An Open Letter to Me

Opens February 27th 2023 reading a critical open letter posted on his YouTube, the Cardano Reddit, and r/cryptocurrency.

The letter wishes he had stayed anonymous like Satoshi and accuses him of a need for approval and of supporting alt-right figures Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson who stoke hate against LGBTQ and poor people.

The letter's other grievance that contingent staking is being dictatorially forced with threats to dial back expressiveness, betraying Cardano as Bitcoin's philosophical successor.

Reads the conclusion that he is dragging the brand into hatred and bigotry and that a large group of developers are ready to fork the tech stack and start over with Bitcoin's principles.

Responds that an authoritarianism has crept into politics where disagreeing makes you a Nazi, and that there is a difference between disagreeing with someone and using government to punish them.

Most people do not care about the culture war and would not criminalize lifestyles, and defends Jordan Peterson as a principled, mostly harmless guy who turned bitter from being attacked.

Peterson spent 30 years researching communism and the Soviet mastery over language, so he reacted to people changing language with a criminal component, becoming a hero to some and an alt-right icon to others.

Elon Musk as an industrialist and one of the world's richest men who built Tesla and SpaceX, anchors controlling automobiles, robotics, AI, and batteries via gigafactories and the largest US rocket-engine production.

People did not care until Musk became political and bought Twitter, and that he is a bit of a narcissist without much technical depth, unable to answer an engineer's technical question in a Twitter space.

Contrasts himself as disengaged from Cardano engineering but informed enough to navigate questions, unlike Musk getting into an unforced Twitter debate at his level.

Musk controls the discourse of hundreds of millions, valuable to the industry, since it is not alt-right to say COVID probably leaked from a lab, now a credible theory per the Department of Energy and FBI.

Argues it is not alt-right to point out China's concentration camps or that Iran kills gay people, which the LGBT movement's respect-for-all principle should address.

Says what bothers him is open letters claiming contingent staking is crammed down your throat when nothing will be done without a community vote, and it is a teachable moment for a first major debate.

Names the authoritarian element that disagreeing with the one accepted worldview brands you an evil alt-right movement, and insists it is not alt-right to want the free speech social media censors.

Posting a COVID-lab-origin belief in April 2020 would lose your Facebook or LinkedIn, that some things reported on the left as fact later were not, and that questioning vaccine passports is not alt-right.

As a public figure he represents a free society valuing freedom of opinion, association, and expression as a basic human right, and gets angry when small unelected groups de-platform dissenters.

Disagrees when people arbitrarily change definitions, creating social friction, and says the point of blockchain is inclusive accountability where everyone plays by the same verifiable rules.

Argues the open letters to him project the author's own authoritarianism and fears since they would do the same in power, and frames CIP 1694, the constitution, and the MBO as teachable moments where everything is up for grabs.

Argues a smart person entertains ideas they disagree with and finds merit, since bucketing people as absolutely evil or good by politics makes everyone evil, as no one is sinless.

Calls Musk's multi-planetary-species idea good since nuclear war, gain-of-function, or AI could wipe out Earth, and challenges critics that they have no SpaceX because it is not easy, as NASA and China show.

The Falcon 9 landed itself and SpaceX sent astronauts to the ISS by private hands, and that while you can credit the engineers, SpaceX would not exist without Musk, a nuanced person despite the pedo-diver lawsuit.

Governance only works if you depersonalize, recognize it is about the community not the individual, and see the good, bad, and ugly, and that accusing him of cramming contingent staking ignores that the debate drew over 2,000 to a Twitter space and will be a CIP voted on.

Accepts a real possibility that the community tells IO to move in a different direction and gives Cardano to someone else, which is its right in an open protocol, since to have power means you can lose it and what you do in failure matters more.

The letter's author is a victim of programming and propaganda, like Clockwork Orange, designed to make you subservient to an ideology and surrender your agency, which happens on left, right, and center.

Credits being homeschooled and growing up in Hawaii on 20-year-behind TV with letting him skip cultural programming and think for himself, and says you must build systems that force people out of that model.

Build systems that steel-man arguments, use the scientific method and facts, force inclusive accountability, and reward process over the loudest, which IO tried via the academic peer-review process.

Every paper's PhDs are no better than the least among the community until the paper passes a process, and that ego-subservient process must enter CIP 1694, the MBO, and the constitution so nothing passes without fact-based discussion.

Warns otherwise Cardano becomes a demagogic abomination endowing power to the few, and that Bitcoin's anarchy is not the solution since it accomplishes few things by design and cannot step out of its pond.

On dialing back expressiveness, notes Sebastian pointed out his original white paper wanted a simple Turing-incomplete scripting language, but innovation added expressiveness that changed Plutus's philosophy so everyone wants a feature.

Contingent staking is already here via Plutus, the only difference being layer 1 versus layer 2, so removing it would mean dialing Plutus back, which is the point of a fact-based conversation.

As custodians you inherit these decisions like the Constitution's authors turned it over to each generation hoping the original intent shines through, which sometimes led to conflict and civil war.

Agrees with the letter on Satoshi's anonymity, wishing Cardano had it, but says you only get to do that once and leadership sometimes requires the courage to step out since governments are led by people.

Argues America is only as good as its leaders today, not the icons of the past, and similarly Cardano is only as good as its leaders, so an anonymous founder gives no benefit 20 to 30 years out as the guard changes.

Government has a designed slowness because complex ideas take time to grow comfortable with, and that changing the protocol puts all 12 billion dollars of collective value up for grabs each time.

Every CIP adds to or detracts from the economic, brand, and philosophy pool, so larger ecosystems naturally slow down to protect what exists, which is why people push innovation at the edges via layer 2 and side chains.

Like the free market a thousand experiments with 900 failures produce the successes that build Microsoft, Facebook, and GE while the failures inform the next ones, a mindset Cardano must adopt.

Closes that it will be a long, tough year with more open letters and vitriol, that you know you are doing it right when you have upset everyone a little, and that it is the work of his career.