Why the first Bitcoin billionaire in space sold bitcoin to do it
One small step for man, one giant leap for Bitcoin
Dima Zel/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
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Until now, no Bitcoiners have stepped foot on the actual moon, considering Satoshi wouldn’t write the white paper for another 36 years after the last astronaut returned home.
Maybe 50 people, tops, have been shot into space since the white paper came out, including on suborbital flights like the Blue Origin trips, which probably don’t count. Perhaps there were Bitcoiners among them.
We do know this for sure: Chun Wang is the first Bitcoin billionaire to ever enter Earth’s orbit.
The F2Pool co-founder spent three and a half days in space last month, only to land on stage with Rizzo, the Bitcoin Historian, at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas this week.
“Space was great. I already read a lot about space all my life, and I just went there for verification. So, don’t trust, verify. I verified space,” Wang told Rizzo.
He’d privately funded the expedition for an undisclosed sum after pitching SpaceX on the idea of operating humanity’s first ever space flight over Earth’s poles. Wang commanded the mission, which SpaceX operated with a Crew Dragon spacecraft, which are partially reusable.
Wang spent three months over a 14-month period training exactly as an astronaut would.
“The only difference…we pay ourselves, and professional astronauts, their respective countries pay for that… ours is kind of a newer private commercial space flight, that’s a difference, but we go through the same training process.”
Wang initially got into Bitcoin after coming across a Slashdot feature in 2011. Bitcoin’s most famous Slashdotting was its February post: “Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity.”
Luckily, he started mining soon after, and actually sold some of his bitcoin to fund the space adventure.
Rizzo asked: “There’s a lot of people here who don’t want to spend bitcoin, and maybe they don’t want to spend bitcoin to go to space. You spent bitcoin to go to space. Can you talk about why you wanted to spend bitcoin to go to space?”
“I think, you know, you cannot just stack that for no reason. Bitcoin, it can help humanity. And I think space is one of the next big things,” Wang said.
“…It’s very well worth it. Because eventually humans have to be — like Elon said, humans have to be multiplanetary. We cannot be stuck here.”
As for whether Wang thought to make a Bitcoin transaction from space, not so much. “Nobody asked me. Because, you know, payment, you have to pay from one person to another. We only had four people up there, I didn’t have to pay my colleague.”
“But yeah, we did have internet. I think future flyers, future space travelers, once we have a sizable community up there, they’ll have a reason to make a payment — they’ll make a payment.”
Catch the rest of the interview from Bitcoin 2025’s livestream video (link is timestamped).
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