Bitcoin Forum

First off, let me say that I am very excited about Bitcoin and the community that is growing up around it. Keep doing what you're doing and this can be something big!

Now the main event: I am a member of a team at Concordia University (www.concordia.ca (http://www.concordia.ca)) that will be sending a small, multi-purpose satellite called a CubeSat (http://www.cubesat.org/ (http://www.cubesat.org/)) into Low Earth Orbit (600km to 800km altitude) sometime late in 2012 (Sept-Nov timeframe). We are in the team formation, idea generation and "momentum gathering" stages right now. Here is a link to the university newspaper on the subject: http://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/688 (http://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/688) Part of our mission is "community outreach" which also happens to be one of the major goals of the Bitcoin project right now as well! What I am proposing is this: would members of the community be interested in donating a few Bitcoins to the Concordia CubeSat cause, in return for some more public awareness about Bitcoin?

Our kickoff meeting is this Friday, I'll pitch the idea to the team, but first I'd like to gauge the response here on the fora. Some questions:

Would you donate a few Bitcoins to the Concordia CubeSat team?
How much visibility could Bitcoin bring to our team?
How much visibility could this project bring to Bitcoin?
What should we do with the donations?

There would be pretty awesome cool factor if the satellite ran a lite btc client itself :) You could see if the donations are enough to do that, or just mention it in your publication.

That would be truly awesome. Bitcoin would be the first currency in space.  :D

Actually has any astronaut carried a cash when launched into space?

I would donate BTC to this.  Put me down for 50 if it happens

I would totally sent bitcoins to your satellite.

Now everone wants to know is whether it comes with anti-anti-satellite weapons.  ::)

Other than the EFF this seems pretty mainstream.

Yes, I would donate (don't know how much yet). I see the value of such project. Running a bitcoin client seems pointless to me (I guess you won't be able to update it anyway). A nice  bitcoin logo on it would be nice (I guess there will be press coverage of it). On the other side, posting here already gave you some visibility, maybe a link on the "Trade" page, that you accept bitcoins, will give even more. Also, I believe many people here on the forum are running blogs, they might make a post about this.

About the last question:
Maybe a Canadian trader wants them to buy you snacks/beer/etc. while working on the project. ;) (I doubt that you will get hardware, etc for them).

Just some questions:
What will the sat do? I know the project is for educational purposes, but if it doesn't do anything, you could as well send junk up there (and there is already enough junk up there).
Within what time range will the project run and when will the launch be?

It would be nice to buy advertising space on its surface for a bitcoin logo and site address and may be a QR/datamatrix barcode with some info. Photo of the satellite may be putted into popular scientific journals and encyclopedias.

"Beta software ?
On my satellite ?"

Thanks for your responses.

At the meeting, I brought up Bitcoin, and we agreed that Bitcoin is unique and every little bit of funding and attention helps. We will be discussing finances in a future meeting, and while the university is giving us some funds to start with, we will certainly accept small donations towards our science package onboard the satellite.
Unfortunately, we won't be able to actually run a Bitcoin client on the satellite itself. The power and CPU constraints are just too tight, we have to save CPU power for the scientific mission and communications, etc.

I really want to emphasize the community-driven aspect of Bitcoin, and getting people involved academically in our satellite project means getting the word out first! So thanks for your continued interest.

Unless you are generating the client doesnt use many resources.  On my laptop for instance firefox uses 220,000k memory while bitcoin uses 24 000 k while idle and not generating. That might be 24 k too much though  :D

Perhaps someone at your college might consider doing a peer reviewed paper on bitcoin ?

Well, I guess the hardware and software of satellites are nowhere comparable with laptops.
(likely to have some embedded system running on a certified ARM cpu)

And on your laptop bitcoin uses little memory, but it needs the rest of the system to run (boost, openssl, crypto++, berkdb).

Running bitcoin client on it is really pointess. I guess community can be interested in logo / QR code on satelite itself. I will certainly donate it! It can give us some attention from screntific or mainstream media

Its useless but one day it is certainly possible.

I agree with the logo idea. A qr code would be great.

Yeah, that seems like a really cool idea.

I'm a Concordia University grad and will definitely donate.

OP hasn't been on the forum since December 2010. This is a dead thread.