After Cardano (ADA) founder Charles Hoskinson confirmed rumors that he was considering purchasing cryptocurrency and blockchain-focused news portal CoinDesk, his interest was met with some rather harsh criticism, to which he decided to respond.
Indeed, hitting back at a piece written by Protos’s Cas Piancey, titled ‘Opinion: Charles Hoskinson would be the worst thing to happen to CoinDesk,’ Hoskinson explained his intention to overhaul journalism by changing the incentive structure, in a video streamed on January 26.
According to him, the main problem is that there is a lack of depth, peer review, accuracy, accountability, and consequences for lying over political or monetary reasons:
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“The dirty secret of journalism is things are written not because they’re true, (…) or they’re trying to give you, the reader, an objective reality. Things are written to make money. That’s what corporate media does (…). Everything about this process of journalism is about money now.”
Veracity bonds
To address this issue, the Cardano founder has suggested “aligning the concept of prediction markets to an outlet” in the form of ‘veracity bonds,’ which would introduce a financial recourse for inaccurate journalism and which was criticized by Piancey as ‘ludicrous.’
“Veracity bond with a prediction market model says that if you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar, you actually lose money, and, as a reader, I get to know how serious you are. Why is that a terrible idea to introduce that?”
To support his argument, Hoskinson drew attention to the accepted concept of fact-checkers, with whom everyone is fine “as long as they politically agree with us,” but “when they’re wrong, there’s no recourse.” On the other hand, he says, “we’re not okay with economic incentives for the veracity of an article,” calling it the “elitism of journalism.”
Critics are just scared?
Finally, further calling out the critics for being afraid of the change and putting money on the table for the things that they write and say because they could be proven wrong, the entrepreneur also voiced his opinion that attacks on him prove that he is right:
“That’s when you know you’re on the right road because people get real scared real quickly when you want to change things for the better because they make money for the worse – that simple.”
As a reminder, Hoskinson stated that the media generally had an agenda, in a video streamed on January 20, at the same time confirming he was indeed interested in buying CoinDesk to reshape its current model into a blend of a news and community platform.
In response to the possibility of this acquisition, Piancey wrote the opinion piece in which he referred to Hoskinson as “a new cryptocurrency oligarch to replace Barry Silbert” and “some rich guy” who “thinks he’d bring a better legacy to the outlet,” but whose ideas don’t “do anything to fundamentally ‘fix’ journalism.”
Featured image via C.Hoskinson YouTube
Watch the entire video below:
