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

“So I'm not doing the topic justice. There's a lot more to it, but that's the basic concept. And in a Redeemer validator model, you need stuff like that because as your model gets more complex and a lot more things happen, you don't want to have a situation where I have to run, replay a huge amount of the UTXO graph to be able to get to a point where I have the state of the system. You need some mathematical artifact that gives you the state of the system quickly. And then you say, okay, I now know how to, what computation thread I need to run to be able to get enough to be able to redeem this transaction. So he just found a more compressed representation of it. And the math doesn't matter. What matters is there's a whole beautiful field that thinks about this type of stuff. And it was never once linked before into our industry.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's just a way of expressing scripts. And basically, you get these concise representations of proofs. And then you can say, okay, the script is correct, but you don't have to run the whole program.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A consensus protocol, like proof of work to another proof of work and so forth. So we loved having that kind of IP sitting around because it gave us the ability to kind of play around with ideas in a matter of weeks instead of months or years. And then he just took that concept and he gave it away. The wave protocol was built on it. That was Sasha Ivanov. He did that. And I think there's two or three other cryptocurrencies that were launched from Scorax. Alex took that and built Ergo from it. So there was a nice intersection where there was overlapping technology with ergo, with our technology. And the other thing was that the community was so open and friendly. It was just a no-brainer. Just go in and start building some things there. Now, in terms of evolving ideas, the whole Sigma protocol idea is very different and it's very interesting. And there's a guy at a Boston University. His name will come to me in a second who came up with this stuff. And I think there's some merit there, especially as we start moving closer to the...”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we said, Hey, we're coming here to work and build. Oh, yeah, we love working with you guys. This is so cool. The other thing is Alex used to work for us and he had this lovely project called Scorax. And it was all about like a pedagogical framework for building blockchains. And if you want to do prototyping or academic research, it was great. It was super modular and it separated the consensus network and transaction layer from each other in just the right way so that you can make it modular and mix and max things. So you can put secure Cadimia in or maybe a different network layer and a different”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Apple is moving away from the PowerPC to Intel, and Microsoft was moving towards the PowerPC. Just this weird intersection of history. So at that time, the largest order of Mac computers made was done by Microsoft. And they were using it for Xbox stuff. So Ergo, we've used the same way. So we said, well, we have this extended UTXO model. The only thing that's sufficiently close to it where we can beta test contracts is actually with Ergo. And Alex just was a little faster in getting certain things out because we were doing things in a slightly more rigorous way and slightly more expressive way. So we actually tested a stablecoin, an Oracle, and other things on Ergo. And it has just incredible community.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, anything's possible, and there's a lot of evolution Ergo has to go through, and Ergo was kind of like when the Xbox 360 first came out, while they were prototyping at Microsoft needed a development environment, they ironically purchased a lot of Apple computers to do that.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and everything about Alex is always like, How do I solve this? How do I do that? And he gets legitimately excited when he meets somebody that he can collaborate with. Or learn from. That's where Bitcoin was in the beginning. Everybody set their egos aside, whether it was Hal Finney or whatever, and they would just say, how can I help? What can I do? And it was all about coming up with some cool new thing or solving some cool new problem. I don't see any of that in Bitcoin today.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the proof of works side, Satoshi had this one CPU, one vote idea. So Alex tried to create non-alsociable puzzles to make it impossible to have mining pools. And there's all these other beautiful little things. And he's this brilliant Russian programmer. And he surrounded himself with all these other brilliant people. He has zero ego. He has negative ego. When you put him with a person with ego, your ego goes down. Yeah.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then what happened? Over the whole big block debate that happened. They just treated him like dirt, like he was subhuman or something. So I don't know. The culture has changed a lot. And if they like it, it's good for them. They can enjoy their religion. But it's not for me. And where I like being is I had a guy who used to work for me, Alex Chirpinoi, and he created this beautiful project called Ergo. To me, that is the spiritual successor to Bitcoin. Ergo is really special because it has the same culture, it has the same mentality, and the technology is kind of like a natural evolution of what you would do if you knew about Bitcoin and you wanted to build the next big thing. So it's still a proof of work system. It's still a UTXO system, but he added UTXO with some smart contracts. It's this Sigma protocol idea.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made. And the whole point of Bitcoin was to redefine the notion of money, redefine the notion of value, you know, these types of things. So it just, I'm no longer part of that. And it made me sad because I really enjoyed being part of how I got started was a Bitcoin education project. I did a class on Udemy. I gave it away for free. I had 80,000 students and they would email me. I got 5,000 emails before I stopped answering them. And everyone come in and ask me some question about something, sometimes arcane, sometimes trivial. And I take the time to sit down and answer the question or forward the email to somebody I knew who could answer that particular type of question. And there were some amazing people in the early days like Mike Hearn and Gavin and others. And they were just super committed. And Mike's Casey knew Satoshi actually emailed him back and forth because he was around 2009, 2010. He did the Bitcoin Java client. And Satoshi was all excited. He said, oh, wow, Bitcoin can come to a cell phone. This is really cool and exciting.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm in Mongolia riding camels, and the camel herder has Bitcoin, and the movie desert. So that's telling you that's a pretty pervasive technology if you have that level of adoption that quickly. When I went to Miami, it was unrecognizable. You know, everything was so commercial. Half of the vendors at the conference were like watches that cost half a million dollars and they were covered in diamonds. So when you see that kind of materialism leak its way in, its first is repulsive. The other thing was there was no, like I remember one of the first conferences, Mo Levin's conference in February 2014, the North American Bitcoin conference ironically in Miami. There was a Bitcoin help center booth. Dima ran it and a few of the other Bitcoin OGs ran it. The core developers actually came over like Jeff and others who were there and sat at the booth. And anybody come up, ask a question. Anything you want to ask about Bitcoin? That was the culture, just help people welcome in. There was no help booth there. There was no notion of that. There were six hour lines and superstars and things like that. And again, again, it was always the same thing. Look how much money all these people have made.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Makes me sad is I remember the old Bitcoin community and I've seen what it's become. And the old community was really fun, like the San Jose Conference in 2013 or subsequent conferences. You know, there was just a lot of people they had no money and they just really loved this idea of decentralized money. They loved this idea of decentralization in particular. And you could struck up a conversation with everyone. There's no ego at all. But what was really fun is you could really get intimate friendships and relationship, great conversations with people there. It's kind of like the early days of AI, you know, they all meant in Dartmouth and all these other places. Very intimate. There was no egos. Everybody was just trying to do some really cool stuff. Now, just like those early days, there was an overestimate of how robust the solutions would be. So we believed, oh, yeah, 10 years we're going to rule the whole world, right? Didn't exactly happen. On the other hand, Bitcoin grew from nothing in just 11 years to...”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the price. That's what they do, and that's the only thing they pay attention. That's why this is the most attended Bitcoin conference in history. Not because somehow Bitcoin got so much more adoption. It's because this is the highest price point Bitcoin has ever been this year, you know, over 30,000”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great, but then you have to have some focus and commitment as an ecosystem. And the excuse they use is, well, no, we don't because we're decentralized. And because we're decentralized, we don't need that as if there's some sort of guiding swarm intelligence that will naturally push the system in that particular direction. But then you ask, well, how do people measure the success of Bitcoin? Is it the fact that they've actually achieved lots of transactions and lots of actual economic activity and lots of businesses accepting Bitcoin? That will go up.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the frustration that I have is like if you really are serious about this whole lightning and gold economy thing, I love choice. I'm a libertarian by nature. I love competition. And, you know, I read all those books. I read Louis von Mises' work and Murray Rothbard's work. I love what Hayek had to say about private currencies. Let's go try it.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go back to the gold reserve, and we tried that for a long time. It didn't really work in a modern global economy. We had the Bretton Woods Agreement, all these other things. And so I understand what you're saying. Maybe there's some merit to that, but if that was really in earnest where they want to go, then the conversation should be about, well, how do we make it easy for layer two protocols to interact with Bitcoin? So why is simplicity not built into it? Why is it taking so long to do SNORCIGs? Why is it taking so long to do all these obvious upgrades which are cryptographically low danger? Also NEPA POWs. An interactive proofs of proof of work. There's no cost to doing that. It's just a property of proof of work where certain puzzles are more special than other puzzles and by noticing that you can create these beautiful proofs that allow you to have sidechains and light clients. It's not compromising security of the system. It's just something you get for free with proof of work. Those came out in 2016. There's derivative work fly client floating around. Where the hell is it?”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And have we ever built a successful banking credit system off of gold? Never. It never works because there's too much volatility in the underlying asset. Would you take a gold denominated loan for something? If somebody says, all right, I'll give you five bars of gold to go buy this car and pay me back five and a half bars of gold. Nobody would know in five years where they come out in that kind of arrangement.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something. Okay, let's do that then. And just say that's all it does. Then why are we doing lightning? Why are we doing any of these other things? You don't really need with a commodity, a digital commodity, high throughput. You can have slow settlement. You can have high transaction fees, all these types of things. And, you know, that's fine. Okay. That's something. Pick”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The philosophy there's no direction. And they say, But don't worry, just buy and hold and everything will sort its way out.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, second, where is the conversation about how do we achieve something? I started with Cardano the End in Mind. I said, we really want to sit down and build this financial operating system. And the definition of success is the poorest person in the world has access the same system as the richest person in the world, and they both get treated fairly. We've never had that happen before. Okay, that's something. You can agree with it, disagree with it, say it's boiling the ocean, it's impossible. At least I have something. I can't for the life of me understand what the hell is the point of Bitcoin. When I joined the Bitcoin space way back in the day, it was, hey, we hate the dollar and hey, we like gold a lot. Let's create digital gold. Let's build a payment system. And then it just kind of went all these different directions and nobody can actually tell you what Bitcoin is for. It's a store of value, okay? You know, there's some proof of work thing where maybe you're like incentivizing alternative energy to be produced. I don't know. Nobody really.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's none. What is the incentive for the system to get more competitive? It's not. In fact, it's the opposite. They've turned it into a religion. I was in Miami at this Bitcoin conference. I had a toilet paper roll thrown at me that had shitcoin written on it. You have Max Kaiser out on the stage doing his best Rick James impression.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the trajectory of things, if I had to bet just those two systems, Bitcoin or Ethereum, I would say nine times out of ten Ethereum is going to win the fight against Bitcoin if it was the only competitor. But obviously we're here and a lot of other people are here, so there's different things going on. So it's a much more complex game. But I think that's always a key, you know, zooming out a little bit. Set the technology aside and the word salad of cryptography aside because it's too much. What you have to always do is say, what incentive does the system have to evolve? And when you look at things like Android and the App Store and these analogous platforms, you say, ah, the evolution is user-driven and there's a financial incentive for the user to participate. So if I had to look at the trajectory of this thing, come back 10 years later, it's probably going to have millions of applications and lots of stuff going on because that's the way the system was constructed. Okay, makes sense. When you look at Bitcoin, you say, what is the incentive to evolve the system?”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out in those circles. He was trying to innovate and do things in Bitcoin, and it was so hard and difficult that he started diverging and going and doing things in a different system entirely. You know, I knew the Mastercoin guys, JR, and all these people. They were maximalists. They really wanted to build something cool and exciting for Bitcoin. And anything they did, the developers would attack them. They say, oh, you're misusing Op Return. You're doing this, that. It was a holy war anytime you wanted to evolve. So I think it's its own worst enemy. It has the network effect. It has the brand name. It has the regulatory approval. But there's no way to change the system, even correcting obvious downsides in that system. Now, what's really cool is Ethereum doesn't suffer from that problem. It's getting to a point where it has a similar network effect to Bitcoin, but the community there is completely different in culture. They love evolving. They love upgrading. Sometimes a little too much. And so that means that if you look...”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the protocol level, that would actually make it incredibly competitive system. Like if they wanted to keep Nakamoto consensus, proof of work, there's ways to enhance proof of work. I mean, conseer did this with Bitcoin NG promotive Esmanas did this with PRISM. Make it 10,000 times faster and you don't compromise the fundamental security assumptions that the system has. You can add programmability to it. Blockstream created a language called simplicity. So there's actual ways to extend, and we did this with Cardano with the extended UTXO model. There's ways to extend what Bitcoin has, keep the philosophy, the accounting, the way of thinking about transactions, but then suddenly you can now do DeFi and other things. But what they've done is said, we will not evolve the base layer at all, and we're just going to build all this layer two stuff, which is usually highly fragile and centralized and requires enormous effort at the base level to do anything. It's not a coincidence Vitalik started as a color coins guy and a master coin guy hanging.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know, I know. So, you know, I'll do respect to the Bitcoin people. It's like an amazing, incredible first generation thing. And it really, we're all here because of Bitcoin. But the problem is you have to upgrade the damn thing. Just because you were a high school football star doesn't mean that 30 years later you're still a high school football star in the same shape. You got the beer belly, you're old. You're not doing this thing again. And that's what Bitcoin has to do. There's fundamental improvements that I think Bitcoin can make.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the problem with Bitcoin is it is so slow. It's like the mainframe programming of the past and the only reason it's still around is because there was so much invested in keeping it around that we just kind of have to leave it there and one day COBOL will die. There's nothing about it from a collection of USPs that's particularly desirable. You have extremely long settlement time. You have extremely low programmability. It is not aware of any other system. There's no native way of issuing an asset in that system. You can't even do a pull transaction. You can't do anything that's interesting or unique there. And yeah, all due respect. Mafia, all due respect. Yeah. You got some problems”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we have no idea which one's actually going to win, but we learn from each other and we co-evolve from each other. So you're running all these experiments in real time in a giant marketplace and maybe they'll consolidate, maybe they'll stay divergent. I mean, look at big tech. You have Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook. They all coexist in their trillion dollar companies. Some cases with TCP consolidates to one standard. That's what we end up using.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“evolve bitcoin to a point where it could become a third generation system if desired as some amalgamation of layer one and layer two protocols and it's the same for ethereum in fact Throwing away Ethereum and replacing it with Ethereum too, because he recognizes he needs to upgrade and evolve the system. And that's what makes it fun because the techniques and methodologies that they've chosen to evolve and upgrade this system are distinctly different from the ones that we've chosen.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, what these technological capabilities gave you was the ability to demonstrate a proof of concept and say these things are possible, kind of like Xerox Park, when Steve and Bill came in, they said, wow, you have networked computers object-oriented programming, and a GUI. And this is like, what was it 70s? It's like, wow, it's like incredible. But none of that was an actual product. That wasn't a Macintosh. But it was enough to get the idea. And then it was a race to how do we productize something like that. And in that case, it actually took several decades to roll out that vision that those guys had. And I think that's what Bitcoin and Ethereum did. But what's unique about this is normally you throw away the prior experiments. With these things, these are self-evolving systems. So it's entirely possible to, Joe Rogan quote,”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we're just in a unique period of history where there's a network effect around some initial infrastructure, and people tend to be building around that. But every single one of the top DeFi providers, if they're getting successful into a certain network effect, they're having the multi-chain conversation. So I don't really believe in a winner-takes-all maximalist view of, well, there's going to be some protocol that becomes the God protocol, first because they evolve too quickly. Second, the incentives aren't aligned for that. TCPIP didn't have a token connected to it. There was no financial incentive where if TCPIP got adopted over something else, they'd make some big company crazy amounts of money. It was a useful piece of infrastructure. So I think that the third generation is going to be as defined by the social components and the usability components as it is by the technological capabilities of the system.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem is your tail is wagging the dog there. You have a situation where you're so focused on the technology that you're failing to understand that there's still Daisy here. You still have the user And where's the app store? Where's the one click install? Where's the use in utility? You know, all these layer two protocols and these DeFi applications in five years they're completely protocol and blockchain agnostics. Because at the end of the day, they care about liquidity, operating cost, and user experience. It's so preposterous and absurd for somebody to say, oh, well, I'm going to go build my application, get on the Apple store, and I am going to use Amazon as my web host. And no matter what happens, I will always use Amazon, even if the operating cost is crazy.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those just right set of evolutionary factors that when you click the domino, it just self evolves into what you need it to get to.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they don't get along. And so that's what we termed a third generation cryptocurrency. And there's a lot of people attempting to compete in that space. There's Tezos and Algrand and ICP and Polkadot and so forth. And each and every one of them kind of brings a different blend of things that they value. So it's not completely equal between scalability, interoperability, and sustainability. Some people were very focused on high throughput, lots of transactions per spec. Other people very focused on governance like Tezos is like the governance chain. And they were one of the first to do a self-amending ledger. And other people are like Aon or Polkadot. They're really thinking carefully about how do we build a nice interoperable ecosystem. With Cardano, we tried to actually tackle all three at the same time, which is one of the reasons why we were a little slower out of the gate. We had to write a lot more protocols, but we think we'd kind of come up with a beautiful interlocking design for all of them. And again, the point is not to get it perfect, but rather get”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now look at the internet. It's like, who's in charge of that? It's this gargantuan network and there's no group of people you can bring in. And thus, the internet evolves very slowly. You see, and so that's the problem is that you have this situation where you want to do lots of utility. You want to do a lot of things. You want to be a financial operating system and be everything to everyone. But then your rate of evolution slows down as your rate of adoption speeds up. So that's one of the other design goals of the third generation. It's not good enough just to do things better, faster, cheaper, and have consistent cost with your population growing or talk to everything, your Wi-Fi moment. You also need a system that can govern itself at a scale of millions to billions of people who have divergent interests. In some cases, ice pick an eye divergent interest. They really hate each other.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you're small, you have founders and foundations and you have trusted actors and core developers and you can feed them with pizzas. You know them. You can meet them. You can shake their hands at conferences. When you're a multi-billion person system, you're too large to be able to do that. For example, we had the Shelley Summit last year. We invited Vince Serf to come to the summit. Vit's a brilliant guy and he had created the internet with Bob and the rest of the gang. And, you know, back in those days, it was such a simple, small system. That one of their students said, Hey, you need to test it. He created a video game just to kind of test the thing. You could call the guy on the other side and say, are you seeing this? Are you getting the signal? They used to have an actual address book for email addresses.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, there were plenty of active exodus and flashes. NXT was an example of a fail to start, and BitShares was another example. There were a lot of people who tried to add some notion of programmability and a different view of how these things should be done. And they were not as competitive. Ethereum kind of came out as that JavaScript moment. Okay, the minute you have that, then suddenly you have ICOs and DeFi and STOs and NFTs and all these word salads of things. And then people start using to get frustrated. Why? Because it's too slow. It's too expensive. It doesn't talk to the things they wanted to talk to. And also, it gets too big to manage itself.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Similarly, you say, okay, I want programmability with this thing. It's kind of like when JavaScript came to the web browser. You went from these static, perhaps pretty, but ultimately static non-interactive pages to YouTube and Google and Facebook and these amazing, rich, incredible experiences because now you can actually interact with the user, you can program things, stuff runs on their side, stuff runs on your side. It's a beautiful two-way relationship. So that's what Ethereum effectively did. They bolted a programming language onto a blockchain and they went from a certain use case to whatever your imagination can have, you know, like sunshine and rainbows and unicorns and these types of things. So you're saying Bitcoin.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Valuable. And I'd say the inflection point was 2013. And at that point, it became a billion dollar market cap. There were like Silicon Valley startups, real exchanges were forming. And it got to a point where there was legitimacy behind the concept. And people started getting, this is a really incredible idea. Moved $10 billion of something from one country to another country in five minutes. It's like, I could never do that before. And, you know, this is incredible. Okay. The problem is the minute that people validate the idea, they immediately want something they don't have. So the minute Elon can land a rocket, you know, there's the next big thing, right? You've landed the Falcon 9, now you're on the Starship.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So what I did in that video, and I've done in a lot of media interviews, because I think it really helps people understand where we're at in the clock, is face things in terms of generations. And so I said, well, first generation is Bitcoin. And really the problem Bitcoin was trying to solve is saying every time we want to represent or move value, we need some sort of trusted third party to facilitate that. So can we build some sort of system where we can create some notion of value that can be teleported around the world and it doesn't require a trusted third party? That's it. And it's done in a beautiful way because it didn't try to be anything else. It just was, you only have Bitcoin, you can only do one type of thing. You can only push it. You can do some things on the encumbrances of like multi-sig and other things. But that's a one-trick pony as a system. And it wasn't really clear if that was going to work or not for a long time. It took several years to build up enough network effect and for Bitcoins to actually become”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's really the, I would like to say the resident detre of our space, the reason we exist is to try to figure out a way to kill the middleman and try to figure out a way that we can better quantify value and transform it, move it, manipulate it. And in many ways, we've actually discovered some amazing things in the last 10 years as an industry. We've kind of created the financial stem cell. This idea of a token can now just as well be a national currency as a CBDC as it can represent a crypto kitty. The same architecture can do stuff at the nation scale, can do stuff for a 12-year-old kid in Texas. It's pretty amazing to see that.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you want to be able to store it, transform it, trade it, and use it to survive. And the question is what rails do you do that on? Do you do those on centralized, controlled rails where there are these third parties that are basically able to live off those things become very fat and nepotistic? Or do you want to do it on rails where there's no middleman? You have a direct relationship with whoever you're doing business. And if you invite more people into the transaction, they're middlemen of value, not necessity.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because that's how people care. You need resources to survive. And finances is kind of like this field of managing your resources in an intelligent way. You could call it SoFi too, social finance, you know. The nomenclature hasn't exactly been settled for our industry, and that's fun. But basically the concept is that you have something.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they're both trying to do the exact same thing. And it's going to be this clash of cultures at some point between the open FOSS and the top-down authoritarian FOSS. Probably some Hegelian dialectic action would happen. We'll create”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People want things better, faster, cheaper. People want to have economic agency, especially when they lack it. Nobody wants to grow up in a world where they're unbanked and they have no access to marketplaces. They're going to seek it. Look at MPESA. It's the great example of that, like cell phone minutes. They're using as a currency. So that's where we're at. And I say a few more years, I think we'll have that right minimum viable set of dynamics inside the system. And then it's inevitable, in my view, that it'll kind of grow and consume and become this concept. And what's really cool is there's competition in the systems and concepts. So China is trying to do the same thing. They're saying, how do we de-dollarize the world and create a digital yuan? So they have a very top-down notion of how to apply this technology and bring it in. And they even have an identity system they're building in parallel called social credit. We have an identity system, a talaprism that we're putting in. Ours is bottom up and you own your own identity. Social credit, you have no idea. You just have a number and some computers giving it to you.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting a loan or payments and so forth. And if they have pain points, what they're going to do is evolve that system to be able to mitigate, manage those particular pain points to a point where the system is competitive for it. So, my job is to be, we have this tagline on our company cascading disruption. My job is to be the first domino. Just kind of knock it over and watch the cascade. And it kind of blows and blows and blows out until eventually it gets to where we need to go. And what I was trying to think about with Cardano was how do you build the minimum viable set of tools and social processes that once we push the domino, the system will just evolve to a point where eventually it can grow to fill that need, not out of charity, but out of self-interest.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have more than 30 different contributors for the 105 papers, and that set keeps growing within the next five years. It'll probably be two, three, four hundred different scientists from all across the world, some from Russia and some from India, some from China and some from Japan and America and Africa and South America. And the faces change, the languages change, the cultures change, but the process stays the same. And that is a permanent organ within what we have constructed as a system. It's the same situation entering marketplaces like we entered Ethiopia. What are we doing there? We have 5 million people in Ethiopia. We're getting them digital identity, and we're dragging that digital identity into the system because that's the most fundamental thing of a financial operating system. You need to know who people are in order to be able to do business with them. Give them credit, be able to give them economic agency instead of thing. But once they're there, they're going to grow up with that system. They're going to deploy applications on that system. They're going to build on that system. They're going to use it every day for...”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like billions of people. And we've done that, but we've done that with large multinational trillion dollar companies with centralized infrastructure. We've never really done that with one master protocol that somehow does it for everyone. The closest approximation is probably BitTorrent. And there is, you know, there was, it's a cool protocol, but it doesn't have all the oomph necessary to do something like this. So Cardano is just our first approximation. And like any good system, we wanted it to be self-evolving. So once you get to philosophy out of where's the target of what do you want to do, then you build a community. Now it's over a million people strong. And that community keeps growing and they keep pushing the system in that particular direction. And what's nice about it is if you build the right philosophy within the system, it doesn't need founders. This is the Grey Legend of Satoshi. It doesn't need founders to be able to get there. So, you know, if you look at the academic side, that's very decentralized.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“System okay, and you know, if you played Nomic in the 1980s or Peter Super fan or any of these things, you can build a self-evolving system. You can actually create a game where the rules can be voted on and changed in the game itself. Great. Okay, so that exists there. And then you say So, there's this interoperability thing. You need a Wi Fi or a Bluetooth moment for the industry because nothing understands each other right now. There are all these chains are... Blind, deaf and dumb to each other. And then there's this thing that has to work at a huge scale.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has the same axis that I do, or Pill Gates does, or someone else who's kind of higher on the spectrum of wealth and power. And so that is what we seek to achieve. But then the question is, well, is Cardano the solution? Is that thing? And the answer is no, because you need a lot more evolution. You need decades of evolution to kind of work your way there. And in many ways, the work is never quite done, but it's better than what came before. Why? Because you have a realization that first the control of the system needs to be more balanced and nuanced. And it needs to be more democratic. So there's this sustainability component of who's in charge and how do you pay for things? Well, the system can print its own money, so it always has the ability to have a budget. Okay, so there's a Treasury idea. And then there's a voting thing. Well, the same things that allow you to move money around allow you to represent votes. So you can do e-voting with the type of.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I always term Cardano as like a FOSS, a financial operating system, and nobody likes it and everybody picks on me for using that term. But basically the idea is that, you know, the world runs on systems, especially the financial world. The BIS and SWIFT and all this other stuff. And these protocols allow you to move value around and represent things like identity and allow you to express yourself in some way. And those protocols, for the most part, work well for people in rich countries. And they don't work so well for people who aren't in rich countries. And so the point of what we do, or at least what I do and what my company does is we think a lot about how do we build a universal protocol that does all the stuff the legacy system has, but just does it better faster and cheaper for everybody in the world. And everybody has equal access to it. So it's the people's protocol. You have a situation where the guy in Senegal.”
2021-06-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #192 – Charles Hoskinson: Cardano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source