Thanks so much for all the food for thought and recommendations. I had a hunch for "capable of recovering", and now I have a clearer roadmap (some critical step

Thanks so much for all the food for thought and recommendations. I had a hunch for "capable of recovering", and now I have a clearer roadmap (some critical steps). I see your way of thinking. This in particular: > Think in terms of how to prevent inevitable unreliability from snowballing, how to make the satellite resilient against inevitable damage and malfunctions, as well as reducing that bottom-level unreliability to an absolute minimum. High-availability of components seems like a given to me (e.g. have 2, 3, 4 batteries as distant from each other as possible, to mitigate loss if one gets shot by some collision or outright fails; rinse and repeat for every critical component, starting at circuit design). In another comment, user "pjc50" suggests to me “"lockstep" chips, such as TI Hercules”, and yet my intuition would be to put two redundant ones on each satellite, just for good measure. But the ultimate economics of the project can be made to work, imho, because I envision a swarm of such tiny satellites actually, wherein you can afford to lose a few nodes now and then, if that makes all of them orders of magnitude cheaper — and thus you can send orders of magnitude more, overall. Brute-force the reliability issue by making them expendable to a reasonable degree. No human life means they can die for all we care, if it makes sense cost-wise. Hence why in that perspective, a discussion on the cost versus benefit of formal methods is of great interest. Needless to say, any advanced draft of the project would inevitably have to be vetted by, actually co-developed with field experts like you. To each contributor their domain. I hope it will be a given too, since I'm thinking of a 100% open-source project (both software and hardware ideally). The more eyeballs... ____ I see your points about blockchain, and they make a lot of sense; the problem I see with current 'cryptos' in general (including the big one) is that they simply aren't welcomed by most decisive institutions, including those who combat on principle the problems you mention. Like, you see the EFF et. al defending e.g. E2E encryption, but none of that drive to promote bitcoin. Thus that 'respectable' cryptocurrencies exist to solve these problems, sure, please, yesterday! — but that they reform the financial system by their very existence? There doesn't seem to be much appeal in the mainstream. I think it's a matter of time, how much each generation weighs demographically in the global opinion / decision power. For now, it's boomers, and they're not in that place.