now you have democratic majority of the entire system. And you can have a real conversation about, okay, how do we read a constitution for this type of a system?”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we have lots of cool partners. We've talked with in that space, and it's the same concept. Your idea comes in. What enters the system should not be what gets approved on the other side. It should go through some sort of gauntlet, some sort of crucible, where you iterate your way through and there's all kinds of optimizations and upgrades and evolutions and combinations and destructions that occur. And then by the time you get to the other side, the idea just dies on the vying because it was a bad idea, or it's a significantly stronger, far more fundable thing and potentially even gets attached with accountability. So you don't just fund the idea, you'd actually fund the auditor at the same time who actually holds the person accountable because the blockchain is not a real company. It's an ethereal thing. You need a counterparty to hold someone accountable who's real for that type of stuff and that type of funding. So that's what we're doing this year. It's like we have a whole team of people, partners like Governance Live and Idea Scale and papers we've written in about 30,000, 40,000 people regularly participating in.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a company. So we partnered with a company called Idea Scale, and they run a kind of a side platform. So people are interested. That's kind of our version of a forum. They sign up and they're special tools in that platform for discussions that are productive. So they don't descend into kind of like trolley Reddit style conversations, but they're much more focused around how is your product building out. And by the way, we're going to add more infrastructure over time. In fact, our chief of staff, Tamara Hassan, she's working on setting up an incubator, an accelerator.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Voting on a hard fork. You can't do it unless your social dynamics are right in your voting system is right. And by the way, you also need to write a constitution around the same time because not all hard forks are created equally. The kinds of things that would add support for a new cryptographic primitive are distinctly different from the kinds of things that would change your monetary policy of the system.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaningful questions about protocol design and improvement proposals and so forth. And then what you can do is you can roll out new voting systems and new social structures and you can let them start voting on training wheels like system parameters. Like for example the minimum transaction fee or that k parameter for the amount of stake pools or these types of things. Then they build enough competency there and they move up the next level and they actually start talking about hard forks using the update system, the hard fork combinator system. See, so that's how you...”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Treasury. She now has over a billion dollars of ADA in it. So it's a lot of money. And that treasury is not under my control or the foundation's control. It's actually controlled by the community as a whole through a program called Catalyst. And so all these people can come together, they can submit spending ballots, and other people who hold data can vote to approve that. What's nice about it is you have a growth engine to improve two accesses. One is absolute participation. So increase the amount of people who hold ADA participating. So the absolute number of people participating. And the other is meaningful participation. So the depth of participation. Did you just show up and vote or did you spend hours debating things on idea scale, the innovation management platform interacting with the funding proposal, going back and forth? And there's dozens of little things like that. Now, my hypothesis is if you run this with enough iterations, eventually you get to a certain critical mass, like over 50% absolute participation and a high level of meaningful participation where you can move beyond funding and you can start actually having”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source