7 ms·

For all you Bitcoiners talking about how it's impossible for a government to turn off the internet, this appears to be a counter-example.

by xapata 6y ago

Nextgrid 6y ago
Turning off the internet isn't impossible per-se, it's just very difficult without disastrous effects on the local economy. I don't know how developed Uganda is, but I can tell you for sure that if the internet is blocked in the US or any major European country, everything stops, including real-life things such as card payments and even airport timetable signs (interesting fact: most of the UK ones run a Chrome instance displaying a webpage hosted by a Romanian company). Even if access to national services is unaffected, those services themselves depend on various SaaSes that would be affected by the international blocking.
- iso1631 6y ago
  > it's just very difficult It's really really simple, as shown by Uganda, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, India and many more countries.
  - aaomidi 6y ago
    Iran, last year. Internet was out for like two weeks.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    My intent was to say it's difficult without incurring major side-effects to the economy. I've updated my comment to clarify. Of course, if you don't have a significant economy to begin with or something else has already disrupted it (riots, uprising, etc - which could also be what prompts you to shut down the internet) then it's not a problem.
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      Or you simply value control over money. The economy is not the primary goal of everyone, not even all governments.
      - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        You need some degree of economy to have control though.
        iso1631 6y ago
        But evidence shows countries turning the internet off all the time, let alone specific filtering, and their economies haven't collapsed. India does it dozens of times a year. In most cases you don't need to completely turn everything off, just shut down the mobile networks, and maybe the big domestic broadband networks, and that's good enough.
        megous 6y ago
        Turn off internet or block social networks?
        celim307 6y ago
        North Korea says sup
        imtringued 6y ago
        If your country has natural resources it is very easy to heavily control that part of the economy and suppress the less controllable parts of the economy (by shutting the internet down for example).
  - Izkata 6y ago
    Didn't Egypt end up with citizen-run satellite or mesh networks that crossed borders? I vaguely remember people from other countries organizing on Twitter to provide it somehow.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      People always talk about networks like that. But the reality is they tend to only be a few thousand people max, while millions are still left unconnected. They're good for exfiltrating news.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    It's simple if you setup your infra in such a way you expect to be able to turn it off. It'd be a lot harder in the US where things are a lot more decentralized. In Uganda, I wouldn't be shocked if all connectivity to outside of the country went through one physical building.
    - iso1631 6y ago
      Maybe the US, which is a very large country, but issue an order to the major ISPs (cellular and cable) to stop carrying domestic network traffic and you accomplish pretty much the same thing. Sure there may be some WISPs in the middle of nowhere which aren't affected, but you've accomplished most of your goal. There's two ways for internet to be shut down. One is legal -- the government tells registered ISPs "stop forwarding packets". Doesn't matter how good your connectivity is when you simply have to turn it off. Your protection there are courts etc, but it's not technically difficult. The other approach is extra-legal -- e.g a terrorist attack. Just look at the effect from a car bomb in Nashville last month, I quote from a newspaper: > The immediate repercussions were surprisingly widespread. AT&T customers lost service — phones, internet or video — across large parts of Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. There were 911 centers in the region that couldn't take calls; others didn't receive crucial data associated with callers such as their locations. The Nashville police department's phones and internet failed. Stores went cash-only. > At some hospitals, electronic medical records, internet service or phones stopped working. The Nashville airport halted flights for about three hours on Christmas. Rival carrier T-Mobile also had service issues as far away as Atlanta, 250 miles away, because the company uses AT&T equipment for moving customer data from towers to the T-Mobile network. The area effected was about 100,000 square miles, roughly the same size as Uganda. From one carbomb outside one building. I think there's only one major Internet Exchange point in Uganda (just like it seems there was one in the south east of the US), but there's certainly multiple fibres in and out. If you're in Mbarara and sending traffic to Rwanda it's unlikely to go via Kampala. Here's a network map of one provider in Uganda: https://bcs-ea.com/service/uganda/ https://bcs-ea.com/service/uganda/ The UK has a few exchanges, but almost everything runs through Docklands in London - various Telehouse buildings within a mile of each other, Telecity etc. Almost all internet traffic in the UK runs through London, and the sites that aren't are owned by Linx (IXLeeds is the only one that isn't). A major flood breaching the Thames Barrier will cause chaos.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  I hope we never find out what happens if the US internet goes down. But with 2020's track record and what 2021 is starting to look like, we might find out!
  - ckdarby 6y ago
    Not trying to talk about existing politics. Outside of a rogue president that convinces the military to act in illegal activity or a true government overthrow it won't happen. No running or existing government in the USA will pull the plug because they know that would end their career. All their fundraising gone. Wall Street RIP. Riots all over the place.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
  https://thekashmirwalla.com/2020/12/high-speed-internet-ban-in-kashmir-500-days-and-counting/ https://thekashmirwalla.com/2020/12/high-speed-internet-ban-... here 500 days and counting of no high speed mobile internet for 8 million + souls. thats worlds biggest democracy for you /s honestly i have seen how life crashes without internet, its not fun
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    How many online businesses got shuttered that you know of?
    - iso1631 6y ago
      Here in a G7 country there have been many offline business shuttered this year. Life goes on.
      - selimthegrim 6y ago
        My point was people in India love to sneer at Kashmiri supposed backwardness but kneecapping their ability to do business online is not going to win them plaudits.
        2Gkashmiri 6y ago
        Its not just business online. 8 million people includes millions of school children who have not gone to school since 5 August 2019. Then since March the corona happened and they had to stay back again. 1.5 years of no formal education but with a twist. While the world across everyone was on zoom, here in the valley the kids had to suffer because "buffering", no video, only either audio on zoom calls or the teacher snaps photos of Notes and forwards on WhatsApp, students copy that photo and work done. Same for audio messages on WhatsApp. Point is, we dont know when schools will open but students are being prevented from getting some semblance of an education. I have a 4 Yo kid in the extended family and he's been in school for 8 days only. Hits out at anyone who mentions school.
    - 6y ago
- ny2ko 6y ago
  Ugandan here. I spoke with my family in Kampala yesterday (cell phone calls still work) and whilst some things like atms not working are an issue, for the most part things are working, especially since there is a large use of mobile money for payments
fastball 6y ago
Blockchains can still operate on decentralized P2P internet even if the main internet is shut down.
- zitterbewegung 6y ago
  You would still have to rely on one person still having access to the internet.
- rank0 6y ago
  This is not at all a practical solution. How much "decentralized P2P internet" infrastructure do you think there is in Uganda? Hell even in the US its virtually nonexistent. Which P2P internet should I use? IPFS? Helium? Any of the other blockchain internet vaporware? Any Blockchain operating in a small region would have no resiliency, be vulnerable to 51% attacks, and diverge significantly from the original internet ledger.
  - toolz 6y ago
    It's not practical until it is - having your internet shutoff isn't practical either, but with that barrier put into place a lot of things become quickly more practical, relatively speaking.
    - cronix 6y ago
      As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.
_trampeltier 6y ago
I think, there was a talk some year ago about a country in South America. It think they had almost mo internet, but a large P2P wireless network all over the country.
jonnydubowsky 6y ago
I came across this project recently which solves for this problem. Locha.io https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentation%2Fen%2Ffaqs.md https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentatio... https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentation%2Fen%2Fchapter_01.md https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentatio... A Harpia node is a Locha Mesh standalone node which can provide services on the network such as an Internet gateway, Bitcoin transactions broadcast, latest blocks data, Electrum Server, a remote monerod, or any other. This device can have a larger antenna plugged, a power amplifier, or even a satellite dish, extending the transmission range in several kilometers
Reedx 6y ago
Even without shutting off the internet, couldn't governments crush crypto by making it illegal to buy or transfer? Countries could do this simultaneously. That would effectively stop ~99% of the affected populations from using it, no? What's the counterargument to this possibility? It seems to hinge on getting too big to ban.
- goodluckchuck 6y ago
  The US outlawed gold in 1933, but as far as I can tell that only made people want it more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
- johndevor 6y ago
  Game Theory. Let's say the US bans crypto, well then Russia will embrace it. Also, drugs are illegal... and it hasn't stopped drugs from trading hands... drugs even manage to make their way into prisons.
  - Reedx 6y ago
    I think they will see that possibility, though. So the US, Europe and others could agree to ban it at the same time. Not all countries would need to sign on to essentially send it back to the stone age.
    - gruez 6y ago
      >So the US, Europe and others could agree to ban it at the same time. Ah yes, like how the US and Europe agreed to ban drugs? How's that working for them?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - Reedx 6y ago
        Terribly. But that's a good example of countries agreeing to ban something.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> For all you Bitcoiners talking about how it's impossible for a government to turn off the internet, this appears to be a counter-example. I'll bite. It's not that we don't think it can happen, in fact those of us actually adept in financial censorship as well as physical censorship have actually advocated that we build additional infrastructure for just this occasion. I've been involved in the HK protests since the inception of the Yellow Movement, where we saw the CCP making its heavy handed presence felt and then had the local police shut down the internet in protest zones. This lead to the use of a bluetooth based app Fire Chat [0], which had also been used in Iraq when governments decided to crack down on 'dissidents' online. I personally never stopped advocatin for them to build meshnets and become familiar with p2p solutions as the financial censorship was soon to follow, and did not long after and still remains to this day: Jimmy Lai's charges is based on Money laundering something they do not have to prove simply claim and they can get away with it. What came after that, especially for me as a I was involved in the CJDNS project in Switzerland and dabbled with hyperboria as well as Zeronet in the US for a short period, saw the need for the creation of an entirely new Internet. Meshnets could serve only a limited capability for a short period of time, guifi is a cool project, but it cannot support the types of infrastructure we've all been reliant on for most of modern existence. I hold a lot of hope for Starlink becoming that after it becomes profitable and recovers its investments as we are in dire need of a new system. Or at least leases out some of its satelites for private use to help build something like it. Thus, we have made progress towards that end in the Bitcoin community, though in my opinion not enough as we've spent countless hours debating BS topics about people and things who don't matter rather on solving some of the more glaring issues. But Blockstream, even for all their misgivings and are far from perfect, are still moving toward the desirable end of having non-internet based transactions a priority to propagate on the mainchain-layer 1 protocol with their satellite [1]. There are other solutions as well, ham radio based tx etc... but I'll spare you the details of that for now as this is getting long. In short, you're talking about some of the most paranoid people in tech with an understanding of cryptography based tools and OPSEC who understand the implications of what you've described as a hypothetical situation while some of us have actually lived through this and used this technology to solve some of the most pressing issues in massive Humanitarian crises in the 21st century (Maidan Revolution in Kiev, Venzuela hyper inflation etc...). We're not all 'moonbois' and scammers though that gets the most headlines (I'm looking at you Micheal Saylor), and our tech, unlike even the stuff you overly compensated guys in FAANG aimlessly build and maintain to the detriment of much of Humanity, has this weird habit of working even when everyone else says it's dead: to this day nothing even comes close to Bitcoin's (the Network) reliability. Nothing. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat 1: https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/
JCharante 6y ago
Don't certain regions of India keep getting their internet cut off to quell uprisings?

For all you Bitcoiners talking about how it's impossible for a government to turn off the internet, this appears to be a counter-example.

by xapata 6y ago

For all you Bitcoiners talking about how it's impossible for a government to turn off the internet, this appears to be a counter-example.

Nextgrid 6y ago

Turning off the internet isn't impossible per-se, it's just very difficult without disastrous effects on the local economy. I don't know how developed Uganda is, but I can tell you for sure that if the internet is blocked in the US or any major European country, everything stops, including real-life things such as card payments and even airport timetable signs (interesting fact: most of the UK ones run a Chrome instance displaying a webpage hosted by a Romanian company). Even if access to national services is unaffected, those services themselves depend on various SaaSes that would be affected by the international blocking.

iso1631 6y ago
> it's just very difficult It's really really simple, as shown by Uganda, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, India and many more countries.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  Iran, last year. Internet was out for like two weeks.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  My intent was to say it's difficult without incurring major side-effects to the economy. I've updated my comment to clarify. Of course, if you don't have a significant economy to begin with or something else has already disrupted it (riots, uprising, etc - which could also be what prompts you to shut down the internet) then it's not a problem.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    Or you simply value control over money. The economy is not the primary goal of everyone, not even all governments.
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      You need some degree of economy to have control though.
      - iso1631 6y ago
        But evidence shows countries turning the internet off all the time, let alone specific filtering, and their economies haven't collapsed. India does it dozens of times a year. In most cases you don't need to completely turn everything off, just shut down the mobile networks, and maybe the big domestic broadband networks, and that's good enough.
        megous 6y ago
        Turn off internet or block social networks?
      - celim307 6y ago
        North Korea says sup
      - imtringued 6y ago
        If your country has natural resources it is very easy to heavily control that part of the economy and suppress the less controllable parts of the economy (by shutting the internet down for example).
- Izkata 6y ago
  Didn't Egypt end up with citizen-run satellite or mesh networks that crossed borders? I vaguely remember people from other countries organizing on Twitter to provide it somehow.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    People always talk about networks like that. But the reality is they tend to only be a few thousand people max, while millions are still left unconnected. They're good for exfiltrating news.
- xxpor 6y ago
  It's simple if you setup your infra in such a way you expect to be able to turn it off. It'd be a lot harder in the US where things are a lot more decentralized. In Uganda, I wouldn't be shocked if all connectivity to outside of the country went through one physical building.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    Maybe the US, which is a very large country, but issue an order to the major ISPs (cellular and cable) to stop carrying domestic network traffic and you accomplish pretty much the same thing. Sure there may be some WISPs in the middle of nowhere which aren't affected, but you've accomplished most of your goal. There's two ways for internet to be shut down. One is legal -- the government tells registered ISPs "stop forwarding packets". Doesn't matter how good your connectivity is when you simply have to turn it off. Your protection there are courts etc, but it's not technically difficult. The other approach is extra-legal -- e.g a terrorist attack. Just look at the effect from a car bomb in Nashville last month, I quote from a newspaper: > The immediate repercussions were surprisingly widespread. AT&T customers lost service — phones, internet or video — across large parts of Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. There were 911 centers in the region that couldn't take calls; others didn't receive crucial data associated with callers such as their locations. The Nashville police department's phones and internet failed. Stores went cash-only. > At some hospitals, electronic medical records, internet service or phones stopped working. The Nashville airport halted flights for about three hours on Christmas. Rival carrier T-Mobile also had service issues as far away as Atlanta, 250 miles away, because the company uses AT&T equipment for moving customer data from towers to the T-Mobile network. The area effected was about 100,000 square miles, roughly the same size as Uganda. From one carbomb outside one building. I think there's only one major Internet Exchange point in Uganda (just like it seems there was one in the south east of the US), but there's certainly multiple fibres in and out. If you're in Mbarara and sending traffic to Rwanda it's unlikely to go via Kampala. Here's a network map of one provider in Uganda: https://bcs-ea.com/service/uganda/ https://bcs-ea.com/service/uganda/ The UK has a few exchanges, but almost everything runs through Docklands in London - various Telehouse buildings within a mile of each other, Telecity etc. Almost all internet traffic in the UK runs through London, and the sites that aren't are owned by Linx (IXLeeds is the only one that isn't). A major flood breaching the Thames Barrier will cause chaos.
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
I hope we never find out what happens if the US internet goes down. But with 2020's track record and what 2021 is starting to look like, we might find out!
- ckdarby 6y ago
  Not trying to talk about existing politics. Outside of a rogue president that convinces the military to act in illegal activity or a true government overthrow it won't happen. No running or existing government in the USA will pull the plug because they know that would end their career. All their fundraising gone. Wall Street RIP. Riots all over the place.
2Gkashmiri 6y ago
https://thekashmirwalla.com/2020/12/high-speed-internet-ban-in-kashmir-500-days-and-counting/ https://thekashmirwalla.com/2020/12/high-speed-internet-ban-... here 500 days and counting of no high speed mobile internet for 8 million + souls. thats worlds biggest democracy for you /s honestly i have seen how life crashes without internet, its not fun
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  How many online businesses got shuttered that you know of?
  - iso1631 6y ago
    Here in a G7 country there have been many offline business shuttered this year. Life goes on.
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      My point was people in India love to sneer at Kashmiri supposed backwardness but kneecapping their ability to do business online is not going to win them plaudits.
      - 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
        Its not just business online. 8 million people includes millions of school children who have not gone to school since 5 August 2019. Then since March the corona happened and they had to stay back again. 1.5 years of no formal education but with a twist. While the world across everyone was on zoom, here in the valley the kids had to suffer because "buffering", no video, only either audio on zoom calls or the teacher snaps photos of Notes and forwards on WhatsApp, students copy that photo and work done. Same for audio messages on WhatsApp. Point is, we dont know when schools will open but students are being prevented from getting some semblance of an education. I have a 4 Yo kid in the extended family and he's been in school for 8 days only. Hits out at anyone who mentions school.
  - 6y ago
ny2ko 6y ago
Ugandan here. I spoke with my family in Kampala yesterday (cell phone calls still work) and whilst some things like atms not working are an issue, for the most part things are working, especially since there is a large use of mobile money for payments

fastball 6y ago

Blockchains can still operate on decentralized P2P internet even if the main internet is shut down.

zitterbewegung 6y ago
You would still have to rely on one person still having access to the internet.
rank0 6y ago
This is not at all a practical solution. How much "decentralized P2P internet" infrastructure do you think there is in Uganda? Hell even in the US its virtually nonexistent. Which P2P internet should I use? IPFS? Helium? Any of the other blockchain internet vaporware? Any Blockchain operating in a small region would have no resiliency, be vulnerable to 51% attacks, and diverge significantly from the original internet ledger.
- toolz 6y ago
  It's not practical until it is - having your internet shutoff isn't practical either, but with that barrier put into place a lot of things become quickly more practical, relatively speaking.
  - cronix 6y ago
    As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.

_trampeltier 6y ago

I think, there was a talk some year ago about a country in South America. It think they had almost mo internet, but a large P2P wireless network all over the country.

jonnydubowsky 6y ago

I came across this project recently which solves for this problem. Locha.io https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentation%2Fen%2Ffaqs.md https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentatio... https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentation%2Fen%2Fchapter_01.md https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentatio... A Harpia node is a Locha Mesh standalone node which can provide services on the network such as an Internet gateway, Bitcoin transactions broadcast, latest blocks data, Electrum Server, a remote monerod, or any other. This device can have a larger antenna plugged, a power amplifier, or even a satellite dish, extending the transmission range in several kilometers

Reedx 6y ago

Even without shutting off the internet, couldn't governments crush crypto by making it illegal to buy or transfer? Countries could do this simultaneously. That would effectively stop ~99% of the affected populations from using it, no? What's the counterargument to this possibility? It seems to hinge on getting too big to ban.

goodluckchuck 6y ago
The US outlawed gold in 1933, but as far as I can tell that only made people want it more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
johndevor 6y ago
Game Theory. Let's say the US bans crypto, well then Russia will embrace it. Also, drugs are illegal... and it hasn't stopped drugs from trading hands... drugs even manage to make their way into prisons.
- Reedx 6y ago
  I think they will see that possibility, though. So the US, Europe and others could agree to ban it at the same time. Not all countries would need to sign on to essentially send it back to the stone age.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >So the US, Europe and others could agree to ban it at the same time. Ah yes, like how the US and Europe agreed to ban drugs? How's that working for them?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Reedx 6y ago
      Terribly. But that's a good example of countries agreeing to ban something.

Melting_Harps 6y ago

> For all you Bitcoiners talking about how it's impossible for a government to turn off the internet, this appears to be a counter-example. I'll bite. It's not that we don't think it can happen, in fact those of us actually adept in financial censorship as well as physical censorship have actually advocated that we build additional infrastructure for just this occasion. I've been involved in the HK protests since the inception of the Yellow Movement, where we saw the CCP making its heavy handed presence felt and then had the local police shut down the internet in protest zones. This lead to the use of a bluetooth based app Fire Chat [0], which had also been used in Iraq when governments decided to crack down on 'dissidents' online. I personally never stopped advocatin for them to build meshnets and become familiar with p2p solutions as the financial censorship was soon to follow, and did not long after and still remains to this day: Jimmy Lai's charges is based on Money laundering something they do not have to prove simply claim and they can get away with it. What came after that, especially for me as a I was involved in the CJDNS project in Switzerland and dabbled with hyperboria as well as Zeronet in the US for a short period, saw the need for the creation of an entirely new Internet. Meshnets could serve only a limited capability for a short period of time, guifi is a cool project, but it cannot support the types of infrastructure we've all been reliant on for most of modern existence. I hold a lot of hope for Starlink becoming that after it becomes profitable and recovers its investments as we are in dire need of a new system. Or at least leases out some of its satelites for private use to help build something like it. Thus, we have made progress towards that end in the Bitcoin community, though in my opinion not enough as we've spent countless hours debating BS topics about people and things who don't matter rather on solving some of the more glaring issues. But Blockstream, even for all their misgivings and are far from perfect, are still moving toward the desirable end of having non-internet based transactions a priority to propagate on the mainchain-layer 1 protocol with their satellite [1]. There are other solutions as well, ham radio based tx etc... but I'll spare you the details of that for now as this is getting long. In short, you're talking about some of the most paranoid people in tech with an understanding of cryptography based tools and OPSEC who understand the implications of what you've described as a hypothetical situation while some of us have actually lived through this and used this technology to solve some of the most pressing issues in massive Humanitarian crises in the 21st century (Maidan Revolution in Kiev, Venzuela hyper inflation etc...). We're not all 'moonbois' and scammers though that gets the most headlines (I'm looking at you Micheal Saylor), and our tech, unlike even the stuff you overly compensated guys in FAANG aimlessly build and maintain to the detriment of much of Humanity, has this weird habit of working even when everyone else says it's dead: to this day nothing even comes close to Bitcoin's (the Network) reliability. Nothing. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat 1: https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/

JCharante 6y ago

Don't certain regions of India keep getting their internet cut off to quell uprisings?