Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano (ADA), a decentralized public blockchain network for building smart contract-based applications, recently noted that the US national debt has now surpassed $23 trillion and that he thinks American leadership is becoming “more and more incompetent.”

He added that “the global financial markets are not healthy” and that “we have all these toxic derivatives floating around and inflationary policies.”

“Nobody actually cares to solve real problems,” Hoskinson argued. The crypto professional’s comments came during his keynote address at the TOKEN2049 conference held in Hong Kong (between March 13th – 14th, 2019).

Hoskinson: Governments And Big Corporations Cannot Solve The Current Financial Problems

Due to the mismanagement of economic policies, Hoskinson believes we’re again “going to have some difficult financial times ahead.” And, “if every time the collapses get 10x larger than the prior one, you can imagine where we’re going to be at,” the tech entrepreneur said. He also stated that governments and big corporations cannot solve the current financial problems.

It’s A “Magical Open-Source Movement”

However, individuals are capable of finding a solution to society’s economic challenges, Hoskinson argued. “At the end of the day, what’s so magical about the technology we build, what’s so magical about this movement is it’s mostly open-source. We share ideas. If Justin comes up with something, I can take it. And, if we come up with something, he can take it. If the NEO guys come up with something, it’s free game. Same for Ethereum, same for Cardano.”

He continued:

And, it works just this way in science. I remember when we first started publishing papers … [and now,] since then we’ve published 40. More than 20 have gone through peer review at major conferences … and in just those few years, I’ve watched from just a few papers presented, to dozens, to eventually dedicated tracks, to having a conversation of skepticism and “okay, good for you, please move on” to “this is really interesting, I’d love to work with you, I’d love to collaborate.”

According to Hoskinson, this shows that the world’s science community is, for the most part, “composable and open.” Moreover, the Ethereum co-founder believes “the code [itself] is composable and open and what we have is a Darwinian environment of thousands of ideas all competing with high financial stakes.”

“We Can Have A System That’s Controlled By You”

He added:

At the same time, we have a legacy system that’s not doing well and we can see that. [Eventually,] these things are going to collide … the outcome of that is still a bit murky to me [because] at the end of the day, we don’t have to have an open, fair, and decentralized system. We can have centralized, hierarchical, digital money. We can have social credit. We can have a system where an actor can shut off the access to your identity, to your money. [And also] prevent you from traveling. Or, we can have a system that’s controlled by you.

Hoskinson further noted:

There’s no universal law that says society should work one way or the other way. It’s ultimately your decision. Just like there’s no universal law that we should have kings versus presidents versus committees versus members of parliament. These are decisions we make. And, what our space is doing is it’s a gigantic experimental petri dish where we’re [learning] in real-time, how to do these things.

Going on to share what he’s currently doing in Ethiopia, Hoskinson said he had helped several people learn how to program in the Haskell programming language (which is used to build software programs on the Cardano platform). IOHK, the non-profit Hoskinson works with, will be working on various blockchain-based supply chain management projects with the Ethiopian government. The director at the Bitcoin Education project also revealed he is involved in developing distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based identity solutions