“The reason Bitcoin exists is we had a divorce from the legacy financial system after 2008—and it was not a good divorce,” he said. “Asset-backed stablecoins that are centralized are like having to give your kids to your ex for the weekend. I hate the centralization of them […] the banking industry is leaking its way back into crypto, putting all the things we tried to get away from right back in.”
Hoskinson next turned to tokenized real-world assets—property, intellectual-property rights, “hard and soft assets”—arguing that Bitcoiners will demand access without relinquishing their coins. The solution, he said, lies in non-custodial lending protocols that treat BTC as pristine collateral: “Figure out lending protocols where they can lend out, get some stablecoin, do something, participate, get a yield, get the yield back in Bitcoin, get their Bitcoin back. There’s a path there.”
In such an environment, long-time holders would rather lever their coins than incur capital-gains tax: “If you’re that 10,000 BTC person who bought under a dollar […] you really do not want to divest at $120,000 and pay that tax bill. You’d much rather lend it—tax-neutral—get a yield, pay taxes on that yield, and live off Bitcoin as it appreciates.”
Hoskinson’s monetary critique was unabashedly libertarian. Citing Ron Paul as an early influence, he contrasted BTC’s engineered scarcity with the erosion of dollar purchasing power: “Our government’s deteriorating [savings] by 8 to 10% per fucking year. It is the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history to say we should tolerate that […] Bitcoin is the first hard money of my lifetime. We just need to clean a few of the edges up—and that’s what Bitcoin DeFi is doing for all of us.”
At press time, BTC traded at $104,960.
