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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

No, it'll be lost. With widespread telecom failures, the miners won't be able to reliably communicate, so the network will partition and will reorganize at random.

People love to think of Bitcoin as impervious, but it's subject to the CAP theorem just like every other distributed system.

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It will certainly struggle but there are clear rules for how bitcoin will behave in a network split - the chain with the most work wins.

As long as the network comes back up at some point no bitcoins will be lost. Some might be double spent though

Which I think agrees with the parent post right? If there is a network partition, and people attempt to keep using bitcoin, then there will be consistency issues.

you might end up with a number of isolated BTC forks though. E.g. imagine if all transatlantic/transpacific communication was lost for a few days, america would have it's own chain, and people would not be willing to switch to a fork without their transactions on as they wouldn't be able to recover they goods they traded for the BTC at the time of the transaction

It's kind of worse than that. The various (temporary) islands, by default, would not make any decision to 'switch' to different islands. As islands reconnect, each time that happens, the larger island wins, and the smaller island automatically switches over.

Bitcoin is great in a crisis.

All you need is a computer, electricity and the internet!

Is there some facility for incorporating (non-conflicting) transfers from the discarded chain into the primary? otherwise it sounds like all txns made during the split on the losing chains will simply be discarded, which doesn't sound desirable at all.

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