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If the hypothetical crisis divides up the Internet so, for example, U.S. users only can connect to U.S. nodes, and connect to U.S. miners -- and the same is tru

If the hypothetical crisis divides up the Internet so, for example, U.S. users only can connect to U.S. nodes, and connect to U.S. miners -- and the same is true for Iceland and China and South Africa etc., it would become extremely perilous to trade value for the currency anywhere in the world, right? Because the geographically-separate chains cannot synchronize in any reasonable way. A breakdown of the Internet by geography is definitely a crisis that should be on radar screens, and it wouldn't require anything like a total societal breakdown. Then HAM TOR and whatever else would become essential to keep the network stable.

alwillis 6y ago
If the hypothetical crisis divides up the Internet so, for example, U.S. users only can connect to U.S. nodes, and connect to U.S. miners You know that's not how TCP/IP works, right? It originally was a defense department research project that had the requirement of surviving a nuclear attack. Unless every undersea cable is severed and every satellite up-link destroyed, the internet will continue to operate in the event something bad happens. I live in New England; I'm closer to Iceland than I am to California for network purposes. Every full node has copy of the entire blockchain going back to the genesis block created on January 3, 2009. The blockchain may fork, but the longest chain wins and the majority of the mining power will pick that and bitcoin keeps on going. Full nodes will continue to verify those blocks. Nearly all miners are in data centers with redundant power and networking, so many of them will stay online. Many of them are using hydroelectricity, so unless rivers stop flowing, most of them should be good to go. Bitcoin already has a peer-to-peer exchange running on Tor; folks will still be able to exchange Bitcoin for fiat, to the extent that remains useful [1]. I’d imagine the software would be modified to support things other than fiat that would be useful to exchange. With a link-local IPv6 "subnet", you could have thousands of machines on a make-shift mesh network and all you'd need is an uplink to the internet to transact. [1]: https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/

alwillis 6y ago

If the hypothetical crisis divides up the Internet so, for example, U.S. users only can connect to U.S. nodes, and connect to U.S. miners You know that's not how TCP/IP works, right? It originally was a defense department research project that had the requirement of surviving a nuclear attack. Unless every undersea cable is severed and every satellite up-link destroyed, the internet will continue to operate in the event something bad happens. I live in New England; I'm closer to Iceland than I am to California for network purposes. Every full node has copy of the entire blockchain going back to the genesis block created on January 3, 2009. The blockchain may fork, but the longest chain wins and the majority of the mining power will pick that and bitcoin keeps on going. Full nodes will continue to verify those blocks. Nearly all miners are in data centers with redundant power and networking, so many of them will stay online. Many of them are using hydroelectricity, so unless rivers stop flowing, most of them should be good to go. Bitcoin already has a peer-to-peer exchange running on Tor; folks will still be able to exchange Bitcoin for fiat, to the extent that remains useful [1]. I’d imagine the software would be modified to support things other than fiat that would be useful to exchange. With a link-local IPv6 "subnet", you could have thousands of machines on a make-shift mesh network and all you'd need is an uplink to the internet to transact. [1]: https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/