Charles Hoskinson: Satoshi did an amazing thing, but nobody developed his idea about Bitcoin

Charles Hoskinson is best known as the co-founder of Ethereum and IOHK, where he leads the research work on Cardano cryptocurrency (ADA). However, back in 2013, he became one chairman of the education committee of the Bitcoin Foundation, and also founded a research team on cryptocurrency issues.

In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Hoskinson said that he still considers Bitcoin as a series of experiments aimed at implementing two key concepts.

“Can we achieve a decentralized form of transferring values ​​or a kind of proto-money?” Can we replace the central organization that issues and provides tokens with something like a secure registry? ” Hoskinson asks today.

According to him, in the early stages of the existence of cryptocurrency, it was not clear whether all of this will survive or not.

“In fact, it took several years to come to what we know and love as Bitcoin today. He had a huge volatility in price, trading volumes were under a thousand dollars a day, and the hashrate jumped up or down. Someone could say that he no longer wants to mine, turn off his computer, and the network lost 30% of the hashrate, ”Hoskinson recalls.

According to him, the changes came in 2013, when Bitcoin capitalization reached one billion dollars and people began to take it all seriously. It was then that a large number of people entered the industry, after which it became clear that Bitcoin would not go anywhere.

Nevertheless, the experiment with Bitcoin continues, I am convinced Hoskinson, and not all the questions posed were answered.

“At that moment there were a lot of questions that should be analyzed very carefully. We needed to say: “Well, the concept is wonderful, but now let's do everything as it should. It is precisely the fact that no one has bothered to properly solve these problems that disappoints me the most, ”he says.

As an example of not being sufficiently analyzed, Hoskinson leads UTXO wallets created by Satoshi Nakamoto about nine years ago.

“There were other things like network stacks or questions about what you need to sacrifice when changing the protocol, for example when moving from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. How to avoid things like the attack of Sybil and the like? ”

According to him, no one has drawn conclusions from all these lessons. Moreover, today Bitcoin itself is increasingly inclined to centralization.

“If you look at the hashrate and who controls it, then in reality only 10% of the participants truly own the facilities. How can this be called decentralization? Satoshi did an absolutely amazing thing worthy of the Tyuring Prize, but no one developed his idea. Instead, everyone rushed to use it [Bitcoin] as it is. And as for Ethereum, we have kept all the same mistakes and flaws related to economic issues, proof-of-work, etc., ”said the head of IOHK.

Charles Hoskinson also criticized the so-called Bitcoin maximalists and the inherent, in his view, lack of understanding of economic processes. While Bitcoin-Maximalists believe that Bitcoin is the limit of everything, that this is the most important money, he tells the story that happened to him in 2014 in Toronto at one of the conferences. There he met the current director of information security at Shapeshift, Mike Perkin, and together they decided to go on a barbecue.

“We went to some place to hell for a bite, and here we are brought the bill. And then Mike says: “I think that Bitcoin will grow in price, so I will not pay them, I’d rather use my credit card.” Then it became clear to me that this is not money. This is a product, it is a means of preserving values. ”

Hoskinson did not miss the opportunity to criticize the ICO, but suggested that the best projects would survive.

“Users threw out money for everything and many projects did not deserve it … It was quite obvious that ICO-mania was counterproductive and that markets would collapse. Now that this has happened, people can start thinking more rationally, and all the bad will be cleaned up. Things with good potential, they will return to their historical heights and will be useful for humanity, ” he added.

Recall that at the beginning of the year Hoskinson stated that the Cardano project he had created had every chance of getting around both Bitcoin and Ethereum in competition.