Some bitcoin enthusiasts have used their cryptocurrency to travel around the world. Others have spent it on a trip to space. But the very earliest user of bitcoin (after its inventor Satoshi Nakamoto himself) has now spent his crypto coins on the most ambitious mission yet: to visit the future.
Hal Finney, the renowned cryptographer, coder, and bitcoin pioneer, died Thursday morning at the age of 58 after five years battling ALS. He will be remembered for a remarkable career that included working as the number-two developer on the groundbreaking encryption software PGP in the early 1990s, creating one of the first “remailers” that presaged the anonymity software Tor, and—more than a decade later—becoming one of the first programmers to work on bitcoin’s open source code; in 2008, he received the very first bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto.
Now Finney has become an early adopter of a far more science fictional technology: human cryopreservation, the process of freezing human bodies so that they can be revived decades or even centuries later.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by cosurgi on Friday August 29 2014, @09:48PM
That reminds me of a novel by Stanisław Lem, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel) [wikipedia.org]
a really good read, and I recommend it. Though the cryonically freezing and thawing a body is only a start of this great story.
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#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
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