re. Buzz Aldrin video
I've never seen such a fine example of 'asking for it'.
When PayPal launched 15 years ago it billed itself as the world's first global currency. Now the company is looking to kick-start a conversation into how to become the payment platform for the solar system with PayPal Galactic. "The time is right today because of all of the interest and movement and money and private/public …
In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altarian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. It exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Nigis are not negotiable currency, because Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination.
Tax evasion??
Surely there needs to be a bank IN space before that can even be considered a risk!
what do they think Google will launch a space mission, just to say all sales take place on Uranus?
Seriously I don't see an issue, whichever country launches a station, will use either their own currency, OR the Dollar/Pound/Euro or bit-coins even!
And if your actually based outside the earths atmosphere, the tax man has no claim on your money, the same as if you reside on a ship for more than 9 months of the year.
But then again maybe we'll leave our planet and suddenly the intergalactic tax collectors will appear and claim back taxes for all the years earth has failed to pay its solar system tax....
So..... there are still many places on the planet where internet coverage is non existent (and hence Paypal cannot be used) I'm really not sure how well this idea will work - if we have banking in space it should be from a bank in space, it should not be a bank situated on a planet - imagine how frustrated we all get with a 3 day "clearance" period - and then imagine the clearance window in space! TCP/IP which is what I would assume Paypal intend to use since it hasn't made mention of designing a new lightweight space friendly networking stack - the latency on Galactic bank transfers will huge! It's essentially a round trip from your location to the Earth and back again. Assuming you were at a restaurant far far far away and it took 1.5 (earth) years for the signal to reach Earth - you would be sat waiting a minimum of 3 years to pay for your food...... and that is providing that the signal actually made it all the way to earth, earth's systems were running AND Paypal wasn't being flaky! It's called Single Point of Failure Paypal - you want to be an intergalactic bank - fine - but you have to be available OUTSIDE the earth to start with.
Many many years ago I seem to remember reading an RFC proposing an extention to the internet domain system to add a new "higher than top level" domain which would be used to identify which planet/moon/asteroid the server resided .... perhaps they needed to respond to this first. Sadly can't find any trace of it at the moment via google but seem to recall it being issued on Apr 1 (and probably by a user on kremvax)
What would you buy? I mean really, even with Amazon Prime it isn't going to arrive in two days.
Maybe Virgin Galactic et al. are going to pursue a RyanAir model where they fuck you for every single thing once you're in orbit. I can hear the announcement now 'you have used all of your available atmosphere. Please confirm or decline a charge of 187.33 PayPal Galactic Credits for three minutes of additional atmosphere'.