Dhruv Bansal Bitcoin Systems – Bitcoin Magazine: Bitcoin News, Articles, Charts, and Guides

This interview with Dhruv Bansal was conducted by myself in an effort to obtain valuable insight into a rather visionary Bitcoiners mind, and I believe my mission was accomplished. Bansal’s answers are profound and thought-provoking, giving us a glimpse into his thoughts on Bitcoin at large. Be sure to check out his talk at Bitcoin 2021 here after reading the edited transcript of our interview below.

Casey Carrillo: Hi everyone, I have here Dhruv Bansal, co-founder and CSO at Unchained Capital.

I was lucky enough to have an email Q and A with Mr. Bansal, and we agreed to sit down here at Bitcoin 2021, where I’ve had the pleasure to finally meet him in person. First of all, welcome to Bitcoin 2021, and I hope you are enjoying your time here.

Dhruv Bansal: Thanks Casey, it looks like I’m going to be a little overwhelmed, it looks like a huge conference.

Carrillo: Absolutely. So, jumping right in: in your previous article you mentioned that you’re excited to see the Bitcoin-inspired discoveries other scientists make within their respective fields. What, in your opinion, gives Bitcoin this capacity to inspire different ways of thinking about things?

Bansal: I think anytime humanity discovers a new principle of organization, governance, construction or material science, it affects everything. I think that’s true for ideas of evolution and for ideas of computation. I think we’re seeing that with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is interdisciplinary. One of the things it does is that it distributes decision-making, order matching, reality and truth in a way that we’ve never seen happen before, which gives Bitcoin a lot of its strength and resilience and is what makes it unique. I would love to see scientists and researchers of all stripes apply those kinds of thoughts and methods to other kinds of systems. My talk with Ryan is attempting to apply some of this thinking to things like the internet, other networks and civilization. But I think Bitcoin can go beyond that: it can teach us how to deal with systems that don’t have any definite state in a given moment in time but that eventually become consistent. We know this from databases quite intimately, but to see it not only affect a database in an esoteric programming context but to see normal people talking about notions of forks and eventual consistency is really powerful. I love to see that learning wash over humanity as a whole and allow us to be more informed of the trade-offs and rules of distributed systems.

Source