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SENS Research Foundation Now Accepts Bitcoin Donations


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Posted 09 February 2015 - 11:37 PM


The SENS Research Foundation remains the only easy way for ordinary folk such as you and I to donate funds in certainty that we are helping to advance the state of rejuvenation biotechnology. It is also the only easy way for someone with a few million to spend to do the same, for that matter. The organization funds research programs and advocacy aimed at pushing past zones of slow progress and neglect in relevant fields of medical research, so as to speed the arrival of treatments for degenerative aging. There is a clear plan, but a lot to be done.

Thus while the well-funded stem cell and cancer research communities need little help beyond a few nudges to keep them on the right road, these are only two of seven areas of research in which significant advances are required in order to eliminate age-related disease and extend healthy lifespans by decades or more. There is far too little work taking place on clearance of senescent cells, or removing cross-links in old tissues, or mitochondrial repair, or breaking down the numerous forms of amyloid and other metabolic wastes that clog up important cellular processes. In all these areas the SENS Research Foundation is one of the few organizations persistently finding ways to move the needle, to speed things up, to bring more attention to the field. The scope of success here is at present only limited by funding: there are any number of scientists in the aging research community who would drop their present work in favor of SENS biotechnology to treat aging given the budget.

With that in mind, here is a little news for those who might have a few bitcoins left over after all the excitement of the past eighteen months or so:

Donate to SENS Research Initiatives via Bitcoin

SENS Research Foundation is now able to accept Bitcoin donations: go to https://www.coinbase.com/srf and make the donation. Coinbase keeps your information confidential, so we don't see the donor. If you would like a tax receipt for your donation please send us your name and the amount of your donation via email.

Bitcoin remains an interesting endeavor, not for what most people think of as bitcoin itself, a payment system and currency, but rather for the underlying combination of cryptography and profit incentives that enables the maintenance of a reliable distributed ledger without the need for a centralized ledger-keeper. Any such ledger-keeper can be easily compromised by a determined attacker, whether criminal or representative of the state, and there is considerable value in a system that is inherently resistant to that sort of attack. The greater the participation in this system, the more secure it becomes: attackers would need immense resources to overwhelm the ledger, and they couldn't do so invisibly.

Rapid transfer of value between two parties anywhere in the world with no intermediary via bitcoins is really the least of what can be achieved with this sort of a system. The real value here isn't a currency, it is trust. You should think of the distributed ledger as a trust engine: the many computing mills churning away around the world on simple cryptographic algorithms are less engaged in mining bitcoins than they are in generating and ensuring trust. Thus programmable contracts are potentially much more valuable than bitcoin transfer, even considering only the simplest possibilities such as timed release of property or escrow without the need for a trusted third party to hold funds. Future iterations of the distributed ledger implementation will no doubt improve upon the options available, but the basic concept is here for the long term I think.


View the full article at FightAging




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