WBD322 Audio Transcription

WBD322 - Dhruv Bansal

Interview date: Wednesday 17th March

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Dhruv Bansal. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to Unchained Capital co-founder Dhruv Bansal. We discuss his Bitcoin Astronomy series of articles, the prospects of Bitcoin as an interplanetary currency, SpaceX, colonisation of other planets, and hyperbitcoinisation.

“We can build one currency for our entire fucking planet, that’s an OK thing, that’s still an admirable goal. We don’t have to feel, as bitcoiners, that we somehow failed if that first currency can’t be used on every planet of the cosmos.”

— Dhruv Bansal

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Dhruv, man, how are you doing?

Dhruv Bansal: Oh, I'm doing great, Peter.

Peter McCormack: I'm very excited about this show as you know.  The moment I read that first part of your Bitcoin Astronomy series, I was like, "I've got to make this show; I've got to talk about this show", because I don't know, man.  The first part, well the whole series has blown me away, but the first part especially.  And I'm going to say, if anyone's listening, I know everyone won't do this, but I do recommend, jump in the show notes and at least read part 1, or go and listen to Guy Swann narrate it before you get into this interview.

But firstly, I have to ask, where did this come from; why did you attack this subject?

Dhruv Bansal: I think it's interesting for me for a variety of reasons.  I'm a sci-fi nerd; I'm a physicist originally by training; it's fun for me to contemplate these kinds of esoteric aspects of Bitcoin; I think I'm a problem-solver and a technologist and that also makes it fun.  So, that's the best answer; it's fun to think about these things and that's why I do it. 

But, I would say I can try to rationalise it with some other, better reasons that I discovered in the process, and one is that, and this is a classic physics thing; when you extremise one variable, you can simplify the problem and you can maybe understand the core thing better.  Physicists are famous for considering perhaps unrealistic, idealised, extreme scenarios to help them as intuition comes, we sometimes say, to understand a problem space better.

For me, this idea of considering Bitcoin, or blockchains more generally, in space far, far apart macroscopically, many minutes or hours in terms of light travel time apart, it's a very extreme scenario, but it helps expose some of the underlying issues that a blockchain has to solve around consensus and communication, making sure all the entire peer-to-peer network is seeing the same mempool, and so on.  So, that's fun and that helps me understand Bitcoin right now, here, today a little bit more, so that's exciting.

Then, I think this is something that Phil Geiger, one of my friends in college that I work with at Unchained, I think his assertion is that, there are perhaps a lot of people who get into Bitcoin because it has cool cryptography, or it's a fun, new, interesting kind of database, or it solves a money supply problem that they worry about, or it protects privacy; there are so many reasons where Bitcoin is multifaceted.  And, Phil's statement was, "Maybe this will get some real hardcore science fiction and physics and astronomy nerds to come join the flock", and we could use bitcoiners of all stripes.  So, maybe that's even a third reason.

Peter McCormack: Well, we should do a bit of a setup for people, because there will be people listening who will jump straight into this, they won't go and read it, or they might go and read it afterwards, and they might be thinking, what the hell are we talking about? 

So, I'll kick off by saying this is a three-part series that you've written and for me, it felt like a mix of you theorising about how Bitcoin works, or blockchains themselves work, in an interplanetary system, which one of these may be on Mars and the Moon; but, you've mixed it with a little bit of kind of fiction, like this could be turned partly into a story, because you start to theorise about how societies might develop on different planets; is that fair?

Dhruv Bansal: Yeah, that's absolutely right and I think one of my fantasies would be if someone, who's a better writer and storyteller than myself, would take some of these speculative scenarios and really write something interesting.  Like, if folks had seen The Expanse television show or read those books, that's a pretty popular, very modern and often described as very realistic take on what colonising the solar system might look like.

But, The Expanse almost never talks about money and science fiction almost never talks about money in general, because maybe science fiction folks think money is boring; but, money is interesting.  The more that I learn about it, the more interesting it becomes; and Bitcoin especially is interesting.  I think there are some great connections between Bitcoin and blockchain and time and energy and consensus, back to ideas that science fiction nerds can enjoy.  And that's again part of what was the motivation for setting this whole thing up.

But, yeah, we're talking about Bitcoin in space and we're asking ourselves, "Will it work; what will happen?"  And, to connect that to the other side of why fictionalisation is interesting and fun here is because ultimately, especially in part 1, I think I provide some "results", some experiments and some simulations that I ran that will support some of the conclusions that I'm making.  But, I ultimately rely upon an argument about human nature and what humans are going to want in the future.  And, in order to motivate that argument, I kind of need to help the reader understand what it might be like to be those humans; what would their recent history have felt like and why would they want and feel a certain way.

So that, I felt, was easiest to communicate, and most fun perhaps, by trying to tell a speculative future history, almost like a science fiction documentary of what happens in the future.  I might argue that again, a much better storyteller than I, but someone like the author of World War Z, that takes a fun, speculative idea, but then tells it in a really realistic found media kind of way.  This is my really small attempt at trying to do something similar in a Bitcoin world.

Peter McCormack: So, just another thing to add into it; when I was reading it originally, the first part, there were two films I was thinking of.  It just sparked an interest, but retrospectively there's something else I've been watching that's come to mind.  So, the two films that came to mind for me, and I don't know if you've seen them; I assume, if you're a space nerd, there's a good chance you have; the original Total Recall.

Dhruv Bansal: Yeah, of course.

Peter McCormack: So obviously, when they end up on Mars.  And they do end up, like at the end, you don't know if it's real or not, but they kind of terraform Mars and it's like, okay, I thought of that; but also the recent Brad Pitt film, Ad Astra.  And, the reason I thought of that --

Dhruv Bansal: I've not seen that one.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's an interesting bit that I won't give too much away, but they go to the Moon and when they get to the Moon, they land there and you see a Subway, right.  So, it gives you this idea that at some point -- or for example, have you seen this thing that's on Apple TV at the moment; it's called, For All Mankind?

Dhruv Bansal: No, but I've heard about it; I'm familiar with it.  I'm actually excited to watch it at some point.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's really good.  So, the loose idea being is like, again I won't give too much away; slight plot spoiler, but not really, you end up with two colonies on Mars: Russia, America.  So, these are very early and these are just astronauts.  But, you extrapolate that out and think further, you know, if you do end up colonising these places, whether it's the Moon, whether it's Mars, whether it's Ad Astra's Subway, or any of these scenarios, you're going to need a medium of exchange.

Dhruv Bansal: Yeah, you're going to need an economy.

Peter McCormack: You're going to need an economy; you're going to need money.  And, if you sit down and talk to your partner and my good friend, Parker Lewis, he'll tell you how important money is.  So, considering your writing and considering the scenario where you need money, you have to put yourself in this kind of post-hyperbitcoinisation world and have to say --

Dhruv Bansal: Yeah, that's right.

Peter McCormack: -- you have to say, Bitcoin is the money.

Dhruv Bansal: Yeah.  I think coming back to your point about money, there's a new trend in the way that the government, NASA, and some of the big space industry companies talk about our return to the Moon, which is happening with this Artemis programme, or whatever; and, there's this idea that maybe last time we went there just to prove something, but proving something isn't going to create an impetus to be able to stay there. 

Last time we went there off the back of government largess and huge, some might even argue, malinvestment with a Swiss-based industrial complex.  And if instead this time we go back we, as a species, go back under a more kind of commercial banner, then we have to justify commercially every step that we take.  We have to make launches more profitable; we have to have reasons why people are going there; people have to pay for it; and that of course brings money more clearly into the picture.

So, I think one could write generally about how money and economics in space is going to be interesting, and it's going to be interesting just in general; but as a bitcoiner, I want to write about how Bitcoin, as money in space, is going to be interesting.  And so, I ask the reader right up front in part 1, to accept one more hypothesis; that, it's Bitcoin.

If you believe in Eth, go ahead, that's fine, that's your thing, but maybe just read the rest of the article and replace Bitcoin with Eth if you like; that's not really the point, but you have to accept that something like Bitcoin, and maybe Eth is a bad example in this regard, but you have to accept that something like Bitcoin in particular, something that uses proof of work and has a block time, something like that is what wins.  I believe that's going to be Bitcoin, but my goal in this article series is not necessarily to inflame that whole argument; it's more just to project forward. 

So, say Bitcoin, or Bitcoin and blockchain wins, hyperbitcoinisation happens, the entire Earth's economy shifts over to that; first of all, what does that even look like in large scope?  And then, as we play out and start to, as a species, colonise other planets and export, therefore, our money, our Bitcoin into those places, what's the reaction; how do they adapt?

I think, going back to your two movies, I haven't seen Ad Astra, but obviously, who pays for the Subway; what's the Subway token in the movie?  Is that a Lightning Network transaction?  How does that work; how does it even connect back to Earth?  Not a question most people exploring space might ask, but as bitcoiners we're compelled to ask these questions.  And I think your example of Total Recall is a great one.  Again, not to spoil the movie, but a significant part of the subtext of the plot is a revolution on Mars for greater independence.

There's this general insight that as we get further away from centres of power, as we settle farther in, it's always been true in the history of human expansion on the planet, as we get far away, we want to get away from mum and dad, we want to build our own empires, we want to build our own states, we want to have our own independence; we distinguish and differentiate as culturally, and we want our own identity as a result.  And, I don't see why Mars or Pluto or wherever we go is going to feel any different.  They're going to have a strong sense of cultural identity based on being Martian.

Then, the series picks up with, okay, well how does that affect their interactions with Bitcoin?  Then we start to get into the real issue which is, Mars is just really far away.  So, this is different than people moving to the centre of Australia or the centre of Canada and deciding to start a Bitcoin citadel.  Bitcoin's going to work fine there.  This isn't a cultural question necessarily about self-identity, as much as it is how that question intersects with Bitcoin and blockchains, given the large distances that intervene between the planets.

So, that's really the entry point for some more quantitative questions around, well how does Bitcoin work over such a distance?

Peter McCormack: And do you know what; this stuff isn't that farfetched right?

Dhruv Bansal: In the beginning, it's not; you're right.  It starts out kind of realistic!

Peter McCormack: Well, if you think about it right now, we have commercial space flight programmes at the moment.  Richard Branson has one for Virgin Galactic; certainly, SpaceX we would expect to get there at some point; is it Jeff Bezos, is that Blue Horizon, I think; I'm trying to remember the name?

Dhruv Bansal: Blue Origin?

Peter McCormack: Blue Origin, that's it.  You've got the US talking about going back to the Moon; you've got Russia and China talking about agreeing a Moon base, which will mean the US has to then have a Moon base; and, it feels natural if you're going to go to Mars and then perhaps you want to establish a base on the Moon first to test some things out, and as you said, you've got this need to commercialise it, because people will want to go on holiday to the moon.

Then you have this scenario whereby, look, when I first got into Bitcoin, I say properly four years ago, where I was really going down the rabbit hole and I first heard Pierre Rochard talk about hyperbitcoinisation, I was like, "Yeah, all right.  Look, I like Bitcoin, but come on!"  Now, four years down the road, I'm like, "Holy shit, this might, could and probably will happen; maybe not for every nation on Earth to begin with, but I can see it happening".

So, I can see the pieces of the jigsaw for your work, I can see all the pieces, right; and it's just kind of picturing them coming together.  So, this takes it to the first interesting point and I've got multiple questions; but, when you're talking about how blockchains work and blockchains work in space, you talked about the fact that people, in this interplanetary scenario, whereby we had hyperbitcoinisation, they are living on different planets, they will need a form of money, they will likely hold Bitcoin and they could even transact with Bitcoin, as long as they can sign a transaction. 

But, there are some issues with, for example, mining, right; you couldn’t really mine on other planets.  And, you talk about this central hash.  I'm doing a terrible job here.  Do you want to explain the concept and I'll throw my questions at you?

Dhruv Bansal: Yeah, sure.  So again, it's kind of like this is where the narrative is kind of useful.  So, you imagine what does it look like when we settle on Mars?  Elon Musk and SpaceX, or whoever you want to say is responsible for that, is investing huge sums of wealth in doing so; Bitcoin is continuing to grow; that's right now, that's already happening. 

But, project both these trends forward 10, 20, 30 years and Bitcoin, again, if we experience hyperbitcoinisation and Bitcoin becomes the money supply, that becomes how we're investing in order to support the Mars programme.  Maybe you get Bitcoin for moving to Mars and being one of the first million colonists and maybe that's such an incredible thing for 30 years from now, the amount that's being offered, that you decide it's worth it.  That's not unusual in the history of settlement, of wild confidence that we're trying to tame.

But when you get there now, again, we're positing; it's interesting talking about money, but we're positing that it's Bitcoin, that we've hyperbitcoinised, so can you use Bitcoin for Mars?  Well, yeah, you can.  You can use it pretty much the same way that you might use Visa or any other kind of system, more or less, if you're a user.  You can hold access to a Bitcoin private key and you can hear about blocks on the network, assuming that there's a network transmitting data to you, which secretly I think is maybe what Starlink is setting up to be able to do.  Maybe it's not just about the Earth; maybe it's about other places too.  Bandwidth in space is a very valuable commodity.

So, assuming you have the bandwidth, you can listen for blocks; you can run a Bitcoin node.  You're going to be out of sync, right; you're going to be 20 to 45 minutes out of sync with what's happening on Earth.  And, that's not because Bitcoin sucks or Satoshi's a bad engineer, or we haven't written the future yet; it's because Earth and Mars are 20 to 40 light minutes apart.  I'm not quite saying that; maybe up to 45 light minutes apart.  I think the lower limit might be smaller.

But the point is, you're going to be out of date a lot, but that's okay; you're just a user.  Most users don't even run their own Bitcoin nodes; they're using Coinbase or something like this.  So, no matter what custody looks like in the future, I hope it does look like collaborative custody; of course, that's what Unchained focuses on and that's what we want to promote.  But in the future, no matter how you're custodying it, you could still use the Bitcoin. 

It's going to be a bad experience.  Today, you're having to send a transaction and it hits the network in a few seconds and you have to wait and hour; if you're on Mars, you have to wait 45 minutes to get the transaction to the miners on Earth, and we'll talk more about why the miners are on Earth, and then you have to wait another hour maybe for it to come through.  So, it's a little bit less good of an experience; but you can use Bitcoin.

You can probably use Layer 2s like Lightning, and you can make Lightning nodes with people on Mars and that could be really fast and you can therefore use Bitcoin as a transactional currency; and that makes sense, because in the hyperbitcoinised world, people are using Bitcoin for that on Earth, so you're used to that and you can achieve that on Mars.  So, so far, everything is great.  And probably, this is how everything starts; this is probably how the colony gets started.

When they're on the colony and they go to the little liquor store in the colony depot, they're paying in Bitcoin, maybe through a Lightning channel, or whatever we have figured out at that point, however far away this is.  I don't want to pin this down to today's technology necessarily.  But, something interesting, I think, happens when the colony grows.  As they get bigger and bigger and bigger, they're no longer 100 or 1,000 or even 1 million people, but tens of millions of Martians; that's a substantial population and it's only going to get larger.  They're starting to develop their own cultural identity.

What they're noticing is that all their transaction fees accumulate back on Earth.  And why is that?  It's for a really simple reason.  They can't mine Bitcoin on Mars effectively.  If someone were to start, if they were to throw up a Bitcoin miner, because they can run full nodes, right, so they connect to the network; but if they were to throw up a Bitcoin miner -- I'm just simplifying here, by the way, a little bit.  I don't think today, Elon could ship a laptop with Bitcoin node on it and connect, even other than bandwidth issues, there are some timestamping problems and whatnot, but those are all solvable; we can skip over that.

So, if they can run a full node, why can't they mine?  Well, they can't mine ultimately because, again, the time lag gets in the way.  Imagine there's one miner on Mars and there's a whole bunch of other miners on Earth; the rest of them.  The very first miner on Mars, the first day, he tries to do it; as that miner gets blocks, those blocks are already 45 minutes out of date.  He tries to add more blocks on the end and by the time he wins, let's even argue he finds a block, he sends that block back to Earth; in the meantime, four more blocks would have been found by earthly miners that he hasn't even seen yet and then they arrive at him.

So, I think Clark Moody put it really well in an article he'd written about this topic earlier, several years before me, which was basically, "It's too little hash rate at too far a distance to be able to maintain consensus with the mining pool", and that's the important part.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, I just want to break that down into just some basic steps so that people listening are understanding, because I know that stuff comes natural to you.

Dhruv Bansal: Am I going too fast?!

Peter McCormack: No, it's good.  But what we're saying is, if I want to send you some Bitcoin now, I'm here and you're in the States, I can get into the mempool in seconds and I know it's going to be about an hour.  But, because of the distance between Mars and Earth, the time it would take for that message to get from Mars to the Earth would take up to 45 minutes; but it eventually gets in there.  And then, I've got to wait for my six confirmations; I may want to wait more for whatever reason.

So, it's good as a settlement layer still, if I don't mind a few hours, but it's no good as a transactional layer, which people occasionally use it for, as like -- I know people don't buy cups of coffee.

Dhruv Bansal: You could still use it as a transactional layer, I think, in my hypothetical future Mars world.  If you tried to build a Lightning channel, let's say, between Earth and Mars, you'd be subject to the same time delays, so that would be awkward.  But, for example, you could be in a Lightning Network with your neighbouring Martians, and that would be fast and that would work just great.  And then, yes, if the two of you had to settle, you would have to flush back to the network on Earth, and that would take time; but that's symmetric for both of you.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and that's just a scenario you'd get used to?

Dhruv Bansal: Right; you'd suffer with it for a while as a Martian.

Peter McCormack: But, the other thing we're really starting to talk about here is economic productivity generated from the blockchain in that, by the time this is a reality, we'd have gone through multiple halvings and what we're seeing is that over time, the block reward for the miners is going to be made up more of transaction costs --

Dhruv Bansal: That's right.

Peter McCormack: -- and less from the actual coin-based block reward.  And what you're saying is, all the Martians here, they're basically sending Bitcoins back to Earth in terms of transaction, but they're not keeping any of the productivity, because nobody's mining there.  But, they can't mine because of the latency on the blockchain.

Dhruv Bansal: That's the crucial connection; exactly right.  Like, why can't they just mine themselves and keep those fees?

Peter McCormack: So, say blocks want one or two hours, could it then work?

Dhruv Bansal: Great question; yes, indeed it could.  And so, this is the result, it's that as soon as a blockchain designer chooses a block time, they're making some kind of claim around how much time it takes for the blockchain to gather pending transactions and mint them into blocks; but, they're simultaneously making a claim about a few other things.

We already know that block time affects things like orphan rate and so on, right.  As you decrease the block time, you increase the orphan rate; this is the number of forks colloquially and the number of blocks mined that don't wind up into the long-term blockchain.  But, it turns out the block time also sets a certain physical scale, simply because light and space are connected in special relativity. 

There's a maximum signal travel speed in the physical universe and we believe that's the speed of light, which means the largest -- this is again an approximation; the largest, on some level -- I shouldn't say largest.  Maybe the characteristic scale of Bitcoin in space therefore is approximately equal to its block time. 

Now, 10 light minutes isn't very far in the solar system.  It's big enough to encompass the Moon; the Moon is about 2 light seconds away, so on Lunar, the great cities that are built there, or whatever, people will be able to use Bitcoin; they'll suffer a minor delay as they connect back to Earth, or whatever; that's okay, it's a couple of seconds.  But moreover, they're probably going to be able to mine over there too.  They'll be able to build mining equipment, they'll be able to keep transaction fees local on Lunar, should they care about that, because they're very close to earth.

But, Mars is many minutes, sometimes up to 45 minutes away, and for a block time of 10 minutes, that's going to be too long.  If Satoshi had designed the block time to be several hours, it could easily have included Mars and maybe Venus, or Mercury, or whatever, but there would have been a further distance at which point it stopped working; maybe at Jupiter, or Saturn, or Pluto, but certainly the next star over, if we really want to get out there.

Peter McCormack: There will also be a limit.

Dhruv Bansal: There will also be a limit.  So, a blockchain is a physical, in space and time, it's like a bounded box.  That's an important thing to realise about it.  And, that choice is made the second you tick the block time for it.  So, Ethereum has a block time of a few seconds and is using proof of work right now.  But a large part of these arguments will still carry over, even though I don't believe proof of stake long term is a sustainable solution to these problems, but that's irrelevant. 

By choosing a block time of a few seconds, Ethereum has a much higher uncle rate, and so they try to have a different reward policy that rewards uncle blocks and so on, so they have to deal with that problem; but it also restricts their blockchain size to be much smaller.  It's only going to be a few seconds in diameter.  It barely will reach the Moon, much less anything further away.  Now again, that might not matter, because as long as you can get to the Moon, what's between the Moon and the next planet?  Nothing.  But, to a certain extent, it's just important to know when you fix this time, you fix the scale.

The words that I use in the article to describe these concepts are, I describe the idea as a "centre of hash" and that's really what I mean by, where is the Bitcoin blockchain?  Well, it's on the planet Earth.  But, where's the mining happening?  Also on the planet Earth.  If you average where the average location of all the miners are, it's somewhere near the core of the Earth today.  It's kind of a silly idea, but it kind of represents where the centre of the mass of the Earth is; it's somewhere in the core.  And, the centre of mass is a useful idea in physics when we're trying to describe the overall gravitational properties of the Earth.

So similarly, the centre of hash, where most of the miners are, weighted by their hash rate, is a useful idea when we want to try to think about how blockchains interact in very long scales.  And the claim that I make in the first article, which I support through some simulations that I ran, and whatnot, but I think you can get there analytically if you spent a bit more time than I have is, as you get further and further away from a blockchain's centre of hash; so in the case of Bitcoin, as you get further and further from the planet Earth, the effectiveness of your ability to mine degrades. 

So, the same hash rate at the centre of hash, it gets a certain amount of blocks; and as you move away from Earth to the Moon, it degrades maybe a tiny percent.  And as you move away, way, way further out, the further you get, the less blocks you seem to win with the same amount of hash, because you're further away and that latency penalty starts kicking in.  At some point, you simply can't win any blocks anymore.  And so, it's like there's this curtain or horizon, I call it a "hash horizon" which surrounds every blockchain; and my claim is that Bitcoin's hash horizon is, at most, a few light minutes wide, which is too small to contain other planets like Mars.

Now, coming back to the future history, why is all this relevant?  Because it means, exactly as you said, Martians can use Bitcoin, they can invest in it, they can hold it long term, they can even transact with it locally on Mars very conveniently, maybe less conveniently with folks back on Earth, but they can never mine.  And if they can't mine, what does that mean?

So today, we think of Bitcoin mining as what?  It's like a weird thing that some people do to get Bitcoin.  It helps keep the network running, etc.  But if, in my supposition, we're in a hyperbitcoinised future world, then mining is much more than that.  Mining is, on some level, unified with the energy production industry.  It's part of what optimises our ability to go find and discover and operationalise energy sources, because it creates this floor for the price of energy and that lifts the market. 

So, mining is viewed as this important thing for an economy.  If your economy doesn't have mining, how are you going to optimise your energy production infrastructure; how are you going to make sure everything is as efficient as possible if you don't have that natural blow-off valve, so to speak, of hash rate to coordinate everybody around?

So, Martians are going to feel like, we're building energy grids like they used to in the 20th century over here.  We're getting inefficiencies like in Texas where we had snowpocalypse recently, right.  We have inefficient, poorly maintained energy grids that will never work if Bitcoin mining is really integrated well with energy production, because it's still liquid and somewhat monetised.  So, I think there's a desire of a futuristic hyperbitcoinised culture to want to mine.  The mining is a virtue.  And moreover, even if the energy thing is less of a concern, do I think it's an important one?  What you stated is really important too.  You're sending all your fees to those people over there, those Earthers, and there may be some cultural animosity.

Peter McCormack: It's kind of a trade deficit in some ways.

Dhruv Bansal: Indeed.  It's a mining gap between the users and the community on Mars and everyone on Earth.  Everyone on Earth mines in this future vision.  It's not like mining is just a weird -- it's part of the infrastructure of the energy economy, so every energy-producing facility, which might be your house and your solar panel, is perhaps also mining to a certain extent; it's just everywhere.  And Martians just can't do that and so, what's their solution?

I propose that they will start their own blockchain.  And now, everything will work in reverse, because Earth is so far away from their blockchain; all our tremendous hash rate won't be able to affect them.  We won't be able to participate meaningfully in their blockchain.  Their miners will become the ones who drive that blockchain forward.

So, this is a really interesting moment to me, when I first convinced myself of this.  I maybe don't like the phrase "Bitcoin maximalist" as a label for myself, I think mostly I just don't like joining things; but, I'll accept "small-hand maximalist" as a description.  As a Bitcoin small-hand maximalist, I could be so comfortable and cavalier with saying Bitcoin is limited in this way and that people will eventually "rebel" against it and start their own currency. 

Then I sort of had to admit to myself that I already believe Bitcoin is limited in space and time, because of the choice of block time and hash horizon, so maybe it's natural that separate colonies get their own chains and that somehow, the universe wants us to spread out and it wants us to build these new blockchains.  And indeed, perhaps that's what's exciting about proof-of-work blockchains, is that why would you go settle all these other planets; why would you even want to?  Well, what if you could start your own blockchain?

You can't do that here.  We've learnt that lesson, or we're learning that lesson now.  ICOs fail; altcoins collapse; people who want to start their own blockhains, who want to have the immense demonstrable financial gains from doing so can't.  And, we don't know that today in today's market, but maybe 100 years from now, we do know it; it's in our bones.  We get that that's not how it works.  There's one currency you build; everyone uses that.  That's what Bitcoin taught us.

But, if Bitcoin can be used everywhere but can't be mined everywhere, there's a real reason why a fork of Bitcoin that does exactly the same things as Bitcoin does, that just happens to have been started on Mars and mined chiefly by Martians, is meaningfully different; and, that's an interesting conclusion to reach. 

I enjoyed a lot of the conversations at Unchained between myself and other folks talking about this idea, where I think I convinced a few people at least, who may have started out, "No, dude, Bitcoin is the universe's currency.  We're going to use it as we settle the stars".  And to realise, well maybe it's just for Earth and, is that not enough?  That's okay, right?  We can build one currency for our entire fucking planet; that's an okay thing; that's still an admirable goal.  We don't have to feel, as bitcoiners, that we somehow failed, if that first currency can't be used on every planet of the cosmos.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's an interesting intermediary step, which is the human factor in this.  And this, you can only speculate.  But, if we think beyond the basic colonisation of Mars, perhaps we have millions of people there, terraformed, etc, which is all theory, but let's just assume it's happened; we don't know what the governance structure for Mars will be, or how it will evolve.

But, what we should expect, based on the history of humans, is that people will want to self-govern and in the end, the people on Mars will not want to be governed by the people on Earth, who have different rules.  They're far away; they take, how many?  Is it like a four-month journey from Earth?

Dhruv Bansal: Today, it's very long.  It's 9 or 18 months.  It takes us a long time for us to get to Mars.

Peter McCormack: Well, let's assume some better technologies, they can go quicker.  But then, at the same time, people always want to self-govern.  We can look at examples all around the world where people want to self-govern.  So I think naturally, you could expect a revolt, you could expect a coup, you could expect Mars to want to govern itself with different rules.  At that point, if their currency is Bitcoin, they're still essentially a slave to the currency of Earth.

Dhruv Bansal: In a sense and I think we might today be, "That's a weird conclusion to reach".  But again, in a hyperbitcoinised future world, Bitcoin is so plugged into every aspect of your life.  It's not just your settlement coin that you speculate around and make memes over; it's transactional; you invest in it long term; you get paid in it; there are potentially other layers that exist on top of Bitcoin, like much of the internet and much of technology, maybe settling down or motivated or plugged in to economic incentives that connect on Bitcoin in some way.  So, it's really central to you.

You may even view it as a way that you achieve political identity.  I'm not a big "put elections on the blockchain" guy; that's not what I'm saying as directly and as simply as that, but I think there are connections between Bitcoin, blockchains, money, identity and political representation.  And, I think on earth, we will be running those experiments over the next 100 years.

Bitcoin is interesting, not because it changes money, but because it reconfigures global power structures.  We're not going to have society that looks exactly the same afterwards; I hope it's better, I really do, but it's going to be different.  And in the future, this idea of your currency and your coin and your mining, all that connects and defines a big part of who has power over you and who controls your life, is going to be natural to assume. 

And just consider the very simple idea that, if Earth and Mars ever go to war, which happens all the time in science fiction books, about colonisation and settlement of Mars, what if earthly miners just decide to censor all Martian transactions?  How would they know they're Martian transactions?  They're coming in over the damn dotcom link, they're not coming in over the phone wires, or whatever mechanism that they have.  If all the miners are on the other team, there's a reason to feel unsafe in times of conflict, so that may be another motivation for far away colonies to decide to take things into their own hands.

Peter McCormack: Which means we potentially get Marscoin?

Dhruv Bansal: I called it Muskcoin in a blatant attempt to get Elon Musk to read the article, but yes, something like that; something like that maybe, I think, is what happens.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, just a slight segue, but you saw the new job titles that him and his, I can't remember, was it his Finance Director?  He took yesterday, Master of Coin.  Perhaps he's already thinking that far ahead; perhaps he's already considering, well if we are on Mars, will we have Doge; will it be Bitcoin; will it be Muskcoin?  You never know.

Dhruv Bansal: I want to conjecture that if he knew about some of these fun ideas, he'd be into them, but maybe not.  Maybe he already knows about them; maybe he already figured them out and he's just way ahead of all this and he's out there doing it.  Maybe he's just saying dumb shit on Twitter!

Peter McCormack: Well do you know what, I took that actually as a strong signal yesterday because, was it Parker; did Parker put up the SEC finding up on Twitter as well?

Dhruv Bansal: I'm not sure, but I definitely saw a bunch of people talking about it.

Peter McCormack: I think Parker put it up, but the SEC finding confirmed that.  But, I took that as a strong signal that he's come to the realisation of how important this is.  Maybe he's got that bias because he's got $1.5 billion in and they've made more money on that than they've made on selling cars; but at the same time, I think he's come into that realisation of how important Bitcoin is.

So, for him to be thinking that far ahead would not surprise me at all; maybe not as far ahead as you, but for him to be considering the important role that Bitcoin is making, you know, a generational impact; that wouldn't surprise me.

Dhruv Bansal: No, and I think that's why people are eager, on some level, to run all these experiments.  People want to go to Mars, they want to -- it's clear that there's so much excitement over a -- I want to say, excitement of a different kind.  There's more sustainable excitement, it feels like right now; there are so many more invested players that are excited about space and space exploration than perhaps ever before.

Elon's already brought the cost of space travel down by a huge margin.  It's very difficult to imagine where we would be without reusable rockets and what they've done to the overall cost of putting a kilogram of payload out into space.  And you need, before any of the crazy speculations that I've engaged in can even happen, you need to just get into space more cheaply.  And so, I think Elon's pushing in a lot of smart directions; I especially like your point.

Elon, I think, is really smart about getting funding from places.  If it turns out that you can sit on an asset class that grows at 200% per year on average, maybe that's a really good source of funding to invest early in; and I think a lot of, hopefully, corporations are seeing that and that's why we're seeing this recent craze of allocations in corporate treasuries.

Peter McCormack: So, Muskcoin; the interesting scenario here that is slightly different for Bitcoin is that Muskcoin can't have the same immaculate conception that Bitcoin has.  Bitcoin is unique, it is completely original in that Satoshi plugged the pieces of the jigsaw together, but to create this new form of currency that never existed before --

Dhruv Bansal: At least in human history.

Peter McCormack: In human history, yeah; we'll come to that!  I know what you're getting at with that!  But, it's a completely unique invention that has so many -- just such a wide-ranging impact upon humans and money and, like you said, how we govern, the political landscape; we could go on forever about that.

Now, it could be from very early on that somebody wants to create a coin on Mars, and perhaps people are happy with Bitcoin to begin with, then it's considered a shitcoin.  Whatever scenario, there may be multiple tests.  Now, that's a very different scenario because, essentially, it is like now; it's like that shitcoin race where someone's trying to prove it.

But, like you say, on Mars, there's actually a legitimate reason to have a separate coin.  So, is it something that's created by a central governance, because maybe Mars has governance; maybe it isn't sovereign individuals; maybe it isn't private cities?  Who knows what that scenario is, but it's a different scenario for the genesis of whatever that coin is that's created.

Dhruv Bansal: I think it's interesting to definitely conjecture about who will be motivated to do it and when.  On some level, if my article touches any kind of nerve with anybody who makes it to Mars, maybe they start it the first day they get there.  But, it's going to fail on some level because, something that I explore in the article is that, while it's true that the great distance that separates Earth and Mars gives Mars great defence against Earth's hash rate, it's also true that this word "defence" is meaningful.

Here's an example.  If there existed an entity that had a tremendous hash rate and suddenly posted on the internet today a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain, that had the same genesis block, but was longer and had fatter, heavier blocks with more proof of work in them, it would destroy the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.  Why?  Because, as soon as node heard about that blockchain, it would be, "You're the heavier chain", and it would jump over to that chain and it would ignore the entire 500,000 or 600,000 block history that humans here think, in our real time when it created in this hypothetical example. 

I call that a "hash bomb".  If a blockchain shows up that has more weight than the real blockchain, but just garbage transactions or no transactions, or allocates all the Bitcoin that's created or the token that's created, to one central entity, the attacker, it essentially destroys the entire economy; it resets it to zero.  And, folks can get around it, but it's very disruptive.  You can imagine, that would disrupt Bitcoin today and Bitcoin's barely used by nothing but a few million nerds.  Imagine in the future, when we'd have hyperbitcoinisation, what a disaster that would be. 

That's not possible in Bitcoin, because no one has more hash rate than the Bitcoin miners, so how would you produce such an object?  That couldn't happen, right; impossible.  But, if you were the first guy on Mars and you create Muskcoin and it's just you and your PC hashing on Muskcoin, and some earthly miners hear about it and they laugh and they're like, "This guy's an idiot!  We're just going to build a bigger version of Muskcoin", and they'll dedicate 1% of one facility's hash rate for one hour; and they'll build a fake version of Muskcoin that has the same genesis block as what you pick; and they'll just send it over to Mars.  It'll land; it'll destroy your entire network.

So, there's a sense in which it's predictable for both sides what the conflict might look like, should they actually decide to be adversarial and try to mine against each other's chains and create havoc.  A Martian miner knows essentially the multiplicative factor by which their hash rate gets multiplied through the large distance and latency; and, I'm not sure what the exact numbers would be, because all this is very theoretical and speculative, but imagine it's 1 to 100.  So, Martians would know to look until we get to 1% of Earth's has rate, they're going to be able to destroy us very easily, just by a small number of them deciding to resist us and push back. 

So, there's a sense in which if they're smart, Martians will discover a shelling point; there'll be some moment where they realise that, "We now have sufficient GDP and energy production already online where, if we invested in 3D printing a whole bunch of ASIC miners, we could launch Muskcoin and we could survive.  Because remember, most people on Earth aren't going to care; most miners are going to be, "Oh, whatever.  As long as I can keep mining, I'm not going to give a shit about Muskcoin over there".  It's only some minority that are motivated even to mess with this chain; they don't want to lose their fees maybe.  So, there's some fraction of earthly miners that would say, "Screw those guys, I'm going to try and take their chain out", but most won't.

So, muskcoiners don't have to defend against all of earthly mining; they just have to defend against people that are willing to fuck with them.  That's going to be some minority.

Peter McCormack: It depends on power structures and government structures.

Dhruv Bansal: That's true; people could coordinate.

Peter McCormack: So, if there is an elite, for example, trading with Mars, very profitable trading with Mars, has a very profitable relationship and all of that trading is done on Bitcoin, that seeing this almost revolt on Mars; that could be a threat to their income and that could be a point -- look, I don't know if we have nation states, I don't know if we have a global government, or a half-global, whatever it is --

Dhruv Bansal: Opposed interests, right.  A Martian would have to just try to measure up, "Well, who's opposed to my attempt to do this?"  What kind of hash rate could they actually realistically bring to bear that, remember, every hash they spend on attacking me is one that they don't get to spend on earning Bitcoin.  So realistically, how much hash rate can be summoned against me today?  And the answer is, maybe not that much, maybe a lot; I don't know.  It will depend, as you say, on the political configuration and climate at the time, like how contentious is the idea of Martians developing their own currency.

I bet a lot of earthly folks would support it.  They would say it's their right to do that; like, "We're self-determined.  They should be self-determined".  There's going to be conflict and disagreement about it, but eventually, if they're smart, they'll measure and they'll say, "Only now do we feel confident that we could resist and therefore, we should launch".  And in terms of the immaculate conception, like who will do it, I also think that's an interesting question because, again, this is the far future. 

Maybe we are good at launching distributed projects with no owners; maybe we have methodologies and best practices; maybe there have been hundreds of projects like that launched on Earth, not necessarily new blockchains, but maybe whatever; anonymous marketplaces, or other kinds of structures and we've gotten really, really good at learning how to manage distributed, anonymous launches of projects.  Maybe that's a skill that we have; maybe there's an entire scientific discipline related to engineering those structures that got its start in Bitcoin.

So, I'm willing to believe that, should they want to do it, they'll have the knowledge that we don't have in order to be able to understand how to do it, when to do it and who to do it with.

Peter McCormack: Well, the successful people will be smart.  I think we can all agree --

Dhruv Bansal: People will try and fail and then eventually, someone will really succeed.

Peter McCormack: Well, I mean you only have to go back on the history of Bitcoin and look at the projects before Bitcoin, all the Cypherpunks, all the different projects and attempts; maybe it's the same scenario.  Maybe there are the equivalent Martian Cypherpunks who are thinking through this deeply, thinking like you're thinking.  Perhaps your research forms part of their research; they're having to consider all these scenarios.  Perhaps they even put out a decoy blockchain while they work on another one.

Dhruv Bansal: I didn't consider that; yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and maybe that's it.  But, my assumption would be, perhaps it's even developed by AI with its own defence.  These are all the things we don't know, but you would assume that they're going to have to go through a test and learn process to create something to deploy.  Because, the other thing is, like that transitional period, we would be talking about hyperbitcoinisation here on earth; they would obviously have to consider hypermuskcoinisation. 

Dhruv Bansal: They would be seeking it, presumably.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and there's that transitional period where they're using Bitcoin, but some are using Muskcoin; and then, does Earth ever accept Muskcoin?

Dhruv Bansal: And, I think there are tensions there too, right.  Not every Martian is going to support this.  They're going to say, "This is stupid.  Let's just use Bitcoin; it already works.  I don't give a shit about mining, I don't believe all that stuff.  We'll figure it out; don't upset the boat", and I think there are all these wonderful American revolution analogies and Tories and Redcoats freedom fighters who are actually manipulated in their own ways; and, there's wonderful fiction, I think, to be written at this intersection one day. 

That was one thing that I was trying to inject a little bit, is the sense of, this is a revolution of a certain kind and like any revolution, it needs leaders; at the right economic climate, it needs to have the right timing, and it's going to create problems after the fact and vacuums that need to get filled and replaced and figured out. 

But, it feels like also an interesting kind of revolution.  It's an economic revolution.  It's not necessarily a bloody war; it's more like, both sides assemble their hash rate, perform a calculation and determine that it is or it's not economically reasonable to continue to fight, or whatever.  That's the ideal bloodless version of this revolution.  I don't know if it will actually be that way.

Peter McCormack: Well, it could be also an actual repeat of Bitcoin.  You could have the equivalent Joe Weisenthal, working for Bloomberg Mars, claiming that, "Muskcoin is too volatile.  I'm going to keep using Bitcoin".  You could have the equivalent Nic Carter on Mars with his FUD dice, rolling out the Muskcoin FUD.

Dhruv Bansal: John Carter, let's call him!

Peter McCormack: John Carter, yeah!

Dhruv Bansal: That's a joke.

Peter McCormack: John Carter is from…

Dhruv Bansal: I think, Edgar Rice Burroughs, I want to say; someone on Mars is named Carter!

Peter McCormack: Well, you could have a repeat of a similar amount of FUD created around Muskcoin that you've had with this transition away from the dollar to something like Bitcoin.  It's not really that unexpected.

Dhruv Bansal: It could be a glorious era of many coins.  It doesn't have to be like all of Mars is coordinated and they pick one coin and they launch it and everything is solid; they could bicker and fight and attack each other, just as much as Earth could attack them.  And, in fact, that may be one of the best things for a misaligned Earth interest, or antagonistic Earth interest, to do; just fund some Martians to launch a competing currency and say that it's better and try to convince people to use that one.

So, I think even Martians may recognise, through their knowledge of history that, "Look, if we really want to nail this, we've got to do what Bitcoin did", and I don't know how that will work out.  Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but I agree with you, maybe people will try to start the project too early and they'll fail; and when the time is right, you'll see a lot of people competing to become what is Muskcoin. 

Because, imagine that, right?  Just like today, there's this feeling of one of these currencies is maybe going to become really big.  Maybe some people believe many of them are, but others believe just one is going to win because of various reasons; which one is it?  If you're on the wrong one, it doesn't matter how much you had, right; you have to be on the right one. 

It creates all these tribal conflicts, and maybe those embroil Mars for a few decades as they're struggling with their own revolution, so I think there's a lot of fun and speculation to be had here.

Peter McCormack: Do you know one thing I hope about Mars, and I don't know if this will happen; I hope there are no weapons on Mars.

Dhruv Bansal: No weapons?

Peter McCormack: I mean, it would be impossible because you're going to have 3D printers, so it's almost impossible. 

Dhruv Bansal: Nuclear weapons in space ships and so on.  I think space is a dangerous place in general.

Peter McCormack: I think the next step then is, okay, Muskcoin happens, there are colonies on the Moon, Venus, perhaps on some of the moons of Jupiter.  Okay, we've spread out through the solar system, there are now multiple currencies, we've got trading routes, trading partners between these planets.  We've essentially created the same multicurrency world that we have now that exists on Earth, in the solar system.  And, we potentially get to that, because of trading partners, "We'll take your coin.  Which one should we hold?"  We have a reserve.  Maybe we have a basket of reserve blockchains.  We recreate that scenario.

Potentially, in recreating that scenario, we might not have inflation.  But, there may be the argument that someone will say, "We need one blockchain to rule them all across the solar system"?

Dhruv Bansal: Yeah, that's where we kind of pick up in part 2.  Part 1 kind of says, exactly as you're saying, "If you believe us so far, then what you've accepted is that you can be a bitcoiner and you can still believe that new blockchains will start far away, because they can't mine and so they need to mine and so they'll start.  That means many of them will potentially start, so now we'll go way forward and you have many blockchains.  Isn't that just today's inefficient multi-fiat currency world?"

And, to your world, no, it's no multi-fiat, because we can't inflate these currencies.  But, maybe the Plutonian blockchain is very loose with their money supply, right, so maybe there are conflicts like that that occur.  Maybe there is more or less inflation, but you might imagine that in a healthy, interplanetary economy, that these kinds of, if you like, arbitrages in trading and cross-chain atomic swaps, which let us trustlessly exchange these different blockchain assets; these sorts of structures will help even out the market.

So probably, Bitcoin continues to be the most valuable currency in the solar system, because it's connected to all the wealth and biological, intellectual, technological population of Earth.  It's very hard for me to see how Muskcoin, market cap-wise, is worth more than Bitcoin, at least to start out with.  But also, over time, you can imagine demographics and populations shift and change.  The solar system can support many trillions of human beings.  They're not all going to live on Earth.  There are going to become other power centres and you might imagine that over hundreds of thousands of years, as we settle the whole solar system, indeed other blockchains could become more dominant over time.

So, a little bit you're right.  There's this paradigm of shifting multiple currencies and shifting balances globally, as one or others are considered more reserved than others; because remember, everybody can hold everybody else's currency and trade it, they just can't mine, except for on their own.  And exactly as you're suggesting, people will start to ask, "This seems inefficient.  Is there a better way; could we build a blockchain that all of us can just use?"

Well, first of all, you can all use Bitcoin.  You can hold Bitcoin and trade it anywhere you are; that's not a problem.  You have to wait a long time for things to go back and forth to Earth, where the centre of hash and Bitcoin lives, but you can use it.  So, maybe the question is, the reason we're not all using Bitcoin is because we all decided we needed to mine; that was helpful.  Is there a blockchain that we can build that we can all mine on?  And, part 2 kind of asks this question.  And the real question is what we learned in part 1, that any blockchain is fixed in space and time and that they're related. 

So, if you want people to be able to mine over a spatial volume that's the size of the solar system; that's your "hash horizon", to use my language; that's many light days in diameter.  So, that suggests that your block time can't be 10 minutes; it needs to be at least several days, maybe a week, maybe a month even, if you start to go at that level. 

So, if you have a blockchain with a block time of a month or weeks or weeks to a month, what does that look like?  In theory, its hash horizon is large enough for everybody to now mine on it.  But, how long does a halving take?  How long do you wait?  You wait a quarter for a confirmation, for a fully confirmed transaction in this; and I've called this blockchain that's the size of the solar system, I've called it "Solcoin" in part 2, just to have a name for it.

So, you're waiting months to confirm Solcoin transactions.  I think I talk about how it would take tens or hundreds of thousands of years to go through halvings and produce the whole supply of Solcoin, whatever it was; let's assume it just ran the same way Bitcoin did.  So, it's this crazy structure.  And this is, to me, an interesting constraint.  As a physicist, I often think when there's a constraint that seems like you can't get around it, it's actually a law of nature; that's a famous quote from Heisenberg. 

So, if we were struggling to build a blockchain that's this big, that works the same, that has a 10-minute blocktime and all that, maybe the lesson is we're not supposed to.  I mean, we're supposed to, but I don't know what, "we're supposed to" means in this context, but maybe what we're supposed to do is accept that in order to build a blockchain the size of the solar system, that all our city states and planets can hash with them, that we must accept an incredibly slower kind of pace.

Then, I suddenly realised that that's actually really natural for space, at the scale that we're talking about.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, unless you could relay messages through wormholes, which Einstein believes exist.

Dhruv Bansal: Which is not part of my speculation; but if you can, it changes a lot of things.  You just have your wormhole cell phone and you talk to your buddy instantly on Earth, or whatever; I don't know.  That changes the nature of this discourse.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's another step there that I think's quite interesting to think about as well.  How does Solcoin come to exist?  Potentially, with interplanetary colonies, interplanetary currencies, do we have therefore certain hostilities naturally, like we do on Earth between countries; is Bitcoin a bit like the dollar is right now?  It's kind of the solar system currency; there's the equivalent of the petrodollar across the solar system, which is Bitcoin.  And, perhaps there's a group of, I don't know, a group that are dispersed across the planets and they're saying, "Solcoin fixes this; fix the money; fix the Bitcoin; fix the blockchain"!

Dhruv Bansal: Fix the money; fix the solar system; indeed!  It's interesting to conjecture.  But again, at this point we're so far outside of the realm of the stuff that we can reasonably talk about, but it's fun, right?

Peter McCormack: Oh, I love it.

Dhruv Bansal: And I think you're right in a sense.  There is risk.  Part of the reason that the Martians wanted their own coin is that they felt risk trusting the bitcoiners over on Earth, because cultural walls can intercede, right.  Great distances create separation, create new kinds of interests.  If we can assume that different parts of the solar system, different colonies and stuff, feel this kind of occasional mutual antagonism, well they may not be comfortable collaborating or building projects, or whatever.  And that's not to mention the inefficiency problem which we've kind of already addressed.

I think there's also a long-term risk management problem which is, if you're -- this is the idea I introduce in part 2; I really do believe in the future, wealthy people and maybe average people, but certainly the elite of society will live a very long time.  They will live for not 100 years, maybe 1,000 years, maybe 10,000 years.  It's not insane to conjecture about technologies, biological or cybernetic, that might enable those kinds of lifespans. 

If you're one of the wealthiest humans and you expect to live for 10,000 years, where do you keep your money?  If you keep it all in Bitcoin because you live on Earth, what if Bitcoin gets blown up; what if Earth is blown up?  If you can clone your mind, embezzle, as we sometimes see in these kinds of futuristic scenarios, well how would you keep your money in one spot?  You would spread it out, right.  So maybe now you play the portfolio management game of, you hold some Bitcoin, some Muskcoin, some Plutocoin. 

This is another inefficiency that has been introduced.  It might be easier to hold Solcoin, a currency that cannot be destroyed by destroying any single planet, because its hash rate and its blockchain is spread out across nodes around the entire solar system.  That's a very interesting construct.  Solcoin's timescale is so long, but you live so long.  Maybe you're the kind of person that routinely hibernates for 1,000 years, while you wait for your investments to mature, because your big gain is you're trying to get to the next star system. 

So, you're this elite person that's developing this technology and you're told it will take 300 years to build, so you just go to sleep and you expect your funds to be safe when you wake up, and you don't want to consider the risk.  It might be really interesting for you to operate at these long timescales, which is exactly what Solcoin delivers alongside the solar system scale, or hash horizon. 

So, there are all these interesting connections between getting bigger timescales, human ambition; and again, that's part of why I like to fictionalise some of this stuff, because it helps people connect, I think, a little bit to what these motivations might be for people.

Peter McCormack: There are a couple of other things we need to drop into that then.  So, there's the assumption we're stretching out thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years, so we have solved the problem of potentially most death scenarios, apart from certain accidents.

Dhruv Bansal: The solar system, we know, can support trillions of people, so what's a good way to get to trillions of people is if people stop dying.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, certainly the aging problem; well, do we call it a problem?  I don't know if you call it a problem.  We've solved aging when it's a problem for you.

Dhruv Bansal: Some people call it a problem.  Here's one of my favourite lines, I think, I've ever heard in scientific talk which is, "Well, what's the problem with aging; why should we stop it?" and he pauses and he's like, "Because it kills people"!  We don't consider that it's so natural to age and die, it's part of life, but people are pushing to solve that problem.  Some of the same people that have settled in Mars and building rockets are building life extension companies, because the two go hand in hand. 

The scale of space is so tremendous that if you live 100 years, you can't experience but a hair of it; so, it's in your interest to create a future where you can both travel in space and live a very long time.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and our man, Hal Finney, is cryogenically frozen, I understand.  So, maybe he comes back to work on that project.

Dhruv Bansal: Perhaps.

Peter McCormack: But, the other thing to consider actually, this may be a scenario whereby it's not all humans; maybe it's a scenario where it's mainly robots and robots are designing these things.  That's another thing we just don't know but, if Elon Musk has got anything to do with it, we're certainly heading in that direction with Neuralink.

Dhruv Bansal: That's right, and that's one of the best ways that you might have long-lived entities.  Even if humans don't achieve for themselves significantly long lifespan, or limited outcome, only live to 125 years, maybe there's no mind uploading or whatever; if there are things like AIs, then those can be long-lived entities.  I don't know whether they're benevolent, whether they have personalities, whether they're sort of mindless investment bots that just exist to make money for their creators, or whether they have ambitions of their own and secretly, human civilisation is directed by these timeless AIs, while we're all just these ephemeral meat bags that consume around them all the time.

I think, depending on your politics perhaps, your philosophy, your morality, you can project a lot of scenarios, but I think there's definitely a match between timescale, space exploration and I'm arguing, money as well.

Peter McCormack: Well, I guess in a scenario of whether this is robots as such, there is a problem you do solve in that you don't need to essentially terraform planets to colonise them with robots; all you need is energy.  That's the only thing you need.  You don't need food production, you don't need to worry about the supply or production of oxygen; so you can colonise future planets with robots.  Or, I wonder if there's this kind of humanoid in between, part biological, but doesn't require food or oxygen.

I think in that film, it was a shit film, it was a Johnny Depp one where they upload him with a computer, those scenarios you solve a number of problems for colonising other planets.  I mean, the two major problems are food production and oxygen; you don't need that.

Dhruv Bansal: Yeah, it's much easier to travel long distances if you don't have to keep biological things alive; that's for sure.  And maybe that's part of what drives some of these changes in society at these long-term scales, is that we are increasingly not biological things; that we take on a different perspective that's much more centred around energy and less around resources.  I think that's another really deep connection, and especially when we talk about going even further than other planets.

If we're talking about going to other stars, I don't think it's generally appreciated how much energy we're talking about when we contemplate ideas like that.  It's fun for me in movies when there's the casual taxicab space-sized interstellar spaceship that some guy jumps out of and jumps back in and he goes off to another star.  And it's just fun and cute, because the amount of energy, forget a big spaceship with all this sophisticated stuff; just like a rock, you know, the size of a taxicab, that's moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light, contains more energy than our civilisation produces annually, by many orders of magnitude.

So, just this idea that humans are going to build a spaceship and go to the next star over in a short amount of time, within a few tens or even a few hundred years, it requires energy that we can't even access today.  So a question behind the question is, in order to do all these amazing things that we contemplate doing as we become an advanced civilisation and do all these wonderful things, how do we afford the energy budgets; how do we build the structures which optimise human energy collection by orders of magnitude required to get to those kinds of outputs?

I think this is exactly the Bitcoin criticism of energy usage, but inverted.  Bitcoin is a hungry machine that makes us go liberate energy resources that we're not otherwise using, because we can put them to work hashing.  And, they don't have to be adjacent to a supply chain, or a market, or a source of raw materials in order to be valuable economically; we've just got to hash with them and then we can turn them into real money.  That idea applies at the solar system scale too.

Our sun is streaming out so much energy in every direction, all through space, that we're not using.  If you like, it's being wasted right now.  It's just entropy being manufactured out into space.  And, if we could harvest all that energy, we could maybe be able to power things like interstellar missions; maybe we could actually become an interstellar species ourselves and ascend a Kardashev scale, if you've heard that I talk about it in the article; just becoming more of this species.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's Type 1, Type 2, Type 3 civilisation.

Dhruv Bansal: Sure, yeah, like a loose categorisation of civilisations by their energy budgets; exactly.  If we want to ascend that scale, we need a driver that causes us to always be hungry for more energy.  And, blockchains are proof of work.  In particular, blockchains are great drivers to do that. 

So, when we think of Bitcoin, as I sort of conceptualise in part 2, Bitcoin as moving like up the scale from being like a sub-planetary civilisation to becoming a planetary-scale civilisation that uses the full energy of the energy that hits the Earth's surface; not because we're using all of it for Bitcoin mining, that's absurd, but because Bitcoin mining drove a virtuous cycle in the adoption of new energy resources and the building of new energy pipelines and pathways and optimising; and made more efficient our entire production of pipelines.

So similarly, I think that can happen at the solar system scale, but if you have a blockchain that incentivises energy collection across the entire solar system, such as Solcoins, there's this connection again between long timescales, huge energy, money, ambitious projects, long lifetimes.  I think, again, you could get around this if you could just make it so that everybody can mine everywhere; or, you could get around this if people didn't hyperbitcoinise in the first place, or something, and everybody just trusted the central bank of Earth.

But, I think these speculations are so interesting, because they reveal ways in which Bitcoin, like we thought it was a money, we thought it was a consensus tool, but it might actually also be an energy optimiser; it might be an engine that takes us straight to the stars over the course of 100 years.  That's pretty cool!  I'm not saying that's exactly what it is; it's more complex than that and I'm simplifying greatly, but I love that, in particular, I love that proof of work is this incorruptible, ungameable, unpredictable thing that also creates positive effects potentially for society's energy usage and infrastructure.  That is still more conjectural, but I think that's what's happening.  And, following that trend is part of what this series is all about and seeing where it takes us as a species.

Peter McCormack: So, what I really liked what this idea you talked about, because I've heard about these concepts of Type 1, Type 2, Type 3 civilisations, and there was a thing that was, I'd say about a year ago, I don't know if you followed it, but there were these weird signals coming out of space; and, there was this conjecture of whether this was a planet that was harvesting the energy from the sun because of the -- it was something to do with the blink of when the planet -- I don't know; something weird was going on.

Dhruv Bansal: Yeah, the pattern of light curve, it was really the dips in the light curve of a famous star that astronomers were looking at over the last few years; that's right.

Peter McCormack: And they couldn't work out what it was.  And then, we got these artist impressions of this kind of mutant matrix that was harvesting energy from the sun.

Dhruv Bansal: Those were exciting!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I was like, "Really; that's fucking cool, man.  Is that real?!"

Dhruv Bansal: I think it turned out maybe something more natural, but that doesn't mean that idea is unrealistic.  But moreover, I love that science fiction has again often talked about, "Hey, one day advanced civilisations might build crazy structures like this".  They never ask who funds that structure; how do they have such an incredibly huge energy production pipeline to do this thing?  They don't ask what is the incentive structure, the relationship between the government and industry that caused this; like, why did they even build it?

They posit crazy things like, "It was the project of our famous scientist [or] our population was growing, so we just decided to build this thing".  They don't ask those deeper economic questions, because there hasn't been a framework that is interesting about money to apply to that context, until we start to think about scaling up Bitcoin and blockchains and proof of work.  Suddenly now, it starts to connect all these ideas together. 

Again, that makes me a longer term believer in Bitcoin.  It helps me not worry about proof of work, because I don't view proof of work as some massive weakness, like we're wasting energy; no, we're using energy and the usage of that energy delivers all sorts of benefits and in fact, it might shape our society over the long run.

Peter McCormack: This is where we should probably bring in the Fermi paradox though and talk about the fact that we might never get there.  So, whenever I see the Fermi paradox, I get this smile on my face, because I read about it first on Wait But Why, you know that website that guy writes those ridiculous things.  I'll put it in the show notes in case nobody's read about this; but, the Fermi paradox is this kind of concept that we never reach -- why are there no Type 2 or Type 3 civilisations; why have we never been visited by aliens?  Who knows; we might do; we might have been.  We've seen some weird things coming out.

If you listen to Joe Rogan, some kind of weird things are going on there, but surely if the Type 2 or Type 3 civilisations exist, they maybe would have visited us; we'd be aware of it; where are they; and the idea of the Fermi paradox is that there's this great filter that no civilisation gets past, because it always destroys itself.

Dhruv Bansal: Yeah, that's a common explanation.  I guess there's the tension between -- because, to be clear, it's not really a paradox if you just say, "We're the only life out there.  It's just us and that's it; that's the solution".  That is a perfectly acceptable solution, it's consistent with all the data that we have; it's just not very satisfying perhaps and I think it's a little bit unlikely.

I talk about, in the third part of the series, that life is probably common in the universe; simple life, right, like little bacteria, or simple cells, or things like this.  We have a lot of reasons to believe that those are common.  But the Fermi paradox is saying, "Well, if the universe is so big and if simple life is so common and everything is so old, surely there is enough time for a lot of things to evolve as we did into civilisations like ours and become curious like we are and go visiting, or at least send signals, for God's sake.  Just shine a light at somebody and let them know you're around".

So, why aren't people doing that to us; why don't we see huge amounts of signals like that all over the cosmos, right?  And, there have been a lot of proposed resolutions to this paradox, and I think my favourites are typically in the class that you describe, which is that there's some kind of filter, often known as The Great Filter, a step that it's difficult for civilisation to take, or an accomplishment that most civilisations don't make; and that prevents, as life as common as it is, from beginning common civilisations like ours.

Of course, the most compelling question about The Great Filter is, is it in our past, or is it in our future?  Did we already get past it and so we're good and, because we became multicellular and we're going to be coasting all the way to galactic domination and most planets just aren't able to get past single cellular life, they just get stuck there; because if so, we're golden. 

Or, is it in our future?  Are we about to destroy ourselves in the next 100 years because, as soon as you invent technology, you basically kill your planet, because you have no idea how to control technology?  Maybe that's The Great Filter, so that's a very depressing idea, that it's in our future and that every planet develops a civilisation like ours, which then snuffs themselves out with nuclear war or disease or global warming, or some awful thing.  So, there are lots of different kinds of explanations.

Peter McCormack: Look, I'm a believer in a universe of a billion, billion galaxies, which each have a billion, billion stars, that mathematically it's likely that there will be other forms of life.  I remember in biology when I was a kid it was like, if there are other forms of life, you probably can't imagine what they're going to look like.

Dhruv Bansal: Sure, and that's the fun part, right, and I think I'm pretty honest about that in part 3.  I think I open up and say, "At the end of the day, we have no idea.  We're so far now down the speculative territory that even I have to kind of pause and admit that I have no idea what is happening; that we're just going to make some guesses and we're going to try to follow our guesses.  And, we're okay with our guesses being wrong, but if our guesses are simple and uncontroversial, guesses that we think are likely to be true, if we're being Bayesians, we have high belief in them as priors, if we like, then maybe our conclusions are okay and worth listening to".

In the article, I try to offer some pretty simple initial guesses of what alien civilisations, should they be out there, what they must be like.  And then, we try to pursue the consequences and basically what I conclude is, if they're out there, they have blockchains; and if they have blockchains and they're talking to us, they're sending us blockchains.  And then I try to pursue the consequences of that idea a little bit more.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean that bit was quite a leap to say that they've come to the same conclusion --

Dhruv Bansal: Do you think so?!

Peter McCormack: -- that a blockchain is the perfect design for money, because we have to make the assumption that they are intelligent life.

Dhruv Bansal: I clearly had a conclusion that I was trying to reach, yeah!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and we don't know where we would be classed amongst these.  We might be this amazing, intelligent life.

Dhruv Bansal: Sure.

Peter McCormack: Or, we might be the fucking morons of the universe and they're like, "Look at those fucking idiots down there, acting like fucking idiots"; we've got no idea, right; no idea at all.  Also, the other thing I think about with regards to, why haven't we seen signals, etc, the universe is obviously a big place.  We've dominated this planet, but I was reading the other day about, was it two new sharks have been found; New Zealand, or something or other?  We're always finding new species.  So perhaps, we've not been found.

Dhruv Bansal: No, I think that's honestly the best explanation.  It's the one I personally actually subscribe to, is that we haven't looked and no one's looking for us, because the universe is huge and it takes so much time for signals to move through it, and we've only been aware, in a universal way, for maybe 100 years, since we had radio and other kinds of things.  It would have been difficult for us to even notice signals from other places before that.

Obviously, if folks had come to visit us, we would have noticed it, presumably.  But, maybe that's just really difficult because, again, the universe is so large.  I think that's just a very simple and, to me, a very satisfying explanation, because it doesn't make any claims about who's out there; it just says, if they're out there, you haven't heard from them.  And that's reasonable, because it's just a huge place and you haven't run into them yet.

It's only if they're incredibly common, like every star system has them, that we would expect really to be inundated with signals and have something that we need to explain.  If there are hundreds or a few thousand civilisations across the galaxy comparable to ours, or much more advanced even, they're still really far away from us.  The galaxy is huge.

It's like saying, "What if there were 1,000 tribes on all of Earth".  Okay, fine, your nearest tribe is still hundreds of miles away from you at that point; you're unlikely to run into them, no matter how much you've forged, and it's going to take a long time for you to develop the perspective to realise how populated the planet really is.

Peter McCormack: Have you seen the Drake equation?

Dhruv Bansal: Yes, very much so.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, I've just drawn it up here.  So, "In a universe aglow with 2 trillion galaxies", which I didn't realise, "you'd be supremely smug to think that Earth alone hosts clever creatures", etc.  I can't remember the actual number.  Was it up to, like, 100,000?

Dhruv Bansal: Yeah, we don't know.  It's very sensitive to the assumptions you put in.  I think that's like my attitude in this article, like we simply don't know if they're out there or not.  We know that it's possible; we think it's likely; but we know it's not like -- there can't be too many of them, because we would have seen them in some way, but there still could be a good number and we would have no evidence; and that is completely consistent with all the observations that we've made.

So, on some level it's my kind of mea culpa until I open the door and be like, "Okay, so I can speculate freely.  I can conjecture that there are many alien civilisations out there right now, even in our neighbourhood and we haven't seen them; and I can now try to talk about why we haven't seen them and what they might be like.  And of course, since this is a whole Bitcoin series, I want to connect them back to Bitcoin; I want to make the claim that if they're out there, they're like us and they're using Bitcoin".

On some level, it's kind of like the idea that Bitcoin and blockchains -- obviously they aren't using Bitcoin like our version of Bitcoin, but they're using something that looks like Bitcoin, right; it's a proof of work blockchain.  And part of why I think that's important -- go ahead?

Peter McCormack: You're taking it as a natural evolution, right?

Dhruv Bansal: I am.

Peter McCormack: Like, if life forms evolve from single cell, maybe they always evolve in some form of ocean.  Eventually, they've got to find a way to get out the ocean, so they get the little wings and then they come to the land and they can breathe oxygen, and then they need arms and legs, opposable thumbs, a brain.  All that stuff is maybe natural.  Who knows if they have the same organ structure, right?  Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't; all that stuff is way over my head.

But also, if it becomes intelligent life, then it discovers technology, whether that's like a hammer and then fire and then ultimately, the microprocessor; and I guess there's the assumption they eventually get to the point of money and they get to the point of a blockchain.  But just before we touch on that though, because the Drake equation's quite interesting, I've got it up here, "Yes, the aliens are likely around, and 10,000 societies could inhabit our galaxy (not to mention those other galaxies) but they're not close".

Dhruv Bansal: Yeah, they might be far away; that's true.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  But then, do you ever think about that?  I was like, "Do you know what; there may be a planet way over there and there's a bunch of aliens on that planet going through the same shit that we're going through on here, arguing over bullshit, in their own little world", but wouldn't it just be great to see it?

Dhruv Bansal: I would put it up -- for much of my life, it's been one of the most interesting questions that I just have always wondered about.  I'm not a big wonderer about, does God exist or not exist; I feel like the terms there are not well defined.  But, I constantly wonder about whether aliens exist or not exist.  Maybe that says more about me than anything else.

Recently I started to wonder a lot more about who the hell Satoshi is.  It's became my fast-running number two mystery that I think about in the shower.  But for many years, yeah, the Fermi paradox and just where are they and are they like us; I think many people who don't think about this often maybe don't feel this way, but I certainly feel that, if we found a signal, if we detected them, if we had direct proof that they're out there and they're even like us in any way, like we can communicate with them at all, it would be the most important scientific discovery of history.  I feel comfortable saying that.

Many other people would disagree and that's fine, people have different priorities; but to me, it changes what it means to be human on some level.  We're suddenly not the universe; we're one planet and we're one tribe.  And I'm not an idealist, I don't think it brings us all together in a Kumbaya way; I think it's going to cause all sorts of crazy shit to go down on our planet in the short term.  But maybe long term, just knowing how we fit into the universe more broadly will help us understand where we're supposed to go or what we supposed to do.

I kind of feel we're a little bit foundering or something; like we've lost direction in some way.  I think about everywhere we went on planet Earth, there were humans that we found when we got there, no matter who we were, whether we were colonials or colonised.  People were everywhere on Earth, pretty much.  And for much of human history, we assumed that they were out there in space when we looked.

There's a cool, maybe it's apocryphal; there's a cool contest when radio was first invented and started to come out in the early part of the 20th century, or late 19th century, so early on.  There was this reward for, "Can you send signals to space, radio signals, and can you get a response?" and you won a certain amount of money if you got a response from an alien civilisation.  But it can't be the Martians, because the Martians obviously exist, and so that would be too easy.  And so, this was the terms of the contest that was created, which I just thought was so cute, because it reflected such a belief that we no longer have.

What actually happened is, once we got good at space, we went up there and we were like, "Hm, all these worlds are dead, there's nothing out here, there are no signals; we're completely alone".  And I think maybe it created this weird, existential panic in our species that, "Oh my God, we have no idea what the point of universe or existence is any longer.  We're completely alone and we're just a random accident and this is what it is".

I sometimes believe that if we were to discover that there are other beings out there, in fact maybe many of them, it would give us maybe, again, not directly a purpose perhaps, but it would contextualise what it means to be human, in a way that we used to have; we're part of the universe of life and the universe is alive and it's for life, it's not random, we're not an accident; it's common and meaningful therefore.  I don't know; that's starting to get a little philosophical.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, but I think about it in both ways.  I think about it, because I'm a bit of a space nerd; I love all this geeky shit.  And, I think about it both ways.  If we are an accident, if we hadn't happened, or we destroy it; what a fucking bunch of morons we are.  But what an amazing accident to happen, right? 

This is probably back to my uni days of smoking loads of weed, but I used to think about firstly, you have to have the Big Bang, right, which nobody can really explain in itself.  Then you have to have billions and billions of years and at some point, there's a creation of the Earth, right.  Then the Earth has to have all this perfect environment for the creation of life, and then life is created, and then up through the single cells, up to fish, whatever, dinosaurs.  Eventually we get to the humans and then, humans procreate and two by two, all the way to this point where I was fucking born!

The chance of any of us being alive and existing right now at this moment is so ridiculously small, it's incalculable.  So, why the fuck are such a bunch of morons? 

Dhruv Bansal: Why don't we appreciate it more?

Peter McCormack: Why don't we appreciate it more, because the chance of any of us being alive and being alive at this moment is so rare?  But then at the same time, I think about these other civilisations.  Are we an experiment?  If these other civilisations exist --

Dhruv Bansal: Are we in a zoo?

Peter McCormack: Are we in a zoo; yeah, the human zoo?!  Was it Musk who said, "If you can create simulations, we're most likely a simulation; mathematically, we're most likely".  I still don't believe we're a simulation.

Dhruv Bansal: Nor do I.

Peter McCormack: But, all these things I think about and I wonder if there are these other civilisations, and I wonder if they just go through the same struggles, conflict, war, that everywhere, if that's a natural -- as gravity is natural in the universe; that's natural as part of the cycle of any form of life.  Or, if we are really just a bunch of dickheads?  I can't figure it out!

Dhruv Bansal: I think that that's part of what I spend some time talking about in the article.  Some things have to be kind of universal.  We have to all experience gravity and light and energy usage; it's hard to imagine life not respecting those kinds of boundaries.  Certain things, even surprising things, may be universal, like the mechanism of genes, or DNA, or cellular metabolism, like ATP synthase; these things are evolved on Earth very quickly.  And it could be that the reason they evolved quickly is because they're very likely to occur in the right circumstances.

So, maybe we wouldn't be surprised when aliens are made of DNA just like us, because how else would you make life?  That's the simplest and easiest way to do it.  And maybe… I don't know.  Conversely though, there are lots of reasons to suspect that they may be vastly different, especially as life grows in complex surprise.  We are a society of individuals, which is almost the definition of the human condition, is that we're all the same but we're all in competition with one another, and that just is the joy of life.

We've all seen in science fiction the hive mind, where everybody is like the same individual.  Does that society have the same conflicts that our individual members experience?  So, I think there's room to entertain that life can be really, really different; but we can also entertain the idea that maybe there are certain universal selection pressures and efficient choices that life routinely makes and if it's common, then we may expect many kinds of life to look or act or experience things that we experience.

I'll give you an argument that I've heard which is fun to run through which is, why should all alien civilisations or all alien species that we'll communicate with have eyes pretty much that work like our eyes; why is that?  And that's an interesting question.  It's because life really has -- if life evolves and maybe needs liquid water; if liquid water evolves, then where are you going to find liquid water on the surface of the planet?  You're going to only find it in certain kinds of atmospheric pressures and compositions.  Those are likely to be clear to space at certain frequencies.  So, light's going to come in at certain frequencies; that's what may create the visual spectrum on earth.  That's the light that comes in through the atmosphere from the Sun.  So, maybe these aliens will also have eyes.   

So, you can run these kinds of just-so stories, letting them all have telescopes and then they'll be able to look at us and know what we know.  So, you can tell these stories to yourself about how everything will be the same; but you can also say it could be different.  We don't know that life might exist inside some of the icy moons of Europa and Enceladus and our own solar system; those are dark places, we think, with no light at all.  So, maybe life doesn't need eyes.

So, I think there's a sense in which what you believe or project or claim about external life or aliens or whatever, it says a little bit more about what you are thinking, what you are and what you think is important about humans, than almost anything else.  So, when I talk about Bitcoin and alien species, I am saying that these days, I think that humans' ability to compete and cooperate and use money to solve resource allocation problems is one of the things that defines your society and that's why it's important to project that out to aliens.

I think that people who think that the aliens are zookeepers, or that the aliens are malicious predators that are out there to kill us, they're projecting some aspect of what they think life really is, or they're picking the things that they think are most important and they're elevating those, and then they're using those to make more general predictions.  Maybe no one is right; that's really not my claim that certain people are right or wrong here, I'm just trying to recognise that when we speculate like this, we're a little bit looking at ourselves; we're looking in the mirror more than we're looking out towards the stars.

Peter McCormack: I think that's the point.  We're judging any other civilised, well, any other intelligent life, as evolving as we have with the same mistakes and decisions and, who knows, man?  I'm with you.  I think it's the most interesting question that we face; are we alone?  I do.  I think that's why everyone talks about it.  I think that's why, when Elon Musk talks about going to Mars, or Joe Rogan gets an Air Force fighter jet pilot who saw some weird kind of Tic-Tac thing that he talked about, I think we all get drawn to it; we're all drawn to this idea.  I think it is the most interesting question, beyond anything else.

Dhruv Bansal: Because we all want to say, "I fucking knew it man; I knew all along they were out there!"  We all feel it.  Not all of us; some of us feel the opposite, but many people like it's got to be true, right, and so we're just waiting for the evidence to show up a little bit.  So, I think it's partly under that model where I'm just, "Okay, so I'm looking in the mirror and I'm saying what's cool about humans is Bitcoin and that's what I want to talk about".  So, I'm going to say they have Bitcoin and I'm going to motivate that because I think it's natural for them to have Bitcoin. 

We talked about stories that we can tell ourselves that convince us that they'll be like us and why and I try to tell some of those stories.  Like, if they're a society of individuals, they're going to need language; and, money and language coevolve.  So, they're going to find money and if they find money -- and if they're talking to us and they're the source of an alien signal, they have telecommunications technology, and they have computers because otherwise, how are they sending us signals?  And if they have those things, then they also have money. 

Well then, why didn't they discover Bitcoin?  They have everything they need to discover Bitcoin.  Are we so clever that only we could discover Bitcoin, or is evolution -- does technology emerge when a society needs it and all the prerequisites are present because, inevitably, someone then invents that thing?

So I think, under that model, I suspect that if they're anything like us, even in the broadest strokes, and they're able to develop technology and they're a society of individuals with conflicts, they're going to find Bitcoin one day.

Peter McCormack: I think that's a really good -- dude, I think this has been my favourite show I've ever fucking made!

Dhruv Bansal: Thank you.  I enjoy talking about Bitcoin with other space nerds!

Peter McCormack: Well, do you know what, I don't smoke weed anymore and I kind of felt like we should have done this with a bong in Texas, maybe with some whiskey.  We're definitely going to talk about this when the planes are flying.  Do you go anywhere else with this?  Is there anything -- look, I think you and I, we're going to do an open discussion about this at Clubhouse at some point.

Dhruv Bansal: That's right; we're going to get something scheduled.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Are you going to go anywhere further with this?  Is there anything, because I'm super interested in more of a realistic exploration of the first part at a technical level?  I'm really interested in that personally, as I said to you before we started talking.  That bit might be relevant in our lifetime.

Dhruv Bansal: Yes, I agree.

Peter McCormack: Unless I cryogenically freeze myself and -- well, the potential is, that's kind of a good hodl strategy, to cryogenically freeze yourself and come out in a few hundred years and be trillionaires!

Dhruv Bansal: I think we explode ourselves right now when we freeze.  You've kind of got to assume that the guys in the future will be able to fix that for you, but sure, yeah!

Peter McCormack: So, are you going anywhere else with this?  Is this done; I've done this; I'm moving on; or, is there anything else?

Dhruv Bansal: I mean, on some level, I feel like I am a little bit done.  I've been thinking about all these issues for a good number of years and it took me some time to just sequence it all out and get all my thoughts out on paper and create a little bit of a discussion space for other people that are interested and stuff like this. 

I don't know that I have too much more original to say right now on these topics, certainly not in the popular sense.  I think I've speculated enough; I want to speculate on some other things now.  I really want to get back to some more Bitcoin Core, Stack stuff.  I think there are a lot of things interesting in the Lightning Network and other places that I want to start writing about a little bit more. 

But, there is one area that I have been developing.  Especially to me, what was interesting about part 1 was how hard, if you like, the result was.  I did a simulation and, if you like, you can disagree about Martians will create Muskcoin; you can disagree about whether Bitcoin is the most important coin, or whether we'll have hyperbitcoinisation, or whatever; but, it's challenging I think for someone to disagree with the claim that Bitcoin, as currently conceived, will not work outside of a certain distance from Earth, at least not for mining.  I think that's pretty incontrovertible, based on the simulation that I've done now.

But, a simulation's not as good as other kinds of arguments, perhaps.  I'm working on a more analytic treatment that tries to sort of say, here's the maths and here are all the ingredients and this is why you can prove that the simulation proved that result.  It looks like an exponential decay and there has to be some equation that tells me the same thing.  So, I want to start talking a little bit more about a theory of how blockchains converge over space and time; again, not because it's super relevant today to Bitcoin, but it might be, it just might be, in a few decades, as we start to actually think more seriously about getting to Mars.

So, I want to spend a little bit more time on that stuff.  But no, overall, I feel like I'm kind of done.  I put out a lot of weird speculative, crazy, long, difficult-to-get-through articles.  I imagine most people just skim them and just look at some of the pictures and like some of the quotes and stuff, and that's totally fine.  I don't intend for them to be -- they're not very actionable, let's put it that way.  But, I do think that there's enough content in them for folks who particularly are interested in space and the Fermi paradox, or Bitcoin and blockchains; and, especially where all these things intersect. 

I think there are a lot of people at the intersection of being interested in astronomy and space and aliens and Bitcoin and futurism more generally.  So, I think, if you're in that intersection, come back to these as you occasionally think about Bitcoin and space and stuff and I think you'll find that there's a lot in there to serve as a good point for starting off discussions. 

I also totally would love if someone were to actually really fictionalise this.  I think it would be really cool to watch.  I just would actually want to watch a TV show about this, what happens on Mars 50 years from now, while this stuff gets unloaded, you know.  That's a little bit of a high hope; I don't think anybody's going to do that, but that would be cool.  I would like that.  I think the proudest I have felt is when some folks have read these articles and been, "This is really good science fiction", because I love science fiction and I think that's high praise.  So, I hope somebody makes it really science fiction.

Peter McCormack: Well, like I said to you, for me it was two things.  It was accurate theories about what happens with Bitcoin in space, but it also was a bit of science fiction.  I've read every word of the first part twice.  I read it the first time you sent it and I was just glued to it, the first time you posted it; and then I read it again for this; and I've listened to Guy Swann narrate it, because I just love listening to Guy Swann narrate stuff.  I just did Gigi's book that he narrates as well; he's so good. 

I've read every word of part 2.  Part 3 was more of a skim because I was like, as I went through it I was like, "Okay, I get this, but I'm so far removed from the bits I care about", plus I didn't understand it all, so I thought I'd let you shoot the shit!  The only other thing you're going to face is, I almost guarantee every other podcaster's now going to want you on to discuss this, because it's fucking fascinating!

Dhruv Bansal: To talk about Bitcoin in space?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dhruv Bansal: Well, I love talking about Bitcoin in space, so I'm excited about that.  I think folks in my company will be annoyed that, why aren't I talking about Unchained and all our amazing products and our Concierge onboarding programme, that I'm supposed to promote, and I want everybody to check out, because if Bitcoin is going to space, let's put it this way; you don't want to lose your Bitcoin.

So, I think part of what takes me a really long time to get these things out is that, this is not my job, or something I even do full time.  This is when I can sneak in a few hours where I've had an inspiring thought and I'm like, "I've got to write that down".  Then this stuff gets done.  And I think Parker suffers from this too.  Part of me wishes that Parker could just write all day long.  I'm sure the audience is familiar with Parker Lewis, but he's such a good and compelling and interesting writer and I've learnt so much reading his series that part of me is just, "Dude, could you just do that?"

But then I'm like, "No, don't do that, because you are an incredible co-worker; and Unchained without you, it would be a very less successful business".  So, it's awesome when we have folks who are incredible employees and really shift the ball forward at work, but are also writing stuff that I think is, especially in Parker's case, that's going to last a long time.  They're going to be reading that on Mars when they're plotting Muskcoin!

Peter McCormack: Well, I agree with you on Parker.  I mean, his Gradually, Then Suddenly series is phenomenal, and I'm talking to him about doing a series with him based on that, because it is so good.  I think what you've done at Unchained, you've just built a really great team of actual bitcoiners.  Other companies have done a really good job of bringing people in outside of Bitcoin to bring a different perspective, but you've got a really good core team of bitcoiners.

Do you know what; one of the saddest things about the pandemic is the lack of travel.  I used to get to visit you guys.  I used to get to drop into your office every two to three months, come and have a steak and a beer, and I haven't seen you guys for over a year and that's sad.

Dhruv Bansal: It's still happening that we do a lot of Bit dev -- thank you so much.  Yeah, we do a lot of Austin Bit dev meetups and they're increasingly well attended, which I do find kind of shocking, considering I think a lot of people are still staying home.  Austin is an incredible place to be running a Bitcoin company and it's not just Unchained Capital, though I am really proud of us for being a pretty central node in the Austin Bitcoin community. 

There are a lot of folks who are just coming there.  I think it's that mix of Texas, maybe the income tax situation; there's climate; there's fleeing California; there's the shelling point idea of more and more people come here, so more and more people come here; and indeed, we were able to even get you to swing by and we got steaks.  I'm looking forward to that stuff coming back online much more, but it's exciting to see, nonetheless, how much enthusiasm is here, even with the pandemic going on. 

I think sometimes at Unchained, we conjectured there was an effect of a lot of people had a bit more time at home; maybe they started to take a bit more care with their finances and their Bitcoin stuff; maybe there was a lot of stuff they were needing to do, like getting into a multisig collaborative custody setup with Unchained that they were putting off for a little while.

As soon as the pandemic hit last year, we saw a huge increase in folks coming and signing up and taking the next steps.  Again, I do think a big part of that was driven by fear and monetary changes and people reacting to government policy perhaps as well.  And a big part of it was due to how much effort we put in on our Concierge onboarding.  But, it's an interesting pandemic; blessings and curses all round.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well ,every time I have a conversation with Parker over Telegram or Twitter he always says, "When are you moving to Austin?"  I'm like, "Dude, it is a series consideration, man".

Dhruv Bansal: Parker's good at getting people to move to Austin!

Peter McCormack: I have the complexity of children to consider, but I did say to the kids either way, they want to get back to the States; they love it; so, we're going to have a holiday there potentially, if we can fly this summer.  And I said, "Look, you guys have got to come to Texas; I've got to take you to Texas", so maybe we'll swing by and hopefully, I'll get to see you guys again, because I want some barbecue and I want to see you guys and I want a whiskey!

Dhruv Bansal: That's the real reason; Peter just misses the barbecue and the steaks!

Peter McCormack: Well, no, you know what it's like.  I get to drop by Austin, I get to drop by your offices and you always kindly let me use them to do interviews, which I'm always grateful for.  But, I also get to see Jimmy, I always get to see a few people and I just love it.  So, fingers crossed, man.

Funnily enough, today, I accidentally signed up to the Beefsteak next month and I can't even go.  I thought it was the Miami one I was signing up to, like a moron, but hopefully, dude; hopefully soon.  And listen, I'm humbled that you let me do this; we were talking about it quite a while ago.

Dhruv Bansal: No, thank you for the opportunity.

Peter McCormack: No, dude, any time, man; I've absolutely loved this.  I flat out say now, this is my favourite show I've ever made.  It's that intersection of science fiction and Bitcoin, two of my favourite things.  The only other thing I need is Lamborghinis in it, then I've got everything I give a shit about all in one interview; I just can't make the Lambos work!  But, I'm humbled you let me do it.  I'm going to share this out with everyone.  I'm going to try and encourage everyone to read at least parts 1 and 2 before they do, hopefully all 3 parts and I just can't wait to get it out there.  So, thank you.

Dhruv Bansal: All right, Peter, thank you.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, all the best.  Keep crushing it with Unchained and, yeah, hopefully I'm going to see you soon, man.

Dhruv Bansal: See you soon.