Cardano founder responds to accusations of alt-right association

After an anonymous member of the Cardano (ADA) community posted an ‘open letter’ on social media to Charles Hoskinson, heavily criticizing him over his public views, the Cardano network founder has decided to respond to these accusations.

Specifically, Hoskinson responded to a post by the Reddit user known as demesisx, in which the said user accused Hoskinson of associating with “alt-right hate group personalities like Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk,” and which was published on the social media platform on February 27.

Details of the open letter

As the user, signed as ‘a huge Cardano fanboi that has had enough,’ writes:

“Can you please stop associating your best-in-class, DECENTRALIZED, OPEN SOURCE technology with alt-right hate group personalities like Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk?”

The user also accused Hoskinson of “the dictatorial and disingenuous way that contingent staking is being foisted upon us,” and that “many of us feel that you are enthusiastically dragging [the Cardano] brand into association with hatred bigotry, and partisanship,” and “am/are increasingly embarrassed by our associations with the alt-right.”

Finally, the user also added that this group of unsatisfied community members was “VERY ready to fork the beautiful, elegant tech stack that Cardano rests upon and start from scratch with a whole new crypto with Bitcoin’s principles of decentralization intrinsically protected.”

Hoskinson’s response

Commenting on the letter, the Cardano founder criticized involving “the philosophy of random people like Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk who have literally nothing to do with Cardano, and it’s so serious that we’re about ready to fork the protocol.”

As he highlighted:

“The vast majority of people don’t care at all about the culture war, whether they’re left-wing or right-wing,” defending Peterson as “just paranoid about the use of language.”

According to him, Peterson “started seeing that certain people were changing language, and he was deeply uncomfortable with it because they said, ‘if you don’t get along with language, there’s a criminal component now,’ and that triggered him.”

As for Musk, he called him “a very powerful person” who “has a huge amount of influence and (…) is in a position where he has the ability to control the discourse of hundreds of millions of people, and that’s valuable to our industry,” adding that:

“Let’s be clear here, it is not alt-right to point out that Covid probably leaked from a lab or at least that it should be an equally considered theory to the natural origin. (…) It’s not alt-right to point out that China has concentration camps, millions of people are in them, and that we should do something about that as a society.”

On staking and anonymity

Hoksinson also accused the demesisx of using strawman arguments amid fears of the Cardano community voting in favor of contingent staking, which he said, “has not even been written as a SIP,” and that “it’s already been decided by the community that nothing will be done without a vote by the community.”

However, he agreed with the letter’s author on the anonymity of Satoshi Nakamoto:

“He did it right, and I so thoroughly wish every single day that Cardano could have a similar story to it and it would be better off for that. Unfortunately, you only get to do that once.”

However, “if your only intent is to set up a system that does one thing, you can be Satoshi, and you can do that quite well, but if your intent is to build something that generation after generation is going to take custodianship and stewardship of, it’s a living breathing organism that’s going to change even if the founder stays anonymous.”

As a reminder, Hoskinson has met a lot of criticism over his contingent staking proposal, which he believes would allow the ecosystem to meet regulatory requirements. He has retorted to these claims by asserting they misunderstood a basic concept, which has brought him and the community even more criticism.

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