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

“Just a structured way of discussing how you wish to change. Then there's a question of do you want to do this implicitly or explicitly. In the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum, it's an implicit system. So there's no on-chain voting. There's no like five people said this and four people said this, so we do this. In the case of Cardano, we're actually explicitly inviting this. This is one of the biggest differentiators between Cardano, Polkadarios, and these other things is that we're really serious about governance to the extent that we're actually doing foundational research in e-voting. We're building new voting systems, we're exploring preference voting and quadratic voting. And the long and the short is that we want more and more people to participate in voting for things. And you have to start somewhere. So our hypothesis is we can bootstrap the system with the treasury system. So in Cardano, some of the inflation goes to the block producers, just like any other cryptocurrency, but some goes into a decentralized.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first thing you have to do when you build these types of systems and they get to a certain scale is you have to build some mechanism for people who are interested in governance to self-select and participate. Just create a collection bucket. In Bitcoin, we had Bitcoin talk and Bitcoin Reddit and these things. And eventually the GitHub repos and these things, there was a place to go if you were interested. And you need some sort of change management system where people who want to evolve the system can write it down in a very careful way. So in Bitcoin's case, it was Bitcoin improvement proposal. On Ethereum, it's the Ethereum improvement proposal. And for us, it's the SIP, the Cardano improvement proposal.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the first thing you have to do is you've got to look at meaningful metrics, not vanity metrics. What does it mean to have legitimacy in a governance system? You can build any governance system you want. You can have a dictator, right? Like Bob is in charge. It's like whether you like Bob or not. He's in charge. It's not very legitimate. And you can have pure democracy where every single person votes and then nothing ever gets done. County dog catchers like a six-year election or something like that. So there's a spectrum there between absolute power to one and perfectly egalitarian power to every single potential participant inside the system. And then the question is, okay, well, how do you even architecture, how do you handle choice architecture in that? Are you asking your people about every question or are you asking your people about a subset of questions related to a particular set of topics, but then they're not allowed to talk about other topics? Like, for example, are they allowed to change the tax rate, but they can't change freedom of speech, that kind of a thing?”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been proposed, and it was turned out. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, there are a few people in our company that have done pseudonymous publications. If you look at the chimerical Edgers paper, it's not a real name. It's a crazy name. It's Sydonymous publication. And that's usually for throwaway work. There is one project we inherited from an anonymous person, which is fascinating. It's called Q Adidas. And it's basically an extension of the QED manifesto from the 90s. And the pseudonym is Bill White. And I think it's some anonymous mathematician, but I can't figure out which one it is. But basically, it's a marketplace for deduction. So it's like this magic machine where you can create incentives for people to write mathematical proofs in a theorem prover and make some money from it. So there's some cool work that's there. And it's sad that Bill stayed anonymous because I think that could have been easily published and there was a lot of really cool things that could have been done with QADIS.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you get really screwed if you do that. So there's a misalignment of incentives in the academic world towards anonymity. And generally, it's only done when you're doing something very controversial or there's a whistleblowing type of a component. It's not typically done for foundational work. And Satoshi was really one of the first things. Because if there was a Satoshi doxed himself, and I don't think it's possible anymore, but if he or she did that, that's like a Nobel Prize in economics, likely. You're on the shortlist for that, and there's enormous accolades that would come beyond the monetary incentives of being able to dodge yourself.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you publish anonymously, it's like being doing clearance work in high energy physics or something like that. After 30 years of this amazing career working on nuclear weapons and classified reactors, you finish and then you go to apply for a job and they're like, so what have you done for the last 30 years? Stuff. Where is it on your CV? Well, I can't really talk about it. Okay, welcome to Community College.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every paper that goes through the referee process, the authors are ripped off, so you don't actually see the authorship when you submit to the conference. So that's just best practice. But the question is, do you preserve the anonymity post-conference and actually not reveal the author of the paper? It's a detriment for the deals we make because the whole premise of working with our company as an academic is that you're going to have amazing co-authors and your work is going to appear in great conferences, great journals, and as a consequence, you get tenure.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody did it years ago. I didn't look if the model was found or not, but I just remember reading on a Bitcoin talk. And Sabo was another one of the common candidates. Half an Isabo and Adam are probably the top three things that people...”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it matches closest to Nick Sabo if you actually do a written stoometry analysis of Satoshi's writings to Sabo.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think anybody's actually done it, but there's actually a beautiful paper. It's like 94% accurate that code still longer.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I mean, if you really care, you can even do this. There's a lovely paper written by the U.S. Army. If you just Google Code Stellometry, U.S. Army. A technique where you can use ML and a few other things to actually kind of develop a fingerprint for the way that people write code. So all you got to do is take the original Bitcoin source code and then take all the open source repos from around that time period and before and see if there's a match. Between those two. Now, if he's really good at creating an alias, probably not so good at obfuscating the code that was written. So the odds are that you'd probably find a match to a repo that's connected to a real-life human identity, or at least a weaker opse because you're younger, you have weaker opse.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hell was Adam when Satoshi was around? I don't think there was any overlap where they were pulled together at the same period of time.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, because the code was not good enough. Hal was a Unix, Linux guy. He was a talented programmer. He was a talented developer. The initial code for Bitcoin was developed, it looked like on a Windows machine. Adam worked at Microsoft, go figure. And also it was very academic and it had to be cleaned up and a lot of things had to be patched up and fixed. If Galic Hal developed it, they probably had less of let's use SecP256K1 and these types of things and more of like, hey, let's build this cool engineering thing and we'll figure out the protocol design later on. It just stinks of an older academic, the initial design of Bitcoin and the initial rollout of Bitcoin. And then brilliant people like Greg Maxwell and others, they came and cleaned it all up. And lo and behold, where's Adam? Like the CEO of the largest Bitcoin development company in the space who's trying to keep working on and building out Bitcoin.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you know, if you have a preponderance of the evidence, I think the most likely candidate would be Adam Back. It's the Occam's Razor candidate, mostly because he's the right place, right time, right age, right skill set. If you look at the design of Bitcoin, the types of decisions like the use of fourth descripting language, that was pretty common in English and European pedagogy in the 1980s and 1990s. It's like an example language for a stack-based assembly. And like little stuff like that, little quirks like that. Also, he created hash cache, which was the predecessor of proof of work. And he just kind of got a chip on his shoulder that Microsoft never did anything with it. So he's probably looking for something. He grew up with all the cipherpunks. He knew of Hal Finney. He knew of all these people. He knew Phil's everpower.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a saying from Sun Tzu paraphrasing it, the best leaders are felt but never seen. So I think that's exactly right. The less the leader can be in the room and the more the principles of the leader are in the room, the better for the firm. Because what you're doing is creating more leaders that way. You're inspiring the next generation, the next wave, the next circle out to act with those principles, but contribute in their own way and their own flair. And so you gain collective intelligence inside the organization instead of just constraining yourself to however the great the leader can be. The other side of it is if the leader's principles are too strong, so this is the dark side of it, you end up with happening Disney with Walt Disney after he died for like 20 years. People said, well, we don't do that because Walt Disney wouldn't do it that way. Or to a lesser extent, Apple, we don't do that because Steve Jobs wouldn't do it that way. Well, he's dead. He's gone. Move on.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Excited about mechanizing math and making machine understandable. Now all these guys who do this work. There's like all these mathematicians and computer scientists and no one pays attention to them and they're kind of like the red-headed stepchildren of mathematics and they live on the boundaries and periphery. Meanwhile, they're super passionate and they absolutely love what they do. And if only they had the right resources within 50 or 100 years, what they're doing can probably become the dominant model of how to do mathematics. So I'm now in a position where I have the financial means to take care of these guys. So all I have to do is just call them up and say, hey, would you like to work with? Oh, absolutely. And cut a check and it's done.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I'll win. Maybe I won't win. But I'll be the last guy to leave the boat. If we're freezing to death, you get my coat and I'll just deal with the cold. That kind of mindset, you have to have that. I got that from my dad. He got it from his father. My grandfather and great-grandfather, my dad said, I grew up Montana, and they were like products of the Homestead Act. Very rough Montana, you know, a lot of people died and froze to death up there eaten by animals or something or shot by their neighbors. And nobody investigates anything because it's Montana. So the only way you survive is by taking care of each other and being a good member of that community. And if somebody gets big, you have this implicit desire to go and give back and take care of the community that you came from and invest in that community. Like I came from the mathematical community. I never completed a PhD, but one of the things that I'm doing is I'm going to put $20 million and set up a center to do automated theorem proving. And we're going to heavily invest in lean because I'm super.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything that the Republic and the Empire sought to achieve. So you have to think for the future. You have to think in institutions and systems. You have to have things that ground yourself. And you have to be fully prepared to lose everything and give up everything. After I left Ethereum, I had nothing. Reputation was damaged, not a lot of money. Nobody really want to work with me. No one pick up a phone for two whole years. It was horrible. And so I was a bedrock in that experience. And now look at where I'm at. I built all the way up to that and that wasn't by accident. I had to surround myself with amazing people. Why would amazing people want to surround themselves with me if I was a narcissistic asshole who just was like it's me, me, me? Everything would be a transactional relationship. It would be okay. Well, get as much as we can and then run away as quickly as possible. Instead, it was, I'm going to invest in you.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are egomaniacs and they connected these fantasies and they live for themselves. Look at Xi and China. He's unraveling a power structure that was what made China, China today. After Mao, they said, we probably shouldn't have another one of those guys. And so they said, let's build something where there's checks and balances and no one person is going to run the whole show, or else it'll descend and regress and we'll have problems. And then what he's done, he's thinking only about himself, not the best interest of China. So he's systematically unraveling a system they've been embracing for over 40 years. And to what end? After he dies, the next guy who comes in, even as he's super confident, the next guy is going to horrifically abuse that power structure. And the same thing happened with the Romans after Augustus, the great emperor, then suddenly down the line you have Caligula and Nero and all these other terrible emperors that just destroyed.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, he's still pretty good. So, you know, but then again, regardless of doing that, I now have Cardano. I have this great career. I've done all these amazing things. So I think that's the single best way of handling power is you have to do things to keep yourself grounded. In case of Washington, he's deeply connected, Mount Vernon. During the Revolutionary War, he was like sending letters talking about the irrigation ditches and the barn and things like that. He was always connected to that. And then also develop a mindset that you're only here temporarily. Everything you have is finite. It's going to go away at some point, no matter how much you want to keep it, you will die. And somebody else will have it. So you live for the next generation. You don't live for yourself. You look to the future and you say, what am I going to leave behind? What am I going to transmit? And then in that kind of mindset always forces you to be more gracious, cooperative, and collaborative with people. All these dictates.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hate, right? So it grounds and connects you. The other thing is, you have to get used to giving away all the best things in my life have come as a consequence of first giving. I got started in the cryptocurrency space by giving away a free class, Bitcoin or Howard Learn to stop worrying or love crypto. You did a free podcast, right? In life, if you give and you develop that mindset of I'm not attached to the things I have and if push comes to shove it goes away, usually you get more back. Like I give away all my ether I never received any of 293,000 Ether at the all-time high over $1.2 billion. I give it to my secretary. I had no idea if it was going to be worth anything or not, but he kind of got shafted. And I was like, well, they don't like me, so they don't like you by the transitive property of relationships. So you're screwed. And he's like, well, I'm going to go back and my wife.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there's a humility behind these types of activities and these things, and there's a Honest work component like when you grow hay or whatever, you have to plant. You have to actually water. You have to irrigate. You have to actually be there. And you can't use some excuse. Well, I was meeting the president of El Salvador. I was doing this. Hey, he doesn't give a shit.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm Right. And so, but my point is that when you are unrestrained, like literally no one can say no or you have the ability to distort reality around yourself and you're not constrained by social customs, it creates a situation where you start losing perspective. You're not grounded anymore. I think so it's less of a question of will you become evil or not? It's more of a question of will you lose so much touch with humanity that you just can't relate or understand people. And then you inadvertently, by your actions, start harming people, either through the policies that you pursue or the things that you start building and so forth. So I think the best inoculation against that is to surround yourself with activities that are utterly divorced from your reputation and status. The best thing are animals and gardening. Because, you know, a donkey doesn't care if you're a billionaire or broke, they'll shit on you exactly the same way.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you see this most pervasively with people who inherit a large amount of money or title, like dynasties like the Melons or the Rockefellers or other people. It's the worst thing you can do to somebody is just hand them an enormous amount of power that they're not prepared for. And the challenge with this space is like everybody's young, and we're all billionaires now. And we have these cult followings who do all these things, right? Nobody really says no to you. Like, for example, I have this ranch up in Wyoming. And it has 400 bison on it. So now I'm a bison rancher. If somebody was like monitoring, auditing, that'd be like, Charles, do you have any experience where taking care of bison? I'd be like, no. So you think it's really a good idea to have this ranch with 400 bison running around. What the hell are you going to do with bison? I just have to figure out.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. But anyway, he gives me this 80 page paper and he says, Charles, it's like the culmination of everything. I want to, this is how we're going to do AGI. And I said, that's crazy, Ben. I said, I'll throw some money at it. We're going to hire some developers. I have no idea where it's going to go, but I mean, I get to hang out with Ben Cordz. That's fun. That's the kind of stuff. And that's the really cool side of the space. And it's what I enjoy and the Vitalic rival of the thing, the Ethereum thing. I try my best not to mention it. I hate the fact that still when Bloomberg or anybody else writes a story about me, they'll see Ethereum co-founder. Can you say something else”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He wouldn't tell me either. I interviewed him as well in Wyoming. And every time I come, he'll have his shirt off. He'll have the fucking hat on.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll be defined by the things that I achieve and do and the people that we help and the things that we build. And since I started this industry, I've gotten to a point where not only do we have this amazing company with these incredible people who work at this company, but we also have the ability to pursue amazing different interests. Like I met Ben Gordzel. And Ben and I are going to do an AGI project together. And of all places Rwanda. And he gave me this 85 fucking page paper. He was wearing that damn hat that he always wears. I think he showers with the hat on. He never takes that thing off.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that has been fun. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. The dark side of the industry is that people love labels. They love saying this person's good, this person's evil, this person's a sociopath, this person's not. And by the way, they've never met that person. They've never interacted with that person. And they just say, well, I heard from this person, I read this book, or I did that. I would say, oh, so some books written by a journalist makes $50,000 a year who's looking for a movie deal say that somebody said this or did this in an unconfirmed way so what can you do sue him for slander i mean so you just let it ride and you let it roll and if it was just ending there that'd be great but the problem is it cascades and people just repost it and they relive it again and again and again and then what do you do about it you eventually just say i'm not going to talk about it anymore i'm done with it and you move on and you say you know what if it's your problem it's your problem it's your reality that you want to live”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, so it's like so many great conversations and so many great people. And what I've really noticed in this industry, when you separate the tribalism, the maximalism aside, there really is a love of creativity and building. And there's like no other industry like it. I've been in many different places in life. And here people just love art. They love beauty. They love the unknown. They love pushing things. you know really you know in some cases Necessarily the most socially beneficial way, but they really love the challenge, right?”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I met, you know, I was hanging out with Sylvia Macaulay, and I remember before he launched Yal Grant, I said you should really just do a Bitcoin Cash style play and airdrop Bitcoin. What the hell are you doing distributing this?”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've had a chance to sit on government panels pass laws, 24 laws in Wyoming. I mean, there's like all this amazing stuff that's there, and it's such a fun conversation. There's so many superheroes in that conversation, like Kaylin Long and Taylor Lim Holm. And there's Alex Sherpenoy, who we already mentioned that I met along the travels. I met Ralph Merkel. I met all these amazing people along the way. I have fond memories of, by the way, he should interview him, by the way, amazing guy. He does nanotechno.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my only point, though, is that it's a closed chapter, and it's funny. I was there for six months. I've been building Cardano for years. We've done all this stuff. I've been to 52 countries. I love talking about those experiences. And there's so many of them. I've met heads of state. Mongolia, like eagle hunting and, you know, being bucked off horses and riding the sand dunes, we've invented all this new cool technology that the space itself is using.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So pleasant and enjoyable. Tell us all about it. And tell us about your relationship with Vitalik. It's like I barely talk to the guy. I see him every now and then make every two years we say, hey, he says, hey, it's like, okay, maybe 10, 20 years in the future, you know, Walt Mossberg or Robo Walt will bring us together like he did Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. And we can kind of talk about, you know. That was a tough time.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For almost eight years now, it's just been this reoccurring pattern. Every interview, tell us about your time at Ethereum. Those six months you spent there that were...”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reason they didn't do it is you know it was licensed GPL and I think they wanted to relicense Apache if you ever talk to Bob Summerwall he was there at the time and he had this amazing story about like these terrible fights where it's like guys just relicense the goddamn code let's figure out a way to make this happen so that we can you know get this huge network effect of being basically IBM's play Didn't do it, they created fabric, you know, these types of things. So there's a lot of lore in stories in that respect. But the space is better because of Polkadot. And there's a lot of good people there. Web3 is a good concept. And we run into their people in Germany and Zurich a lot. And they've always been cordial and friendly and really affable.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A competitor like that, and oftentimes I've said that if polka dots like Ethereum 1.5, it's what F2 probably should have been. What Vitalik wanted to do, which was incredibly aggressive and brilliant, but it's a lot. And there's so much execution risk in that plan. And I think they've had like six years of playing around with it. Had they gone down the Polkadot road, they probably would have been in market with it in 2018. And because they already had the network effect, they would have had years of building on that, iterating that. And they already had a path to it too. All they had to do was just give Elaine She and her cohorts at Cornell a $5, $10 million grant. Snow White would have been the dominant protocol, not Oreboris in the proof of stake space. So it's really fascinating historically when you look at these things and the rivalries and what they did and what they didn't do. Gavin had a chance to have C++ Ethereum be used as IBM's enterprise blockchain.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they have a better shot of it than anything in F2 or with currently Ethereum. Now, the big contrast between the two systems, though, is we actually have native multi-asset. We have a different accounting model. I think our base ledger is far more expressive. Our rate of evolution was proof of stake is much faster than theirs because they're based on derivative work, and we already have Oracle's omega and other things there. And I think we have a better ultimately a better sidechain model will come because we have something called Mithral for that. But we learned a lot from their work. The other thing is that we thought about governance a lot more carefully, in my view. And we have catalyst in Voltaire. And really the key there is saying, how do we make sure that every single person who holds data can participate in the network? That wasn't a high design priority of Polkadot. It was more fast commercial adoption, the acquisition of customers. We'll come to governance later. And those were just different business philosophies. But it's nice to have...”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fulfidot was more of like, hey, let's go ahead and actually curate our ecosystem more carefully. And we're going to build it in a way where there's predictable or as predictable a cost as possible with the rollout of the infrastructure. And that's so important for a business. It's not necessarily important for an experiment or a startup where they're just trying to get populations quickly as possible. We'll figure out later. But if you're actually sitting here saying, I need to know what my expenses are three years, five years, ten years into the future, you need predictability there.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we already have this parachain thing, right? So now by just looking at that, I can kind of get an idea of how one way of doing it. And so that's just beautiful that we live in a space where that's there. It's open source. And if it's really good, you just say, okay, well, we'll just take that and adopt that. There's no shame, you know. The other side of it is that Polkadot really has focused a lot on commercial adoption, Silicon Valley adoption, and getting real use and utility. I say in a much more sustainable way than Ethereum is focused on.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better understand consensus actually does this. They actually did it with EOS, and they wrote this lovely report trashing EOS saying, hey, by the way, all those claims these guys made are just not true. But, you know, it's nice to do that. It's nice to use your competitor's technology or competing protocol technology because you learn a lot along the process. It's not all bad. There's always something there because they have different trade-offs and customers that potentially are more interesting. Like right now we're grocking how do we want to do the sidechain model of Cardano. Polkadot's actually a tremendously useful piece of infrastructure for that conversation because they copied part of our infrastructure. Gavin's a trained computer scientist. He got his PhD from York and he read our papers obviously and he realized that Ore Boris was a really good starting place for building proof of stake system. So Polkadot's consensus is very similar to ours. And so if you're saying, hey, how do you do a good sidechain model?”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do. We actually have a whole group of people that do business intelligence and comparative analysis, and we're getting to a point where we want to start eventually forking their code and running private versions of it and just playing around with things.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's like, I don't really think too much about it. I think the context of the question was more what is Cardano specific over Ethereum or Bitcoin or any of these other things? And yeah, okay, an existential lurking bug could happen. It's a lower probability for us than the other systems because we use formal methods and we use peer review inside the protocol design. So there's been more eyeballs and tools and techniques used to check things. And we actually have discovered a lot of weird wonky bugs before production and resolve those bugs. So it shows you the system works. It's a lot of fun.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have something like that, seep its way in, leak its way in, and that lurks in the distance. But you know, if that's a problem shared with every one of your neighbors. It's like everybody working at a nuclear power plant. Well, yeah, you can all dive radiation poisoning. Well, we all kind of knew that, didn't we?”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's always a possibility bugs can exist, there can be flaws in the protocol design. Zcash was a great example of that where there was a subtle flaw and it damaged the fidelity of the cryptocurrency in ways no other cryptocurrencies ever experienced. Normally when you have a bug, the bug you can see like the Bitcoin overflow, the value overflow incident. Yes, Bitcoin can be created, but we can verify they weren't. So the monetary policy is preserved. When you have a bug with a private system like Zcash and it exists on the shielded side, there's no guarantee unless you can audit the total supply inside that shielded side. My understanding is you can't that somebody didn't exploit the bug and create trillions of these coins out of thin air and just hiding them on that system and dripping them out. And so the monetary policies for every damage as a consequence of a bug like that, it's probably the worst type of bug you can have for these types of products. So, you know, no matter how good of a job you do, they have great scientists. There are great people there, great engineers there.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see, so that's a problem. There are, of course, other things that could fail. Like, you know, we could lose project cohesion. Lots of people could quit and die. But again, there's so much momentum. There's so many things here. The ideas are already out there. And there's no intellectual property. You know, when you publish 100 papers, you read a million lines of code. That's something and it's permanent. And it's in the commons now. So it's just as much yours as it is mine. So there's no notion that somehow, you know, if the core development company disappeared, then that concept is lost forever like the library of Alexandria burning to the ground. It's there and someone else will take it, fork it, and get it done.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The dollars. We're so proud of you. Amazing work. Congratulations and so forth. And that's probably the most disheartening thing about the whole being around and doing this stuff where all the things you do only matter as long as it's making someone else rich. And in a way, I feel almost like a failure, because that mindset means that we haven't yet inculcated the community in a proper way saying, hey guys, this is about more than money. It's about more than the value of ADA. What we're attempting to do here is re-engineer the way society works. I'd like your voting to be different. I'd like your property to be different. I'd like you on your cell phone to have a universal wallet. And when you go to Starbucks or wherever, you can buy your coffee with silver or gold or airline miles or something like that. And they get paid whenever the hell they want to get paid. And I want those rails to be done with a system that puts you in charge, not someone else. And they say, yeah, that's all fine and great as long as Aida's $5. We're all happy.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To scarred ideas that are proven to be wrong, if we become dogmatic and embrace an orthodoxy that is counterproductive to innovation, then it'll stall out the ecosystem. And you'll notice I never said price in any of this. I never said, hey, failure is if the price goes way down and success is if the price goes way up. That's unfortunately the metric that most people use, but I couldn't care less about it because the reality is if you construct a system that encompasses the entire globe and has billions of users, it's probably going to be a pretty valuable system. That's a secondary thing. It's an after effect of having success and adoption use and utility. Unfortunately, most people have reddit and Twitter and other channels, they tend to just judge your entire success based on that. I had very few people when Shelley launched, even though it took us four years to get there and a lot of work, say congratulations on Shelly. But I had a lot of people when Ada reached.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is unbelievable in the Cardano community. I think we're number one for tattoos. And if you think about that, it's a strange metric to have, but there are brands that associate that way, like Apple and Harley Davison and so forth. People tend to actually tattoo the logo. Those people don't leave. They don't actually walk away from the ecosystem. They're fanboys to the core. So there's a lot of people that are here for life. They don't care if it's Dollar Ada, two cent ADA. They believe in the mission vision and value of what we wish to achieve. And they've become evangelists in that respect. So the question is, does that community sustain itself? And also, does that community not make the same sense and mistake of Bitcoin, where they become toxic and maximalistic and they start becoming highly religious about whatever beliefs they have? My hope is our community will be open and Socratic and love the scientific method and be willing to entertain ideas without adopting them.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A small group of actors have total control over who gets to use the system and how they get to use the system. And your use of the system is monitored and shared with that small group of actors. So social credit in China is a great example of that. A small group of people have access to that and then your experience in Chinese society is determined by it. So that's an example of a failure mode. And then other could be just network effect. We start experiencing a churn rate and the inputs don't match the outputs in that you lose more than you gain. And then over time, the system dies off. However, that's really hard in practice. Once you reach a certain network effect, even if you become stable.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next step, the smart contract step, will achieve what we want. And the next step, the governance step will achieve what we want. I mean, it's an experiment in all these types of things. All cryptocurrencies, all companies are, in a sense, experiments when they are evolving the business model. And as our case, our business is systems and society. We're offering to the world a vision of how to run humanity in a different way. And the only way the system can do that is by millions of people joining the system, self-evolving the system, and growing it in that particular direction. Another failure scenario would be the system evolves in the wrong direction. So it's self-evolving, but it goes into a more centralized dystopian way. And that's problematic as well.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source