Lex Fridman: In a white board presentation, you gave these 3 phases. And, you kind of implying that there will be an end phase to this whole evolution. Cardano is just like the cutting edge. But if you look back to Bitcoin how do you compare Cardano Vs. Bitcoin? Where we are? How it started? How it is going?
Charles Hoskinson: So, what I did in that video, I have done in a lot of video interviews. But, I think, it really helps people understand where we are at in the plot is to phase things in terms of generation. Our first generation is Bitcoin. Really, the problem that Bitcoin is trying to solve is every time you want to represent or move value we need some trusted third party to facilitate that.
So, could we build some sort of system, where we can create some notion of value that could be teleported around the world and it doesn’t require a trusted third party? That is done in a beautiful way, because it didn’t try to be anything else. It just was – you only have Bitcoin – it was just one type of thinking – you just push it. It can do some things like multisig and other things. There was only one Tripony as a system. And, it wasn’t really clear if that was going to work or not for a long time. It took several years to build a network effect for Bitcoin to actually become valuable.
Then, I would say the inflection point was 2013 and at that time it became a billion dollar market cap like Silicon Valley startups and real exchanges performing. And, it got to the point where there was legitimacy behind the concept and people started getting this is a really incredible idea.
I can awake capital control, so that I can like move 10 billion dollars or something from one country to another country in 5 minutes, which I could never do that before. This is incredible. Okay. The problem is that the minute people validate the idea they immediately want something they don’t have. So, the minute that Elon can land a rocket, the next big thing, landed the Falcon 9 – similarly I want programmability with this thing. It is kind of when Javascript came with a web browser, you went from the static, perhaps pretty but static non-interactive pages to You Tube and Google and Facebook. And, these amazing rich and incredible experiences, because now you can actually interact with the users and do program things – it is a beautiful two way relationship.
So, that is what Ethereum effectively did. They built on programming languages, onto a blockchain and they went from a certain use case, to whatever your imagination could have: sun shaded rainbows and unicorns and these types of things.
Lex Fridman: So, you are saying Bitcoin is HTML and Ethereum is Javascript.
Charles Hoskinson: Basically, yes when Javascript came. Like Javascript has all kinds of problems and issues. Actually we have plenty of Active X and Flashes. And, NXT was an example of what failed to start. And, Bitshares was another – there was lot of people who tried to add some notion of programmability, a different view of how these things should be done. And, they were not as competitive. Ethereum kind of came out as Javascript.
Okay, the minute you have that then suddenly you have ICOs and DeFis and STOs and NFTs and all these word salads of things. And, then people started using it and were frustrated, why because it is too slow, it is too expensive, it doesn’t talk to the things that they wanted to talk to and also. It gets too big to manage itself.
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