Topic: A Interplanetary Currency - page 5. (Read 9187 times)

It costs way less to mine for water and materials in space, and transport those materials through zero gravity to the space station, than it does to mine for them on earth and launch them from here. The plan is to provide water and resources for the ISS to start with, and then space hotels and other space tourism venues once they become available.
So, it's mostly the gravity thing

Mars would end up playing a part for things we may need to process first, and a processing factory in space is too costly to build (building airtight caves on mars is cheaper than building large airtight can in space) or for things that we do need on earth that may be hard to get here (gold, plutonium, platinum, rare earth metals, etc.)

Indeed they are looking into it,  but honestly I don't understand why.  If you really want to mine stuff, I'm pretty sure it would be cheaper to mine sea floor than asteroids.

I think the most likely outcome will be mars having its own Bitcoin fork, with a floating exchange between earth and mars. If Mars ever starts needing a currency, they will need something they can use locally.
As for why mars would ever get colonized? Mining for resources on mars is one possibility, but a bigger one may be that mars has a much lower gravity than earth, and thus would make a much cheaper (from a re-launching point of view) stop for refueling and restocking of resources for space miners (those mining stuff from the asteroid belt and such). Sounds far fetched, but Virgin and other companies are seriously looking into mining in space already.

Wrong editing of my post.

Depends on whether or not there's something there besides dirt that we could use and we can't find cheaper anywhere else.

Does it, really?

From a philosophical point of view, it's not obvious that we should make lots of efforts into preventing our extinction.  After all, if such an extinction happens, it will only concern future generations.  I'm not sure I understand why preceding generations should bother.


Assuming perpetual exponential growth of human population is silly.  In several developed countries people don't even renew generations.  It seems that the more advanced civilizations are, the less children they make.

... with the currently known physics.

We should have been dead in 1883 http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425780/billion-ton-comet-may-have-missed-earth-by-a-few-hundred-kilometers-in-1883/

1h video?? TLDW anybody?

I guess the fact that we might get extinct by some stupid accident some day might be incentive to put a lot of resources in the establishment of a self-sustaining settlement either in Space or another planet/moon.

There are. They are just generations of light-speed travel away. If we survive these damn next 100 years I would feel quite bullish for earth's life and we could prepare for another 1000 years to bridge these gigantic gaps.

(Anybody knows this theory:
If there is a first man (pick any) and a last man (due to irreversible nature of entropy there will be), a random man (you?) is in the second half of all men with … 50% probability. So with 100.000.000 humans having lived before you and the next 100M being born in the next 100 years, the last human might just be around the corner with 50% certainty. With continued exponential growth the 99% probability for extinction would not be 1000 years.

I love this thought experiment )

There are no other planets.   And extra-solar is just too far away.

Delay is no issue. Maybe bandwidth is. Not sure how much bandwidth there ever will be if you have people over there but most likely not more than a hand full of connections (radio signal coming from Paris will not be distinguishable from same frequency coming from New York so you could get distance by relaying signals via the moon or some other spots that you occupy to get bandwidth).

With bloom filtering and a convention to use only addresses of a small address space (vanitygen: 1Mars*), Blockchain traffic would be negligible. Sure, earthlings would love these 1Mars* addresses, too just for the coolness but that would rather add anonymity/denyability to our Martian wallets.

The reason for it to happen, I would think for scientific reasons, and to test equipment and learn so we could inhabitate other planets later on.

I don't think humans will ever establish a long term settlement on mars, but I love the idea that some people try.

Here is a recent talk of Elon Musk about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB3R5Xk2gTY

Actually, this would be a really good publicity stunt for bitcoin ... see if you can get one of the astronauts up on the Space Station to receive some bitcoins!

(I bet the Russian guys would)

Bitcoins, first human currency in space.

You need to put dark energy in front of your spaceship and nobody knows how to make some.  We don't even know what is this stuff.


Well, we try to find them with SETI, but no results so far.   There are also reasons to believe that it will be impossible to contact a civilization if it's more than about an hundred light-years away (the radio signal would be much too weak).   We would be very lucky if more than one technologically advanced civilization had developed in such a small neighborhood, and in the same time frame.


Earth will stay inhabitable for about five hundred million years.  That's a lot.  IMHO, humanity as we know it will almost certainly NOT exist in ten thousand years.  Or if it still exists, it won't matter much because it won't be the most intelligent life form anymore.   Humans will be over-powered by machines, who might just keep them as pets or something.  And for a machine, the concept of being "inhabitable" is much different than for a human.

Human will not live on mars or the moon, for the same reasons nobody lives in Antarctica, Sahara or on deep ocean floors.  We're just not built for that.  Why would you like to spend tons of money to settle down in such an hostile environment, anyway?


We don't need to send humans for exploration.  Robotic probes will do it as they currently do.  If we send humans, it will mainly be symbolic, for fun essentially.   Spatial hiking will be some kind of a very expensive leisure activity.

Sending and receiving transactions might work, as far as you're patient enough. However Curiosity's CPU will get lots of orphans / high stale ratio (near 100%), so it won't be profitable at all ;-).

It's said that bitcoin people think outside the box, now, imagine in the future, do you think that there will be possible to move anything (including radio signals) faster than the speed of light?

Alcubierre’s idea: bending space-time in front of and behind a vessel rather than attempting to propel the vessel itself at light-speeds.

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2012/09/19/nasa-actually-working-on-faster-than-light-warp-drive/#ixzz2D5DLGgFT


So, the universe is wast, perhaps there's already other civilizations that have created interplanetary communication technologies, perhaps we one day will get in touch with them, and start using their technology ?

Also, one day, our sun will stop shining, and by that time, if mankind is not extinkt, we would need to find somewhere else to live, and it would be logical to think that we would need to inhabitate more than one planet on our quest to inhabitate the universe. :p

Also, it's not unthinkable that in say a couple of hundred years from now, maybe before that we have bases with people living on mars, the moon and so on. In the future, there will probably be astronauts that will be willing to dedicate their entire life for space exploration, it is also possible to imagine that a giant self sustainable space station would travel through space, while hosting a complete and sustainable eco-system for hundreds or thousands of years until it finds an inhabitable planet.


Use your imagination people!

Of course you won't mind.

I mean, it would be used for commercial exchanges between mars and earth and goods would take months or years to ship anyway.  So it won't matter if payments take a few hours or even days.

You can use bitcoin over there if you don't mind somewhat slower propagation to and from Earth, but you can't mine.

As someone cooler than me said, "the speed of light sucks".