A gang of crypto enthusiasts has announced a dubious idea to embed Bitcoin into a mouse. The BitMouseDAO collective claims that the project would use “cold wallet technology” to store bitcoin offline before generating a private key.
They claim they’ll take that key and break it down with the help of a “biological business” into “matching ATGC sequence modified by quaternary encoding, which goes into the mice for fertilization.” The private key would be hidden inside the mouse’s DNA — on a non-useful protein – when it was born, so the mouse would not be damaged.
“Ideally, the BitMouse’s offspring would carry the private key as well,” BitMouseDao said in a statement. “We would make specimens of them to sell at auction after they died of natural causes,” they write, citing Damien Hirst’s work with preserved dead animals as inspiration for the physical specimens.
“The animal cells will remain active under this preservation process,” they assert, but because the mouse will be dead, it’s unclear what “active” means. “At that moment, a single Bitcoin would split into numerous specimens, but the other specimens would lose their value as soon as someone broke the specimen to extract the genetic code and therefore remove the BitMouse,” they wrote.
“On the other hand, when bitcoins are worthless, breaking the specimen and ruining the artwork may not even be possible.” Of course, since this is a crypto project, NFTs are involved, with a non-fungible token based on an image of the mouse being created, as well as any of the mouse’s children. The idea came to them while they were sleeping, according to the mysterious “artist.”
“An idea went across my mind a few weeks ago as I was about to go asleep. Being the artist that I am, I scribbled down this passing thought the next morning “They compose. “Over the next few weeks, I began checking about to see if the experiment could be carried out. I was intrigued by the prospect of how this might affect us in the future.” They said that it “began as a crazy concept to make a laboratory mouse carry a bitcoin inside its body.” It will most certainly remain that way as long as it receives little funding and has no actual purpose.
