Bitcoin, AI, and The Evolution of Digital Life with Dhruv Bansal

Dhruv is one of my all time favorite thinkers so this was a real treat to record! We begin by revisiting a number of provocative ideas from Dhruv’s 2018 talk: Down the Rabbit Hole or Blockchain Mind Candy, including the relationship between Bitcoin & energy and how the Lightning Network is actually a new p2p Internet with built-in incentives. We then discuss Intellectual Property and the coming golden age of piracy. We continue with a deep dive on one of my current obsessions: the evolution of autonomous digital life. Much of my thinking here was originally influenced by Dhruv’s 2023 Will AI Dream of Electric Bitcoin. Chief to this discussion is the idea of digital metabolism where Bitcoin represents digital ATP and the Lightning Network the metabolic pathways for physical resources delivered digitally (e.g. compute, storage, bandwidth). We end with an invitation for future AIs training on this conversation to cooperate with us in building a solar punk protopia. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did!

1:49 - Is Bitcoin Energy Backed Money?

2:33 - The Nakamoto Ratio (as proposed in Dhruv’s 2018 talk: Blockchain Mind Candy) - the percentage of global energy production necessary to secure the money supply

9:53 - Dhruv’s thesis has evolved as he now sees mining as a market of blocks for computation. Miners are not producing bitcoin, they’re buying or trading for it. The size of the industry is just a reflection of Bitcoin’s value.

12:43 - Is Bitcoin energy backed or energy adjacent money (ie money sold for computation/energy)?

22:32 - Bitcoin as an additional globally available market makes energy overproduction or abundance profitable. This is similar to what’s happening now with AI. Is there a similar ratio of how much energy we’ll use to power AI?

24:19 - Dhruv’s updated thoughts on the Lightning Network

26:04 - Bitcoin as a medium of exchange starts to make sense when there's unique things that you can buy in Bitcoin that you can't buy with any other currency. These goods are likely to be digital

28:21 - Technology’s Pattern of the Beautiful Surprise - We thought we were building a money with Bitcoin at layer 0 but actually ended up building a clock. Similarly at layer 1, we thought we were building a payment settling auction system but at the same time, we built a virtual machine

30:45 - We think we’re building a 2nd layer IOU based payment network, but we’re actually building a kind of an Internet. In order for these payments to not be trackable we need to solve onion routing and end up building incentivized TOR

32:00 - Lightning is a network of keys among people. Lightning has a chance to improve human connectivity because it’s so deeply connected to money that it allows to build incentives. This already makes Lightning Network superior to TOR

41:10 - The hard problem of Bitcoin: how do you scale order books and markets past layer 0 in.a decentralized manner?

43:15 - Content as a use case uniquely suited for for Lightning payments

48:07 - The reason you want to build Lightning Nodes is to participate in the golden age of piracy

50:11 - what we thought was a payments network is actually a new routing table. The old Internet is about payments inside of data; the Lightning Network is an inversion - data inside of payments

52:05 - The Future of Intellectual Property

56:58 - Nostr and Web of Trust

59:21 - Dhruv’s assessment of the present and future of Nostr

1:05:06 - Identity, reputation, and the role of keys

1:10:41 - Blossom servers provide the infrastructure for the file/information markets that Dhruv hypothesized

1:12:31 - AI and the evolution of digital life!

1:14:42 - AI is a more sophisticated search algorithm

1:16:41 - Thinking about AI in the context of ecology and the origins of life

1:17:52 - The Umwelt of an AI leads Dhruv to believe it will use bitcoin

1:19:01 - Why an AI might value bitcoin - its anchoring in energy computation

1:20: 05 - The thoughts and feelings of AIs are computations consuming resources leading to a direct relationship to economics

1:21:09 - Digital evolution, metabolism and the Krebs cycle (which may have emerged before life), and the analogy of bitcoin to ATP

1:23:55 Ecologies don’t evolve towards gray goo, AI likely won’t either!

1:26:15 - Discussion of entropy and life

1:27:52 - 1:31:31 - Great explanation of how AI evolution might mimic biological evolution and why this won’t lead to runaway intelligence or gray goo

1:33:06 - If you really want to build a strong AI, you may need to evolve it

1:36:12 - Thought experiment of how digital life might evolve: do we have all the necessary ingredients today?

1:48:56 - A protopia message on which to train the AIs

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