Hey all,
My apologies for the late action on the influx of ticket selling on the subreddit. I've gone and removed a bunch of the existing posts and set up an automod rule that will hopefully catch and remove these posts before you see them.
Please continue to report and down vote these posts if you see them. I don't have a ton of time to be actively monitoring the sub, but I promise I'll remove them when I see them.
I've been a Charles fan since 2017. I've admired his vision, what he stands for, and the community he's built around Cardano. What really drew me in was the mission: banking the unbanked, giving power back to the people. I invested based on those principles, and I still believe in them.
That said, something in Charles's video today gave me pause. When he mentioned that one of his reasons for building Cardano was to be loved and liked, I found myself sitting with that for a while. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting that; it's deeply human. But it made me wonder about the relationship between that desire and the mission itself. Does the motivation behind a belief change the belief? If someone champions ethical principles partly because those principles earn them respect and affection, does that make the principles less genuine? I honestly don't know the answer. But it's a question I'm now turning over.
When Charles talks about empathy being critical to governance, or why a move to Discord makes sense, I find myself wondering whether that comes from a place of wanting to foster community or from his desire to be approached with empathy. Perhaps I need to stop thinking about it binarily. There’s no reason it can’t be both.
And to be fair, he has been torn apart by people unfairly, in my opinion. I believe that Twitter is a toxic place and exists to create drama for engagement. While I’ve never been in his position, I feel like I can understand why it’s taken such a toll on him. It makes sense that he’s hurt and he wants to create a space where the feedback is positive or, at the very least, constructive.
I want to be clear: I'm not accusing him of bad faith. These are just the questions and thoughts that surfaced for me. What I do find myself wondering, more broadly, is where the tangible impact is. Is there someone who was genuinely unbanked and now has access because of Cardano? Someone who feels meaningfully more autonomous because of it? I'd love to see those stories, because I think they'd go a long way toward grounding the mission in something concrete.
We keep talking about growth but what are we growing? We’re trending towards metrics like TVL and all that to prove that the chain is active, but I don’t care about those things. Where are the metrics for % of the overall population free of government tyranny? Is it enough to say that using Cardano will result in the outcome of financial autonomy? How can I know that or believe in that without actually seeing that happen for someone?
I'm still here. I still want Cardano to be what Charles envisions. I just want to shift the focus from him to the people that Cardano is actually helping.