The Clarity Act is the Worst Thing to Happen to Crypto | Charles Hoskinson

In the long term, I see $250,000 Bitcoin happening and million-dollar Bitcoin happening. It's an inevitability for these things to happen. No one from the Bitcoin space has ever been able to explain how the native Bitcoin layer one is going to give me a governance system, a voting system, a smart contract system at six transactions, seven transactions a second, and hour-long finality. You guys are worshipping Mike Saylor and the Dads. You're literally worshipping a structure where a third party aggregates a huge amount of Bitcoin, and people acquire it through a regulated exchange going through KYC and AML and owning a stock. They're all going to get stolen. It's like 60% of the supply is in for the dead Bitcoin because a lot of people lost their Bitcoin. All of that will be stolen, and it will be flooded into the market. But if some third party has all those interactions, somebody has all your dick pics. That's bad. You don't want that to happen. You want that to be under the control of the peer-to-peer network, not at a particular company or an individual. The whole point of DeFi is to not be a regulated institution. It lives on chain. It's decentralized. The minute I say this, XRP people show up. They're like, "Oh, Charles is bad. He's so bad. You know, why are you so anti-XRP?" This has nothing to do with XRP. Nothing.

It's so funny when people say, "Well, crypto's dead." It's over. You know, it never went down too much, are you? It's like just pack it up, boys. Let's go home. So, this gargantuan parallel economy we've built, all these other things, you're just going to throw it away. You're just going to ignore it. "Well, yeah, but the token price is down." Good lord. You've missed the entire purpose of our revolution, everything we're doing. It's like, yes, the token price goes up and down. The price of oil goes up and down. Okay? So, when oil goes to $38 a barrel, we should just say the internal combustion engine is a failure? Let's all just move on and go back to horses? That's what we're going to do? So, when the price of crypto goes down, let's go back to the legacy banking system? And ride our horses again? Come on, what the fuck is wrong with you people? Grow the fuck up. I think a lot of people that are in that camp, it's because they were banking on price appreciation to solve their current day struggles. And they didn't have the runway to weather the inevitable storm. Like when I started buying crypto, I was well aware that I think, yes, eventually this will work, but there will be a lot of time that has to pass where there will be good days and very bad days. I think a lot of people didn't fully grasp that. I think a lot of people also, especially last cycle, a lot of people were throwing around a lot of price predictions. And so, I think a lot of the retail people came in and thought those were like near guarantees. Right? And a lot of those things didn't happen. A lot of things beyond our control.

Sure. It's very straightforward. So, we operated on the model that the US government was going to fully embrace crypto, pass the Clarity Act, pass the Genius Act. We only got the Genius Act, and it was neutered. We didn't get the Clarity Act. And we also operated on a model that the government would work with the industry and actually would figure out a way to operate where it works for everybody. Instead of doing that, they just didn't do anything. And then we had 1010 happen. We had all these liquidity events get blown up in our face. We had overleverage, and there was absolutely no flow of the Bitcoin money into the altcoin space, which is why we didn't get an altcoin mania. You know, the other side of it is that the Terras were an unpredictable event, and they massively damaged the world economic order. And then we got an AI bubble. And we also have a precious metal bubble. So, a lot of the liquid money went into AI and to precious metals. Now I got $6,000 gold. And these other things. You know, there's only so much money in the world to flow around, and people stopped putting in crypto. They put it into other things. Now, in the long term, I see $250,000 Bitcoin happening and million-dollar Bitcoin happening. It's an inevitability for these things to happen. It's hard to pick an exact point because the micro is always unpredictable, but the macro isn't. Why? Because we're going to go from 550 million crypto users to a billion, then 2 billion, then 3 billion. And we're going to have $10 trillion of real-world assets enter the cryptocurrency space, whether America likes it or not. It's going to happen because people are greedy, and they want that to occur. And we're going to see generational gaps. So, new generations coming into crypto native and using crypto in new and different ways. And we're already seeing stablecoins taking over developing countries like Argentina and these other things. So, there's a functional inevitability because of the scarcity of the underlying products and the fact that companies are buying them, countries are buying them, and taking positions at central bank level for these things to occur. You know, we get the timing wrong sometimes. You know, it was a four-year cycle, the flow-to-stock model. We tend to follow that, and 2025 was the most likely candidate for that to occur. But you know what? Maybe we missed that window. It takes a few extra years for it to happen. But it's less about the price. The price is a measuring stick of the overall size, scope, and interest in the market. And it's more about what is it doing? Is there a government running on crypto? We almost got there in 2021 with El Salvador. We didn't. With Argentina, we have a good chance of getting there. So, there's going to start being small-to-mid-size countries that just turn over to crypto. We only need a few of them, and the whole world changes at that point. That's that standing ovation model or throwing the match on the ground. And I think things like the Epstein files really showcase the power of this. And here's why. If you had selective disclosure, there would be none of these redaction problems. Because somebody in the FBI or the DOJ would just simply release the files and then sign it to prove that they're from the FBI or DOJ, and they would still stay anonymous. So, they wouldn't get snowed in or any of these things. You see? So, that calls truth to power. So, how do you hide anything anymore in a complex bureaucracy if people can selectively disclose those corrupt things that are going on? You can't. And then everybody gets to see the truth, and they get to see the whole thing, and we get the answers why these things are there. You see? So, when you have governance systems where you can check here on vote, you have sound money, you have selective disclosure, you have anti-corruption built into its core, people notice that, and they start asking very basic questions. Why does Argentina have a better system than the United States of America? That doesn't make any sense to me. And they say, "Oh, well, reasons." It's like, "Nah, yeah, you need to go. And we're just going to go build that system." So, it may take 3 years. Maybe that takes 5 years. Who's going to compete? Honestly speaking, who's going to compete? It's like, what is the alternative? No, we really just love the satanic pedophiles and their brown-age gods. We just want to burn more kids to balls. I mean, it's like, yeah, and we just love banks that get so big that they... By the way, they also work for the cartels. And we just love these big financial institutions dominating it from cradle to grave. You're a content producer. Boy, you know, I just love platforms where if I say the wrong thing in an interview, that I get deplatformed, lose my entire livelihood, and I get disenfranchised from my million viewers. Boy, I just love that system. I just want more of that system. Please put it all over my face. It's good for my skin. It's like, come on, guys. There is no alternative. There's an inevitability of buying this system because you're basically saying, "Would you like filet mignon, or would you like me to shit on a plate and force you to eat the diarrhea?" You know, it's like, "What would you like?" I would like the steak, please. No, no, no. Consumers clearly prefer the shit on the plate. Clearly, you know. Our polling agencies we hired, they decided that that's what they want.

So, the thing is, I've been in Bitcoin since it was a dollar. And I've watched every generation change, and I've watched all the technology come and go. And I've been a participant in some of it. Like, there's no coincidence why we, the Ethereum guys, started with like color coins and master coins and these other things. We tried to make Bitcoin better. And what happened is Bitcoin made a philosophical decision that it wants to be digital gold, and it wants to be a big storage of value. It doesn't really want to be a payment system. It doesn't want to be a smart contract system. It doesn't want to be an NFT system. And sure, there's runes and ordinals and all these layer twos, but what you're basically saying is to use Bitcoin for these things, you have to leave Bitcoin and do it somewhere else. It's like, okay. So, let Bitcoin be Bitcoin. There's no reason Bitcoin can't be digital gold and reach a $10 trillion market cap like gold has or go beyond. There's no reason why it can't do that. But do you still then have to answer who's the digital oil? So, who's going to run the dApps, the DEXes? Who's going to issue the tokens? Who's going to run the intellectual property? Who's going to create privacy preserving primitives? Who's going to fight the quantum computers? There's a million other things. And it's kind of silly. It's like you're saying the only way for gold to be valuable is for the gold to live at the gold mine. The Bitcoin network is the gold mine. It mines the gold. Bitcoin is the gold. So, what do you do with gold? You take it out of the mine, you make jewelry out of it, you do stuff with it. So, Bitcoin can go to other networks and do all these things and then come back home. We call that Bitcoin DeFi. With Taproot, you have a security primitive where the Bitcoin network can basically be the root of security for those transactions. So, you can use Bitcoin in DeFi on Cardano today. You can use Bitcoin in DeFi on Ethereum, on Sui, and all these other networks. And they can do all the yield stuff and they can do all the real-world asset stuff and they can lend Bitcoin and all these things. And when you're done with it, you go back home. Go back to the mine. It's not a problem. So, I don't see this friction between the two. And no one from the Bitcoin space has ever been able to explain how the native Bitcoin layer one is going to give me a governance system, a voting system, a smart contract system at six transactions, seven transactions a second, and hour-long finality. And by the way, they're trying to remove, like BIP 110, I think, the ability to store data on the chain. So, they want to reduce utility inside the system instead of increase utility inside the system. No one can ever explain that to me. And they say, "But lightning!" "But side chains!" Haha. We heard about lightning in 2013. It's 2026. We heard about side chains in 2014. It's 2026. I'm sorry, if you tell me that you're going to take a poop, but you've been on the pot for 12 years, there's something wrong with your colon. It's just not going to happen. There's something going on there. If you're really going to do these things with these solutions, they would have done these things. The fact that they're not done at scale is an indication that they just don't want to do it that way. And that's okay. That's why the rest of the altcoin space exists. It's not productive anymore to say everything but Bitcoin's a shitcoin. All these people are evil. Their only purpose is to extract value and scam people. They're not the enemy. The enemy are the multinational banks. The enemy are the Mag 7. The enemy are the big governments that want to control and dominate us. Those are the enemy. Those are the people that are holding the entire human race back, who start wars, who rape kids. They do horrific things. And we see it every fucking day. I'm sorry, that's not happening in Ethereum land or Solana land or things. Yes, there's meme coins and pumps ups and pump downs and these types of things. Well, guess what? You guys are worshipping Mike Saylor and the Dads. You're literally worshipping a structure where a third party aggregates a huge amount of Bitcoin and people acquire it through a regulated exchange going through KYC AML and owning a stock. You're worshipping that. Okay, so don't tell me that you're not succumbing to these same vices that the altcoin space has. You just do it differently, okay? So, chill out. Calm down. We're all on the same team and we're all working together. And you know what? Some people are oil and some people are gold. You kind of need both to run an economy. We're not competing anymore. Let's work together and then working together, we can figure out how to build a new economy for a new people for a new time. A global world where everybody has to follow the same rules and yeah, corruption is nonexistent.

Okay, but then explain how. That's what I would love for you to... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like it's from an intelligence agency. Okay, so where's the back door in the code? Because I've looked through all of it, I can't find it. You know, where's the construction that's like dishonest? The magic of this thing, whether it's alien technology that fell from the sky or the lone NSA agent who did it on the side, he transformed his turbo autism into this magic new thing. Guess what? It don't matter where it came from. What matters is what did we do about it? We found it. Fell from the heavens. And what we did is we all looked at it, we verified it, we figured out how it works, we mechanistically understand it, and now we're building on top of it. The origins don't matter. They really don't. Okay? You know, do we really know who invented the English language? Kind of a collective thing, right? There was at least one person who was speaking something, who came up with something that kind of sort of sounds a little bit like English. And then through millions of people speaking it throughout thousands of years, it turned into English. So, does it really matter who spoke the first words of Bitcoin? If it's a collective problem of evolution and generation after generation takes it, modifies it, makes it their own, and then you eventually create your own language? The same for religion. You start a religion somewhere. You know, Jesus was walking around. He's on Temple Mount talking to people. He's got his disciples. And that's been 2,000 years since that moment. So, all this stuff has happened and it's changed with the times. Doctrine's been upgraded. You know, Vatican II, all this stuff happens. And now we kind of have a new thing and there's a plurality of things. You have Protestants. You have Orthodox. You have Catholics. You have all these big things. Billions of people are connected to them. So, Bitcoin is exactly the same where any cryptocurrency is the exact same. The founder doesn't matter. The original intent doesn't matter. It's where do you evolve it? What problems does it solve and how does it evolve and who gets to decide that? If it's decided by five people you never met, you can't vote for, that's a bad system. If it's decided by the commons and there's a governance system to upgrade these types of things, that's a good system because it can evolve over time and become something quite useful to everybody.

It's a very complicated concept. And the best thing you can do is Google the Edinburgh decentralization index because we studied this for five years. And we created an index with the University of Edinburgh. We have eight different dimensions you can look at decentralization from. Everything from who's writing the code to the token supply to who's running the nodes to, you know, how many software clients do you have? There's all these different lenses you can look at. So, decentralization is a nuanced thing because you can be very decentralized in one direction and then you can be hyper-centralized in another direction. So, there's no notion of perfection here. It's rather lenses that you look at these things from. The key is, do you have a culture that wherever you are on that index, one of your strategic goals is to improve it year by year. Okay? So, you can be at four, whatever the metric is, but you say next year I'm going to be at five. And next year I'm going to be at six. And next year I'm going to be at seven. Because then you know that if I get on this train, 5, 10, 15 years, it doesn't matter. They're going to figure it out. That's what Cardano did. We started federated and static. Now we're dynamic and decentralized. We have the most decentralized consensus layer in the market. And then we created a governance system. And it started a little clunky in the beginning. It was a federated oligarchy. Now it's a complete on-chain government with a constitution and representation and there's elected people and liquid democracy and these types of things and on-chain budget and on-chain treasury. And then we augmented it with members-based organizations that have product and technical steering committees and companies can join and control the roadmap. And now no one company controls the development of Cardano. There's dozens and dozens of software companies. There's independent node implementations. And there's an on-chain treasury that has over a billion dollars of value to pay for all the development of Cardano that no one controls. It's controlled by the commons through an... We started one place. And over a 10-year period, we built year by year by year, including a constitutional convention with 50 countries participating in Argentina in December of 2024. That was a great time. You know, and so we had to build all that though. So, you know, step by step by step. So, when you looked at that directionality, you say, "Okay, there's a commitment to the ecosystem be more resilient, more decentralized, more diversity, more ideas, more countries, more people involved in that." And other systems, they don't want to do that. They want to keep it centralized because it makes them fast. Faster to market, okay? We ship features faster. The more decentralization, the slower you go. You know, so there's a balancing act between these two. And the market has to make decisions about what it values and why it values. And they tend to undervalue security and decentralization until they lose it and then they really need it back. And then they overvalue it and then they overcorrect. So, the banking sector was too centralized and consolidated. So, Bitcoin was invented. And then Bitcoin became super decentralized. But now it's really hard for Bitcoin to coordinate solve problems. So, like if quantum computers come out, like how do we solve that? It's not just adding a post-quantum signature scheme. Because what do you do about all the legacy accounts that refuse to migrate? They're all going to get stolen. It's like 60% of the supply is there for the dead Bitcoin because a lot of people lost their Bitcoin. All of that will be stolen and it will be flooded to the market. There's no migration strategy because there's no one who has the keys to even migrate behind them. So, you need a governance system to kind of figure this out and they don't have one. It's anarchy. So, they're super decentralized but there's no governance system to coordinate for a common problem. So, even though everybody agrees we need to solve it, there's no path to fully solve it inside the system. So, another thing that's really important with cryptocurrencies is that you have to have a governance system built into the chain that gives you the ability over time to get more and more decentralized, but then also big problems you can talk about them and solve them in a timely manner, create a strategy and endow like what is the official Cardano roadmap? I don't decide that. It's decided by an on-chain mechanism and then people can go and execute it, but I don't decide that. What is the economic priority for Cardano? I don't decide that. The on-chain budget and treasury decides that and then money gets allocated to go solve that particular problem. When should we hard fork and what features should we add? Feature A or feature B? And what if there's contradictions within these things? Do you choose A or B? I don't decide that. An on-chain governance system decides that. If you don't have an on-chain governance system, then guess what ends up happening? Power structures form out of necessity and they end up pushing it through and they end up having all the power and they never give it up. They never give it up. No one ever gives up power once they get it. That's why George Washington is so impressive. He's like the one guy since Cincinnatus that actually gave up real power and he's like, "Hey, you know what? I don't want to be king. I'm just going to go back and like sell tobacco and alcohol on my plantation." And everyone was like, "Ah, it's got to be a trick." And they're like, "Oh my god, he's actually serious. What the hell? You're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to be king. Get back here. Make you president." And then he like then leaves as president. He goes and makes whiskey and he was actually the largest whiskey producer in the United States after he retired from the presidency. He made 11,000 gallons of rye whiskey a year. Wow. Fuck. Yeah, so that was a good retirement. He's like, "I'm just going to get perpetually shit-faced. You guys have to go and run this nation that I'm running now. I'm done. I'm out." That's awesome.

Well, no, you don't understand. You don't pick Web3 and just say, "Well, I'm going to start Web3 and then find a product market fit." What you do is you pick the product you want to build and then you ask the question of, "How do I endow within that product some principles that make that product better?" So, here's a great example like your roadmap. So, let's say you're building a game and it's an MMO or something like that. Do you really want to be in a position if you have 10 million players to go and sit down and make every single decision about that game world? Like every time you rebalance the warlock class or every time you rebalance the fighter or something like that, you just piss off so many people. You get death threats and everything. Like, "I put eight years of my life into this and you nerfed it." Some neckbeard shows up and he's like, "You've ruined my life. I'll never forgive you." You want your community to be involved, right? And so you say, "Well, how do I build a voting system that's secure?" Well, Web3's got all these amazing secure voting systems. Then you have all these Chinese gold farmers and they're running around like, you know, macro mining gold and all this other stuff. Well, how do you build like an in-game currency that actually makes sense and you kind of regulate the supply and do this all? Well, why don't we just use cryptocurrency to build that in-game currency for this whole thing? And then you say, "Okay, like how do I know I'm playing with a real human being? I need proof of human." Okay, versus a bot. Well, maybe there's a solution for that in the Web3 space. And so, you're not starting like I want to be a cryptocurrency thing and I got to do Web3. What you're doing is you're starting with I want to build a great game that respects its players, it's sustainable, it has kind of a multi-sided market for governance, you know, has a stable economy and it's not laden with bots and trash and all this other stuff. Cryptocurrency gives you all that stuff. So, then all of a sudden you just brought 10 million people into the cryptocurrency space because you have 10 million players in your MMO and you just brought them all there and it gives you a big competitive differentiator because when your competing MMO does stuff, they're in the legacy system where they got to build an economy, they got to figure all this stuff out, they got to deal with Chinese gold farmers and they got to deal with the bots and oh, and then they still have to manage all of the rules inside the game and every time they fuck it up, they damage their relationship with the community. So, crypto now becomes a competitive differentiator for you. And that's what you got to focus on to start with. Or Tinder is another great example of that. It's a slightly different use case, but it's just so great. Okay, so we have this problem in Tinder where everybody is incentivized kind of to lie in their own way. And you get bad connections and bad outcomes, you know? It's kind of like you get the team move version of the person and then you show up and you're like, "Oh, fuck, I did not sign up for this." So, I would like to verify that the person's 6 ft tall and I'd like to verify they're STD free and they're actually a doctor and they actually make $200,000 a year or they're actually the person in the picture. Okay? So, that's selective disclosure. So, if you have a blockchain-based identity system with a selective disclosure regime, you can actually verify these types of things without necessarily revealing who you are. Okay? So, as you're trying to make decisions about escalating the contact, you could take it all the way up to the edge and then you could back off and there's no privacy leakage inside that type of system. Like marriage is another big one. Like maybe you'd like to verify that the person you're hooking up with isn't having an affair or something like that or you know, it's their husband is actually a marine or something and he's and you show up and he just, you know, beats you to death because you slept with his wife. You'd probably like to verify these things before you have your casual encounter. And so this is the type of stuff where the technology of cryptocurrency can solve that problem. It can solve it at scale. You have strong math-based guarantees in it. You don't even know you're using a cryptocurrency at the end of the day, but it's there and makes it a safer transaction and interaction with people. And also, no company controls the data. It's a huge problem. You know? What if some third party has all those interactions? Somebody has all your dick pics. That's bad. You don't want that to happen. You want that to be under the control of the peer-to-peer network, not on a particular company or an individual. So, do they know they're using crypto? Do they care they're using crypto? No. I see. And so, it doesn't matter if it's a video game, it's a voting system, it's a casual connection system, it's a gambling system. It doesn't matter if it's a website. All of these things can fit into the Web3 space, but you don't start from Web3. You start from how do I build trust? How do I make it efficient? How do I respect my users? How do I make it safe? How do I make sure everybody's following the same rules? And also, how do I build infrastructure where I don't have to run the infrastructure necessarily? That's the cost thing. Okay, if you build a big web product with half a million users, million users, do you want to pay the hosting cost for all that? No. So, maybe you can get the users to run the system and it's a peer-to-peer distributed system kind of like BitTorrent. Then every time somebody comes, they eat what they kill. You know? So, your OPX is the same whether you have one user or a million users inside the system. So, it's a lot cheaper to scale. So, if I'm a business guy, I could give a flying fuck about Dogecoin, Bitcoin, sperm coin, smack coin, whatever coin you got. Okay? I don't give a fuck about any of these things. What I care about is my bills stay relatively the same as I grow as a business so I don't go goddamn bankrupt like Sam Altman is with ChatGPT. You see? That's what I care about. Well, if Web3 can build decentralized infrastructure and the user basically provides the resources, then I don't have to pay for my users. That's Web3. And so, when you make that argument, are you making an argument about philosophy and crypto? No, you're just making a business argument. You're just saying like this makes your business cheaper, faster, better, safer, and easier. One of the things we said all the time in the early days of Bitcoin, Roger and I, you know, Roger Ver and these other guys because I remember I was so long. I know all of them. Is we talked about chargebacks and safe transactions. And he said if you accept Bitcoin, when you get the Bitcoin, you have the Bitcoin. Nobody calls the credit card company and says, "Hey, I want to reverse my Bitcoin thing." So, if you were in an industry laden with chargebacks and credit card fraud, Bitcoin was like the best thing in the entire world for you because once you got it, you got it. It's irreversible. It's like somebody handed you a bag of cash. They can't take it back. And every merchant got that. They were like, "Whoa." But they were frustrated that it wasn't value stable. So, then I tried to build a stable coin with Dan Larimer. We built the first algorithmic stable coin with BitShares and it didn't work, but we tried. So, now we got stable coins. It's the same concept though. So, a lot of merchants are like, "I don't fucking care about crypto, but this thing like I get the stable coin and I have it and nobody can freeze it or take it back. I like that because my fraud goes to zero. I have no credit card fraud, identity theft, or any of these other things. Safer internet's another thing. Like I'd like to move to a situation where it's one-click login for everything and there's no identity theft. So, when you go to log in your website, you click a button. That's it. That's signing a transaction. Is that like I need to sign a transaction because I'm a cypherpunk and I want to live and have 14 monitors and it's like the movie Hackers with Angelina Jolie? No. I just want to click a button and it works and my grandma wants to do that. She just wants to put her thumbprint or something and you log in and it's there. It's one click sign in. It's another thing in crypto. That makes your user experience better for everybody, right?

Well, it's the same situation with any of these Web3 projects. You know, you have a much better chance of finding talent in the Web3 world than you do in any others because what you do is you start with a GitHub repo. You start working on some things. You broadcast around and organically all these people just start showing up. Like a great example would be OpenLaw. When you look at Cloud bot, it was just one guy. And he, you know, he just turned his autism up to 11. He's like, "I'm going to create a robot lobster. Yay!" And you know what? He created a robot lobster. And then all of a sudden all these people just showed up and they said, "Wow, that robot lobster thing is pretty cool." And now he's got 160 plus thousand stars. He's got hundreds of contributors. It's the fastest-growing open-source project in human history. And everybody just started installing these robot lobsters. Now they have their own religion, their own Facebook. God help us all. They're already saying death to the humans. It's just been a few weeks. It's great. Okay, so that's how you do it in the Web3 space is that you already have a governance model, an early adoption model, a fundraising model with crowdsourcing. You have a transparent open thing and you never start from zero because in many cases people have already tried to solve this problem. So there's all this other open-source technology that exists. So you start with a community that solves 70% of your decentralized YouTube. You fork the project. You work within that community. You put your little flavor on it. Some of the people follow you over and then you have a fundraising model to be able to at the very least pay the developer salaries to be able to build it to the next level. And if you get it right, all these people show up and it gets done. And we've seen this time and time again. That is so much better than being a VC guy, Techstars and then going and pitching 400 VCs and giving away 30% of your company and then having to, you know, make a weird business model just to be able to get your growth curve up and customer acquisition and then Meta buys you for half a billion dollars and you run away and you've built like a small MacGuffin for their little meta empire. It's just a bad model. It's outmoded. It doesn't work. We tried it with Ethereum. We went pitch Google Ventures and talked to Kevin Rose and all this other stuff and then Vitalik was like, "Yeah, just do a crowd sale. Do the ICO. Let's do that." And it worked out really well. You know, decentralized fundraising works so well. Baldur's Gate 3 is another phenomenal example of that. Okay, there was no way in the standard game publisher model that Baldur's Gate 3 can happen. It's just an impossible game to make. You have Sven Vincke showing up wearing actual medieval armor being like, "We're going to make this game! And it's going to take like eight years to make and it's going to be so vast that you could have sex with a bear. But don't worry, it's not bestiality because it's actually a druid that's wild-shaped and it's going to be so massive that like you could do everything and there's 4 million variations and then I'll just have to eventually release it because it's so big. Oh, and then by the way, we're going to like slow drip it out through early release model and all these other things and everybody will play the whole game over again when a patch comes. Like, "What do you are you? Get out of here. Sex with bears. What's going on here? This is insanity." But instead, what he did is he went to the people and said like, "If you want this magic carpet ride, you can buy it for $59 early release model." And all these people are like, "Hell yeah, I want this magic carpet ride." And millions and millions of people bought into early release and it created funding to be able to carry the game all the way through and actually released the thing. That is how cryptocurrency works. You know, you start with the aspiration and vision. You talk about it. A group of people show up and eventually you get to your bear. You know, whatever your bear is.

I gave up on the Clarity Act. You know, I helped write part of the original Clarity Act and we've been working on something like it since 2022 with the FIA. I was back with Gillibrand and Senator Lummis. And then 137 amendments in 2025, including Elizabeth Warren's amendments, came in. They removed developer protections that we put in. They removed a whole bunch of things that were put into the Clarity Act. And really they created a model where everything defaults to Securities Exchange Commission. And you're security by default. You have to go beg, borrow, plead, and steal to get your way out of the security side. It's not a sustainable or good model. Then you got guys like Brad Garlinghouse come by you like, "Well, you know, we just got to have no bad bill instead of just no bill." No, you climbed up the ladder and you pulled the ladder up so no one else can climb up with you. That's not good regulation. That's the same oligarchy and nepotism that we all complained about with the banks. And because you're on the other side of the table, now it's good for you, so fuck all of us in the industry and all the small guys. We can't have a system where you start as a security by default. You'll never get liquidity. You'll never get listing. You'll never accumulate a user base. You can't fundraise. It just is a non-starter unless you're going to change securities law. But nobody wants to change securities law. Then the other thing they did is they didn't want to change securities law. So you know what they did? They made the CFTC the new SEC. You know, and it's almost like that meme with Steve Buscemi or whatever his name is. He's got like the skateboard. He's like, "Hello, fellow kids." You know, like, "Hello, fellow people. I'm a crypto person." Now the CFTC is not set up to regulate cryptocurrency. So now you have to create a mini SEC in the CFTC because you don't like the SEC. Okay? And then you're going to give the SEC right of first refusal on all new projects. Somehow they have to beg, borrow, and steal enough money to be able to get a skate velocity, but how will they ever be able to get to a critical mass if they never get liquidity or adoption because they don't get any listings and they can't trade because they're all securities? It doesn't make any sense. And I said this again and again and again and again. I said, "You're killing US innovation if you guys do this. You're killing the market." Then on the DeFi side, we had developer protections for DeFi inside the bill. They took them out. Okay? So now you build a DeFi thing, you're regulated like a regulated financial institution. It's just come and register. The whole point of DeFi is to not be a regulated institution. It lives on chain. It's decentralized. If you want to regulate it, tell the blockchain what the disclosure regime is and let us do our disclosures at the blockchain level, not having a custodial organization speaking for the fucking DeFi application. They just don't get it. But you know who's writing it is the banks. And the irony, guys, is the only group of people holding up the passes to Clarity Act now is Coinbase, not because of any of these principles. They just want to be able to pay a yield on their stablecoin. And they're like, "We are fighting for the retail consumer for yield on our stablecoin." Okay, so are you supporting DEXes? Okay. Are you supporting things not being a security? Stablecoin yield. That's all they're fighting for. That's the whole thing that's setting this whole thing up. It's like this one wedge issue. They're not any of this like, how do we regulate the industry properly? Why? Because the whole process was fucked. First, they had the wrong crypto czar. They just picked podcast bro David Sacks because he was Elon Musk's best friend as chief operating officer of PayPal and they all knew each other. Now this is back when Musk had power in Trump land. So he picked David Sacks. He brought in David. And actually he wanted to punish Sam Altman. So they made him the AI czar, but they're like, "Well, he can't just be the AI czar, so we got to make him the crypto and AI czar, okay? But don't worry, Bo Hines will do all the other stuff." And then actually no, we're not going to do it. What they should have done when they picked the crypto czar is sent out a survey to all of the verticals in the American cryptocurrency global cryptocurrency industry. The layer ones, the exchanges, the wallets, the NFT companies, the meme coins, all these projects. And asked a bunch of questions about what's working, what's not working, what do you want. Then go to all the administrative agencies and go to the CFTC and the SEC and FinCEN and the Federal Reserve and all etc. etc. say, "What are your concerns about crypto?" Then you go to the global regulators. You look at the MiCA framework. You look at the framework like the ADGM, VARA, and the Japanese framework, the Singapore Monetary Authority. You get all their feedback as well because you have a global regulatory regime. You put it all together within 180 days and you establish a baseline of principles and then you create a steering committee made up of the economically the top leaders of each of those verticals. And then you say okay, this group of people, then you go to the Senate Congress, this group of people is going to basically put together what we think should be the principles that guide the bill. And then the Senate Congress will click in and then they'll go ahead and write the legislation and everything has to be on the table. Tax law, the definition of a security, the Bank Secrecy Act, all these things for the updating and modernization of it. Then here's how you make it bipartisan. You go to all these crypto billionaires and guess what, a lot of them are young and came from California and they grew up under California education. So maybe just maybe they actually are Democrats. I'm shocked. Oh my God, there's Democrats in this space who have money. And you go and you gather that gaggle of people together and you go have them have meals with all the Senate Democrats in the Senate and the congressional Democrats. You say, you know, 2026 is coming along and if you all want to be pro crypto, maybe this group of people will cut you $10 million checks just like they cut checks for Trump. And then suddenly the Senate and the Congress is like, yeah, we need some of this crypto thing. This crypto thing sounds really good to me. Like you know, yeah, $10 million check in crypto is great. Okay, that's how you build the bipartisan muscle because you already got the Republican. The president wants it. So you just get about 10, 20 good people there and you tell Trump don't launch fucking Trump coin. And World Liberty, don't do it. Calm it down, okay? Launch it after you have the framework because then they can't complain. They voted for it. They can't be like, well, yeah, you're we didn't think you would do that. Well, it was totally legit legal, right? And if you've written the framework the right way, you should be able to watch those types of things. Instead they went opposite that. Anybody who has a seat at the table, they had to pay to be there. Seven, eight figures. Okay, that's just donations. And then there's no national strategy, there's no principles behind the strategy. The only thing was time to market, get past as quickly as possible, no bipartisanship and by launching Trump coin, it personalized crypto. Crypto equals Trump. Okay, so either if you're Republican, great. If you're Democrat, that's pure evil and corruption. So when you go to Blue Sky and you go to all these Democrat forums, they don't say like cryptocurrency has bad actors. Now they say cryptocurrency by its core is a scam and illegitimate and bad. They've turned on it and it's become a talking point in the 2026 election. They're going to say crypto equals corruption. That's the Democrat talking point now. Trump corruption. He made $5 billion from crypto. Crypto bad, crypto corruption. It's the biggest corruption thing ever. And you know what, we don't do ourselves any favors when we have FTX and Luna and BitConnect and all these other things, right? There's plenty of ammunition if your goal is to go attack crypto within the failures within the system. So they fucked the whole thing up and Uncle Sachs and all the other guys, they just didn't know what they were doing and they didn't understand how politics actually work and how you build coalitions with people and they made the process so toxic that you know, people just left out of frustration and now you have a bunch of vultures preying on something. So I'm not very optimistic about it passing and I'm less optimistic about it actually being meaningful or effective. And what people don't realize is by the way, when if it does pass, the rule making will take two to three years if not longer. You know, the Consumer Financial Protection Act or whatever it was that Warren did and all these other people did, that still has rule making going on and that passed I think in 2011 or 2010, like 14 years later or 15 years later, they're still doing rule making for it. So what happens if the Democrats win the House and Senate later on win the presidency? The final rule making of the Clarity Act will be done by Gary Gensler 2.0. And what does that mean? Everything's always a security by default and the whole industry dies. That's what they're going to do. So no, a bad bill is not better than no bill because when we had no bill, we had ambiguity and we could win court cases. When you have a bad bill, you don't have any ambiguity, you lose every court case and scary Gary 2.0, it's not just a single guy in the storm drain going, "Hiya, Georgie." No, God, man, he's coming over to your house now. He's showing up in a bus of scary Gary's and everybody's fucked. So it's just an egregious insult what they've done and sour and sour and sour and you know, don't take my word for it. Just read the goddamn bill and see the latest thing because everybody likes to personalize this. The minute I say this, the XRP people show up. They're like, "Oh, Charles is bad. He's so bad. You know, why are you so anti-XRP?" This has nothing to do with XRP. Nothing at all, not at all. This has to do with the industry and basic standard definitions. Do you want to hand to the same Securities Exchange Commission that sued you for the last five years total power over the entire space? This is what it does. Read the bill. Read the bill. Just read it. Use Gemini or ChatGPT to do it for you if you don't want to do it. Just read it. Okay? It's not good work. It's bad work. It's a patchwork because they didn't want to fuck with the Securities Exchange Act or tax law or any of these other things. They created this new monster and also how do we fund it? So if we're going to make the CFTC the agency to regulate all this stuff, they got no funding increase from this. So how are they going to go hire and what budget are they going to use to hire the 1200 or 1500 or 2000 people that they need? And guess what? If they don't have a budget for it, how do they give you a timely approval? If you need approval for something, who's going to do the work? So guess what happens? They slow roll it. You ask, six months later no answer. You ask, six months later no answer. You ask, six months later no answer. Well, I'm sorry, we're just so busy. We don't have any money in the budget for this whole thing. And we are government efficiency. Don't. No, don't. Don't. Just don't. You don't. This not... Why would you do this? It's so stupid. It's just people who have never worked in government thinking they know how to run a government walking into a system and then saying, well, it's too hard so let's just give it to the banks and they'll figure the whole thing out because they're friendly to crypto, right? The banks love crypto. They're crypto's ally. Yeah, they've been to get... they do money, crypto does money. You guys are going to love each other. It's just... I'm sorry, guys. I'm so angry about it because we had such a beautiful window. We had so much time. We had so much momentum and support. December of 2024, the Democrats were all like, God, we got to be pro crypto. How do we figure out how to be pro crypto? Everybody wanted this thing to work. And it was just mangled and horrifically mismanaged and we're going to get just a steaming pile of shit out of this whole thing. Just a giant steaming pile of shit. You know, and it's no redeeming... It doesn't even fertilize the soil. It's like the shit that actually damages the soil. You can't grow crops afterwards. It's salt earth shit. You get salt shit. That's what we're getting. They're mixing salt with the shit. And it smells really, really bad, you know, and it didn't have to be this way. It really didn't and they fucked it up.

Cheers.