Bitcoin Forum

It occurred to me after reading this article: http://www.space.com/18596-mars-colony-spacex-elon-musk.html   where Bitcoin is going to shine in the next 25-100 + years is exchange of currency between planets.  I can see on Mars where someone wants to make a transfer they could between Earth and Mars.  I just thought it was a cool to think about.

Bitcoin won't work between planets, the latency is too big.
It takes about 15 minutes for a roundtrip to Mars.

So what?

The very point of bitcoin is to be able to overcome synchronization delays due to network latency.

mega internet lag to update the blockchain. plus why would they need money on mars.

they would just use ration cards and stamped the day they eat a meal..

interplanetary currency, that's way cool!

What if you want to do a transfer of wealth to earth?

I just thought it was mind-blowing to think about!

We send radio signals to Mars, it means bitcoins could be used between planets as well. :)

The good people at ISS are tweeting:

check this

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/jan/HQ_M10-012_ISS_Web.html

Yes I think planets and large intergalatic societies will trade very directly information streams and innovations sent directly. Just 10 years delays in messaging would make negotiating complex contracts impossible.
"You sent me the latest in laser weapons tech and will continue to send you the latest in fusion reactors" etc..

Bitcoin on Mars? Mars is worse than living on Antarctica so I doubt there will be much economy there for a long time. Maybe one day they would have their own chain though.

My goodness this is good news. Good piece of information there :)

They could need Earth money in order to buy stuff from Earth.

Come on.  ISS is in Low Earth Orbit.  So about 400km above sea level.   Using internet through such a distance is no big deal.  And internet signals pass through space all the time anyway, since they are often relayed by communication satellites.

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

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

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.

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!

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 ;-).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 :))

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/

... with the currently known physics.

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.

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

Wrong editing of my post.

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.

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.

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 :P

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.)

You should probably focus on being able to spend bitcoins on Earth before setting your sights on space aliens.  Also, I bet they'd already have a currency that doesn't take 30 minutes to complete transactions with and is probably accepted by most of their society.

BTW, the SA retard above thinks that
"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"
is the same thing as
"They're discussing the possibilities of trading bitcoin with alien species to buy their technology."
Holy crap you are stretching  ::) Besides, the right thing to say would've been "It's much more likely that advanced alien tech would have ways of breaking SHA-256, making bitcoins useless, rather than provide improved communication tech." As I said, no imagination whatsoever.

First of all, you can take a private key with you wherever you go; it doesn't need to be plugged into the network to store value. The network is only needed to verify that it still has coins (that's why brain wallets are possible). And second, it doesn't matter how long it takes to transmit a signed transaction. As long as my Earth-Bitcoin transaction is transferred from earth to mars, and gets accepted by Earth miners, it will work. Latency is only a problem for transmitting mined blocks, not transactions. It will take a very long time to verify, of course (15min to transmit to earth, 10 to put in a block, 15 more to send confirmation back to mars).  As for the rest, it'll work same as currency exchanges between countries here on earth, where one exchange is in one country (planet), and the other in another country (planet). Nothing has to be between. People flying from New York to London don't land in Iceland to exchange GPB for USD.
Yes, once in a while, when the planets are on opposite sides, the sun will be a problem. Maybe by then we'll have relay satellites. Or maybe we'll all be dead before any of this happens, anyway.

There are indications that some of the deposits of the minerals on the asteroids are pure (due to their particular pressure/temperature/gravity histories) ... i.e. zero refining costs ... basically you just have to go up there, pick it up and bring it back.

SA troll posted

The same way NASA is able to keep a constant link with the Mars rover. You guys do know we have rovers on, and satellites around Mars, right? If we ("we" the human race, not "we" the bitcoiners, you idiots) do eventually get a colony established on mars, do you honestly think they won't have any communication channels with earth? Chances are there will also be a heliosynchronous satellite in orbit at a 90° offset to our planet, so that we will always have a way to send signals to whatever destination may be on the other side of the sun at the time. (I'm expecting you can figure out what heliosynchronous orbit at 90 degree offset means)

P. S. Please keep the "I don't understand any of this basic financial, technological, and astronomical stuff... you must be the idiot, herp-derp-lol" stuff coming. It's rather amusing.

So what you're saying is that robots will come self aware and develop a survival instinct?

I would be interested in your musings about how this would come to be.

A "floating exchange" means an exchange between two currencies that is based on open market trading, not on one currency being pegged to the other. Just like the current BTC to USD market is a floating exchange. It doesn't mean there will be an exchange floating somewhere in space. But, of course, you didn't know that term because I'm a moron.


Aww, that's cute. I bet you also think lasers make pew-pew sounds when they are fired in space. Sorry, but from a thermodynamics point, space is actually very hot, and vacuum makes a great insulator. In fact, if you found yourself out in space, and were somehow able to survive without dying from decompression or suffocation, you would actually find space comfortably warm. After a while you will even find it very uncomfortably hot. A mining rig in space would have the same issue, getting way too hot and not having any good way of cooling itself off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrot

Maybe someday hybrot will use human neuron to build their progeniture.

I think the most likely scenario is the one that has already been happening: humans will keep using technology as a tool to improve their lives. Meaning that any advances in memory recall, AI, or communication will be used as a tool, first through devices we carry, and eventually through devices we wear, implant, and possibly even grow within us. I'm of the "continued self-guided human evolution through technology" camp, as opposed to "we're all going to die through a Terminator scenario" camp. Though I guess we won't really be the same humans once that all happens.

This is so retarded. Who is the idiot who posted that?

Whenever I see these threads I always think of this for some reason:

http://m.youtube.com/results?q=intergalactic#/watch?v=Nrbc_0Pf10Q

 ;D

Anyone know how the general population ever responded to the following claims, before they were ever done?

- It is possible to fly an airplane with many people accross the atlantic sea!
- It is possible to see live images of what's happening on another continent.
- It's possible to land a man on the moon!

The people who made things possible, were those who believed, the visionaries. Some would've called them dreamers.

It's in human nature to not believe anything until it's actually happened. Humans are exploring space, and this will escalate in the future.

On a serious note, though, since it will be impossible to mine the same blockchain on both Earth and Mars, the only two options would be to either keep Earth as the central mining point, and let Mars deal with the huge latency of broadcasting and confirming transactions (which people there really won't like), or fork their own local chain. The same would happen if Bitcoin got stuck behind some country's firewall. Anyone know how something like that would work? I figure it would be similar to trying to bootstrap another Bitcoin from scratch, including setting up its own miners. Would that even be possible any more?

Not really. Extrasolar planets are accessible for colonization with 1960s technology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29#Interstellar_missions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29#Interstellar_missions)

Venus, Mercury, plenty of very large moons.

I'm not sure it's so obvious.

Light takes a few minutes to travel from mars to earth.  It's the same order of magnitude than the target delay between bitcoin blocks.  Does that mean earth and mars could not mine the same blockchain?  Not so sure.

Time delay would not be an issue for each planet, providing they don't wait for confirmation from one another before starting mining the new  block found locally.  And that's pretty much how the current protocol already work, isn't?

Surely it would increase the amount of chain forking, and it might take more time for them to resolve, but nothing would be very different from how bitcoin currently works.

Well, I think so anyway.

I obviously meant "no other planets we might consider colonizing"

That's what I meant.  Humans as an organic species will probably disappear but human culture will survive through the machines and AI it will have created.  Transition will happen more or less peacefully, not in a man-vs-machine war.

The latency between Earth and Mars would be a few minutes to over 20 minutes and communications would probably come at a premium. You are better off having a separate block-chain and call it MarsCoin or something.

^^^ That. It takes 10 to 20 minutes for a signal to go from earth to Mars. It takes 10 minutes on average to mine a block. This means unless earth and mars take turns mining a block, each waiting for the other to finish, they will each be in a permanent state of forking each other (each will take 10 minutes to mine it's own block, only to receive a competing block from the other planet 5 minutes later). I guess the dispute could get settled with whoever mines the highest difficulty block, but it would make confirmations and mining rewards way too chaotic.

Edit:

Oh god, I forgot about this. That likely blocks any chance of using Bitcoin between two planets with anything other than sending it at a few batches at a time over a span of a few hours. Send with error checks, receive confirmation, re-send whatever was errored, wait for block confirmation, and receive confirmation of the block could take as long as 20+20+20+10+20=90 minutes. Just for one Bitcoin transaction.

The whole concept is just plain cool IMHO.

i could see it working with international space station and the moon if economies there were big enough i guess.

Double spends may be an issue. You would want to wait for 60 confirmation instead of 6.

Even people in the arctic need to pay for internet porn and send their earnings to family members. Of course people on Mars will want to do business with people on Earth. All of those spice miners will want to send profits to their families back on free Earth. Not to mention buying your freedom for the Earth masters.

Introducing the Interplanetary Bitcoin Exchange (IBEX). I've put a thought into this. All I need is a logo to resemble the following image.

http://www.fxdirectory.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Ibex-has-a-strong-sexual-dimorphism1.jpg

Fuck me! Why the hell did it have to look like a goat?

Here's my backup plan: The Interplanetary...

http://motionnet.blogspot.com/2012/08/interplanetary-internet-ipn.html

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TmayFQv-8ZA/UB6DoWxZ3hI/AAAAAAAAAJ8/xLpK0Xg6UM8/s1600/vintcerflift09.png

I think there is actually no big problem with using Bitcoin on Mars. It just needs a bit of additional work:

• it's not always possible to communicate directly with mars. there is this big thing called "sun" inbetween! i.e. for a permanent mars base, we need additional relay satellites.
• i could envision a central server at mars, that acts as a clearing station for all transactions.
• double spends on mars and in parallel on earth are possible, but would be detected in less than half an hour.
• for the entire lifespan of bitcoin, the mining power on earth will very likely be  much higher than on mars. so, mining over there won't make much sense in the first place.

Agreed.

The bitcoin network on mars would work as "clearing station" and could do all a central "clearing station" could provide as it knows no more or less about confirmations than a central one.

Once Mars becomes inhabited, there's always the option of its citizens starting a new currency based on the Bitcon protocol, only used on Mars with its value determined by the then Bitcoin exchange rate.

Then again, it's quite possible that no currency will be allowed on any planets that we Eathlings ever populate in the future.

Most likely the martians will force us to buy their currency. Fucking early adopters.

In which case the Earthlings will conduct a 51% attack. I'm not racist or anything, but I've always felt like them damn Martians were always up to no good. Boycott Mars! Let's start a petition.

I am surprised no one remembered about this thread: Bitcoin Theory (Byzantine Generals and Beyond)  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99631)



From his other thread:



So far socrates1024 didn't finish his theoretical work, I guess mostly because of lack of interest from other people due to little practical need. But personally I am fascinated with this stuff. 

socrates1024 has completed some portions of this work and afaik is still making good progress (from what I've read/discussed).

I am afraid that Musk would force us to use PayPal^^
But I don't think I'll need money on mars, because I'd have paid Musk already millions before even entering the space ship to my new homeland.(talking about a 50y time frame here) And how can I set up my mars koi pond? The next big question is, what kind of laws will be applied there? My laws? Musks laws? Zimbabwe laws? The next country for large scale shadow banks? XD

^^^ Depends on who gets there first. If NASA or a coalition of governments, then our laws. If some corporation that is mainly interested in mining or operating a low G space depot, then whatever corporate law they use.

And the race is on!

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ3g3Mvy-NgA7x9KpFEI5oSSkHJYfLFfl-kTkMJQJgbleh2WrU_

I'm not sure that Icanhascheezburger Corp has a space program.

The Bitcoin Foundation should join the race, to get bitcoin on Mars.

This thread is no longer too far-fetched: http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-elon-musk-80000-mars-20121126,0,2580983.story

At least I agree with this:

« He added that it would be a fun adventure to watch, even if you aren't planning on going yourself. »

I'm not sure how far six million dollars would help SpaceX now, but assuming it would, their marketing director could consider pre-selling 1,000 seats now for the discounted price of only BTC500 (approximately $6,000 USD) each, with the following stipulations:

• All pre-sales are non-refundable and can not be transferred to another party.
• Base on the exchange rate reaching $1,000 USD:BTC1 at least once, regardless of the exchange rate prior to launch(es).
• A seat will be reserved in only your name or one of your children (even if not yet born).
• Must be able to pass the required physical prior to your flight.

I'm sure a few other caveats can be added to the list, but you get the gist.

Here's the best part for SpaceX. They can opt to sit on the coins and wait till the exchange rate doubles, thus having $12M USD to further fund their endeavor. The way they can help accelerate said doubling is by announcing their intentions, thus bringing more awareness to Bitcoin.

Worse case scenario for all those who purchase tickets would be that they would have bragging rights for a long time, along with receiving possibly some perks from SpaceX. I'm pretty sure there's at least 1,000 people in the world that would love those bragging rights, coupled with having a slim chance of actually being able to journey to Mars at the greatly discounted price.

~Bruno K~

Reminds me of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_American_World_Airways#In_popular_culture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_American_World_Airways#In_popular_culture)

Time for a Mars Flight Club (MFC): http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1989-09-03/features/8903010181_1_moon-flight-requests

...until we invent sub-space communication.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspace_%28Star_Trek%29

http://www.policymic.com/articles/19636/mars-colony-spacex-elon-musk-wants-to-build-vegetarian-colony-on-mars

There is a spy reading this forum  ;D

I agree. Some sort of spy...

« That was true of the English colonies [in the Americas]; it took a significant expense to get things started. But once there are regular Mars flights, you can get the cost down to half a million dollars for someone to move to Mars. Then I think there are enough people who would buy that to have it be a reasonable business case. »

If Elon Musk seriously considers that people should pay taxes in order to finance the dream of a few SF-fans to settle on a giant rock millions of miles away from any drop of liquid water or liter of breathable air, then I'm afraid that to me he is not sympathetic anymore.  At all.

Comparing Mars to America is just ludicrous.   America was not a desert.  There was air to breathe, water to drink and so on.  Hell, there were even some good-looking, bare breasted native women welcoming sailors with flowers and often offering their body on the beach.  And I'm not even joking.

I mean come on, the first land where Colomb arrived in America was the Bahamas:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/images/12_05/bahamas.jpg


And as a comparaison, this is where Elon Musk dreams of settling down:

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/parker/TwnPks_RkGdn_left_th.jpg

Those people are completely delusional.

Does Elon Musk love large, arid deserts and wastelands??  We have some of those on Earth, no need to go to Mars:

Antarctica:
http://www.discoveringantarctica.org.uk/alevel_img/10003375.jpg

Sahara:
http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/030/972/i02/shutterstock_93404287.jpg

Pacific ocean (well ok that's not technically a desert but it's just as if.  Go try to live there all your lifetime if you don't believe me):
http://www.sciencenreview.com/data/images/full/2012/03/22/1228-pacific-ocean.jpg


I'm pretty sure those places are paradizes when compared to Mars.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/parker/TwnPks_RkGdn_left_th.jpg

Delusional? I think you, I and Elon realize that Marstizens won't be happy if their lives consisted of only all work and no play. Now what could be a perfect fit to compliment the current Martian landscape?

I got it!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_fJMWtOVgb74/Siy3-zJV_-I/AAAAAAAAFWI/S9SBuUK_mcs/s400/vintage+vegas+sign.jpg

Below, you're possibly looking at the first Marsfiaoso.

http://cbskmvq.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/field_web-banner_300x250.jpg?w=420

Mars has water. Not a lot, but it may be enough. And if you use some solar panels to pump electricity through that H2O, you'll have some H fuel and O to breathe. But yes, it's not as nice as landing on a tropical island. However, tropical islands don't have drinkable water (unless you manage to find a spring), and don't really have food, unless you feel like chewing on vines and bark. So, although it looked prettier, back then it was rather inhospitable as well.

It very much depend on the size of tropical islands.  Indeed lots of them are too small to provide fresh water for any human.   But I think (though I'm not sure), that where Colomb first landed, there was water, coconuts, vahine and everything.


There's lots of water in sahara also, if you don't mind digging deep enough.   For some reason it doesn't help making the place less hostile, though.   I wonder why it should be different on mars.

At least there will be food to eat.

http://cache.jezebel.com/assets/images/39/2011/09/printablefoodsplash.jpg

I mentioned above about printing food to eat on Mars. Well, check this out: http://www.seattlepi.com/business/boeing/article/WSU-prints-shapes-from-moon-rock-4074709.php

Whenever Phinn contributes to a thread it suddenly becomes a conversation stopper :P anyone else notice that ? LOL

Oh yea! Oh Yea! Well, I got news for you... (brb, for I need to Google up some news)  ;D

Plastic found on Mars!  :o

old credit cards?

Found something intellegent--AGAIN--to add to the conversation.  ;D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi_Universal_Intergalactic_Denomination


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7029564.stm


http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44158000/jpg/_44158391_coins_other_203.jpg

If the frozen water on Mars was melted it would cover over a third of the world with an ocean. There is a lot of water there.

Wouldn't we just use some form of quantum internet. If not, We could super-cool cas coins into BEC's scan them with lasers and beam the info to mars, shoot it at some more supercooled mass and teleport the coins of course.

This.

If we could incoorperate a shark somehow it would be the perfect internet.

Obviously the lasers shooting the BEC info to mars would be mounted on sharks

Be sure the correct shark species is chosen, for we don't want any remoras hitching a ride.

Didn't you know that transaction fees for solely for the purpose of nurishing remoras?

And on Mars lemmings fly.

So... where is this intelligent thing you said you were going to add? I think I missed it  ;D

You're the guy with the creepy coffee table.  ;D ;D ;D

I know this quote is a little old, just REALLY want to add to it: At current rates, the estimated minerals on the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter alone would be enough for every person on earth to have 100 mil usd worth.. (granted the value would lower drastically)

There's a lot going on with this idea.  First, long-distance entangled quantum particles will allow instantaneous communication to Mars soon.  Secondly, aliens could intercept the transmissions and crack the hash calculations and replace the data in the chain with their superior computers.  Third, anyone rich enough to get to Mars has enough goddam money already and would just use a USD credit card, lol.

I was thinking about quantum entangled communication where it was first mentioned, but didn't really say anything.
The issue with that method is that you need to physically deliver the second "copy" of the entangled material to the communication destination, and you will use it up whenever you use it to communicate.
Basically, two entangled particles stay entangled until you read the information off them. Soon as you do, the entanglement breaks, and they're useless. So, communication of this type would be instantaneous, but would require a constant replenishment of communication "fuel" to be ferried from one planet to another. Not a cheap proposition.

possible inhabitable planet 12 light years away ?

http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/12/19/0254212/possible-habitable-planet-just-12-light-years-away

of course if there was more hashing power on Mars, then the Earth-visible blockchain would become quite interesting.

Just had a weird realization - right now it costs a not small fortune in fuel costs to go out to space, and is cheaper to stay down here. Once we're more or less space-bound, it will be cheaper to stay in orbit, and cost ridiculous amounts just to come down to visit a planet and come back up.

At some point in the future, it will probably be necessary to leave earth as the sun has a limited amount of years it will exist before it burns out. This is still very far into the future though.

Yep, like 5 billion years worth of fuel.

So "at some point" is pretty far-fetched. I seriously doubt even our civilization and our bodies will exist in its current or similiar form.

Yeah, I was thinking about much nearer term. Like, "I've been living and working on this mining station on this asteroid for a few years now, and it's pretty cheap do fly-by's around Earth's orbit while I drop off the raw materials, but I better not screw up and get caught in the gravity well, otherwise I'll get stranded down there, and it will cost a fortune for me to get back home."
Or even just that visiting neighboring asteroids is cheap, but visiting family at home on earth is not.

Cost of energy for propulsion, i.e. energy conversion mechanism efficiency, is the underlying factor here. As far as space propulsion goes we haven't got past 1G tech. yet ... and space-bound rockets as a working concept have been around for almost 8 decades.

Controlled fusion and/or gaseous fission tech are on the roadmap and who knows what else innovation may throw up, but it is a pretty safe bet to follow the propulsion energy vs. cost curve into the future and assume it will get cheaper.

Flying across the Atlantic was impossible 100 years ago, now those flights can be got for as cheap as 5 barrels of oil.

We are in trouble before the sun burns out. In 700 million years , as it ages, the sun has bloated enough to make life impossible: scorching hot desserts and evaporating oceans. Mars should be nice if it is terrraformed in time.

Hum...  12 light years might be too much long a delay for a bitcoin node.    ;D

You never know lol

[citation needed]

From what i know, the sun will get bloated and turned into a red giant right before the end of its existence (so still few billions years to go).