- Charles Hoskinson has rejected Stephen Diehl’s accusations that the crypto industry and specifically Cardano is a fraud.
- Diehl accuses Hoskinson and IOHK of exploiting Haskell’s reputation to defraud retail investors and thus push the token price.
In a new video Charles Hoskinson has reacted to an article published yesterday by Stephen Diehl, in which the renowned computer scientist accuses the crypto community of being a big fraud industry that takes advantage of Haskell’s reputation to “plunder” retail investors. In the article “The Haskell Elephant in the Room” Diehl even goes so far as to say that software is becoming an instrument of right-wing extremism. Among other things Diehl wrote:
Every day retail investors are being enticed by the promise of easy returns for nothing. They are fleeced by this massive industry that is no longer being run by slick haired “Wolf of Wall Street” characters, but by software engineers like you and me. […]
In this new era the Haskell community itself has simply become a tool to buy legitimacy and pump token values. The reputation of our community is now used to defraud the public and convince non-technical users of the soundness of an utterly unsound investment.
Hoskinson explained his outrage at the article and said that Diehl even contacted employees of IOHK to inform them that they were involved in a Ponzi scheme as part of the work on Cardano. Hoskinson vehemently denied this accusation, however. As Hoskinson explained emotionally, Cardano has nothing to do with fraudulent ICOs, since Cardano is not about making money with licenses. Instead, it is an open source project that is open to everyone.
I have dedicated my live to give millions of people economic identity. To call that a scam is reprehensible, and mail my employees and tell them they are participating in a scam is a disgusting conduct. [Regarding partnered companies] […] to say that they are taking corrupt money is also reprehensible.
Cardano and the entire crypto industry are at the forefront of a financial revolution that, as Hoskinson explained, Diehl does not to understand:
A global conversation about the fundamental reinvention of money is underway. How regulation should work, how money should work, how property rights should work, how online voting should work, the nature of privacy and how much we should have, how to build a different kind of data economy instead of a surveillance economy. And the technology that our industry is building is at the forefront of this discussion. This is not fraud.
As Hoskinson further explored, there are two possibilities for the future financial industry. Either the future will be created by the open source community or it will be decided by people “we’ve never met, in darkrooms”. The crypto industry is about giving people back their financial freedom and self-determination over their lives, Hoskinson said. This also has nothing to do with right-wing extremism, as Diehl claims.
Hoskinson was also outraged to claim that his employees are taking “dirty money” to develop open source technology that benefits humanity.
For some reasons he does not seem to complain that [his]firms take lots of money from the United States Department of Defence, US military, certainly that institution has some blood on his hands and crimes it has committed in the past, that’s okay. But people who want to give people economic identity and liberate people, that’s apparently wrong because there are some bad actors in our industry.
As in the past, Hoskinson also sharply criticized the legacy banking system, which has abandoned all transparency and guidelines and is now only working for itself and its profits:
And when we have the audacity as an industry to recognize that the legacy industry has become ineffective and corrupt and exclusive […] living from bailout to bailout, failing every 10 years and having to have the American people, the European people an others come together and basically pay for excesses of these industries and when we have the audacity that perhaps printing 6 trillion dollars in the United States out of thin air is morally wrong. That we should have money with principles, that’s a Ponzi scheme?