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lawless123

>lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency,

A post apocalypse in which internet survives seems far fetched.

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> A post apocalypse in which internet survives seems far fetched.

The apocalypse is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.

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)

Well... in California when it snows, everyone freaks out. In Minnesota, it's a Monday.

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

> But on the other hand it is completely immune to collapse of governments

This reads like a parody of Bitcoin fanatics. You can't be serious.

I think he means "any given government" not "all governments". Like, if the government collapses in Venezuela, Bitcoin holders there will still have their purchasing power preserved.

Ha, "completely immune". Good luck accessing your wallet without power plants...

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.

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.

"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.

wouldn't self-interested infrastructure providers be able to intercept/modify bitcoin traffic for their own gain? BGP hijacking on steroids?

They would be able to block your spends and could keep you from connecting to the network but that's it.

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...)

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?

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.

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.

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

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.)

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)?

The one burning more electricity on mining new blocks would win, and the other ledger would be invalid, after the point of divergence.

... 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. :)

You need to read more about how Bitcoin works.

Apparently you're the one who needs to read up. Any valid transaction from the shorter chain could (profitably) be incorporated into the long chain. Only double spends would be invalid, which are difficult to do in a network partition.

I've been involved since early 2011. I'm quite aware of how Bitcoin works.

The difficulty is arbitrary and set socially (mechanistically it is currently set by a formula in the software; it could be set differently if people decided to use different software...).

So having a lower difficulty at time t is a terrible reason for a given miner to move to a given chain, they have to also believe that it will be the consensus chain that maximizes their value/opportunity in the future.

Also, if you don't care about distributed consensus (discarding chains outside the network to make it keep working), POW mining is an expensive and inconvenient way to keep a ledger.

After a hundred years each blockchain's software would already have different hard coded checkpoints. They would effectively be 2 different coins and treated that way.

Ethereum has already forked on purpose and ETH and ETC are treated as two separate coins

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