Winklevoss twins use bitcoin to book space trip
| San Francisco
You can't spend bitcoins at Amazon.com or to pay your mortgage but, as the聽Winklevoss聽twins聽showed on Wednesday, you can use the digital currency to book a trip into suborbital space.
Cameron and聽Tyler聽Winklevoss, who famously accused Facebook Inc founder Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea, said they used bitcoins to buy tickets for a high-altitude voyage on billionaire Richard Branson'蝉听Virgin Galactic聽commercial spaceflight venture.
The brothers, Olympic rowers who earned MBA degrees from聽Oxford University, have become bitcoin evangelists and investors and are planning to launch a fund to make it easy to trade the digital currency on the stock market.
In a blog post,聽Tyler聽Winklevoss聽compared Branson's space endeavor and bitcoin entrepreneurs to major historical figures who changed the way the world was perceived, like聽Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus,Vasco da Gama聽and聽Nicolaus Copernicus.
"It is in this vein that Cameron and I contemplate our tickets into space - as seed capital supporting a new technology that may forever change the way we travel, purchased with a new technology that may forever change the way we transact," he wrote.
Virgin Galactic, a U.S. offshoot of Branson'蝉听London-based Virgin Group, is selling rides on itsSpaceShipTwo聽for $250,000.
The聽twins聽are not the first to sign up for聽Virgin Galactic聽using bitcoins, but it is the highest-profile flight booking to date using the currency. Last November, Branson announced that a flight attendant fromHawaii聽had become the first person to pay for a seat with bitcoins.
Bitcoin, a digital currency that is traded on a聽peer-to-peer聽network independent of central control, has seen its value soar in the past year as it gains attention from growing numbers of investors, entrepreneurs and regulators.
But the virtual currency's struggle for legitimacy has been shaken by recent debacles, including the collapse last week of聽Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, once the world's dominant bitcoin exchange.
Few major retailers have begun accepting payment in bitcoins, and critics say the currency's high volatility makes it unsuitable for everyday transactions.
The six-passenger, two-pilot聽SpaceShipTwo聽is hauled into the air by a twin-hull carrier jet and then released.
The upcoming flights are designed to reach altitudes of more than 65 miles (100 km) above Earth, high enough to see the curvature of the planet set against the blackness of space.
