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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: 1, Redundant) by nightsky30 on Friday August 29 2014, @06:05PM
Water tends to expand when frozen, and thus cause damage to the surrounding cellular membranes from what I understand. Though there is life out there which has been revived after many millennium:
http://www.livescience.com/174-creatures-frozen-32-000-years-alive.html [livescience.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Friday August 29 2014, @06:23PM
I take it nobody read the Wired article? "... Finney’s blood and other fluids were being removed from his body and slowly replaced with a collection of chemicals that Alcor calls M-22, which the company says are designed to be as minimally toxic as possible to his tissues while preventing the formation of ice crystals that would result from freezing and destroy his cell membranes." Not that I think he isn't dead or could be reanimated. Reading the story can help to clarify issues...
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday August 29 2014, @06:35PM
Multicellular organisms are powered by a a mind-bogglingly complex set of chemical reactions, which can be terminally disturbed by micrograms of the wrong substance.
The idea that someone is now replacing those precious bodily fluids with something else, hoping that someone will take the time, energy and resources to bother to figure out how to reverse that process later, is ... optimistic.
There will be Frankenstein experimenters for sure, but I'd rather not be the one who has to be revived with the consequences of having so much of my body's information replaced by a guess, even a well-educated one.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by emg on Friday August 29 2014, @07:03PM
The cryonicists I knew thought it was more likely that someone would scan and upload their brain into a computer than actually restore their body. But, given a few centuries of technological progress, neither seems too improbable.
Of course, IMHO, the most likely reason someone would invest the time to reanimate you is because they think you'd make a neat pet.
(Score: 2) by nightsky30 on Friday August 29 2014, @09:01PM
I'm not going to be anyone's pet, basilisk or otherwise.