Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjkundert | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what will happen the next time we have a prolonged global network outage (ie. days, weeks). The next time we have a major kinetic conflict, for example...

Since Bitcoin will "fork" in each network partition, and everything will work ... fine, within each partition -- right up until the moment the network is repaired, and all but one of the "forks" simply disappears.

I think most people will be surprised that this is the correct behavior.

This is something; just not "money".

View on HN

For most people this is not as bad as you might expect. Transactions on the losing chain can be replayed on the winning chain as long as they haven't been double-spent.

Last time it happened in Egypt, the government was overthrown and the leader had to resign.

With Bitcoin, you have to shoot all the Bitcoin satellites _and_ stop the internet to do what you propose.

Denial of your opponent’s access to the battlefield is “table stakes” in the next war.

I assure you — all terrestrial and major satellite up/downlinks will cease within minutes of the next major conflict starting.

Well, in case of a global thermonuclear war I think we'll have bigger problems than some transactions being reversed.

You don't have to work nearly that hard to cut off internet access to many countries. Satellites are relatively easy to destroy if you're willing to ignore the debris it creates.

Undersea cables are easy to cut. Land based lines are easy to cut. Unless the locations of these cables are well hidden (which I don't believe they generally are), you could easily severe all of a country's internet connections in a couple of days.

> Satellites are relatively easy to destroy if you're willing to ignore the debris it creates.

I agree, but someone here made a good point in the last thread about this: in a couple of years, they plan to have 42,000 StarLink satellites active. That’s a lot of very capable missiles.

or the forks continue divided and a exchange value begins to form between them ... if one side of the partition has been less productive then the value eventually transfers to the other fork and the mining gradually slows down and continues or stops at sometime.

By the way how well do you think the other monetary systems will fair under such conditions you describe?

This “big” problem is solved by avoiding unnecessary global consensus, when agent-to-agent consensus is all that is necessary.

See the Holo / Holochain projects.

That's probably not going to happen; we have satellites broadcasting the bitcoin blockchain: https://blockstream.com/satellite/

What's the attack vector there presuming only Blockstream runs the satellite?

But is anyone receiving? It would be interesting to test it.

Sorry I’m not quite following. I understand if groups are isolated from each other we will have different forks of Bitcoin running around the world, but why would a fork disappear? Wouldn’t the separate partitions merge into one network again?

The forks don't "disappear", but they get overruled since the consensus has shifted to the majority opinion of the ledger. Thus all of the transactions on a local fork (that doesn't become the majority) are wiped out -- including possibly deposits in exchange for cash.

Surprise!

Nope. Correct behaviour is that the longest chain “wins”; all others disappear along with all their transactions.

> This is something; just not "money".

It's a store of value. From what I gather, people are using it to protect their money against inflation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com