Bitcoin Forum

If we expand beyond the confines of Earth then eventually we will be spread out far enough that the Bitcoin protocol won't be able to keep in sync.  I'm talking about when transactions are initiated multiple light minutes away, e.g. Mars ranges between 4-20 light minutes away from Earth http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_far_away_is_earth_from_mars_in_light_minutes (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_far_away_is_earth_from_mars_in_light_minutes).  Solutions will be developed of course but what do we guess they will do?

A small number of explorers far away is not the problem; they will initiate transactions by a proxy on Earth.  When enough settlers are on Mars then they will want to initiate transactions there without having to wait as long as 40 minutes for a proxy on Earth.

When ordinary people face the problem of transmitting data from Mars to Earth the mankind won't use money. Why does anyone need money in the world of abundance?

I believe this is what you're referring to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy)

I would post this link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

Lifecoin will be implemented to enable only Earth-bounded virtual life after physical death so the uploaded minds will be not endangered.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=291020.0

Because we're mortal. People's time will always be scarce until mortality is solved. Thus, people will still need a means of determining how to prioritize their time. Money is great for that.

Mars can have its own altcoin. Politics will likely make having a single blockchain across planets very advisable for a long time to come. Good fences make good neighbors.

And unlike the messy topology of geopolitics on earth, inter-planetary security on the basis of time of flight is pretty trivial.  Earth will never have to fear a blockchain attack by mars or vice versa, if they choose to preclude it.

Each could still transact on the others blockchain, they just couldn't participate in the consensus.

Each planet will have its own locally-mined cryptocurrency (Marscoin, etc), which each have a floating exchange rate to the original Earth-based Bitcoin. Marscoins and bitcoins can be directly traded for each other in order to settle interplanetary trade balances, the only issue is the speed-of-light delay for confirmations (which is unavoidable no matter what). Naturally Bitcoin can't be mined on Mars and Marscoin can't be mined on Earth, but that's not important.

An interplanetary coin with a block target of several Earth days (to allow interplanetary mining) is also a possibility for interplanetary trade or as a solar-system-wide reserve currency, but probably not necessary as long as the planetary coins can be freely traded, in which case it's likely that Bitcoin will become the solar-system-wide reserve currency (making all previous price predictions seem hopelessly pessimistic).

+1

Marscoin would trade against bitcoin like any other alt-coin. 

A colony ship traveling at a high enough rate of speed relative to the Earth or other center of commerce hosting Bitcoin or variant, even if they are within range of participating in the consensus might fail to meet the requirements to do so based on time dilation.

Aliens arriving from some distant place might be in range and not traveling at a high rate of speed relative to Earth.  They could join in on the consensus.  In fact, we couldn't actually stop them even if we wanted to since we fundamentally couldn't tell if an Internet packet was from them.  Perhaps we won't mind if they participate.

One strange possibility is they can only survive deep enough in a gravity well that they brought along their black hole and live near the event horizon; from there their time dilation makes them unable to participate in the consensus.

I very doubt the mankind will be able to colonize (terraform) other planets while still using money and have market-based capitalism. It is almost 100% there will be resource-based economy on the Earth when we will be able to walk on the Mars without suits.

Time dilation will reduce their effective hashrate but will not have any other effect, though the speed-of-light delay will make mining impossible at interstellar distances anyway regardless of time dilation. An interstellar coin with multi-century block times is almost certainly too impractical to be of any use; we'll just have to get used to the idea of a multitude of freely exchangeable star-coins and leave mining rigs off the starships (though I'm not sure how mining rigs on starships can possibly be economically feasible anyway, given how immensely each extra gram of payload mass increases your launch costs).

Probably not the right forum to say this but...

Alt-coins my good man! Bitcoin for Earth, Litecoin for Mars, Bytecoin for Jupiter, ETCoin for Saturn, ETCoin...

Either that or we will have discovered new physics and ways to manipulate them to reduce latency!

perfect reference for this thread

www.theorising-life-after-your-own-death.com/whilst-sitting-in-a-basement-not-living-the-life-your-given.php

Agree that each planet would have its own currency, and exchanges would take several minutes or hours.

Wil McCarthy's scifi novels talk about the issue of speed-of-light slowness in the solar system. A hard superluminal comm network was set up for certain time-sensitive relays.

in this case i use paypal.

That pretty much nails it.

Does anyone remember “The Probability Broach” by L Neil Smith, wherein space faring humans in an alternate universe use gold and silver coins as currency? And the use of fingerprinting techniques is seen as revolutionary in forensics investigations?

Also, does the topic of currency ever come up in Ursula K. Leguin’s “The Dispossessed”?

And Charles Stross in “Neptune’s Brood”: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=252633.0

Also: on Orionsarm:   http://www.orionsarm.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=302

"...it's divided into slow, medium and fast money. Fast is every day cash, medium is investments in infrastructure and slow is money that can only be transferred once the sender, receiver and a bank have all registered the trade. The point of the latter is that all three will be in three separate systems and because of how long it will take to organise slow money payments will be immune to problems of inflation and financial fraud that cash would be over interstellar distances.”

Hmmm. One of these sounds a bit like our favorite coin, doesn't it?

Bitcoin won't survive in the deep space. Aliens will easily get all private keys or mine all the blocks within a second.