Ambitious proposal: Bitcoin mining… in space

Bitcoin mining requires power consumption. Everybody familiar with the process knows it, and since the first day mining became a thing for those who don’t mine but recognize the financial opportunities, people invent more and more ways to get the cheap power necessary for mining. In Russia, for example, officials proposed to use the power surplus in the Far East to mine cryptocurrency, as many vast Soviet-era plants were built with a large power generation capacity, and the full potential of some of these plants has never been realized.

However, at a recent Paris conference dedicated to Bitcoin and its security, titled Breaking Bitcoin, even more interesting proposal was voiced: to build special spaceships or satellites specifically for cryptocurrency mining, as nothing blocks the sun rays in space. This makes space a good place to mine coins.

This concept was offered by Peter Todd, the former Bitcoin Core contributor and cryptography expert. He later stated in a blog post that the concept is purely theoretical, almost like videophones the sci-fi fans imagined since the 1950s but nobody knew how to create them until computers came in.

The most notable problem in Todd’s concept is beaming power back to Earth: what if space mining rigs should transmit mined altcoins via telecommunications instead? Seems more practicable.