There is no ATM on Mars

In the galaxy that makes up the digital asset ecosystem there are some initiatives that are exploring the outer regions of our imagination.

Marscoin is one such project. If we start afresh on Mars it makes sense to start a financial system that leapfrogs whatever we currently have on earth. That means no more ATM's, banks, Paypal etc. A Martian settlement is also unlikely to have paper money, let alone coins or even credit cards. They would need a secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer and electronic form of money, a cryptocurrency therefore. Marscoin is designed to be just that. Let your imagination run free for a moment. Would it not be fascinating to start a new society in a new world. Since money makes any world go round, it will impact a future Martian economic and financial system but also the social fabric of that new society. Let's take a look...

A brief monetary history lesson

Very quickly, let's recap the role of money. In the 13th century, the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan embarked on a bold experiment. He decreed that money would take the form of paper. When Italian merchant Marco Polo visited China, he apparently marveled at the spectacle of people exchanging their labor and goods for mere pieces of paper - value was being created out of thin air :-). Kublai Khan recognized that what matters about money is not what it looks like or even what it's backed by, but whether people believe in it enough to use it.

That concept is the foundation of the current monetary system, which is built on nothing more than government support and people's faith in it. One can define money by the three roles it plays in an economy:

• store of value - allows you to save and defer consumption to a later date
• unit of account - assigns a globally accepted value to goods and services
• medium of exchange - creates an efficient way to trade goods and services

Digital Money & Society

Bitcoin is the first example of a currency technology that runs on a blockchain, a decentralized digital ledger. Bitcoin’s value is entirely driven by a fixed supply and market demand. Value and adoption have risen dramatically since its introduction in 2009. While more than ten thousand or more other cryptocurrencies have been launched since, Bitcoin stands alone as a store of value, a financial network and if we choose to believe Gresham’s law (bad money drives out good money), possibly a global reserve currency in the future.

In addition to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, we are seeing the increasing importance of stablecoins. Stablecoins are digital assets that are designed to maintain a stable value relative to a national currency or other reference assets. Today, stablecoins are primarily used to facilitate trading, lending or borrowing of other digital assets, mostly via digital asset exchanges. Proponents believe stablecoins could become widely used by households and businesses as a means of payment also because they lack the price volatility of ?itcoin and others.

The benefits of stablecoins include lower-cost, safe, real-time and more competitive payments compared to what consumers and businesses experience today. E.g. the recent move by Amazon UK to stop using VISA credit cards. Stablecoins could rapidly make it cheaper for businesses to accept payments and easier for governments to run conditional cash transfer programs (including sending stimulus money). They could connect unbanked or underbanked segments of the population to the financial system. A Central Bank Digital Currency or CBDC is also an example of a stablecoin - but let us not open that particular can of worms here and focus on our extra-terrestrial journey.

Money on Mars should be better

A future extra-terrestrial financial system will most definitely be distributed, cryptographically secure, peer-to-peer and offer instantaneous settlement allowing for the use of capital when and where it's needed. Economic decision making will be done in a highly automated and efficient way.

Imagine a 'hive mind' decision making process by settlers who plan to build a new hyperloop on Mars. Via transparent, cryptographically secure voting, 60% of the colonists decide that this project is a go and perhaps commit their funds to the project. If the vote reaches execution limits, capital gets allocated and materials purchased, work-orders and time-schedules dynamically adjusted etc. Because information flows directly between participants, the activities are very efficiently coordinated. Decision making like this will likely happen in a Mars DAO, a distributed autonomous organization, see my article here.

Similarly to the leapfrogging of technologies on Earth - for example, some developing countries skipped landlines in favor of cell phones - we assume that a Martian society will much rather implement a resource-saving, electronic form of money which is fair, i.e. decentralized, than any form of paper money or coins or worse, replicate the current system on earth where central banks and governments constantly debase the currency by running the money 'printing presses' hot.

A planetary economic and financial system based on Marscoin

In 1990 Robert Zubrin and David Baker published a feasibility study detailing plans for a journey to Mars and building a rudimentary base using the natural resources available on Mars.? In 1998 The Mars Society was founded at a convention in Boulder, Colorado and Robert Zubrin has led the organization ever since. In recent years a series of individuals have started to take matters into their own hands. Most notably Elon Musk with SpaceX, Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin and to a certain extend Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic.

A future planetary economic and financial system could look a lot like Bitcoin, a decentralized, secure and peer-to-peer network. However, due to the nature of interplanetary communication, Mars is too far from Earth to allow it to participate in the bitcoin network on Earth. The time it would take for a payment on Mars to be confirmed by the blockchain on Earth would be more than 40mins, at least. Not very practical when you want your coffee hot and now :-). Mars would need to start their own cryptocurrency on their own local network. A project like this was introduced to the public by Lennart Lopin - one of my favorite crypto OG's - at the Mars Society conference in 2014. Marscoin's genesis block was mined on January 1, 2014 and the network was launched. It has been running ever since.

How to create a currency on Mars

It's fairly easy actually :-) Someone has to download the Marscoin network on a USB stick, bring a small miner computer, jump on a spaceship to Mars and once arrived hook it up to the existing computing network and kickstart the Marscoin Blockchain :-).

Those first settlers will have to pick their favorite ledger technology, but once a software client has been selected, nothing much remains to be done but to run mining nodes and allow colonists to keep a record of their coins with personal wallets. Over time, new features could be added to the blockchain or programs developed that interact with the blockchain via side-chains or as decentralized apps. This network ledger will lend itself to a wide range of use cases, for instance:

● Keeping track of sales

● Property transfers and land registry

● Permanent receipts

● Voting

● Immutable record of ideas/innovations

● Immutable Record of data from factories, sensors, production

Miners on Mars

Because Marscoin is based on the same capped supply idea and Proof-of-Work mechanism as Bitcoin, it immediately creates an interesting first mover advantage. As of May 2021 a total of 35,934,831 Marscoin have been mined. In 2024, the last Marscoin will be mined bringing the total to 48 million. Those first settlers, the early adopters, gain the benefit of mining the currency when the number of participants is still low and the issuance of coins greater. This could vey well spark the same wealth creation dynamics we know from Bitcoin and the broader digital asset ecosystem. Tying Marscoin into a token-allocation system (minting of NFT's) further increases the incentive to join the colony and pool resources into it. Lastly, purchasing and using Marscoin now supports the non-profit Mars Society and allows people to directly contribute to the exploration and settlement of Mars.

We are going to Mars (most probably)

Permanent human settlement of Mars is rapidly becoming a reality. SpaceX is developing a transportation solution and The Mars Society is working on surface logistics and infrastructure. Many people share the dream of making humans a multi-planetary species.

The clearest image of Mars NASA has ever created

Why Mars?

Among all the planets in our solar system, Mars is unique in that it possesses all the raw materials required to support not only life but a new branch of human civilization.? We can illustrate this clearly if we compare Mars with our Moon, often mentioned as a potential target for space settlement as well.

In contrast to the Moon, Mars is rich in carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen. All in biologically readily accessible forms such as carbon dioxide gas, nitrogen gas and water ice and permafrost.? Oxygen is abundant on the Moon but very difficult to extract. ?If all of the ice and permafrost on Mars were to be melted into water, the entire planet would be covered with an ocean over 100 meters deep. ?The Moon however is bone dry.

On Mars there is an atmosphere thick enough to protect crops grown on the surface from solar flares.?Thin-walled inflatable plastic greenhouses protected by domes made from UV-resistant hard-plastic can be used to rapidly create cropland on the surface. The strong greenhouse effect created by such domes would be precisely what is necessary to produce a temperate climate inside.?

Such domes are light enough to be transported from Earth initially and later manufactured on Mars out of locally available materials.?Because all the resources to make plastics exist on Mars, networks of these 50-to-100 meter domes could rapidly be manufactured and deployed, opening up large areas of the surface to human habitation and agriculture.?Such simple greenhouses would be impractical on the Moon due to unbearably high temperatures.?

The point here is that unlike on any other known planet, Martian settlers will be able to live on the surface and move about freely and grow crops in the light of day.?Mars is a place where humans can live in large numbers and supporting themselves with products of every description, made out of local materials.?Mars is a place where an actual civilization can be developed, not just a mining or scientific outpost. Mars could very well be the New World for our generation and those to follow.

Conclusion - reaching for the stars

“I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species than if we’re or not. You want to be inspired by things. You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great. And that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about.”?— Elon Musk

Serious amounts of intellectual energy and money is spent on this fascinating new opportunity. Some of us are bound to leave earth and build other worlds at some point. Why, would you ask? Peter Diamandis - one of the world's top 50 leaders according to Fortune - puts it like this:

"One thing is for sure: [...] everything humanity has ever held of value on Earth… metals, minerals, energy, real estate… are in near infinite quantities in space, and the greatest wealth ever anticipated will result as humanity reaches towards the stars. We are on the verge of accessing this infinite cache of materials and energy for the continued expansion of humanity, and our progress towards increasing abundance. As a result, we are about to see the greatest economic boom in human history, leading to a period of prosperity beyond our comprehension."

Sources & Inspirations

Marco Polo on Money, https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=287

Amazon to stop accepting Visa credit cards in UK, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59306200

Marscoin website, https://www.marscoin.org/ and on twitter, https://twitter.com/marscoinorg

4 Minute explanation about Marscoin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOiBZp8liLU

Talk between James Burk & Lennart Lopin at the 2019 Mars Society Convention, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zdnu6sA_5hw

Marscoin update June 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlQzuDiKrSk

Marscoin Expo 2021, https://www.marscoin.org/expo/

Interview with Lennart Lopic, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlQzuDiKrSk

Water on Mars, https://www.marslifehd.com/mars-life-hd-team-finds-multiple-sources-of-flowing-water-in-the-same-crater-on-mars/

Mars Society website, https://www.marssociety.org/

Peter Diamandis on Space, https://www.diamandis.com/blog/musk-v-bezos-great-migration-into-space

US Treasury Report on Stablecons, https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/StableCoinReport_Nov1_508.pdf

Stablecoins and the Future of Money, https://hbr.org/2021/08/stablecoins-and-the-future-of-money

NASA Mars Exploration Program, https://mars.nasa.gov/

UAE Space Agency, the Emirates Mars Mission, https://www.emiratesmarsmission.ae/

National Geographic, Planet Mars, Explained; https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/mars-1

NASA Artemis Program Taking the Next Step to Make Moon Nuclear Reactor a Reality in the Next 10 Years, https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/34634/20211122/nasa-taking-next-step-make-nuclear-reactor-reality-within-10.htm