James Webb & Bitcoin/ Sending bitcoins to the first alien

[Daryl_Dixon]

Let's talk a little about the future
Imagine if James Webb discovers many planets that have intelligent life, like us. This can be very exciting
We can exchange information with each other. So what can we pay them for this information?


Gold: Gold is certainly a valuable metal and it might be well received on other planets, but these planets are very far away and we cannot send any physical thing "like gold".

Bitcoin: Bitcoin is not a physical thing, we can send it in space. Imagine, we will teach them blockchain technology and then exchange information. We can also use Bitcoin to pay them. Just get the wallet address of an alien and send them your bitcoin! LOL

Maybe our grandchildren will use this method. Sending bitcoins to the first alien  

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[tranthidung]

Bitcoin: Bitcoin is not a physical thing, we can send it in space. Imagine, we will teach them blockchain technology and then exchange information. We can also use Bitcoin to pay them. Just get the wallet address of an alien and send them your bitcoin!

Bitcoin is created by Proof of Work mining but it is an encrypted currency so from its mnemonic seed or private key, you have many methods to own your coins

• Paper
• Metal/ steel sheet/ plate
• Digital file
• Backup software
• Safe vault
• and so many more methods

So you can either send information for ownership of a Bitcoin wallet (in Bitcoin inside) into space by many types above, both digitally and physically.

[Mbitr]

Bitcoin will be in space soon 

Quote - “ In 2022, BitMEX and Astrobotic are sending a unique physical coin to the Moon, loaded with 1 Bitcoin.”




https://www.moonb.tc/

[nullama]

Interesting thought.

But Bitcoin is very human, think about the consensus rules. They are very specific to how we perceive time for example.

An alien would probably experience time in a different way. Even other animals on earth live vastly different amounts of time, so an alien would probably experience time in a very different way, therefore our consensus rules might not be applicable for them, therefore they would prefer an altcoin basically.

On the other hand gold is just a rock, so they might probably not value it a lot.

[NeuroticFish]

Bitcoin is not a physical thing, we can send it in space.

Actually in order to actually have the alien get to use bitcoin he will have to be connected to Earth's internet.
Until that is achieved, anybody claiming to be sending Bitcoin to aliens (in a digital form) can easily be seen as scammer.
Ah, and one more small technical difficulty: did we find any aliens yet?

[slaman29]

Imagine if we visit a primitive (technology speaking, not cultural or ethnic or whatever) tribe in a remote remote corner of earth. And they give us their newest invention, which is maybe some kind of beads as money.

I think that is how it would feel to aliens who visit us and we offer them Bitcoin.

They traveled through galaxies, for sure they have better than Bitcoin

[m2017]

Bitcoin will be in space soon  

Quote - “ In 2022, BitMEX and Astrobotic are sending a unique physical coin to the Moon, loaded with 1 Bitcoin.”

This is not exactly space, but Earth orbit. If bitcoin is sent a little further, then it will really be space. For example, to another planet (for example, Mars, as E.Musk plans) or just into outer space.

Is this the "bitcoin to the moon" everyone was dreaming of? The future first settlers on the moon may start a strife over the possession of this 1 bitcoin coin.

[mk4]

If aliens were to take something from planet earth, it would most likely be natural resources that they want or need, not bitcoin or whatever currency.

[darkv0rt3x]

Imagine to cover the entire Mars surface with solar panels, harvest solar energy to then transport that energy wirelessly to the moon, where our mining rigs would be working around the clock while in all other habitable planets would be taking advantage of Bitcoin. heheh. Utopian but interesting idea to help planet Earth with natural resources, climate challenges, etc!

And btw, I found this very interesting video about the consequences of covering desert Sahara with solar panels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ASvupr8Zg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WDzbrDGdq0

[franky1]

sorry but if aliens/ future colonists were to use bitcoin

bitcoin has a blocktime average of roughly 10 minutes

space aliens would need to sync blocks. meaning blocks need to propagate to a distant planet in under 10 minutes to stay in sync and be able to see a confirmed transaction within reasonable time.

using bitcoin, as bitcoin limits the possible distance of colonists/aliens


what you would probably see..
(if there is a good locking mechanism on a sidechain/altnet side to truly back/peg main blockchain funds)
where by people will lock up an amount of BTC. and if (as just highlighted) a secure sidechain/altnet that could be trusted to manage the funds would be a chain/altnet that is used on another planet. where by the funds do not need to swap on the main bitcoin network by the minute and instead it becomes a once a day 'settlement' with a X confirm requirement based on the distance/time between earth and planet.

with all that said.
dont expect aliens to work in binary. or have computers like we do.
expect their 'networks' to be nothing like bitcoin or crypto.

we would need to create a representative lock on the aliens data structure. in a secure unbreakable way.
locking bitcoin is easy, no change needed. its the alien network that needs to have a consensus mechanism that cant break to then peg to the locked bitcoin reserve that would need to be part of the education/communication/introduction with the aliens

[Leviathan.007]

None knows about the future and what's going to happen in the world especially when we are talking about space which is still unknown to humanity, sending bitcoin to aliens can be considered a theory but the thing is bitcoin is a technology and we don't know about the possible technology of the aliens they maybe have an old world and bitcoin can be totally unknown for them also they are maybe having much more technologies than we do and bitcoin can be considered as a toy for them.

[danherbias07]

It will be more shocking if they won't accept it for the reason of "It's ancient." 
They would rather take all our resources than our so-called future currency. If they can visit Earth and make contact they might have better technology than us.

[Lucius]

Let's talk a little about the future
Imagine if James Webb discovers many planets that have intelligent life, like us. This can be very exciting
We can exchange information with each other. So what can we pay them for this information?

We have already discovered planets that are possibly suitable for life, but even if we had spaceships that travel at the speed of light, it would take us years to get there, and given that for those who travel at that speed time slows down considerably, while for others it's going quite normally, the crew on the way back wouldn't have found anyone alive from those who were alive in their time. You could see something similar if you watched the movie Interstellar.

Maybe our grandchildren will use this method. Sending bitcoins to the first alien  

Somehow it seems to me that Bitcoin would not be of much interest to those aliens, because if you watched Star Trek, in the future currencies practically do not exist - so even though it is only SF, it still seems that people should progress in that direction. On the other hand, some aliens may be greedy like the Ferengi, they just need to be explained the concept of digital gold

[ChiBitCTy]

Yeah I’m not too sure how much foreign alien life would care about bitcoin or blockchain technology, but maybe it might be something useful to them (probably not). Though I do share your enthusiasm for the new Webb telescope and can’t wait until we see more of what it finds.

[pawanjain]

LOL, there are so many flaws I don't even want to go deep into it. But just the thought of sending bitcoins to an alien makes me wonder why would anybody even do that.
Firstly we don't even if the aliens would even consider gold as a precious metal. May be their planet has an abundance of gold and it's more or same like rocks in their planet.
So it's not necessary what's precious here needs to be precious there too. Everything gets changed once we leave the planet.
The laws of cosmic space are outside our perspective of what it can be.

[kryptqnick]

I do believe that alien life probably exists, including intelligent one, because it simply doesn't make any sense that in the vast universe we'd be the only ones. But I think that, unfortunately, humanity is not ready as a whole for first contact. We still have occasional genocides and systemic racism even among humans. Anything new will be perceived largely as a threat and not as something deserving human rights because of our xenophobia. We have serious hostilities and sometimes wars between countries because apparently not everyone gets that imperialism is over (I'm looking at you, Russia). So if we meet someone now, governments, armies and many others will blow it if not commit a terrible crime.
But let's imagine that somehow we do achieve a lot of moral progress within our lifetimes and we meet intelligent aliens. Who's to say they'll have money as a concept? Or an idea of exchanging things for other things? They can be a society that simply takes and gives what it can and needs, without the idea of property or a medium of exchange. And certainly, explaining to an alien race that we're giving them something that they can't touch and it looks just like numbers and other symbols on a screen but it's actually valuable is likely to cause misunderstandings. So it's just not a good start (barter IMO is a good start), but eventually it can be quite good because at least it's money that isn't controlled by any our government.

[PrivacyG]

Anyone else other than me starting to strongly despise this 'Gold versus Bitcoin' thing lately?

First of all, be it Bitcoin or Gold, how do you send it that far away?  If extraterrestrial life exists, it has to be intelligent enough and, moreover, it has to have the equipment, capacity and electricity as far as I can tell.  You send BTC to who?  How?  How will they know what Bitcoin is?

Let me put this a bit differently to make my point understood.  Imagine extraterrestrial life exists already, even on Mars, even on the Moon, even around our planet.  Their existence is so real and evident we are looking at it every time we look at the moon or at the sky, but we have such low capacity to understand it that we do not get it yet.  What if their form of life is different from what we understand as 'life'.  They may be intelligent, but maybe they are looking at earth without seeing us as 'living beings' either.  Maybe to them, we are anything but beings.

We are too small to understand things that may actually be more than evident.  To me at least, communication between us and aliens would be extremely hard and may take hundreds or thousands of years or, ultimately, it could actually be impossible.

Back to payments and stuff.  How do you pay them?  Gold is physical.  Bitcoin requires a computer, understanding a coding language, an operating system capable of running a Wallet et cetera.  What are the chances they actually have computers, understand lines of code and know how to use a Wallet software?  Let us be realistic for one second!

But now that you brought up aliens and we are speculating on it.  What if a new trend comes up replacing the Quantum Computing fears.  What if, by sending Bitcoin to extraterrestrial life, aliens get to completely destroy the idea of Bitcoin by 'cracking' it?  If they are as intelligent as many suspect them to be, then Bitcoin is doomed so is anything considered 'digitally secure' as of today.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

[OgNasty]

I would be very curious what an alien would have to say if you tried to pay him in Bitcoin.  Imagine trying to explain they need to backup their private keys and how to connect to the network to send their funds.  They would probably think you were insane.  Perhaps a better gift to give the first alien would be some type of intricately crafted piece of golden jewelry or maybe a fine watch with a lot of moving parts.  Bitcoin may better be served as remittances for large companies. 

[hatshepsut93]

Imagine, we will teach them blockchain technology and then exchange information.

If aliens exist, they would laugh at blockchain technology. It's just a hash-linked list that isn't suitable for most application, despite the advertisement done by scammers that tell that it's the biggest revolution ever.

If we will have contact with aliens, they might be so advanced that it will be them who will be teaching us about superior technologies, so maybe as a result we will abandon both fiat and Bitcoin and switch to a completely different form of money.

[PrivacyG]

I would be very curious what an alien would have to say if you tried to pay him in Bitcoin.

Imagine trying to pay an entity who might not even understand what 'paying' means.  Maybe there are no transactions in their kind of world.  I think there are a TON of issues a human would have to get through before actually and properly communicating with an extraterrestrial.  We often have this false image of aliens being overly intelligent and understanding most things, notions et cetera that we do as well.  That is because we tend to believe we understand most parts of the Universe, but I believe we understand nothing about it yet.  Just look at that recently released picture of the space.  We are so small and negligible we probably have close to zero knowledge of the Universe.  And realistically, what are the actual chances someone who comes from millions of light years can properly communicate with us?

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Regards,
PrivacyG