How Charles Hoskinson of Cardano is so annoying

Charles Hoskinson Arguably good and bad things about Cardano. Without him, of course, the chain wouldn't exist — he's been leading its growth over the past decade and says he's invested $450 million of his own money to get the chain off the ground.

But he is a bad publicity magnet who makes everything about him and always picks pointless fights. This week, for example, Wyoming is threatening to sue Cardano for not using it as a stablecoin. He frequently covers the network's many technical achievements in decentralization, governance and the new privacy-focused sidechain, Midnight.

Although he's only 37 years old, his receding hairline, gray beard and signature colored shirts make him look like a retired professor – he even wore a cat during our Token2049 interview. Being born in middle age may have fueled his passion for researching experimental stem cell longevity therapies, which he plans to try on himself to turn the clock back 10 years.

With a fortune of about 1.2 billion dollars (according to him), Hoskinson has enough money to do whatever he likes – hunting for foreign artifacts, editing plants in the dark or trying to convince world leaders like Argentina's Javier Millay and Trump's transition team to stop crypto and/or the world. Advantages of running on Cardano.

Hoskinson and the controversy

Hoskinson's wealth is often referred to as “mad money” and he seems to embody the idiom, often saying controversial things and openly insulting other projects and people in his character.

“We were hoping you'd say something terribly controversial, and then we'd get some good news,” he joked when we met the magazine.

And that's exactly what happened after Hoskinson explained at length why Ethereum is run like a dictatorship. To that end, Cointelegraph has publicly complained about the fact that it was quoted after publishing the news story. He was upset that a story was printed based on what he said – misquoted, or taken out of context.

During Live with David Gokshten, the Cardano founder complained about how unfair it was to only mention some of the interesting things he said in a 500-word news story, even though the transcript of the interview was 11,000 words long.

“Bow down, Cointelegraph. Let it be better. You're trash for that. So that's it, no more interviews with them.”

How to win friends and influence people

Rather than attacking the medium in the hopes of onboarding some new users, they think it's more beneficial to Cardano to try to be friendly.

Daily users of the network increased from 30,000 to around 100,000 on some days after the token price tripled. To put that in perspective, the Ethereum ecosystem sometimes sees 20 million transactions in a single day.

Hoskinson's instinct, however, seems to be to support the drama rather than slow it down. For example, a few weeks after our interview in Singapore, he inadvertently posted a memecoin that angered some users, led a small X account, and told his 12,000 followers that such behavior had given Hoskinson “Cardano cancer.”

Rather than ignore the insult, Hoskinson asked his nearly 1 million followers if it was “Cardano's cancer.” After 51.6% of the 50,501 respondents agreed that yes he was, it got really tricky.

As a result of this self-inflicted injury, he confided that he was fed up with being “subjected to routine attacks and particularly hurtful comments every day” and went offline for a while.

When Hoskinson's massive army of fans moved in, not everyone was sympathetic. One of the early responses to the poll said: “It's up to Charles to make such an opinion.” This is like watching Elon install it on the Internet.”

“You are the founder of this chain and a public figure,” said another. Maybe you don't have to deal with every criticism like we did in high school?”

Let's talk about the administration of Voltaire

What Hoskinson really wants to talk about is Cardano's reform of Voltaire-era governance, which places power in the hands of the community through a representative system of governance.

But he draws attention away from the reform by talking about himself in a self-promoting way while overshadowing other projects.

“Cardano is one of the greatest technical breakthroughs in human history,” he wrote in early September after Chang's update was released. “This Bitcoin dunk is unique, books will be written about what happened.

He also predicted that Cardano would overtake Ethereum within a decade and Bitcoin within two, with the massive claim that most of the world's governments would eventually run on Cardano's infrastructure. He also said:

“The biggest threat to Bitcoin supremacy is and always will be Cardano.”

Elsewhere, “I don't see how it is” about the original and most popular cryptocurrency. [Bitcoin] He survived. Religion, not ecology. He compared it to Microsoft Windows, which “no one cares about anymore” due to its adoption of mobile devices.

“It becomes another property, the host collapses, and dies a slow heat death.

After bashing Bitcoin on numerous occasions, he recently switched gears to claim its greater value instead. He said he “cried” when he saw a ZK-proof transaction that would allow Bitcoin to be used trustlessly through a bridge on Cardano.

“That big, absolutely huge, gargantuan one for Cardano. It's probably the biggest piece of news we've ever had.”

What was the Reformation of the Voltaire Era?

After spending 800 words of this story talking about Hoskinson rather than Voltaire's administration, let's delve into what appears to be a very impressive improvement. Since going live a few months ago, Weiss Crypto upgraded ADA to A-, joining BTC and ETH at the top of the rating.

As with most things on Cardano, management has been carefully considered and scrutinized to within an inch of its life. By taking control from the founding organizations – IOHK, Emurgo and the Cardano Foundation – and handing it over to the community, it essentially transformed the network into the world's largest DAO.

ADA holders vote on representatives (think members of Congress) who vote on their behalf on things like reform and treasury management. Share pool operators also have input, and there is a constitutional committee that limits code changes in the first three months.

The upcoming constitution, which is currently in draft form, will set strict limits on what changes are allowed – such as changes to provision or that could undermine the democratic nature of elections.

A total of 64 workshops were held in 51 countries to finalize the list and elect 128 delegates to the Constituent Assembly held in Buenos Aires in early December.

“What are the fundamental rights in the system? If you have that ADA, you know they're like deflationary monetary policy, or burning the treasury, or not exchanging the treasury,” he explained in Singapore. “And what are the things that should be open to debate every year?”

Hoskinson, as some members of the community are quick to point out, is an advocate for increasing inflation and for Cardano's treasury to never burn.

“But obviously, I can't decide that alone. “Onchain is a management system.”

Cardano management vs. Ethereum management

On paper, at least, Cardano's model looks more democratic than Ethereum's, which is largely an informal proposal system for Ethereum improvements, discussed by the community before a small group of Core Devs teamed up.

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, expressed his concern about the management of the onchain, saying that it can consolidate power among the owners of large tokens, the majority of votes are very low participation, and many decisions are too complicated for a simple yes/no answer.

Therefore, the magazine asked about the strengths and weaknesses of Cardano's approach to Ethereum.

In response, Hoskinson explained that blockchain has few choices for governance models. You can choose to keep the protocol forever simple, like Bitcoin, meaning “no argument needed.”

“It doesn't work much, and that's by design. It's a feature, not a problem, for that ecosystem. Or eventually elect a king and just say you're in charge and do this thing. It is either a foundation or a good leader. And most open source projects like Linus do with Linux.

“So if you build onchain governance, you're going against both sides, and instead you're going to have three kinds of governance assets.”

He explained that the first asset is democratic consensus by electing representatives who represent different interests in the ecosystem.

The second is access to institutions like Cardano's member-based organization Intersect, which can “translate complexity into simplicity” so that “when it comes to that onchai government, you've already chewed up a huge amount of energy, and you have a vision of where things are going.”

The third part is to continue the administrative process and to set up the basic rules, spending, minor rights, unfiltered transactions, etc.

“If you have those three things, you've got the right move to remove the anarchy of Bitcoin or the tyranny of Ethereum, and you've certainly got something moving forward with one voice, but it's still decentralized at the end of the day” because it represents everyone.

wait what

Wait… Did Hoskinson call Ethereum a dictator? If the magazine was just a throwaway line, he gave him a chance to retort:

“Can I stop you there and explain? Ethereum was a dictator. But they are not really dictators…”

But it didn't go back—it doubled.

“The whole vision came from one person. ‘Yes, Vitalik is not in charge.' Well, everyone wants the road map. Everyone looks to him for inspiration, and he's the only one with enough energy to bring people together,” he said.

If you take it out of the equation, now, what will the next hard fork look like, and how quickly can you get there? Where does this idea of ​​embracing layer 2s come from, or scrolls, or other things? Was it a random ethereum engineer or something like that? Or Vitalik Buterin blogged about him, talked about him, defended him.

Since Ethereum was originally supposed to be a collaborative project between Buterin and seven other co-founders, you can understand where the consensus Joe Lubin and Hoskinson are coming from.

But when push came to shove in 2014, when there was a dispute about making Ethereum a for-profit company, Buterin was the first among his peers and made his own decision. Not only did he make Ethereum non-profit, but he fired Hoskinson as CEO at the same time.

Ironically, of course, if the description of “tyrant” applies to Buterin, it also applies to Hoskinson's role in leading Cardano since 2015.

“No more!” He noted that 168 scientists have written 223 papers on Cardano technology.

“And all these papers were written by faceless people. If you add [one]You take one out, it doesn't change his calculation. It's a decentralized brain,” he said.

“So, I'm alive, Charles is alive/dead, it doesn't matter. There are still new inventions every day.

Eliminating the single point of failure

Hoskinson concedes that he will have a continuing role as a leader, but without material power.

“It's hard for founders to fire themselves. Even Satoshi had a bit of a challenge in the early days to get out of Bitcoin and hand over the right leadership structure.

So you're trying to fire yourself?

“Yes, that is the goal. This is the purpose. Any founder of open source decentralized [ecosystem’s goal] It should be that you cannot have a single point of failure.

And, as the community gradually takes control of the project, Hoskinson doesn't mind the controversy.

He'll be just another member of the community, if the ADA has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of administration. But given his massive influence to date, does he also emerge as first among equals?

Andrew Fenton

Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a film journalist for News Corp Australia, SA Wind and national entertainment writer for Melbourne Weekly.

Follow the author @andrewfenton