It occurs to me that if a theoretical person had a space launch company and a solar panel company and a lot of interest in cryptocurrency, they would probably start launching solar panels into orbit to mine cryptocurrency soon

I did an extremely bad calculation on this and I figure if you replaced the computers on one 60-satellite Starlink launch with Bitcoin miners, you could make about $20 million over 15 years after investing roughly $70 million

So if SpaceX can scale up launches and shave another 1/3 off costs (not impossible) and crypto goes up 3x in price (not impossible), space-based mining becomes a break-even proposition.

At this point every earth-based miner, who has to pay rent and power costs, is at a serious disadvantage, and within a decade LEO is going to be saturated with cheap-ass Bitcoin-mining rigs.

No human born after 2050 will ever see the Milky Way, just a haze of twinkling graphics cards in space churning out Bitcoin

And of course, as you get a rush of companies and state actors competing in a low-margin speculative industry, safety standards will plummet even as the risks involved skyrocket. I give it 30 years until Kessler syndrome wipes out all the sats and world economy with it

Elon Musk is never going to Mars, because Elon Musk will be trapped down here with us beneath a sky of trillion-dollar daggers

We will never mine the asteroids, because you can get 10% of the profits for 0.1% of the risk, and that’s how capitalism works