A crypto group wants to genetically engineer mice so the animals can carry Bitcoin inside them.
The project, BitMouseDAO, launched on 25 January with two investors – both of which have only put in 0.01 ether into the scheme.
A DAO is a ‘decentralized autonomous organization’, a group that is represented by rules encoded as a computer program. Participation in a DAO is usually done through ownership of a token and smart contracts, rather than a top-down hierarchy.
The person behind the project, according to the blog post, compares the experiment to artist Eduardo Kac who used a fluorescent protein to make rabbits glow under certain lighting conditions.
“We have tied the value of the mouse directly to Bitcoin, and it will fluctuate with the daily value of Bitcoin. Maybe in ten years it will be worth $100 million, or maybe it will be worth nothing”, the anomyous author writes. They also intend for the offspring of the mouse to also carry the private key.
BitMouseDAO told Motherboard that it was a collection of artists who “prefer to be like pack with no country, no gender, no member”. It plans to build a community over time, as the work does not need “as much money as auctioning constitutions or space travel” – referencing two other projects that
“BitMouseDAO is an art project that connects the crypto world with the art world as well as the biological realm through the bold idea of putting bitcoin in mouse,” it said. “We explore consensus on the value of crypto and our vision for the future of technology. We don’t make a biochemical monster.”
The way that the group intends to achieve this task is by editing the mouse’s genetic code to carry the private key that can be used to access bitcoins.
If that does not work, the group will engineer a virus – albeit a harmless one – that is carrying the key and inject that into the mouse.
“Ideally the offspring of the BitMouse would also carry the private key and we would make specimens of them to sell at auction after they die of natural causes. At that point, a single Bitcoin would split into multiple specimens, but as soon as someone breaks the specimen to extract the genetic information and thus remove the BitMouse, the other specimens would lose their value”, the blog post says.
“On the flip side, breaking the specimen and destroying the artwork may not even happen when bitcoins are worthless.”
The group claims that it will not harm the mice, nor target any useful protein that could influence the mouse; the mice will be bred for the first three months, and a member of the group will receive a physical mouse artwork after the last mouse dies of natural causes.
