Mining Bitcoin on the moon is not a new idea and it will happen sooner or later.
The idea of mining Bitcoin in the moon is not feasible at the moment, the technology is not ready yet, setting up Bitcoin full nodes with lightning would be better for a start. For miners there will need to be a lot of testing with mining rigs in LEO (low earth orbit) and this will allow for environmental hardening and testing prior to the more harsh lunar environment.
The early installs will be for marketing purposes and prototyping/testing. The not too many tons budget for the next few decades is primarily determined by governments, so private companies and individuals will need to push limits and pay by themselves if the plan should happen in the near future.
The idea is to make a sound and secure monetary system on the moon. At the same time, it will be possible to use the excessive energy from solar panels, nuclear plants and thermo-electric generators (TEG) in low-demand periods for the space powerstations which are soon to be made by the US, China, UK and Japan.
Benefits of Bitcoin mining on the moon
1. It will be a liberty engine on a natural satellite, and a safe monetary network in outer space.
2. It will help with testing ASICs in outer space.
3. It will help making earth-moon entangled communication more efficient.
4. It will help stress-testing the moon-grid before wireless power transmission (WPT) aka Power beaming is fully up and running.
5. It will help to quietly heat up space stations while making money.
6. It will be able to match controllable load with uncontrollable generation when the WPT is running.
7. It will push the builders of the quantum internet to reduce latency on the Bitcoin Network.
Solutions:
The application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners for mining Bitcoin will be strategically placed on the moon.
There are different solutions to withstand the shifting temperatures on the moon since the moon also rotates around its own axis (takes 27.32 days), so a lunar day (sunlight is exposed to the surface for around 13.66 days and same for the lunar night. The temperatures changes from: Daytime temperatures near the lunar equator reach a boiling 120° C (250°F, 400 K), while nighttime temperatures get to a chilly -130° C (-208°F, 140 K)1.
A. Place the ASIC miners in pits/caves. These shadowed pits/caves would have a stable temperature around 17°C which would fit the ASIC miners perfectly2. At the same time, miners would be able to heat up the caves, making it viable for humans to stay there.
Cables will supply the ASIC miners with electricity from either the nuclear plants, lunar solar cells or TEG. Regarding the energy from Solar and TEG, it will probably go to an energy transmission base, and from here a cable would go to the cave with the ASIC miners. The ASIC miners need an input to solve the hash puzzle and an output to direct their mined blocks. This would happen via a cable to a transmission base on the earth-oriented side of the moon (if the miners are placed on the other side, lunar cycle). The input and output will point directly to the earth or to a Bitcoin satellite (Blockstream) via Laser beam transmission and Radio frequency transmission (for backup)
B. Encapsulate the ASIC miners with mooncrete (lunar concrete/lunarcrete) so they can withstand the extreme shifting of temperatures during the lunar cycles and radiation. For a long time, the idea was to use mooncrete with sulfur, but it seems to have changed, because of the melting point and stability of sulfur345. The concept with the transmission of electricity and Laser beam/RF would be the same as above (A). These facilities would be placed around the moon where people will stay/live, so they could help generate heat for the moon population and secure a sound monetary network. Many propose making cities near the lunar pools, since it´s possible to harvest power from the sun via solar cells up to 95% of the time67.
ASIC miner specs on earth:
– The operation altitude is something that needs a lot more testing. When the ASIC miner is used at an altitude from 900m to 2000m, the highest operating temperature decreases by 1℃ for every increase of 300m8.
– Optimal conditions for ASIC miners are around 5-35 °C (can go a bit lower or higher, and will probably be tweaked for the operation) 9.
– Relative humidity (non-condensing) around 10-90%.
– Directing the heat exhaust from the ASIC miners to places where people live, factories, or just to heat the facility where miners are placed (not a problem in the caves/pits, but maybe ventilation is needed here).
– Robots should be able to service and clean the mining facility (the room the miners are in) and do maintenance on the machine, no robotic ASIC mining facilities is not seen on earth yet. Software updates is the easiest problem to solve, but visual inspection – like checking fans, cable and connectors is harder. Even harder is dismantling the machines, dust cleaning, with air compressors and/or antistatic brushing and ultrasonic baths.
Still a lot of testing needs to be done.
The cost and backup batteries
Also remember it´s still very expensive to bring stuff to the moon, so it´s probably better to start small, setup the facility and then scale up. Since there is an ongoing space race with better rockets and more competition, the price per kg has lowered, and with better technology, it will become more feasible to setup the system, but who will be the first? Many ASIC miners weigh in the +10 kg range.
It should also be possible to secure the moon-grid with 3D-printed sodium batteries, fuel cells10 or radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG) for backup. It should not be a problem, when connected to the moon grid, however, stable electricity is important for ASIC miners because they need to uphold durability and sustain efficiency.
Why this paper?
It´s important for the human race to level up according to Kardashev scale and go interplanetary – The moon is the first step on this adventure called “securing human life”.
This paper is building on the ideas of great scientists that have made a great effort in coming up with ideas to make a sound electrical monetary system, including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Richard Buckminster Fuller and later the cryptographic researchers/cypherpunks, including names like R.C. Merkle, David Chaum, Wei Dai Adam Back, Nick Szabo, Satoshi Nakamoto and many other great people.
Notes:
Distance:
The average distance to the moon is 382,500 kilometers, this distance varies because the moon travels around Earth in an elliptical orbit. At perigee, the point at which the moon is closest to Earth, the distance is approximately 360,000 kilometers. At apogee, the point at which the moon is farthest from Earth, the distance is approximately 405,000 kilometers11.
Speed of Signal via Lasers (encodes data in photons) + Radio Frequency
The speed of light = 299,792,458 m / s = 299,792.458 km / s
| Distance | Calculation | Seconds | Light-seconds | Astronomical Unit (AU) |
| Average – 382,500 km | 382,500 km/299,792.458km/s | 1.27 s | 1.27 light-seconds | 0.00255685 AU |
| Shortest – 360,000 km | 360,000 km / 299,792.458km/s | 1.20 s | 1.20 light-seconds | 0.00240645 AU |
| Longest – 405,000 km | 405,000 km / 299,792.458km/s | 1.35 s | 1.35 light-seconds | 0.00270725 AU |
The transmission of a signal to the moon is not really a problem, the Bitcoin software works with 600 seconds (10 min) blocks. There will of course be some latency for the ASIC miners on the moon, for receiving the signal (new block reception). The bigger problem is all the earth mining facilities also will have to wait when a block gets mined on the moon and distributed to the network for validation (Next block dissemination). Combining the earth and moon Bitcoin mining grid will create latency, which will end in waste of some hashing power on already solved cryptographic puzzle (blocks). It will take some time to optimize the interaction with earth and moon, but it should be solvable.
The problem with latency is something mining facilities on the earth already optimize a lot to increase their rewards. Different tools like Miner Entanglement (ME) have proved to increase newly discovered blocks on Bitcoin nodes, which benefit in more rewards12.
Extra: Lasers can pack much more data than RF, but you’ve got to depend on RF on days with very cloudy weather as this can interfere with the laser communication (laser can do partial cloudy weather).
Laser communication have already proved their way for communication from moon to earth1314.
ASIC mining chips for BTC
Mining Bitcoin started when Satoshi Nakamoto used his CPU (central processing unit) back in 2009 to mine the first BTC. In 2010 the first mining devices utilizing GPU (graphics processing units) was developed and used. In 2011 FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) were re-modeled to mine Bitcoin and was the most efficient at that time. 2013 was a groundbreaking year in BTC, when the first ASICs (application-specific integrated circuit) were designed by Avalon, now Canaan Creative. Since then, ASICs have become more advanced and smaller (soon 3nm), newer manufacturers have entered the market and advanced the chips, to mention a few; Bitmain and MicroBT. Right now, ASICs are still the leading technology in Bitcoin mining, but it might change in the future with the introduction of quantum devices?15
Powerstation notes/Space Grid participants:
Power stations are needed. It is possible to make solar cells directly on the moon with robots controlled from earth like Shimizu have proposed16.
Blue Origin say they have made solar cells of simulated moon dirt17.
Lunar Resources say they have made solar cells of simulated moon dirt18.
+ Different universities like Taltech19 are designing solar cells etc.
Nasa and Doe are looking to design a nuclear reactor (fission) for 40 kilowatts of power 20.
China talks about nuclear reactor (fission) on the moon in 202821.
Rolls-Royce will send their nuclear reactor (fission) to the moon in 202922.
Global Power Technologies have earlier provided NASA with TEG for moon missions.
Nuclear fusion on the moon will eventually become possible, as the moon has an abundant supply of helium-3.
Great Rocket manufactures:
SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Energomash, CASIC, RFA, Agnikul Cosmos, One Space technologies etc. Building on great ideas by, among others Archytas, Hero of Alexandria, Song dynasty, Roger Bacon, Johann Schmidlap, Wan-Hu to newer rocketry scientist like Sir Isaac Newton, Willem Gravesande, William Congreve like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert H. Goddard, Hermann Oberth, Wernher von Braun, Sergei Korolev, Mikhail Klavdievich Tikhonravov, Qian Xuesen and many other later coming great scientists23.
WPT (wireless power transmission)
People in the field of WPT also have many names to consider like James Clerk Maxwell, Herman von Helmholtz, Henrich Hertz, Wilhelm Bjerknes, Nikola Tesla, Raytheon, William Brown, Peter Glaser (Father of Solar-Power satellite idea), Georg Goubau, Felix Schwering, MSFC, JPL, DOE/NASA, Hiroshi Matsumoto and JAXA, CRC and SHARP, Naoki Shinohara and JAX, Nobuyuki Kay and John Mankins, AFRL, NASA and many different universities etc.
WPT with power beaming is the efficient point-to-point transfer of electrical energy across free space by a directive electromagnetic beam24.
- https://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/lithos/LROlitho7temperaturevariation27May2014.pdf
- https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/places-on-moon-where-its-always-sweater-weather
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283048239_Advances_in_manufacture_of_Mooncrete_-_a_Review
- https://chemistrytalk.org/sulfur-element/
- https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjce-2021-0098
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/new-light-on-the-lunar-poles-156800678/
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103514004278?via%3Dihub
- https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=000202303141725089465TmbmX08067E
- https://microbt-whatsminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Product-manual.pdf
- https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/home/lunar_fuel_cell.html
- https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/Distance_to_the_Moon.pdf
- https://pure.tudelft.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/98471202/2021135560.pdf
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNrM-3zY1Ns
- https://icsos2014.nict.go.jp/contents/pdf/S1-2.pdf
- https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/04/26/the-rise-of-asics-a-step-by-step-history-of-bitcoin-mining/
- https://www.shimz.co.jp/en/topics/dream/content02/pdf/lunaring_e.pdf
- https://www.blueorigin.com/news/blue-alchemist-powers-our-lunar-future/
- https://www.lunarresources.space/#about
- https://taltech.ee/en/news/production-electricity-moon-hands-estonians-0
- https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-announces-artemis-concept-awards-for-nuclear-power-on-moon
- https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3200569/china-developing-new-nuclear-system-power-moon-base-expected-be-and-running-2028
- https://www.rolls-royce.com/media/our-stories/discover/2023/uk-space-agency-backs-rolls-royce-nuclear-power-for-moon-exploration.aspx
- https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/rocket/TRCRocket/history_of_rockets.html
- https://wirelesspower.ieee.org/wpt-history/