@Cardano_Power@IOHK_Charles “The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground…Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights…What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?” (Kundera - “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”)
I bought Ada in 2020 and all the way through the bull run, even after ATH. Bought NFTs, supported projects, rarely sold anything Cardano related to this day.
I cashed out my life savings in 2023, during the last bear lows, and put most of it in to Cardano.
I have worked to build in this ecosystem without a salary for 3 years now.
I have put my own ADA up for payrolls to ensure our employees get paid.
I have sacrificed everything to be here. I have always believed in Cardano. I have shown up every single day for the last 5 years.
That’s why I won’t sit here quietly and watch it all burn down around me. That’s why I won’t sit around and watch the people who have lived comfortably, making none of the sacrifices I did, continue to strong arm governance because their payday is running out.
Yet I see dReps and CEOs attacking the community for how they vote. Is this really what we signed up for?
Governance was supposed to be our chance as a community to have a real voice and it’s being completely diminished by propaganda and bullies. Attacking people on the timeline because of how they voted is just pathetic and not the governance I signed up for I helped conceive.
The system was finally showing signs of strength, pushing back against expenditures, forcing accountability from previous years, and ushering in a new era of Cardano, where the community fully decides.
Unfortunately that is clearly not the reality. A few dReps hold all the power, most have their hands in or around the FEs. It’s ok. I am not as mad at the centralization of voting power. I’m mad because we aren’t being listened to.
Asking for basic stuff to make an educated decision, or have fiscal clarity, is not FUD, it’s called being responsible.
We should hold everyone equally accountable at this point. There should be no varying standards. And I mean this socially as well.
I hope people really take a long look at where we are, how we got here, and what’s currently going on before they continue to vote. We have about half the NCL left, let’s make sure to use it extremely wisely. We can’t afford to miss.
Happy Sunday!
To be honest and frank, I thought you would be secretly happy if at least a few of the IO proposals didn't get funding. Because it would mean the governance system you had helped design and bring to fruition was actually working and you really were "Charles the Community Member" versus the king/CEO of Cardano.
Project Catalyst predicted precisely this friction for the past 5-6 years. All of us who had to go and compete for scarce resources have, in our turn, been called all sorts of names from scammer to grifter to receiving threats of violence and death. Most of us truly believe the things we were proposing would meaningfully improve the Cardano ecosystem. Most of us were wrong most of the time. Probably all of us have had to make the hard decision to let contractors and employees go when we could no longer afford them.
We've all also invested heavily of our time, energy, and personal savings because we believe in the mission; even if the numbers are orders of magnitude different, the relative scale of impact remains.
A lot of people are in an austerity mindset right now because many of us have been already stretched thin and doing our best to make it work and clearly every year will remain a competition for a finite resource.
But, we're all still here. That can't mean nothing. We never started down this path thinking it would be easy.
Also, I apologize for responding in such a way to this clip taken out of context. I have great respect for you and the things you've built here and elsewhere. I hope you and IO remain as valued contributors to the Cardano ecosystem for many years to come.
Not every no vote is a "No to Charles" or "No to IOG", it could very well be just a not right now.
I'll promise to try and do better with my relatively small platform. But I won't stop asking critical questions when I think they're warranted, I'll just try to be less adversarial in my tone and open to hear both sides of the argument.
@ItsDave_ADA i salute and support your persistence, and hope you won’t get filled with hatred against the parties you feel have acted unjustly toward you; all the best to you and your family!
My aim as a DRep has always been clear in its description:
“Mainly to be a direct voter. Making it public as some have expressed a desire to delegate their voting power.”
Which is why I never advertised it.
But for a while now, I've felt that I can no longer think and vote objectively about proposals as I have too many @nftcdn_io customers and other projects connected in some way to some proposals, which clouds my judgment, consciously or not.
And I don't want my biases to affect delegated votes.
I have therefore decided to retire as a DRep and focus on my SPO and technical roles.
If you are part of the few delegated to me, please redelegate to someone who you believe will be able to evaluate the proposals as objectively as possible.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
@SlimFlexington@IOHK_Charles he's in a corner and 'should' do what he can to save face, at some point we need to give him a graceful exit and hope he takes it... we dont want war, its best we give him more grace than he has given us...
A note to the Cardano community. This one is not about IO's proposals. It is about a pattern - and why it matters for every person in this ecosystem, not just me.
First, a fact:
Charles Hoskinson has blocked me on X.
I can handle that and still see his posts about me. But I cannot reply to them. He can address me, characterise me, and dismiss me in front of his audience - in a venue where I am structurally unable to respond.
Hold that thought. We will come back to it.
There is a well-documented behavioural pattern called DARVO.
It stands for: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.
It was named by researcher Jennifer Freyd to describe how people in positions of power respond when they are held accountable. It is not a personality diagnosis. It is a description of a sequence of actions. Anyone can do it. The question is only ever: do the actions fit the pattern?
Here is the pattern, step by step, against the public record.
DENY.
A DRep (@NaVi_GaT0R) raised a legitimate governance question: should DReps with paid IO-linked roles abstain on IO's treasury proposals due to conflict of interest?
Instead of engaging the question, it was denied as illegitimate - reframed as "bullying ambassadors," "spite," "objectively wrong." The substance was never answered. It was disqualified.
ATTACK.
What followed was not a rebuttal. It was a campaign.
Public posts to a 1M+ follower account. IO employees and IO-aligned contractors amplifying. Within 24 hours, IAG was down 32%. Real holders - who are also ADA holders - lost real money.
The person who asked the question was attacked. The question still went unanswered.
REVERSE VICTIM AND OFFENDER.
This is the core of DARVO, and the most important part to understand.
The person who raised a question becomes recast as the aggressor. The most powerful party in the dispute becomes recast as the victim defending the vulnerable.
Watch it happen:
- A DRep asks a question → he is called a bully.
- The largest stakeholder in the ecosystem → becomes the defender of "his ambassadors."
- A governance process working as designed → becomes an "attack" that must be punished.
The offender and the victim are swapped. The audience is handed a story in which scrutiny is aggression and the powerful party is the wronged one.
Now back to the block.
I have been blocked. He can post about me; I cannot answer. When someone said I was "obsessed with Charles," his reply was not an argument. It was: "He's got CDS. It's incurable. We have to just let him go."
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, look at what "CDS" literally means.
CDS - Cognitive Dysfunction Syndrome - is a veterinary diagnosis. It is the medical term for age-related dementia in dogs and cats: irreversible brain deterioration, disorientation, the decline of an animal's mind. It is the condition a vet identifies when a pet's brain is failing and will not recover.
That is the term that was applied to me - a human being, a sitting DRep - alongside the words "incurable" and "we have to just let him go."
Put plainly: a person raising sourced governance concerns was described in the language a veterinarian uses for a deteriorating animal that the owner should put down.
You do not have to take my word for what that is. Read the words themselves and decide what kind of statement it is, and what kind of person makes it about someone who asked a question.
And notice what the insult does not contain. Not one fact disputed. Not one source challenged. Not one link rebutted. The "diagnosis" exists precisely so that none of that is necessary - if the questioner is sick, the questions never have to be answered.
For a community that values reasoned governance, that should be the opposite of persuasive. When someone meets sourced concerns with a fake diagnosis instead of a counter-argument, it usually means there is no counter-argument - only a need to make the questioner go away.
That is the pattern completing itself in real time: deny the substance, attack the person, reverse the roles, and now - silence the channel so the person cannot respond at all.
Why this matters for you, even if you have never heard of me or Iagon:
This is no longer about one project or one DRep. It is about the operating rule it establishes.
If raising a governance question gets you publicly attacked, financially damaged, recast as the villain, and then silenced - then every project, every DRep, every ambassador watching learns the same lesson: do not ask. Do not vote against the slate. Do not exercise the rights the Constitution gave you.
A governance system only works if people can use it without being destroyed for using it.
I am not asking you to agree with my vote. I am not asking you to dislike anyone. I am asking you to look at the sequence - deny, attack, reverse, silence - and decide for yourself whether it is healthy for a network that calls itself decentralised.
I will keep voting my conscience as a DRep. That is the job. I will keep sourcing every claim I make. And I will not stop raising questions because the answer to a question was an insult.
Cardano does not belong to any one person. It belongs to all of us.
That is worth guarding.✅🦾❤️
This is the direct side effect of not being forced to create a revenue positive business and surviving off grants/treasury/ICO.
All 3 FEs were funded well enough to get to the point of real revenue creation, yet here we are in our second round of community governance, with our FEs asking for the entire budget.
No one else is getting a fair stab at it. Look at where the ecosystem is. Who else should we blame???????
This is just downright disrespectful to all the people who have been fighting tooth and nail to survive in this ecosystem.
I don't hate the FE's, let me be clear, but there is a major lack of accountability.
Money talks, and it's screaming at me right now.