Overview
Charles Hoskinson Blog is a personal essay archive that lets readers follow how a crypto founder argued through the industry's early disputes in his own words. The essays are long, first-person, and unedited by any publication. It is an archive rather than an active blog: years pass between entries.
The author is Charles Hoskinson, who founded Input Output, the engineering company behind Cardano1, and who also co-founded Ethereum2. The blog runs on Blogger and holds the posts, each with its reader comment thread, plus a short author profile box and a year-by-year archive list. Its own self-applied title is "Thoughts from Charles"3.
Key Features
- Primary-source founder writing. The essays are first-person arguments, and one on protocol design answers a former business partner's criticisms while conceding its author "could be misguided or stuck in my ways"4.
- A record of crypto's formative arguments. Separate essays work through the 2016 hack of The DAO (an Ethereum-based pool of investor money for funding projects)5, the Tezos governance dispute6, Ethereum Classic7, IOTA8, and Lisk9, written while the outcomes were still unsettled.
- Design reasoning you can check. The protocol-design essays link out to academic cryptography papers and public code repositories, so the arguments can be traced back to their sources rather than taken on trust4.
- Two Cardano progress essays. "A Crypto on the Edge of Forever" looks back on the project's 2017 progress10, and "A Brief Update on Cardano" sets out how its author framed the project's direction and priorities for a general audience11.
- Original comment threads intact. Each post keeps the reader discussion it drew on publication, which shows the pushback the arguments attracted.
What to Expect
You land on a plain Blogger page with posts stacked newest first and almost no navigation. There is no about page, no search, no tag index, and no contact form. You either scroll, or use the year-by-year archive list in the sidebar to jump to a period.
Expect length. These are essays rather than updates, and most run past a thousand words4. The tone is direct and frequently combative, especially in the pieces answering critics or rival projects. Readers who prefer short summaries will find the format demanding.
The subject matter splits three ways. There is protocol and cryptography writing pitched at readers who already follow the technical debates. There is commentary on specific projects and incidents from crypto's early years. And there is personal writing, which includes an account of a silent meditation retreat and a piece of short fiction12. Anyone arriving expecting Cardano release notes or ecosystem announcements will not find them here.
For anything current, look elsewhere. The author's ongoing commentary runs on X and YouTube, and Cardano project announcements live on official channels and on the ecosystem's Cardano news sites. This blog is best treated as a primary source for how its author thought about the problems he was working on, rather than as a way to keep up with them.
