“People aren’t evil for the sake of being evil they are evil because systems are unjust, and it allows for manipulation.”
Charles Hoskinson is the founder of Cardano, co-founder of Ethereum and in his own words: “a guy who went from broke to billionaire in 8 years”. This morning I attended Hoskinson’s fireside chat at the Inevitable World Summit, and found myself hearing about how Charles got his start in the field of cryptocurrency. Co-host Chris J Snook did an awesome job at leading Charles to discuss what aspects of society he is seeking to fix through his projects.
Hoskinson first decided that his mathematical skills could be helpful in solving some world problems when he witnessed an exchange where a family of illegal immigrants lost a day’s worth of wages when police pulled them over. The police asserted that the cash payment must have been drug money (knowing that it was not) and confiscated it. Being that the family were illegal immigrants to the United States, the police knew that they would get away with this robbery without consequence; this pissed Charles off greatly and he sought to create a niche in the financial markets to combat future inequities like this.
Hoskinson sought not to change human nature, but to limit the effect of human nature on our financial systems. In 2013 he passed on getting his PhD and began to teach a free class on Bitcoin and the programming behind it. Through this class he would teach well over 70k students and eventually have one of those students provide him with the funding for his first project: Invictus Innovation. Following this, he would be recruited to work on and eventually co-found a little-known project at the time titled Ethereum.
He later left the group due to differences in opinion regarding the trajectory of the project and found himself being funded through Japanese VC’s to found his latest project: the Cardano foundation and IOHK; about a 30 billion dollar ecosystem.
Cardano’s strength stems from the points of disagreement between Hoskinson and the other founders of Ethereum, Cardano is a multi-asset ledger where the tokens that are created carry the same power as Cardano’s native ADA token in governance decisions for the project the token funds. On the Ethereum network, an ERC-20 ‘token’ is created using Ethereum via gas fees, meaning that everything that happens on the network is reliant on Ethereum miners. This results in the astronomically high fees we have seen as small-cap traders are screwed out of the ability to regularly stake their tokens into liquidity pools. Cardano on the other hand allows the tokens of whatever the project is to be used in the fees for that project. The ADA token is not the sole stress-point for the ecosystem and this allows for minimal gas fees on the network.
As an additional dig at his former co-developers, Hoskinson and Cardano have included an ERC-20 token converter into the code of their ecosystem in order to allow tokens to migrate from that blockchain over to the Cardano network. Cardano also allows for their smart contracts to include “contingent settlement” clauses that allow for the creation of finite tokens.
Hoskinson noted in the interview that the possibilities are almost endless once you allow for all of the tokens on your network to be “treated like first class tokens”. With finite tokens, governments could produce stimulus checks that must be spent back into the economy before a specified date similar to the way a coupon works at a store.
Hoskinson also gave the example of a concert festival such as Burning Man including tokens in the purchase of the ticket that would be able to be spent on site and only until a certain date before being burned back into the ecosystem supply. Another thing this would be helpful for is VOTING as elections could be drastically simplified.
Hoskinson ended his great interview with some words of advice for listeners:
-Don’t chase wealth, chase passions
-Create a solution to a real problem you have experienced
-Knowledge is available for free, read as much as you can on topics that interest you
-It is ok to fail, keep pushing
-Be fanatically passionate about something you care about
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My name is Rob and I am a college student doing my best to get involved in the crypto world. I have enjoyed blogging thus far and thank you for reading my article! Give me a follow and let’s build the community together through consistent engagement.
