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Topic: Wired: Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopter Is Cryonically Freezing (Read 992 times)

sr. member
Activity: 333
Merit: 252
I heard they had a major accident a few years ago, during which most of the bodies were lost (defrosted).
Oops.
The idea is not bad otherwise. It's just hard to fulfil the promise of  keeping something up and running for what is most likely at least a century.
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 520
I'd rather die and be gone for good Smiley

~CfA~
legendary
Activity: 1386
Merit: 1053
Please do not PM me loan requests!
How much this process costs? Does this is available to anyone that has money or only to selective few?
You'd end up spending between two and three hundred grand, depending on how long you've been a member
legendary
Activity: 2786
Merit: 1031
How much this process costs? Does this is available to anyone that has money or only to selective few?

Minimum Cryopreservation Funding:

$200,000.00 Whole Body Cryopreservation ($115,000 to the Patient Care Trust, $60,000 for cryopreservation, $25,000.00 to the CMS Fund).

$ 80,000.00 Neurocryopreservation ($25,000 to the Patient Care Trust, $30,000 for cryopreservation, $25,000.00 to the CMS Fund).

Surcharges:

$ 15,000.00 Surcharge for cases in the United Kingdom.

$ 25,000.00 Surcharge for cases outside the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom.

$ 25,000.00 Surcharge for cryopreservation of non-members arranged by a third party who is an Alcor Cryopreservation Member.

$ 50,000.00 Surcharge for cryopreservation of non-members arranged by a third party who is not an Alcor Cryopreservation Member.

http://www.alcor.org/BecomeMember/scheduleA.html
hero member
Activity: 840
Merit: 524
Yes!
How much this process costs? Does this is available to anyone that has money or only to selective few?
hero member
Activity: 903
Merit: 1000
LakeBTC.com
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/hal-finney/


Some bitcoin enthusiasts have used their cryptocurrency to travel around the world. Others have spent it on a trip to space. But the very earliest user of bitcoin (after its inventor Satoshi Nakamoto himself) has now spent his crypto coins on the most ambitious mission yet: to visit the future.

Hal Finney, the renowned cryptographer, coder, and bitcoin pioneer, died Thursday morning at the age of 58 after five years battling ALS. He will be remembered for a remarkable career that included working as the number-two developer on the groundbreaking encryption software PGP in the early 1990s, creating one of the first “remailers” that presaged the anonymity software Tor, and—more than a decade later—becoming one of the first programmers to work on bitcoin’s open source code; in 2009, he received the very first bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto.1

Now Finney has become an early adopter of a far more science fictional technology: human cryopreservation, the process of freezing human bodies so that they can be revived decades or even centuries later.

Just after his legal death was declared Thursday at 9 a.m., Finney’s body was flown to a facility of the cryonics firm known as the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. As of Thursday night, Finney’s blood and other fluids were being removed from his body and slowly replaced with a collection of chemicals that Alcor calls M-22, which the company says are designed to be as minimally toxic as possible to his tissues while preventing the formation of ice crystals that would result from freezing and destroy his cell membranes.

Over the next few days, the temperature of his body will be slowly lowered to -320 degrees Fahrenheit. Eventually, it will be stored in an aluminum pod inside a 10-foot tall tank filled with 450 liters of liquid nitrogen designed to keep him in that state of near-complete suspended animation. “That’s where he’ll remain until such time as we have technologies to repair the problems he had such as ALS and the aging process,” says Max More, Alcor’s director and Finney’s friend of many years. “And then we can bring Hal back happy and whole again.”

No human, to be clear, has ever been revived from a state of cryonic freezing. Many scientists consider the idea impossible. But Finney’s wife Fran says that doubters never stopped her husband from exploring a technology that intrigued him.

“Hal respects other people’s beliefs, and he doesn’t like to argue. But it doesn’t matter to him what other people believe,” says Fran, who alternatingly spoke about her husband in the present and past tense. “He has enough confidence in how he figures things out for himself. He’s always believed he could find the truth, and he doesn’t need to convince anyone.”

In fact, Finney and his wife both decided to have their bodies cryonically frozen more than 20 years ago. At the time, Finney, like Alcor’s president More, was an active member of the Extropians, a movement of technologists and futurists focused on transhumanism and life extension. “He’s always been optimistic about the future,” says Fran. “Every new advance, he embraced it, every new technology. Hal relished life, and he made the most of everything.”

Finney was also an avowed libertarian and well-known figure within the cypherpunks, another early ’90s, mailing-list-centered group focused on empowering individuals with encryption, preserving privacy, and foiling surveillance. Finney created the first so-called “cypherpunk remailer,” a piece of software that would receive encrypted email and bounce messages to their destinations to prevent anyone from identifying the sender. He also became the first coder to work with Phil Zimmermann on Pretty Good Privacy or PGP, the first freely available strong crypto tool, and designed the software’s “web-of-trust” model of verifying PGP users’ identities.


https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-and-me-hal-finney-155054
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