"Why We Need Crypto And Blockchain More Than Ever" - Charles Hoskinson

The core of our technology, whether you're a Bitcoin fan or Ethereum fan or Cardano fan, doesn't matter, is this idea of equality, of fairness, of reciprocity. Each and every person is treated equally. Each and every person has the same access to the system as the most powerful amongst us. And it's something that's often forgotten. As we see the third generation cryptocurrencies become more powerful, more prevalent, more pervasive, we have to start making some uncomfortable and difficult philosophical decisions about how our technology works. When you move beyond the comfort of Bitcoin, the homogeneity of it, proof of work, to other systems, you start entertaining the idea that not everybody's going to have a copy of the blockchain. You start entertaining the idea that maybe there are some special nodes, special actors in the system. And then when you do that, at what point have you crossed a threshold where you're no longer decentralized, you're no longer a cryptocurrency, you're no longer the arbitrator of trust, and each and every person is guaranteed equal access? It's dawned on me, being in this space now for eight years, that we don't have good definitions for basic things. How many people here can truly define what is decentralization? What is decentralized? Is it Bitcoin? Is it Ethereum? Is Linux decentralized? What does it mean? We talk about performance. How many people here could really have a great conversation about what does it mean to have high performance? What is transactions per second, especially when you have different accounting models and scripting languages and all these nuances? Those are just two fundamental things: throughput and decentralization. Not even mentioning the notion of inclusive accountability, this idea that you can check each other's work. In the very beginning, Bitcoin had that built in, a utopia where when someone sends you a transaction, you and you alone are all that is needed to be able to verify that, make sure it's not double spent, make sure the tokens exist, these types of things. Now we're 13 years in, and it's speeding up. And we're actually trying to get this technology to work not for a few but for the many, the millions, the billions. Which means every day there's going to be billions of transactions. Every day difficult problems are going to have to be grokked, like your identity, your privacy. Governments are regulating cryptocurrencies. We've spent some time down in El Salvador. We saw Bukele introduce Bitcoin to the nation-state world. We've seen all kinds of governments take positions in Bitcoin amongst other cryptocurrencies. And they're saying, how do we regulate these things? At what point can we reverse a transaction? I thought we could never do that. Maybe we can. At what point can we freeze your funds, de-anonymize things? Are we allowed to do that? Yes, no, maybe. Where do you stand? Where are your principles in this? It gets a little milky, especially when you talk about the difficulty of governing a world. Our industry is in the awkward teens now. We started with idealism. We started with a belief that we could reinvent everything, just like those who came before us not too long ago in the 1970s, that people were writing things like the Whole Earth Catalog, talking about how information networks, once propagated, will allow information to flow anywhere in the world instantaneously. And then comes the 80s and 90s, and then the internet delivered these promises to every consumer. And then we had to start making difficult decisions about how do we manage this internet, how do we get consumerization and commercialization. Web 2 came. And what did Web 2 give us? Facebook, Google, Amazon. These Goliath organizations that seem to know more about us than spy agencies do, and have more collective power over the flow of data and your access to web services than the ITU does, the world order does. And now we're looking at the same set of problems revisited with blockchain. It's here to stay. It's a multi-trillion dollar industry. You're here. You paid for a ticket. You're interested in this space. Maybe you're here for NFTs in the metaverse. Maybe you're here for DeFi. Maybe you're here from Zanzibar trying to give people internet access. Doesn't matter where you came from, why you came. You're here. And the problem is, unlike Web 2 and Web 1, there's no leader, there's no canonical company, there's no cabal of people who make these decisions for you. If we're truly decentralized, if we're truly an open ecosystem, we collectively have to somehow come together and figure this out for ourselves. We have to write some sort of constitution for these things. We have to decide what is the Bill of Rights for the use of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. If you're here just to make money, this technology doesn't matter, means nothing, and you'll lose all the things that make it special in the attempt to chase it. Because why not? It's hard. Integrity is hard. Decentralization is hard. It's expensive. The protocol complexity is extreme. So many things can go wrong. It's frustrating to have to reach consensus, sit in a room with seven people, six of which you don't like, and the majority have to make a decision. You tell me, is that a fun evening? You're really going to enjoy the dinner conversation? No. And that is the reality on a scale of millions to billions. That's truly what's on the label for cryptocurrencies. So having been in this space for almost a decade now and watching it evolve and grow from Bitcoin being at a dollar all the way up over $64,000, watching it grow from just a few people you couldn't even feed them with two pizzas, maybe three, to having camel herders in Mongolia possess Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, watching nation-states embrace it, we are entering a new era. The reality is the protocols are getting good enough to really service the needs of millions to billions. On the horizon we have high performance proof of stake, recursive SNARKs, beautiful bridges with layer 2 protocols. The tech is there or it's getting there. And the next 24 to 36 months, many of these protocols are turning on, and they're already starting to service the mainstream. When you look at some of the largest companies like Coinbase and others, they have tens of millions of customers. A few more years and we'll talk hundreds of millions, if not billions. So we have arrived at a point where we have the attention of the world. Just like in the 90s, the internet arrived at a point where it too had the attention of the world. And we must, as an industry, decide whether we wish to learn from the past or if we wish to just allow it to happen again. There are two paths before us. One: we keep our integrity, and we look to decentralization, we try to define these things, understand these things. Or two: we ignore it, in which case the winners of the conflict of the next five to ten years, they'll have custodians, they'll have escrow keys, highly centralized, highly optimized consensus algorithms that could be reset at any time. The few will be in control of the many. This is the decision. And I don't make that decision. That's why I speak about this often when I come into these rooms. All of you do. That's the true magic of this industry and what makes it so special. All of its growth, its value, its power, its applications, these things came from the people in this room and rooms exactly like it. You are the builders, and thus you are the deciders. What you choose to build on, how you choose to build, how you choose the partner, the things you value, are ultimately going to decide the character of...