Bitcoin Forum

Some day in the future we will have human settlements in Mars can they use bitcoin?

depends if they have internet and means to use it.. may b food and water will worth more than bitcoin who knows

People are probably not going to take wheel barrows of Cash, and Coins to Mars when its colonized. I don't see why it can't be possible, with enough satellites or improved technology one day it might be cheap to have lowish latency interplanetary communication.

Pretty sure we will need to learn how to breathe there before we can be concerned about cryptos there...

word, we should nuke mars or something.. there's all that water under the surface, and that vapor can start terraforming mars. we'll all probably be dead by then there is a decent settlement on mars though.

right now, i rather we discover more about europa.. i really wanna see if live has developed on that moon.

No reason why not.  At the maximum distance between the two planets (378 million km) there would be a 21 minutes delay to get your transaction in a block (42 minutes minimum if your waiting for a confirmation).

I would not recommend mining though, the chances of your block being orphaned are quite high.

Neil

Implying Mars wouldn't have their own blockchain, ah egocentric humanoids.

Given how much of a drought there is there, I think I will be selling cups of water for 1BTC each...

yeah i have some stocked up.. i should get even more. water is life, water is important.

california is such a shitty place to live though.. sales tax is something like %8.2ish percent, electricity bills are going up and up, and now we don't even have enough water to drink.

In theory yes but given the cost of interplanetary transmission and the long latency it is more likely that a separate MarsCoin would develop.  Most intra-planetary transactions would only use their respective currencies but I am sure some company would provide gateway and exchange services between the two networks.

before the mars settlement... mars is the place where the bitcoin foundation funded largest mining facility is located...

read and please contribute to the story line



https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=668028.0

 the answer already advised.

I remember something about this.  I think it was called Doom 3.

kinda inspiration...

maybe satoshi can code some kind of software for terraforming , after that we can pay in marscoin :P

How awesome would it be sending a BTC to someone on Mars!? Receive potentially millions of dollars from another planet in minutes..

the limit to mars - earth communication is about 4 minutes
so blockchain will probally split, a mars block chain and an earth blockchain.
the earth miner will have a 4 minute propogation disadvange for a mars miner to find the next block compared to a local earth miner.
then if by accident a mars miner get the next block then it would be hard for a earth miner to get the next block due to a 4 minute delay.
thats just all theory.

That would be a pretty awesome thing. I can definitely foresee a form of currency at lease similar to bitcoin as being the main currency by the time we do interplanetary travel. I can also foresee us being wiped out by then, whether it be through war of natural disaster. Also, at current technology it would take that long for an interplanetary transaction, but who's to say we won't be more advanced by then to the extent an interplanetary transaction is faster than google glass?

Hopefully Marscoin will have more value than Mooncoin.

when distances take say years for a one way light speed communication, bitcoin in its current form dosn't make sense.
maybe clones of 10 minute bitcoin for local star systems will pop up and then you convert between the different bitcoin clones when you travel between star systems

AFAIK Project Mars One accepted Bitcoin. But unless proper internet connectivity is provided, it is not possible to use Bitcoin on Mars.

Yeah the people mentioning the time it takes for the information to spread through the solar system (or just Earth-Mars) are right. We can't establish a single cryptocurrency when we have to deal with block times of 10 minutes. That's too short for such distances (also the orphan rate will suffer). Side chains? MarsCoin maybe?

YES.

It is possible to stabilish a communication link to mars, since the curiosity is sending images to earth.

Just mining and blockchain core will not be suitable, I think. But multibit is ok.


Maybe some modifications to deal with the delay? Like send transactions from time to time by a central autority, so no double spending attempts?

Or addresses that can only be generated by martians?

Bitcoin have the potential to be the universal payment system, if it keeps improving and keeps being accepted by most people.

I can not see why this would not be possible if they had access to the internet. More and more companies seems to be jumping on and accepting bitcoin and it can only get better. I am sure it would be a while though before any serious use of bitcoin could happen on Mars if it was to happen.

Seems as though bitcoin might be necessary on mars...

The short answer would be, "Yes." The long answer is that there are already some cryptocurrency users who have thought of this, including the Marscoin Foundation (http://www.marscoinfoundation.org/). Interplanetary traders are probably going to insist on taking cryptocurrencies as payment for the sake of convenience and complete lack of patience with Earth-bound banks who want a slice of the pie that they haven't earned. It wouldn't be a long shot to say that those interplanetary traders could be backed by economic strategists who have gotten sick of Earth's insistence on using systems that were outdated before we ever had permanent settlements on Mars.

Contact mars one they are accepting bitcoin for donations I wonder if they would consider actually trading from mars with bitcoin.

I wrote an article on something similar awhile ago. Perhaps it is of interest.

https://www.goldsilverbitcoin.com/what-does-it-mean-for-bitcoin-to-be-one-million-years-old/

I don't think this would actually work very well. It can take several minutes for radio waves to travel from earth to Mars and during this time it would be possible that coins could be double spent. If we were to ever colonize on another planet I don't think that interplant commerce would really be possible due to the costs associated with traveling between earth and any other planet. 

I agree. It would just not be technological feasible to transmit blocks and transactions from planet to planet without loosing the double spend protection that Bitcoin provides.   

I'm sure they can, why wouldn't they. I'm sure that by then BTC will be even bigger and more stable.

If you're talking about the buying and selling low priced items on the level of my teapot, you'd probably be right. However, it's estimated that some medium-sized asteroids could be worth trillions of dollars in terms of the rare-Earth elements and platinum group metals that could be mined from them. It's estimated that the Philippines could make $30 billion a year from its deuterium deposits in this era in which nuclear power hasn't really caught on much (source: this article (http://foobarph.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/vast-deposits-of-deuterium-make-philippines-the-richest-country-in-the-world/)) Imagine how much Martians could make just by being the solar system's shipyard. We'll find a way to make interplanetary trade work.

Talk about being proactive.  People must be running out of Altcoin ideas these days

Why would there be something that says they cannot? You realize it only takes 3 to 22 minutes for the Mars Rover to send/receive pictures/commands back and forth right? At the closet it is 3 minutes, when it is further away it is 22 minutes.

I see no reason why there couldn't be a node that could transmit it.

This is the most futuristic thread among the futuristic ones, btw I think that btc will be useful on Mars, why not?

At the risk of revealing my inner nerd there is a possibility for instant communication between any two points in the universe through quantum physics. You can actually provide an interaction with a sub atomic particle that is in more than one location at the same time and get the exact response in both locations at precisely the same instant. It isn't much of a leap to actively send information this way.

The future prices of these elements would likely fall as large amounts of these elements are sold on the market, as any amount of minerals mined on an astroid would likely be significant.

Fair point, but I imagine that the human population will have doubled and tripled and doubled again by the time it even becomes a factor. And these are all people who will be wanting jewelery made of metals mined in the asteroid belt. And it's not like mining companies will be dumping it on the market all at once. It takes time to extract that much material and, in that time, many wedding rings can be lost in the ocean, necklaces get broken, some of it might become valuable heirlooms to be kept in boxes, stuff happens.

It is true that it takes time for mining companies to mine these elements, however the cost of transporting them from the astroid back to earth would be large so they would want to make as few trips as possible, so they would likely send the mined elements back in large batches. Once the elements are back on earth they would have no reason not to attempt to sell all of what they have. You are right in that there is a chance that demand for these elements would increase but I would personally doubt they would increase by an equal amount that the supply would increase by.

I think they would start out using some different colored coins - so that connecting with earth's markets weren't a problem.  They would probably have an inTRAnet on mars that was just for them.  Then there would just be a BTC exchange rate for the mars colored coins vs. the earth coins.

Perhaps it requires an internet connection but it might be possible to send transactions from Mars across space to Earth and is more efficient than wasting mars resources on printing paper money and currencies, which can then be used for other purposes.
As a settlement currency it doesn't seem like a bad idea.

There are already a project targeted at putting the blockchain in space.

Would they need to have a currency, when they first colonize Mars. {Not in my opinion} The first people would be properly funded, by their governments as a experimental project.

When infrastructure is built and more people go there, they will barter with goods and as it grows, a digital currency would be prefered, because recources to create fiat money, would not be available.

To my mind, first 10-50 years they will make all transactions with food, stuff etc.

funny dreams here

Earth-Mars transactions would currently not be so fast. The distance to mars is about 1.5 lightyears, If I am not mistaken. Faster than light is necessary for crypto to work on such an enormous scale - nobody wants to wait about 2 years for a transaction.
 
On Mars itself - of course. But to mix the economies into a space economy, faster than light is necessary. For now, moon-earth crypto is about the largest we can do.

I suggest you take a class on astronomy. Mars is not 1.5 lightyears from Earth. At its farthest from Earth, it's something like 22 light minutes.

At 22 light minutes, would the slowing of confirmation times cause an issue in the blockchain?

Good question, it would likely relay through the mars network first then the nodes would communicate with the ones on earth in theory
Not sure though two separate clients would probably  be needed  one for mars and one for earth.
Or block generation changed to once every 30 minutes and a small fork for mars and earth luminal communications.

Still pretty fast for the distance from earth to mars lol.

We need to find a alternative signal carrier that is much faster than light for the bitcoin to function properly. The speed of light is unrealiable for long distance space communication. If we try harder their could be a way transmit information faster than light.

They have plans to colonize mars, im sure its probably already been mentioned in this thread, but they are looking for the first few people to go in about 7 years or so. They are sending satellites there soon for communication, I believe there is about a 20 minute time delay so phone calls are out of the question, but bitcoin is sure a possibility as im sure they will have internet access, just a 20 minute delay.

It will take hundreds of years for them to get enough people to really colonize mars, I dont understand why anyone would want to be the first one there, but someone has to...

Sales tax in Sweden is 25%, We have plenty of water though, and fairly cheap electricity.

If there was a 20 minute delay with the internet, wouldn't that mean that if you tried to send a TX it would be possible that those inputs could have been spent 2 blocks ago?

Wouldn't that be near impossible?  I would think the only way for that to occur is if we found a wormhole which would simply shorten the distance (think bent space-time) rather than actually travel faster than the fastest thing possible.  The reason nothing travels faster than light is because time actually stops at that speed.

If you were a photon escaping the sun, you would experience no time on your journey to earth, it would be an instantaneous start and stop method of travel for you.  The only reason the 8 minutes of time occurs to us is because the speed at which we view the universe.  But for that photon, no time passes at all.  Meaning, you would never age during that travel speed.

I think the answer is yes: martains can use Bitcoin. They will want to set up their own coin employing "proof of low latency" for blocks taking more than a certain amount of time. That way, they can have their own block-chain without being swamped by Earth's hash-power.

While TCP will not work over those distances, broadcasting transactions to a relay should work fine.

Actually it would be a minimum of ~5 minutes (when the planets were both aligned on the same side of the sun). When on opposite sides it would be more like (8+8+5) 21 minutes, as someone else mentioned. That would suck for confirmation times. A Marscoin at that point would be a no-brainer. Sigh, actually I think there already are clonecoins named after all the planets... I suppose that's one item we can check off the Master Colonization Checklist, at any rate.  :P

Mining would be a waste of energy on mars.

That would depend on the ability to use local resources to build a system of exchange
If its their own client one computer could do all the work for it and no one else would mine  ;)
A single centralized node

Either way it saves the costs of printing money or wasting resources to create paper currencies vs a phone app.

I concluded the one I know about is essentially a scam because it is not being started by actual martian colonists on the red planet. They hope to get there using "marscoin" as a fund-raiser: but there is no urgency to start a Mars block-chain since Bitcoin exists.

When a Mars chain becomes important is: when they have a large enough population to set up a relatively independent economy. All transactions involving Earth will probably require Bitcoin conversion anyway.

Maybe the Mars population will have such powerful computers that mining will be pointless and won't exist anymore.

That's kinda what I'm hoping. Or at least we have a crypto that doesn't depend on mining very much. We can avoid the evil miners who invested in big powerful rigs and are using it to dominate the computing power behind any cryptocurrency we end up using on Mars. Though maybe it's just that I have enough of an evil genius in me to think of doing that. Bwahaha, right?

it would need an atmosphere to keep the vapor around. I'm pretty sure mars doesn't have a stable magnetic field that prevents solar wind from blowing away their atmosphere.

It's easier to just create biodomes.

martians can be humanoid as well, and if they are colonists from earth they are still human.

but they won't be terran/terrestrial anymore


marscoin may be separate, but still tradeable for bitcoin. Or maybe marscoin will just be a sidechain

Probably. I think a member of the Marscoin Foundation mentioned that we could probably take the blockchain to Mars on a flash drive if we wanted to.

The miners are what secure the network. What really needs to happen is the TX volume gets to be high enough so that TX fees are high enough so that miners will need to spend enough on their miners so even a deep pocketed entity would not effectively be able to attack the network.

They could either operate their own Bitcoin network or we'd have to make see real adjustments to the protocol first. The round trip times from Earth to Mars and back again are just too high to effectively transact BTC or mine blocks that don't become orphaned. Just because both Bitcoin and Space exploration are futuristic and exciting don't mean they also mix especially well...

You guys forget that when Mars gets colonized Bitcoin and all it's technology is prehistoric.

I guess it's possible but really I think it's unlikely.

Consider that SpaceX was created for the sole purpose of reaching mars so that Elon Musk could be buried there. Reaching mars is the first step in colonizing it, and if any company would ever do something like that - it would certainly be SpaceX.  Along with that, it would be fairly quick since they are working at a rapid pace towards space domination.

However, even if it takes 200 years to reach space - we will just more likely be using Bitcoin as our main currency by that point.  USD has been used for close to 200 years now, as well as other world currencies, so I think it's still possible and even likely we would be using Bitcoin. 

It may even be a vastly improved version of bitcoin, but since Bitcoin is a software and not a physical item, it can become something entirely different but we can still call it Bitcoin, and it will still be Bitcoin.

#ToTheMars!

There will be digital currency in an planetary financial system. Most of the goods, if not all, would be digital. But, given that we have 3d printers now they could easily be physical.  There is still the question as to the speed - for all currencies. Maybe 22 light minutes is not a big problem or by then there is a trick to speed it up.

Very good points.
World around us changing so quickly that it's also possible that in 100 years Bitcoin will be outdated, ancient history, replaced with something else, modern and newest technology.
We may even modify Internet and have something complete different in 100 years, who know?

Easily doesn't translate to reasonable though, why would you spend the resources to print out a currency that is easier to use by leaving it in digital form? Maybe some backup hardware wallets could be printed or something like that - but I don't see why you would do something that takes such a large step backwards in progress.

Smelling some kind of adventure "Mars needs bitcoin" !!! Nothing is impossible !! it's only matter of how fast our communication system between earth and mars are developed..

I think they will not have time to worry about going shopping with BTC up in here.

By that time there won't be money, it would be a resource based economy.

Not suitable. Earth is too far away from Mars. Information would take too long to go from one place to the other.

The vast majority of fiat financial transactions are done digitally as opposed to the actual movement of paper money. Even though there is paper money to back up financial transactions the paper money does not actually "move" but the "ownership" simply gets changed. A similar system would likely be in place for interplanetary financial transactions.

If there is life on another planet then perhaps they have a better financial system that wins it from Bitcoin. Our computers would be incompatible anyways.

Aren't you taking it too far? Bitcoin will be history by the time we reach Mars :)

Some other currency might take over BTC

Mars? That's too much, we haven't even reached there. I think at mars 1 btc= 1 million dollars :)

Every person of this forum will be millionaire then..

Mars will be more digitalized/machine based. So high chances crypto like btc will be used.

no, there's no internet on Mars  :D

feck mars dey took errr jaabs. 

 >:(

Future? Any fool should know by now we've been on Mars for decades.

Few people go to space and even fewer return.

It wasn't difficult to control human knowledge on space technology advancements.

I would disagree that currency is always easier to use in digital form. I would also doubt that the internet would be high on the priority list of a potential mars colony so there would be no way of spending/using bitcoin at first. You also have the issue of the fact that it would be very easy to double spend an input if you were to work with someone on earth to spend the same imputs.

Disagree on the internet is not important when colonizing another planet.

Communication is the first priority on just about anything to coordinate tasks and jobs.

Without internet the colonization would be much slower, how could humans access all the knowledge data they need?

You don't need the internet to communicate like this. People were able to do this without the help of the internet for centuries. Any internet that would be setup on mars would likely be limited to very few tasks and would likely not be able to handle unlimited applications as it does today. 

with radio wave it's possible to have internet beyond earth i think, radio waves can propagate very far away in the universe

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/anonymous-new-walkie-talkies-use-radio-waves-to-access-the-internet

They would need to have enough computers around to keep things secure. Perhaps they'll have a different blockchain.