One of the top software engineers behind the Bitcoin digital currency wants to launch it into space.

Last month, Jeff Garzik floated the idea of Bitcoin in space on an internet discussion forum, pitching it as a way to always keep the system up and running – even if it's attacked by malicious hackers.

The plan is to send up a Bitcoin computer on a tiny inexpensive satellite and have this machine communicate with terrestrial Bitcoin computers via radio. Garzik – who works at Bitcoin payment processor Bitpay and helps shape the open source software that drives the digital currency on thousands of machines across the internet – says that the satellite node could help the Bitcoin network fight back something known as a Sibyl attack. This is where malicious computers flood a node on the peer-to-peer network with bad data. It could give criminals a way of spending their bitcoins more than once, and it's also part of the so-called selfish miner scenario that Cornell University researchers described last month, saying it could bring down the entire system.

>'When Bitcoin came around, it seemed natural to me that you'd want some sort of redundancy out in space' Jeff Garzik

The satellite node would give the Bitcoin network a trustworthy node that's accessible from anywhere. It would always report good data, Garzik says, and that could mitigate Sibyl attacks and make it harder to attack bitcoin overall.

But he also just likes the idea of Bitcoin in space.

The notion may seen excessive, but for Garzik – a self-confessed space fan whose dad helped build missiles at the White Sands Missile Range – it has always been an obvious next step for the digital currency. "When Bitcoin came around, it seemed natural to me that you'd want some sort of redundancy out in space," he says, explaining that this could not only help the peer-to-peer network fend off attack, but give it a lifeline if machines are unavailable on earth.

Garzik, like many Bitcoiners, is an idealist. "If you're out in a field in Africa or if you're a researcher in Antarctica, you should be able to have just as much access to Bitcoin as someone in the better-wired portion of the world," he says.

Others agree with him. So far, Garzik has raised more than 37 bitcoins for the project. At today's inflated prices, they're worth more than $32,000.

Jeff Garzik. Photo: BitPay

In a sad way, the biggest hurdle for this most ambitious of Bitcoin projects is not the technology or even the finances. It's the boring bureaucratic stuff: figuring out what radio frequency the space nodes could use, structuring the organization that will launch the satellite, and navigating international space regulations. "The money is really the easy part," he says.

Garzik expects that it will take him awhile to work out the first phase of the project – which involves not only picking a wireless spectrum but also designing the equipment. "Once that gets hammered out, then phase two is: 'Let's write a check and throw some stuff out into space.'"

He estimates that by using inexpensive CubeSat technology, the project will cost about $2 million. He's shooting to fire off his orbital Bitcoin node sometime in the next three to five years.

Bitcoin's lead developer, Gavin Andresen, doesn't seem to think there's an urgent need to get a Bitcoin satellite into space, but he likes the idea nevertheless. "There's this thing good engineers do where somebody thinks up some crazy, ain't-never-gonna-happen-but-possibly-could event," he says. "The engineer thinks about it mostly because it is an interesting problem, and comes up with a simple solution that fixes the non-problem. Jeff Garzik is a great engineer."