6 ms·

>lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, A post apocalypse in which internet survives seems far fetched.

Alex3917 10y ago
> A post apocalypse in which internet survives seems far fetched. The apocalypse is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.
- VLM 10y ago
  And disasters / apocalypse are distributed by a power law or exponential. The lead subject in the linked article is almost certain to live long enough to experience the inevitable next San Francisco earthquake, at which time he will absolutely die if his glasses are broken and he can't get around, so his prepping by fixing his eyes makes sense. Most prepping means your survival on the "oops" scale goes up. The media making fun of anything other than business as usual focuses solely on preppers and total thermonuclear war or zombies or utter economic collapse. People sick of journalists, troll them right back, yah bro I'm prepping for the zombie and alien invasion. In reality, personally I'm very well prepared for legendary blizzards, which makes sense because where I live we get legendary grade "international news story" blizzards perhaps every couple years. Because its very cheap, very easy, and I love my family. But sure, I'd tell a journalist my snow shoes and camping gear are for surviving the thermonuclear winter. Mostly because I hate journalists (just being honest about myself)
  - sjg007 10y ago
    Well... in California when it snows, everyone freaks out. In Minnesota, it's a Monday.
the_duke 10y ago
No but they would survive the collapse of one country and it's economy. (Not saying that this is a smart way to park your money...)
- woofyman 10y ago
  That's only true for countries with small economies. If the US, China, Japan or the Eurozone collapsed, that would plunge the whole world into a depression.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  The number in the ledger will obviously survive, will the value? I mean, say I have some food that I want to trade (not just me, me and my big squad of well armed killers). Are you going to trade instead with the guy who says he has lots of bitcoin?
halomru 10y ago
Bitcoin behaves rather badly under global scale network partitions, or if your global network has a latency of over an hour. But on the other hand it is completely immune to collapse of governments
- cafebabbe 10y ago
  Ha, "completely immune". Good luck accessing your wallet without power plants...
  - mywittyname 10y ago
    Or internet access. It seems like you could commit fraud by traveling to regions without a means to communicate with one-another online and selling them BTCs that were already spent on another network. I bet two people pull that off before those communities ban BTC.
    - usrusr 10y ago
      On the other hand, as long as those communication islands don't reconnect, all those double-spent BTC will be just as good/bad as homemade dollar bills. Bitcoin might be postapocalyptically valuable if the apocalypse in question has hyperinflation at its core, but in a scenario without that it will be inferior even to vintage paper money. The true availability of BTC within a given community is just too much of an uncertainty. What could be a sizable fraction of the amount in active circulation one day could be completely devalued due some early adopter backup going live a day later.
  - halomru 10y ago
    "collapse of government" doesn't have to mean total collapse of infrastructure. Providing infrastructure is harder without government, but if you charge for the infrastructure anyway, you can just increase prices. It's of course a problem for low income workers, but here we are talking about the super rich.
    - che_shirecat 10y ago
drcode 10y ago
To be fair, Bitcoin technically doesn't need a true internet, just an ad-hoc mesh network. (Not that those will be easy to come by, either, but they would be somewhat more feasible to establish.)
- shuntress 10y ago
  What would be the mechanism by which which two previously separate but each fully legitimate (in their own network) ledgers interact? Not trying to poke holes; Just curious. E: To clarify, imagine that the North American Free Peoples Conglomerate and the New China Society finally re-establish contact between the two continents for the first time in hundreds of years. They have each been running fully functional bitcoin networks for generations on their (until now) 100% separated continent-wide networks. Is there any current consideration for combining two block chains? or would this need a new custom solution to handle treating each as a completely separate currency (exchange rates)?
  - vkou 10y ago
    The one burning more electricity on mining new blocks would win, and the other ledger would be invalid, after the point of divergence.
    - LyndsySimon 10y ago
      ... but the individual transactions on the losing chain could would still be valid and could be incorporated into the winning blockchain. It wouldn't be quite a simple as "the shortest chain loses" Oh, and the country with the lowest amount of energy spent mining would win. Both countries hashing after unification would work on the chain with the lowest difficulty, which would be the one with the least hashing power. :)
      - Atheros 10y ago
        You need to read more about how Bitcoin works.
sjg007 10y ago
Well.. Darpa designed arpanet (the precursor) to the internet to persist in the event of a nuclear holocaust. All of those bunkers probably have ham radios (thanks Jon Conner) and redundant internet connections.
- flukus 10y ago
  I was designed to survive a nuclear attack and be able to retaliate, not to survive long term societal collapse.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Alex3917 10y ago

> A post apocalypse in which internet survives seems far fetched. The apocalypse is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.

VLM 10y ago
And disasters / apocalypse are distributed by a power law or exponential. The lead subject in the linked article is almost certain to live long enough to experience the inevitable next San Francisco earthquake, at which time he will absolutely die if his glasses are broken and he can't get around, so his prepping by fixing his eyes makes sense. Most prepping means your survival on the "oops" scale goes up. The media making fun of anything other than business as usual focuses solely on preppers and total thermonuclear war or zombies or utter economic collapse. People sick of journalists, troll them right back, yah bro I'm prepping for the zombie and alien invasion. In reality, personally I'm very well prepared for legendary blizzards, which makes sense because where I live we get legendary grade "international news story" blizzards perhaps every couple years. Because its very cheap, very easy, and I love my family. But sure, I'd tell a journalist my snow shoes and camping gear are for surviving the thermonuclear winter. Mostly because I hate journalists (just being honest about myself)
- sjg007 10y ago
  Well... in California when it snows, everyone freaks out. In Minnesota, it's a Monday.

the_duke 10y ago

No but they would survive the collapse of one country and it's economy. (Not saying that this is a smart way to park your money...)

woofyman 10y ago
That's only true for countries with small economies. If the US, China, Japan or the Eurozone collapsed, that would plunge the whole world into a depression.
maxerickson 10y ago
The number in the ledger will obviously survive, will the value? I mean, say I have some food that I want to trade (not just me, me and my big squad of well armed killers). Are you going to trade instead with the guy who says he has lots of bitcoin?

halomru 10y ago

Bitcoin behaves rather badly under global scale network partitions, or if your global network has a latency of over an hour. But on the other hand it is completely immune to collapse of governments

cafebabbe 10y ago
Ha, "completely immune". Good luck accessing your wallet without power plants...
- mywittyname 10y ago
  Or internet access. It seems like you could commit fraud by traveling to regions without a means to communicate with one-another online and selling them BTCs that were already spent on another network. I bet two people pull that off before those communities ban BTC.
  - usrusr 10y ago
    On the other hand, as long as those communication islands don't reconnect, all those double-spent BTC will be just as good/bad as homemade dollar bills. Bitcoin might be postapocalyptically valuable if the apocalypse in question has hyperinflation at its core, but in a scenario without that it will be inferior even to vintage paper money. The true availability of BTC within a given community is just too much of an uncertainty. What could be a sizable fraction of the amount in active circulation one day could be completely devalued due some early adopter backup going live a day later.
- halomru 10y ago
  "collapse of government" doesn't have to mean total collapse of infrastructure. Providing infrastructure is harder without government, but if you charge for the infrastructure anyway, you can just increase prices. It's of course a problem for low income workers, but here we are talking about the super rich.
  - che_shirecat 10y ago

drcode 10y ago

To be fair, Bitcoin technically doesn't need a true internet, just an ad-hoc mesh network. (Not that those will be easy to come by, either, but they would be somewhat more feasible to establish.)

shuntress 10y ago
What would be the mechanism by which which two previously separate but each fully legitimate (in their own network) ledgers interact? Not trying to poke holes; Just curious. E: To clarify, imagine that the North American Free Peoples Conglomerate and the New China Society finally re-establish contact between the two continents for the first time in hundreds of years. They have each been running fully functional bitcoin networks for generations on their (until now) 100% separated continent-wide networks. Is there any current consideration for combining two block chains? or would this need a new custom solution to handle treating each as a completely separate currency (exchange rates)?
- vkou 10y ago
  The one burning more electricity on mining new blocks would win, and the other ledger would be invalid, after the point of divergence.
  - LyndsySimon 10y ago
    ... but the individual transactions on the losing chain could would still be valid and could be incorporated into the winning blockchain. It wouldn't be quite a simple as "the shortest chain loses" Oh, and the country with the lowest amount of energy spent mining would win. Both countries hashing after unification would work on the chain with the lowest difficulty, which would be the one with the least hashing power. :)
    - Atheros 10y ago
      You need to read more about how Bitcoin works.

sjg007 10y ago

Well.. Darpa designed arpanet (the precursor) to the internet to persist in the event of a nuclear holocaust. All of those bunkers probably have ham radios (thanks Jon Conner) and redundant internet connections.

flukus 10y ago
I was designed to survive a nuclear attack and be able to retaliate, not to survive long term societal collapse.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]