In a new episode of the Keiser Report, guest Dhruv Bansal, the ‘Carl Sagan of Bitcoin’, zooms out to analyze how the world’s leading cryptocurrency can transform society and our economy here on Earth while its network extends throughout the solar system to places like Mars.
Bansal, a physicist who co-founded Unchained Capital, which makes cash loans to long-term crypto holders, agrees with host Max Keiser that Bitcoin, with a computer network that spans the globe, is like “a hungry entity” looking for new avenues to expand and settle.
Bansal starts with the notion that Bitcoin could survive for hundreds of years and could exist while humanity starts colonizing other planets. Before outer space, however, it has to continue its growth here.
“[Bitcoin] reacts. In that way, it’s alive. It has a certain aspect of homeostasis built into it. It rebalances itself based on global efforts by billions of humans, well, maybe millions of us who actually know about it today. So in that sense it’s reactive. I don’t know if it’s alive yet, or that it ever would be, or that that would even be an advantage.
But I do see it lifting us up in very many ways. Maybe it helps push us towards cyborgs that are hashing all the time as they think and walk around. Or maybe it just incentivizes us to go get energy cheaper and faster and better than we’ve ever had to before. Because today, if you were to unlock a big supply of energy in some location, what could you do with it?
You need a market to sell that energy in. Bitcoin is this ever increasing floor of a market. No matter where you harvest the energy, if you can burn it by mining Bitcoin, you can get revenue from that. So if there’s energy in space that we’re not harvesting, we could collect it and turn it into Bitcoin. If there are nuclear power plants that we could invest in to build, that might be something we decide to do because it helps us get Bitcoin…
It can be green. I think Bitcoin acts and it forces us as an ecosystem to go collect energy in the most efficient ways we can. There’s a lot of head room in renewables and alternative energy sources because we haven’t had investment to go out and get those, as much as Bitcoin is prompting us to finally do.”
Keiser says Bitcoin has many of the qualities people ascribe to a living organism.
Says Bansal,
“Or maybe the organism is Bitcoin, the miners, the users, the society it’s embedded in. And the thousand-year-long millennia story of Bitcoin is the expansion of that organism to new locations in space to harvest new amounts of energy.”
Keiser theorizes that Bitcoin is ultimately a hack designed to reclaim society and set it back on a much better course.
“Whatever block number it is, we’re going to take a different angle toward life and escape our destiny as it is right now — of death.”
