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American entrepreneur Charles Hoskinson says blockchain technology offers solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems, from election integrity to the unchecked influence of Elon Musk.
Mr Hoskinson, founder of the Cardano blockchain network and co-founder of Ethereum, spoke to Dr Libby Sander on the Bond University podcast The Floorplan. The following has been lightly edited.
Election integrity
The ‘stop the steal’ movement that promoted baseless claims of widespread electoral fraud in the 2020 US presidential election continues to stir turmoil in US politics to this day.
Mr Hoskinson says recording votes on a blockchain would eliminate uncertainty and increase transparency.
“Here's the problem: I, as an American, can't verify my vote,” he tells Dr Sander.
“So if I vote, I don't know if it was counted.
“You put it on a blockchain, you gain inclusive accountability.
“With that, you can check that your vote was counted, counted correctly, and that the integrity of the system as a whole looks good.
“So then it takes the discourse of ‘the voting system is broken’ out of the commons.
You're no longer debating whether the system is legitimate or not.”
AI and the Shaggy defence
Mr Hoskinson says AI is less than three years away from being able to generate perfect deepfakes, further fuelling global mistrust.
“Probably the next 24, 36 months, picture-perfect video and audio representations of people can be generated and broadcast,” he says.
“So that basically means you can make people say and do whatever you want.
“People will say, ‘there's a video of you and this woman’.
“Now (with the proliferation of undetectable deepfakes) you’ve got the Shaggy defence: wasn't me.
“When you live in a world like that, then nobody can trust each other anymore because you no longer converge to a common shared reality.”
The blockchain in international trade
Amid geopolitical uncertainty, Mr Hoskinson says blockchain technology can help address the declining trust among countries and businesses.
“Look at what's happening geopolitically - we're moving from a rules-based international order to a great powers conflict,” he says.
“Instead of having the international courts and the IMF and every nation agrees to follow those rules, you're moving into empires.
“Russia just takes stuff, and America just takes stuff like Greenland or whatever.
“And then you have China just take stuff, and if you live in that world, what does a trade agreement mean? What does a commercial agreement mean?
“How can you hold companies accountable? Like, how can we hold a Chinese company accountable for carbon production?
“So you have to move the assets and the transactions and the people out of this old legacy notion of commerce into a commons which preserves and protects trust.
“And really the only space that we have able to do that is the blockchain.”
The Crypto Summit
Mr Hoskinson is still smarting after he was not invited to President Donald Trump’s Crypto Summit at the White House in early March.
“It seems that the people who want to think long term are typically not invited to the table,” he tells Dr Sander.
“The Crypto Summit is a great example of that. Not in the people who were invited, but the absence of certain people.
“(Ethereum co-founder) Vitalik Buterin didn't get an invitation. I didn't get an invitation. And many, many other good people were not invited.
“And the people who were invited were kind of flavours of the week, or are directly connected to the President. So it almost became a popularity contest.
“In fact, the White House went out of its way to say ‘Charles wasn't invited’. I'm not sure why. They didn't do that for anybody else, but okay.
“That's a pretty d*** move.”
Cardano
Amid the launch of meme coins and boom and bust crypto investments, Mr Hoskinson says Cardano is planning for the long-term.
“If you don't have an investment in long-term thinking, you get short-term outcomes,” he says.
“We (Cardano) spent two years working on governance. We got Voltaire done. We have an on-chain constitution that's the artifact of more than 50 countries participating and working.
“We have 1000-plus Decentralised Representatives. And so we have fully decentralised governance in our system, and we're talking about roadmap and budget items that will persist over a many-year period.
“All I can do is just focus on that.
“I can't do much about consumer trust because … the consumer sees what they see, and they see TrumpCoin and they see this very short-term stuff.
“People know that there's something going on, but they develop almost immediately either a repulsion or an affinity based upon shallow facts, and that have nothing to do with the actual purpose of the space and why we do what we do.
“So it's a challenge. And it's deeply frustrating at times, especially having spent 15 years of my life in this industry.
“I'd like to believe I’m being a good citizen of the industry, but the contributions we've made, to not have a seat at that particular table (Crypto Summit) is deeply frustrating because effectively, it just makes it very unpredictable for where the United States is going to go and how policy is going to evolve.
And that's going to have an enormous impact on European policy, enormous impact on the Five Eyes, enormous impact on Asian policy, African policy, the Middle East policy, positive or negative.”
Republicans and Donald Trump
Mr Hoskinson, a former member of the Republican Party, says the MAGA movement is driven by fear and anger.
“Everybody in that orbit is deeply scared, they're traumatised,” he says.
“There's problems that occurred - they feel they're wrongfully convicted, 34 felonies.
“They feel that the entire government was weaponised against them, and they're lashing out and being very angry about a lot of stuff.
“And so everything is just like, take everything that's not bolted down. That's the mentality that they have right now.
“It's a survival instinct and it's an entitlement instinct, like, the prior regime did all these horrible things, so we're allowed to do all these horrible things.
“So they're in an eye-for-an-eye mentality, a retribution mentality that's not sustainable.
“At some point they'll either have to evolve or they'll stall out because they'll turn on each other and everything will go to hell.
“The other thing is you'll just run out of stuff to steal. You'll run out of stuff to break. You'll run out of fuel for that madness.
"So that's an unhealthy system, and I think it's a justification for the social work that we do with blockchain and the profound consequences it has for economic, political and social systems.
"Because when you implement this (the blockchain), you go from ‘don’t be evil’ to ‘can’t be evil’. The system won't allow you to deviate into these bizarre worlds, even if you want to.”
Elon Musk
Mr Hoskinson says the world’s richest man helps motivate his mission at Cardano.
“Humans are really bad when they don't have checks and balances, and humans are really bad when nobody's there to stop them from doing bad things,” he says.
“Elon Musk is a phenomenal example.
“He's worth half a trillion dollars, he's surrounded by sycophants, he can't be fired no matter how egregious his behaviour is.
“Just think about basic corporate governance at Tesla, where you have this guy running 20 companies.
“He's now MIA to go hang out with the President running DOGE every day, right?
“It's looking very grim. Normally, a board of directors would call an emergency meeting and basically say, ‘Either you go back to work as CEO of Tesla or we have to let you go’.
“Where's the board? Where's the governance? It doesn't exist. There's no oversight.
“And so in the absence of that, that neurotic behaviour - it grows like a cancer.
“And it gets worse and worse and worse, and it enables and enables and enables and eventually you start lying about stupid s*** like, you know, Diablo IV records or Path of Exile and say, ‘I'm the world's greatest gamer, look at me’.
“Like, why would you lie about that? It just doesn't make any sense.
“And then you have this legion of enabling people saying, well, this person is so brilliant.
“You can't build a government this way. You can't build people this way.
“It creates an environment where progress is stalled because it lives and dies by the whims or wills of an individual who's unhealthy.
“It is probably the biggest reinforcer of the mission we have.
“And when we see stuff like this, it makes us passionate again, because we say, we can't let that be the standard.
“We can't let humanity continue to go down this road.”
The Floorplan can also be found on Apple podcasts.
- Dr Libby Sander is Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Bond Business School, Bond University.