Some things I have in mind if it gets big include: subsidizing cryonics dues for low-income people, covering funding shortfalls for those unable to obtain life insurance, cryonics scholarships to support the development of expertise in neural cryobiology and other areas, and hiring a public relations team to fix the image of cryonics.
My own preference would be to donate to the Brain Preservation prize. Apparently no one has ever actually looked at imaging of how well cryonics procedures preserve brain cells, and the prize is a step towards really evidence-based cryonics. (If Bitcoin gains another order of magnitude or two, it would be even more valuable to see if you could fund a simple experiment like vitrifying & reviving some C. elegans or something to see if they retain learned memories like maze-running.)
a simple experiment like vitrifying & reviving some C. elegans or something to see if they retain learned memories like maze-running
And it's done! "Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived C. elegans", Vita-More & Barranco 2015:
...Can memory be retained after cryopreservation? Our research has attempted to answer this long-standing question by using the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a well-known model organism for biological research that has generated revolutionary findings but has not been tested f
The bitcoins that I had set aside for a Cryonics contest two years ago (and were unredeemed) are suddenly worth a lot more.
Details: I had added 10 bitcoins to get things started, and there were 4.75 worth of additional donations. These were partially lost when the hosted online wallet that I was using (MyBitcoin) was hacked, but 49% was recovered. As of today, after refunding part of the donated money, it is now worth 5.2675. I will be adding from my personal store to bring it up to an even 5.5. At $140 per coin, the new total is $770.
I've decided to follow the buy-and-hold strategy for at least another year, since it worked so well. I don't have exact details on what I'll do with it, but it will not be converted or spent for at least one year, and will eventually be used for promoting cryonics in some way.
Some things I have in mind if it gets big include:
Contributions can be made to:
1Jdn36JUwvJdr3Qiie4aAseFdcoTsND9Qo
(Updated, since the previous address was attached to my personal wallet on an outdated client, which was causing money to be moved out of it by accident. The above is a brainwallet with a reasonably secure passphrase, generated using Blockchain.info.)