What's beyond Bitcoin? - Gopal Bansal

For the past decade, I lived with the idea of Bitcoin, and decentralized networks and opened myself to the understanding of banking and decentralized finance (defi). I have lived in the crypto ecosystem, learned every day, and sometimes tried to write about it. 

There was this thing that continued to poke me in my subconscious intellect. What’s beyond Bitcoin and the idea of cryptocurrencies and decentralization. I have had the mind to understand the value created by the brave browser for the content creators and advertisers and many more projects like these. I have listened to the podcasts of the wonderful economists & historians rejecting and accepting the idea of Bitcoin and I have seen the bear and bull phases of Bitcoin (and that hardly punches me). 

Listening to Raul Paul (Real Vision Finance founder) last year, he mentioned the idea of the social tokens and that blew me off. Now, what are they? I happened to be in the exceptionally good company of the crypto philosophers. They shared with me an idea of a dating + social platform, It was an opportunity for me to understand human behavior in dating and intimacy. On top of that, the whole concept is based on crypto/social tokens. (I am currently working with them.)

When you are in a crypto domain, other than the value of the token, you always wonder how this idea is globally most discussed by the people in power. I happened to watch some videos and read articles on How to start a new country and the Network State by Balaji Srinivasan. I hardly understood this and refused to learn more about this. 

I started focusing on the project DropD and the idea of cloud cities came again in the second part of the paper. Boom! My mind exploded. Now, this is a new avenue. I dwell intensely on this and talked with the founder Sunil Aggarwal about this and as a crypto philosopher, he massaged my mind with his opinion. I tried to grasp the idea. So the idea was new, and my imagination goes for a hard time sulking into this. OK! this is fine.

Now the answer is still vague, What’s beyond the idea of Bitcoin, I have celebrated enough but I always knew that this idea is way more beyond the price itself? What was that?

A few days back, Balaji shared the book “The Network State”. Obviously, for a slow learner like me, I am trying too hard to understand this book. But the core idea satisfies me that I have something to cheer up my curiosity. From Bitcoin to Ethereum to Defi to social tokens and to cloud cities and network states. I have come a long way in the crypto domain. And one thing I know for sure is that this domain will keep on developing unimagined things. I accepted The question "What's beyond Bitcoin? always be there.

Being in the crypto space for a long, I haven’t developed anything yet around this space but the ideas flourishing around this space have always given me sleepless nights over the last decade. I hope this continues till we have a fix in the current ecosystems.