SpaceX Flying Bitcoin Bounty to Moon, where anyone can take it if they can get there

Don’t expect it to cover travel expenses. At all.

Bitcoin Booty

Ahoy, noisy space travelers: If you’re hunting for off-world treasure, look no further than the Moon.

As discovered by Gizmodo, crypto company LunarCrush says it will leave a bounty of 62 Bitcoin near the moon’s south pole that is up for grabs. So in theory, any adventurer daring enough to take a trip to the moon could grab the loot for themselves, which will hopefully still be worth anywhere near the claimed $1.5 million it’s valued at so far (but not necessarily count on it) . The sticker price won’t even come close to the exorbitant travel expenses to get there and back, but hey, it’s the novelty that counts, right?

The goal of this stunt is to “inspire people to build communities that will unlock a new era of exploration,” according to LunarCrush CEO Joe Vezzani. “It is like Willy Wonka’s “Golden ticket” for the Web3 era, and we couldn’t be more excited to see how it all plays out,” he said in a press release.

The bounty is called Nakomoto_1, named after the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin – but it’s not actually a space-protected hard drive with Bitcoin sitting on it. Instead, it’s just a key to a private crypto wallet, engraved on a hidden part of a lunar rover called the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, or MAPP, which is decidedly less cool than uncovering a real treasure chest.

Actual mission

However, the MAPP rover isn’t there just to be a glorified crypto container, and it certainly doesn’t belong to LunarCrush – that’s way beyond the platform’s budget.

A creation of the space company Lunar Outpost, its real purpose is part of Tipping Point, a NASA-backed campaign to get private companies to flex their technology in space in hopes of advancing commercial spaceflight capabilities and infrastructure, which includes setting up Nokia the first 4G network on the moon.

The rover and its crypto prize will be brought to the Moon aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch scheduled for June. Once there, MAPP will be deployed around the moon’s south pole, where it will be used to test Nokia’s wireless network for two weeks. When the mission is over, the rover will simply be abandoned, and then it and its favor will be at the mercy of all motivated crypto-brothers off-world.

As of now, LunarCrush is still trying to raise money for the bounty by selling NFTs, so it might be a good idea to wait until LunarCrush can put its money where its mouth is.

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