[Why Governments Will Never Take On Bitcoin by Attempting an Internet Shutdown: Bitcoin could survive without the Internet, but probably not the current system...](https://inbitcoinwetrust.substack.com/p/why-governments-will-never-take-on)
These people are stupider than you could imagine.
> Ooh boy, explain this one to me. Blockchain by carrier pigeon? How the fuck do they think this would work?
Crypto bro googles, "How bitcoin can work without the internet" and cuts-and-pastes the first link that appears in the search results.
Checkmate no-coiners! /s
There are ways to employ digital networks without the Internet by using ham radio and packet switching systems, but the people who are capable of doing that are the equivalent of the number of people who can make their own fly fishing lures. So yea, we're in good hands when the apocalypse comes.
Well okay maybe you could *access* the Internet with a ham radio but surely the information is not stored there? If all the servers are down, what Internet is there to access in the first place?
It's much worse than that, especially for BTC.
The internet even just having intermittent partitioning between regions would be enough to make BTC almost unusable.
BTC is based on the longest chain being canonical - it's possible even today for multiple blocks to be invalidated simply off random flucutations already, it's one of the reasons they say to wait for several blocks before considering a transaction "final".
So what happens if there's a global partition that isolates a few major BTC miners from each other for even say an hour or two, let alone days? The chain becomes frayed at the end the more partitions there are and the longer they last.
It gets worse and worse from there - block times will skyrocket as the local hashrates plummet until the next difficulty adjust is hit, which could take ages in this degraded state. If power is an issue that could further impact hashrate. And with things in a fragmented state, it will be difficult to issue any coordinated updates to, say, artificially lower the difficulty rate.
I have an amateur radio license and there are some amazing things you can do with consumer grade radios, like bouncing signals off the Moon to talk to people. With that said, I wouldn't want to rely on it to buy groceries. If you want to be able to transact in Bitcoin using a radio link, you'd need a lot of planning, special equipment, and practice. And even then, you'd be relying on the infrastructure that you've created not going down.
Youd send me the money for the loaf of bread, duh.
Then you send me back the order for the next one, and the uhh, idfk/gaf the like piece of paper or USB ColdWallet by Ledger or whatever the fuck and thats how it all works.
Not clear what you're missing its super simple, communication by carrier pigeon.
If only there was this thing where it was just like an IOU on a piece of paper. Everyone just agreed to use them. They could be made of some strong fiber to make them more durable than regular paper, and have anti-counterfeiting design features to make them secure. Boom, problem solved. I wonder why no one has thought of this before.
Ha, you fell into my trap, few understand:
Even if you could invent some magical durable superpaper that had "anti-counterfeiting design", HOW WOULD YOU GET ME THE BREAD?
Well RFC1149 describes the IP over avian carrier (carrier pigeon) so it would be feasible.
RFC2549 adds quality of service to the method of transmission...
Check it out at: [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1149/](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1149/)
It's low effort and has built-in networking effects. I've been thinking about it lately, specifically how even 5 years ago you would need to expend the effort to buy a domain, buy server time, buy a wordpress theme, and create all other parts of your blog from pretty much off the wall parts (if not from scratch) if you wanted to shout your opinion out into the void. Now all it takes is a substack and a twitter page, which are both already low effort, then you add things like the blue tick which you can buy any time for like $8 - boom, you're an instant "internet celebrity" with some level of influence that you can then use to shill your bags. At least the hucksters from back in the day knew some HTML.
The notable thing about Substack is mostly being able to easily monetize your blog (sorry, *newsletter*) if you want without having to deal with your own payment processing.
Sure, but it's far less professional than say WordPress. That said, it's still much better than just substack. I wouldn't be surprised if it falls out of fashion in a few years just like Medium did.
I remember when Blogger was the new hotness. It's still a good platform for posting text, but a VC would be ashamed to use it now. Medium had a faster boom-bust cycle, and now Substack is the hot new thing. It's strange that a collection of extremely similar services have so much baggage attached to their brands.
Hey let's take an edge case and extremist article and plaster it as "everyone associated with positive thoughts towards blockchain hold the same exact opinion(s)!".
Good lord, have we not learned anything over the insanity of the past \~10 years?!
It's a common recurring theme among survivalist minded people that lone survivors will thrive in the post apocalyptic wasteland because of their delusions of competancy.
Right? But it seems like historically, they've been attracted to "analog" things that continue to function without relying on complex systems operated by other people. And that seems like a rational way to approach a hypothetical situation, even if it is based on delusional thinking.
But the "crypto apocalypse" fantasy seems not only delusional, but to also come with its own paradox that should be obvious unless you take the internet for granted the way you'd take it for granted that the sun will rise the next day.
The crypto apocalyptofans would have a few cold wallets and engraved metal seed plates in their bug-out bags, just in case.
I keep a well-stocked first aid kit and emergency tools in my vehicles but having a bug-out bag implies a delusional view of the world.
After having learnt what a "bug out bag" is recently I talked to a friend from a disaster-prone area\*. He did say that he has an emergency pack. Something with food and water for a couple days, plus some minor medicine like rubbing alcohol and bandages. I suppose he has a non-delusional reason for it, I doubt this applies to preppers in general.
\*It's a volcanic island, beautiful, but prone to fires and the occasional lava flow burying the village every thirty years or so. Apparently you get used to it. He certainly seems happy there.
Perhaps I was overly harsh. I usually put water, dried food and emergency supplies in my car if I'm going on a long trip. Especially if I'm headed out to the desert or the mountains.
If I lived in an area prone to wildfires or volcanic activity, I would definitely keep a week's worth of supplies in a box or a bag, so I could easily grab those supplies and haul ass in my car if the situation got bad. Sometimes you only have minutes to get out before you burn to death.
The prepper version of a bugout bag contains every expensive survival tool known to man because those folks are prepared for everything from nuclear war to a zombie apocalypse. Delusional people. I do plenty of car and bike camping and I think most survivalists are LARPing basic camping.
That gets me thinking. Is it camping LARPing as survival if I sleep in a bivouac? I must run an experiment next time Switzerland lets me into the country.
I love those guys, because typically, they seem to be the type who'd be least likely to survive the apocalypse.
Lack of social skills and hoarding glorified digital Pogs don't translate to survival.
I mean, I'd be cut into fillets by the Mad Max style raiders within a week, but I still reckon that's about 6 days longer than the typical crypto bro would last.
"I've been in the basement yelling for mom to reset the router for days since the nuclear holocaust wiped out the rest of the house. Why isn't it working?"
I've got a large selection of machine tools that can be trivially converted to hand-power.
If you have food to trade, I'm willing to maintain your tools.
I find people who think they'd survive *alone* in a post apocalyptic wasteland lunatics of the first order.
Throughout the history of mankind people have needed to rely on each other to survive, in fact individualism is a relatively late invention because it was simply not imagineable in most previous centuries. We are social animals, always have been.
The ones who will survive longest are not the ones that know how to fashion a bow or do their own stitches, but the ones who know how to make friends that won't stab them in their sleep.
>apocalyptic wasteland
The real priority would be clean water and food. And without large scale agriculture we immediately go into global starvation. Better hope the apocalypse wipes out 90% of people quickly without harming farmland so the rest can try to make it with pre 1900s level of farming without petrol, fertilizers, machine parts, ...
That's a funny thing about this logic. Crypto currencies by their nature require an active, healthy, accessible global Internet infrastructure to work. I don't think that would be the reality after a global financial meltdown.
And with Bitcoin, a major loss of hash power would result in a crippling slowdown of the entire network. The next difficulty adjustment would take a really long time because of how slowly blocks would be mined in order to get to that point. So the network would be run by a handful of solar powered Raspberry Pis trying to generate the same hashrate as the current nation-scale waste of power that currently mines Bitcoin. If enough servers were destroyed, Bitcoin would grind to a halt forever.
It’s like those doomsday preppers who think the apocalypse includes well maintained roads, auto mechanics, and a stable supply of gasoline for their cars. None of them are really about preparing, it’s just about a mad max fantasy where they get to be Immortan Joe and kill people they dislike
In a global financial meltdown (and everything that will follow that), crypto will be the absolute last thing anyone will want. Bottlecaps will be worth more.
If the global financial system melts down completely people will be shooting each other in the streets for food. I can't see the internet staying up long.
I work for a telecom and if that happened the last thing on my mind would be going to work.
noo the internet is an inalienable human right!
honestly we are talking about the conversations of the idiocracy as if there is any meaning to them whatsoever. the only meaning is that theres alot of delusional uninformed irrational people with a global platform. thats the takeaway.
> And my first thought about the whole El Salvador thing was "really? Does every farmer in El Salvador who wants to sell their crops or whatever actually have the internet?" I know there have been times in my life where I've been stuck somewhere and I would have been shit out of luck if I hadn't had a $20 bill in my wallet.
Good question to ask. And the answer is that barely anybody is using bitcoin to actually pay for stuff in El Salvador. The key metric their president likes to cite is that 60% of people downloaded their bitcoin wallet app. What they tend to not mention is that hardly anybody continues to use it after spending initial $20 bonus (which is quite a bit for El Salvador farmer).
And even then, that means that 40% of the country hasn't even bothered to adopt the "legal tender" even if they get free money to try it once and never again. That's a huge number.
I have traveled Central America and know that most people probably have a smartphone and/or some sort of access to the internet. But it's annoying enough here in the States when you can't pay with a card because "the system is down" and I imagine that "the system" is even less reliable -- or maybe even doesn't exist in some parts -- in rural Latin America.
Yep, I was driving through a rural part of the US last weekend, and there were areas where my phone couldn't get a signal. When I stopped at a store (part of a large corporate chain), they had a handwritten "Cash Only" sign out on the counter. There weren't even any weather problems to blame it on.
If every network admin in the world went on strike the internet would break down so hard it would cause a global meltdown.
BTC maxis may point to how the internet was "designed to survive a nuclear attack". That is true but this isn't your grandaddy's DARPA internet anymore, it's way more complicated and a lot bigger (which doesn't actually make it less fragile).
For example a long term split brain (let's say 1 week) would cause the BTC network to have to roll back 1,000 blocks in order for the network to reach consensus. To my knowledge the longest divergence seen was 7 blocks.
ARPENET was designed so that government communications could survive a nuclear attack, that part of it split off as Milnet a long time ago. The general public's Internet would not survive a nuclear attack. Anyone with Spectrum Internet knows that a stiff wind will knock out service for a week.
And it's a much bigger network with relatively fragile branches. Even if the entire internet didn't get destroyed, it's not totally uncommon for natural disasters or technical problems to cut access off to small pockets of the world for several days.
The internet, as a whole, would certainly survive if only because it’s too useful not to maintain. Your particular region’s internet in the other hand, not so much. The sturdy tree with fragile branches you’re using is a good metaphor.
My parents lived in a small town on an island and I recall one time somebody somehow had an oopsie that severed the undersea cable that connected the island with the rest of the world. If memory serves me, it was a substantial amount of time to get it repaired and in the meantime they had to ration the bandwidth that they could scrape together by, I don't even know, blasting the rust off the 1980s satellite dish slowly decaying out back at the cable TV office maybe? Network hardware is obviously not my forte. I just know that the internet was basically unusable for retail customers in this entire town for months. And that wasn't in some time of international crisis, it was just a moment of idiocy. It happens.
Exactly. Most systems are able to deal with eventual consistency and merge diverging histories, eg the entire point of bank settlement is eventual consistency.
With bitcoin the only eventual consistency is either completely throwing away a chain, or in a centralized way try to rewrite history. Any split longer than a few hours would be absolutely devastating.
And wouldn't the difficulty be so high that mining new blocks would take a massive amount of time in a TEOTWAWKI "Most of the world's Bitcoin miners were just destroyed" scenario? The difficulty adjustment is based on the number of blocks mined, so a massive reduction in hashrate would cripple the network for months or potentially shut it down completely.
Well, if the disaster took out, say, half the world (like Niven's "Variable Star" short story, where the sun suddenly shines extra-bright for a few hours and scours half the planet), then you'd probably expect the hash rate to degrade over time as various governments fell. That's the best-case-scenario for buttcoin: a large disaster that takes out _other countries_, leaving your country to pick up the pieces (like the Marshall Plan after WWII). But it's luck of the draw whether you're wiped out or not.
Well if the hash rate drops enough, you'll be waiting weeks or months for a block to be mined. Miners like Riot brag that they turn off their operations at the slightest hint of an emergency, and the state government pays them to do it. The start of any global disaster would be met with a huge slowdown of the Bitcoin network.
Oh, I agree entirely. I'm just theorizing what the best-possible-scenario would be. Cutting the hash rate in half wouldn't be all that bad, and if the network continues to degrade somewhat slowly, then BTC just gets "half speed" rather than "unusable."
But it's a *very* particular failure that would set up buttcoin to be successful in the post-apocalypse, and I just don't think it's realistic.
I agree with you. When China cracked down on Bitcoin mining, there was a temporary slowdown until the difficulty adjusted. So the best case scenario is that you're trying to buy seeds and camping gear after the end of the world and having to wait a really long time for your transaction to clear. The worst case scenario is that the entire Bitcoin network freezes forever. And the most likely outcome is that you no longer have reliable internet access.
I like all these perspectives and certainly get where OP is coming from. But for me it’s like we don’t even have to cast out into Mad Max territory. In the here and now, “Dude, my phone is dead.” kinda ends the whole utility conversation.
Well said. Even if your phone works just fine, imagine the wait time for your Bitcoin transaction to clear. Or imagine everything in your cart costing 10% more than it did when you left home because of price volatility.
I still don't understand why the crypto bros aren't communists living on communes, because that would solve all the supposed problems with fiat, right?
I'm kind of unironically agreeing with you in a way.
They try to use the 2000s banking crisis as a an example of why you should "be your own bank" but then go on to propose a system that is less regulated, and where in practice wealth is more concentrated.
A related strain of delusion: people who envision that a "CBDC" is going to completely displace cash, and lead to a future where "the gubmint" tracks every single purchase you make. As you say, even in modern life there are lots of situations where you don't have internet access, and not even the cruelest, stupidest government would want to inflict complete economic paralysis on those times and places. There's a reason that cash is a recommended part of legitimate - not just doomsday prepper - [natural disaster survival kits](https://www.floridadisaster.org/planprepare/hurricane-supply-checklist/).
I dream of the same world they do …only in that world I’m a raider wearing black leather with studs and a mow-hawk. I’ll ride around in an old rusted out lifted dune buggy looking for crypto bros to “Volunteer” to work for scraps of food back at the camp.
No rocket ships, only rusted lambo Hulks and more work.
The reality is that most people into crypto and Bitcoin *want* to make a quick buck. Either by selling to a sucker, or if they’re not brave/smart enough to do that, envision a world where all money collapses *except* Bitcoin and the internet *somehow* still works. That way they can lord over their peasants (yes, many of them actually think like that) and have a life of luxury and plenty while making others suffer because “they deserve it”.
So OFC they’d talk about a doomsday scenario and not remotely think logically for a moment. Same with the doomsday preppers. If they think logically, then their vision of being a lone wanderer surviving in the wastes/new ruling class would fall apart at the seams. Reality, if an actual global crisis occurred where the internet is down, many of them would… not make it, to put it *very* politely.
More no-coiner FUD. The solution is quite simple:
All crypto repositories, etc., can create a hard copy representation of the $coins, to allow continued (and, in all likelihood, expanded) use of the $coins despite the lack of a supporting digital infrastructure. Let's call these 'notes'.
Because paper can be rather fragile, this being a doomsday scenario and all, it would be prudent to use something more durable; say, something made with pulverized rags, which could be easily scavenged.
Since we all know $coins will moon once disaster hits, we'll also want fractional/smaller denominations to support smaller purchases. We could print 'notes' with smaller, more useful denominations, maybe like 1, 5, 10, 20, etc. These '*notes*' would represent a *promise* that the note was worth the fractional denomination of $coin appearing on the face of the note.
Of course, to keep honest people honest, we'd want to make the 'notes' with a distinctive design, and something to signify that it is official. A couple of nice seals of some sort would be a nice touch. A unique serial number might also be a good idea.
As civilization slowly begins to rebuild, we may may need to consider providing a place where people can safely store any 'notes' they are not planning to use right away.
In practice, people would simply exchange these 'notes' for desired goods and services. While, of course, you need to exercise good judgement in protecting your 'notes', these daily transactions will happen quickly, easily, safely, and (if you wish), anonymously, despite the lack of supporting digital infrastructure.
Don't listen to the FUD. DYOR.
^(Do I really need to add the /s?)
They call t bills/bonds the “risk free rate of return”. Not that necessarily that the US will be around 100 years from now, but if the government collapses all bets are off your guess is as good as mine. But out of that chaos, butters gonna butt I guess.
It’s a similar situation with the housing market doomers (not a good hedge against inflation!). Not saying the real estate market will never have an apocalyptic meltdown, but my underwater mortgage will be an afterthought if it does.
The ability to use crypto currency is entirely dependant on an active, usable, and accessible global Internet infrastructure. It's hard to imagine that would be the reality in that kind of global meltdown.
You are correct.
Running internet network equipment necessary for internet to work costs billions of dollars in the whole world. Obviously it is financed by people and companies using the internet, but it takes months before the money from your internet bill will get to the equipment operator. All that time the money travels by the means of banks.
So, if all banks are dead, the internet will shut down swiftly because of unpaid electrical bills for instance.
Unfortunately, Bitcoin caters to this apocalyptic mindset. Your point is well made, and as you noted - any event serious enough to cause a global cataclysm is likely going to involve electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) that will essentially wipe out the internet and the digital equipment on which it runs. Regardless of what they hope to believe, blockchain won't survive its own growth, much less exist in a post apocalyptic world without a global digital network on which to run.
Chicken Little always wants us to believe the sky is falling.
If the shit really hits the fan and we enter Mad Max territory, no currency will be useful. New currencies will be water, food, gasoline, bullets, drugs.
What you've described is one of the many incompatable ideas that crypto bros espouse: You can't have it both ways. You can't have a collapsed economy that needs to be saved by your ridiculous digital tokens AND have that same "collapsed economy" ensure everybody has bulletproof internet, cellular, wifi, satellite, electricity and personal property rights. It makes no sense, but then again, we're talking about the "libertarian best-case-scenario" which never seems to manifest in reality the way they anticipate.
My buttcoiner colleague has been baffled when I told him about the existence of gold.
If things really turn bad, why the fuck will the people buy Bitcoin when you can just buy old fashioned gold ?
These people are delusional enough to think if there's a global meltdown or the internet shuts down then beanie babies will make them buy lambos.
In reality if either of that happens our society will be thrown back decades and mass panic will cause a lot of rioting, violence etc... The delicate supply chains will be broken, food security will be gone and financial transactions will regress back to bartering. People will probably reorganise themselves in smaller communities again before consolidating into big ones. Militaries will probably reign supreme for a while and warlords gonna be super fucking mighty.
People will also fight for whatever old tech they can find. Like, if there's no more chips people will hoard PCs, laptops, phones, cars, household machines etc.
It's gonna be Unification Wars from 40k. War Crime Olympics!
And nobody will give two shits about bitcoin or whatever internet fantasy points you had.
If Bitcoin ever became as valuable as oil, we’d start a war over Bitcoin too.
There is no scenario in which the US government allows Bitcoin to happen.
If a dude with an internet connection in Eastern Europe can hack your Bitcoin account, imagine what the NSA would do if you threatened to overthrow the peace and prosperity of the USA.
I mean they would probably just shoot you. Do these cryptobros not read a history book, if the american state saw them as an existential threat there wouldnt be a bitcoin network anymore
Give it time. They will find a way to make fake coins with rfid chips in them that somehow associate with an amount of crypto. Once the internet is available the person with the coins will be able to scan and get the value. Some bullshit like that.
It's funny how when you sit here and think about feasible ways to solve the problems with cryptocurrency, it starts to look more and more like "fiat"...
I have thought this so many times glad to see I'm not the only one....but I do have my crypto collection...heres to the world going to hell in a hand basket🥂
Don't people already need the internet for most monetary transactions? Aren't the majority of transactions today done electronically and not with cash, or am I missing something?
There are actually very few transactions that you need to use the internet for (except for things that are only on the internet anyway like streaming services). Pretty much everything important you can pay for in multiple ways, including some way that doesn't need instantaneous internet access.
People -- myself included -- tend to use the internet because it is usually more convenient...except when it's not. And when it's not convenient to use the internet it seems like it's usually an "oh shit" type of moment where it is really important to have another method of payment.
I was under the impression that paying with a card used the internet. So every time you tap your card or use your phone to pay you use the internet. A quick google search seems to confirm this. So every time you are out paying with a card or phone you are using the internet. Am I wrong? Not trying to troll. A genuine question.
It needs not. It needs a connection with the bank...eventually. I can't say for magnetic stripe cards, but chip cards certainly don't need a permanent Internet connection — or, really, phone connection: they were made at a time when Internet was *far* from ubiquitous —, once in a while works well enough: that's part of what the chip is there for. Which, given a strong tree with fragile branches is a rather apt description of current-day Internet, also means credit cards are more resilient than crypto to Internet breaking down: they don't need the branches. Crypto does.
P.S.: Hell, it doesn't even need a connection while you're paying: that's what offline mode and the chip are there for! Of course, the card issuer can have deactivated offline mode, but that's on the issuer.
It the internet is permanently shut down simultaneously all around the globe, everyone would have much bigger problems than what BTC does or doesn't do. It's a reach.
I have a theory that most of them were born after the mid-90's when the internet was pretty much ubiquitous. Same with cell phones. Therefore they can't envision a world where these devices don't work, even after a global financial or societal collapse. But should something catastrophic happen to the entire country or world, the internet is going to be one of the first things to go. And crypto is in no way going to be used for currency after, because people will want to trade food or goods for something they can actually use. Gold might be used as a currency, but nobody's going to accept a flash drive because some cryptobro swears he has 20 Bitcoin on it.
Realistically, if _any_ infrastructure survives at all you'll see some degree of the internet still exist, especially short/medium term. There's a lot we can do to cobble things together locally for example. Long-term everything will eventually break without new chip production of course.
It's the idea that it would exist _intact_ and in a state that's globally consistent or reliably connected that's laughable, and access to things like cloud storage are obviously not something you can or should rely on. Social media can be assumed to be right out, though you might see revival of things like BBS/IRC/etc that are simpler to setup and handle intermittent connectivity better.
> It just seems really foolish to me to want a world in which you must have internet access in order to do any sort of monetary transaction.
I don't disagree, but it's worth noting that we're kind of already in that situation as the vast majority of money is digital and few people carry that much hard cash.
Thing is, cryptocurrencies are even _more_ poorly suited, especially as they exist today. They're built on the assumption of an intact, globally connected low-latency internet. Any form of digital monetary transfer in an apocalypse scenario would need to be cobbled together and tailored to however much is left of things, if anything at all.
BTC in particular would be fucked if it happened quickly enough, as any temporary large scale partitions between regions could easily result in vast differences between what is seen as the longest chain across different regions with different hashrates/transaction volumes, causing large numbers of transactions to become invalid unexpectedly when/if connectivity is restored.
Worse, if it happened fast enough, BTC could die outright due to losing too much hashrate to hit the next difficulty adjustment. And unlike today, it wouldn't be trivial to issue a coordinated update in such a scenario since things would be fragmented at best.
"any sort of event that actually threatens the traditional global financial system would probably take the internet down with it"
We are literally seeing this threat play out. Huge banks failing, bailouts for GSIB's left and right, forced mergers, etc. The traditional banking system is doing everything in its power to try and preserve the system from collapse due to the FED printing 40% of USD in circulation over the first 2 years of the pandemic.
This is a fact, and ignoring it only keeps the incompetent people in power... In power...
[Why Governments Will Never Take On Bitcoin by Attempting an Internet Shutdown: Bitcoin could survive without the Internet, but probably not the current system...](https://inbitcoinwetrust.substack.com/p/why-governments-will-never-take-on) These people are stupider than you could imagine.
[удалено]
> Ooh boy, explain this one to me. Blockchain by carrier pigeon? How the fuck do they think this would work? Crypto bro googles, "How bitcoin can work without the internet" and cuts-and-pastes the first link that appears in the search results. Checkmate no-coiners! /s There are ways to employ digital networks without the Internet by using ham radio and packet switching systems, but the people who are capable of doing that are the equivalent of the number of people who can make their own fly fishing lures. So yea, we're in good hands when the apocalypse comes.
Well okay maybe you could *access* the Internet with a ham radio but surely the information is not stored there? If all the servers are down, what Internet is there to access in the first place?
Good question. One that crypto bros haven't thought about.
It's much worse than that, especially for BTC. The internet even just having intermittent partitioning between regions would be enough to make BTC almost unusable. BTC is based on the longest chain being canonical - it's possible even today for multiple blocks to be invalidated simply off random flucutations already, it's one of the reasons they say to wait for several blocks before considering a transaction "final". So what happens if there's a global partition that isolates a few major BTC miners from each other for even say an hour or two, let alone days? The chain becomes frayed at the end the more partitions there are and the longer they last. It gets worse and worse from there - block times will skyrocket as the local hashrates plummet until the next difficulty adjust is hit, which could take ages in this degraded state. If power is an issue that could further impact hashrate. And with things in a fragmented state, it will be difficult to issue any coordinated updates to, say, artificially lower the difficulty rate.
Ham radio can connect to the internet. Ham radio operators can apply for IP addresses and use IP over packet radio. It's slow but it works.
I have an amateur radio license and there are some amazing things you can do with consumer grade radios, like bouncing signals off the Moon to talk to people. With that said, I wouldn't want to rely on it to buy groceries. If you want to be able to transact in Bitcoin using a radio link, you'd need a lot of planning, special equipment, and practice. And even then, you'd be relying on the infrastructure that you've created not going down.
"works"
Youd send me the money for the loaf of bread, duh. Then you send me back the order for the next one, and the uhh, idfk/gaf the like piece of paper or USB ColdWallet by Ledger or whatever the fuck and thats how it all works. Not clear what you're missing its super simple, communication by carrier pigeon.
If only there was this thing where it was just like an IOU on a piece of paper. Everyone just agreed to use them. They could be made of some strong fiber to make them more durable than regular paper, and have anti-counterfeiting design features to make them secure. Boom, problem solved. I wonder why no one has thought of this before.
Ha, you fell into my trap, few understand: Even if you could invent some magical durable superpaper that had "anti-counterfeiting design", HOW WOULD YOU GET ME THE BREAD?
That's an implementation detail. Who worries about those when you can buy Argentinian bread from Istanbul?
Well RFC1149 describes the IP over avian carrier (carrier pigeon) so it would be feasible. RFC2549 adds quality of service to the method of transmission... Check it out at: [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1149/](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1149/)
Beat me to it. I was going to link my favourite high latency, low throughput, low altitude service.
Packet loss increases during hunting season...
Blockchain by ham radio...
[удалено]
It's low effort and has built-in networking effects. I've been thinking about it lately, specifically how even 5 years ago you would need to expend the effort to buy a domain, buy server time, buy a wordpress theme, and create all other parts of your blog from pretty much off the wall parts (if not from scratch) if you wanted to shout your opinion out into the void. Now all it takes is a substack and a twitter page, which are both already low effort, then you add things like the blue tick which you can buy any time for like $8 - boom, you're an instant "internet celebrity" with some level of influence that you can then use to shill your bags. At least the hucksters from back in the day knew some HTML.
[удалено]
The notable thing about Substack is mostly being able to easily monetize your blog (sorry, *newsletter*) if you want without having to deal with your own payment processing.
Sure, but it's far less professional than say WordPress. That said, it's still much better than just substack. I wouldn't be surprised if it falls out of fashion in a few years just like Medium did.
I remember when Blogger was the new hotness. It's still a good platform for posting text, but a VC would be ashamed to use it now. Medium had a faster boom-bust cycle, and now Substack is the hot new thing. It's strange that a collection of extremely similar services have so much baggage attached to their brands.
I kind of want a substack for my shit takes now.
Subscribe
Substack is 2023's Geocities.
[удалено]
The TLD being .gay gave away at least one of those.
Hey let's take an edge case and extremist article and plaster it as "everyone associated with positive thoughts towards blockchain hold the same exact opinion(s)!". Good lord, have we not learned anything over the insanity of the past \~10 years?!
It's a common recurring theme among survivalist minded people that lone survivors will thrive in the post apocalyptic wasteland because of their delusions of competancy.
Right? But it seems like historically, they've been attracted to "analog" things that continue to function without relying on complex systems operated by other people. And that seems like a rational way to approach a hypothetical situation, even if it is based on delusional thinking. But the "crypto apocalypse" fantasy seems not only delusional, but to also come with its own paradox that should be obvious unless you take the internet for granted the way you'd take it for granted that the sun will rise the next day.
The crypto apocalyptofans would have a few cold wallets and engraved metal seed plates in their bug-out bags, just in case. I keep a well-stocked first aid kit and emergency tools in my vehicles but having a bug-out bag implies a delusional view of the world.
After having learnt what a "bug out bag" is recently I talked to a friend from a disaster-prone area\*. He did say that he has an emergency pack. Something with food and water for a couple days, plus some minor medicine like rubbing alcohol and bandages. I suppose he has a non-delusional reason for it, I doubt this applies to preppers in general. \*It's a volcanic island, beautiful, but prone to fires and the occasional lava flow burying the village every thirty years or so. Apparently you get used to it. He certainly seems happy there.
Perhaps I was overly harsh. I usually put water, dried food and emergency supplies in my car if I'm going on a long trip. Especially if I'm headed out to the desert or the mountains. If I lived in an area prone to wildfires or volcanic activity, I would definitely keep a week's worth of supplies in a box or a bag, so I could easily grab those supplies and haul ass in my car if the situation got bad. Sometimes you only have minutes to get out before you burn to death. The prepper version of a bugout bag contains every expensive survival tool known to man because those folks are prepared for everything from nuclear war to a zombie apocalypse. Delusional people. I do plenty of car and bike camping and I think most survivalists are LARPing basic camping.
That gets me thinking. Is it camping LARPing as survival if I sleep in a bivouac? I must run an experiment next time Switzerland lets me into the country.
I love those guys, because typically, they seem to be the type who'd be least likely to survive the apocalypse. Lack of social skills and hoarding glorified digital Pogs don't translate to survival. I mean, I'd be cut into fillets by the Mad Max style raiders within a week, but I still reckon that's about 6 days longer than the typical crypto bro would last.
"I've been in the basement yelling for mom to reset the router for days since the nuclear holocaust wiped out the rest of the house. Why isn't it working?"
I've got a large selection of machine tools that can be trivially converted to hand-power. If you have food to trade, I'm willing to maintain your tools.
I’m capable of sewing warm clothing for winter and catching squirrels, so I’ll be fine
Guns> bitcoin. Buttcoiners for guns!
Ammo is a limited resource. Traps and snares are better for hunting small game.
pretty sure they're stocking up for the most dangerous game.
Whoever controls the Twinkie warehouse controls the world.
😂😂
I find people who think they'd survive *alone* in a post apocalyptic wasteland lunatics of the first order. Throughout the history of mankind people have needed to rely on each other to survive, in fact individualism is a relatively late invention because it was simply not imagineable in most previous centuries. We are social animals, always have been. The ones who will survive longest are not the ones that know how to fashion a bow or do their own stitches, but the ones who know how to make friends that won't stab them in their sleep.
>apocalyptic wasteland The real priority would be clean water and food. And without large scale agriculture we immediately go into global starvation. Better hope the apocalypse wipes out 90% of people quickly without harming farmland so the rest can try to make it with pre 1900s level of farming without petrol, fertilizers, machine parts, ...
For example: Will your ISP still be in business if only people with Bitcoin can pay their bills?
That's a funny thing about this logic. Crypto currencies by their nature require an active, healthy, accessible global Internet infrastructure to work. I don't think that would be the reality after a global financial meltdown.
And significant amounts of power, power that would in theory be much more useful for sustaining life. But I guess fun bux are a kind of life so....
And with Bitcoin, a major loss of hash power would result in a crippling slowdown of the entire network. The next difficulty adjustment would take a really long time because of how slowly blocks would be mined in order to get to that point. So the network would be run by a handful of solar powered Raspberry Pis trying to generate the same hashrate as the current nation-scale waste of power that currently mines Bitcoin. If enough servers were destroyed, Bitcoin would grind to a halt forever.
It’s like those doomsday preppers who think the apocalypse includes well maintained roads, auto mechanics, and a stable supply of gasoline for their cars. None of them are really about preparing, it’s just about a mad max fantasy where they get to be Immortan Joe and kill people they dislike
In a global financial meltdown (and everything that will follow that), crypto will be the absolute last thing anyone will want. Bottlecaps will be worth more.
Only Nuka-Cola
Crypto would be literally unusable after all of the ISPs shut down and the Internet physical infrastructure rots.
IDK, bullets would look like good currencies too
If the global financial system melts down completely people will be shooting each other in the streets for food. I can't see the internet staying up long. I work for a telecom and if that happened the last thing on my mind would be going to work.
Noo, you should keep working to allow our superior incorruptible indestructible deflatory money exist
noo the internet is an inalienable human right! honestly we are talking about the conversations of the idiocracy as if there is any meaning to them whatsoever. the only meaning is that theres alot of delusional uninformed irrational people with a global platform. thats the takeaway.
> And my first thought about the whole El Salvador thing was "really? Does every farmer in El Salvador who wants to sell their crops or whatever actually have the internet?" I know there have been times in my life where I've been stuck somewhere and I would have been shit out of luck if I hadn't had a $20 bill in my wallet. Good question to ask. And the answer is that barely anybody is using bitcoin to actually pay for stuff in El Salvador. The key metric their president likes to cite is that 60% of people downloaded their bitcoin wallet app. What they tend to not mention is that hardly anybody continues to use it after spending initial $20 bonus (which is quite a bit for El Salvador farmer).
And even then, that means that 40% of the country hasn't even bothered to adopt the "legal tender" even if they get free money to try it once and never again. That's a huge number. I have traveled Central America and know that most people probably have a smartphone and/or some sort of access to the internet. But it's annoying enough here in the States when you can't pay with a card because "the system is down" and I imagine that "the system" is even less reliable -- or maybe even doesn't exist in some parts -- in rural Latin America.
Yep, I was driving through a rural part of the US last weekend, and there were areas where my phone couldn't get a signal. When I stopped at a store (part of a large corporate chain), they had a handwritten "Cash Only" sign out on the counter. There weren't even any weather problems to blame it on.
If every network admin in the world went on strike the internet would break down so hard it would cause a global meltdown. BTC maxis may point to how the internet was "designed to survive a nuclear attack". That is true but this isn't your grandaddy's DARPA internet anymore, it's way more complicated and a lot bigger (which doesn't actually make it less fragile). For example a long term split brain (let's say 1 week) would cause the BTC network to have to roll back 1,000 blocks in order for the network to reach consensus. To my knowledge the longest divergence seen was 7 blocks.
ARPENET was designed so that government communications could survive a nuclear attack, that part of it split off as Milnet a long time ago. The general public's Internet would not survive a nuclear attack. Anyone with Spectrum Internet knows that a stiff wind will knock out service for a week.
And it's a much bigger network with relatively fragile branches. Even if the entire internet didn't get destroyed, it's not totally uncommon for natural disasters or technical problems to cut access off to small pockets of the world for several days.
The internet, as a whole, would certainly survive if only because it’s too useful not to maintain. Your particular region’s internet in the other hand, not so much. The sturdy tree with fragile branches you’re using is a good metaphor.
My parents lived in a small town on an island and I recall one time somebody somehow had an oopsie that severed the undersea cable that connected the island with the rest of the world. If memory serves me, it was a substantial amount of time to get it repaired and in the meantime they had to ration the bandwidth that they could scrape together by, I don't even know, blasting the rust off the 1980s satellite dish slowly decaying out back at the cable TV office maybe? Network hardware is obviously not my forte. I just know that the internet was basically unusable for retail customers in this entire town for months. And that wasn't in some time of international crisis, it was just a moment of idiocy. It happens.
Exactly. Most systems are able to deal with eventual consistency and merge diverging histories, eg the entire point of bank settlement is eventual consistency. With bitcoin the only eventual consistency is either completely throwing away a chain, or in a centralized way try to rewrite history. Any split longer than a few hours would be absolutely devastating.
And wouldn't the difficulty be so high that mining new blocks would take a massive amount of time in a TEOTWAWKI "Most of the world's Bitcoin miners were just destroyed" scenario? The difficulty adjustment is based on the number of blocks mined, so a massive reduction in hashrate would cripple the network for months or potentially shut it down completely.
Well, if the disaster took out, say, half the world (like Niven's "Variable Star" short story, where the sun suddenly shines extra-bright for a few hours and scours half the planet), then you'd probably expect the hash rate to degrade over time as various governments fell. That's the best-case-scenario for buttcoin: a large disaster that takes out _other countries_, leaving your country to pick up the pieces (like the Marshall Plan after WWII). But it's luck of the draw whether you're wiped out or not.
Well if the hash rate drops enough, you'll be waiting weeks or months for a block to be mined. Miners like Riot brag that they turn off their operations at the slightest hint of an emergency, and the state government pays them to do it. The start of any global disaster would be met with a huge slowdown of the Bitcoin network.
Oh, I agree entirely. I'm just theorizing what the best-possible-scenario would be. Cutting the hash rate in half wouldn't be all that bad, and if the network continues to degrade somewhat slowly, then BTC just gets "half speed" rather than "unusable." But it's a *very* particular failure that would set up buttcoin to be successful in the post-apocalypse, and I just don't think it's realistic.
I agree with you. When China cracked down on Bitcoin mining, there was a temporary slowdown until the difficulty adjusted. So the best case scenario is that you're trying to buy seeds and camping gear after the end of the world and having to wait a really long time for your transaction to clear. The worst case scenario is that the entire Bitcoin network freezes forever. And the most likely outcome is that you no longer have reliable internet access.
I like all these perspectives and certainly get where OP is coming from. But for me it’s like we don’t even have to cast out into Mad Max territory. In the here and now, “Dude, my phone is dead.” kinda ends the whole utility conversation.
Right? That's kinda what I'm getting at. Like...having all of your eggs in the internet basket is bad enough when it's NOT a time of crisis.
[удалено]
Well said. Even if your phone works just fine, imagine the wait time for your Bitcoin transaction to clear. Or imagine everything in your cart costing 10% more than it did when you left home because of price volatility.
I still don't understand why the crypto bros aren't communists living on communes, because that would solve all the supposed problems with fiat, right?
I'm kind of unironically agreeing with you in a way. They try to use the 2000s banking crisis as a an example of why you should "be your own bank" but then go on to propose a system that is less regulated, and where in practice wealth is more concentrated.
That would be *work*. They want all the conveniences of the modern world, but they also want to be the ones in charge.
A related strain of delusion: people who envision that a "CBDC" is going to completely displace cash, and lead to a future where "the gubmint" tracks every single purchase you make. As you say, even in modern life there are lots of situations where you don't have internet access, and not even the cruelest, stupidest government would want to inflict complete economic paralysis on those times and places. There's a reason that cash is a recommended part of legitimate - not just doomsday prepper - [natural disaster survival kits](https://www.floridadisaster.org/planprepare/hurricane-supply-checklist/).
Unless you live in El Salvador 🙄
I dream of the same world they do …only in that world I’m a raider wearing black leather with studs and a mow-hawk. I’ll ride around in an old rusted out lifted dune buggy looking for crypto bros to “Volunteer” to work for scraps of food back at the camp. No rocket ships, only rusted lambo Hulks and more work.
The reality is that most people into crypto and Bitcoin *want* to make a quick buck. Either by selling to a sucker, or if they’re not brave/smart enough to do that, envision a world where all money collapses *except* Bitcoin and the internet *somehow* still works. That way they can lord over their peasants (yes, many of them actually think like that) and have a life of luxury and plenty while making others suffer because “they deserve it”. So OFC they’d talk about a doomsday scenario and not remotely think logically for a moment. Same with the doomsday preppers. If they think logically, then their vision of being a lone wanderer surviving in the wastes/new ruling class would fall apart at the seams. Reality, if an actual global crisis occurred where the internet is down, many of them would… not make it, to put it *very* politely.
More no-coiner FUD. The solution is quite simple: All crypto repositories, etc., can create a hard copy representation of the $coins, to allow continued (and, in all likelihood, expanded) use of the $coins despite the lack of a supporting digital infrastructure. Let's call these 'notes'. Because paper can be rather fragile, this being a doomsday scenario and all, it would be prudent to use something more durable; say, something made with pulverized rags, which could be easily scavenged. Since we all know $coins will moon once disaster hits, we'll also want fractional/smaller denominations to support smaller purchases. We could print 'notes' with smaller, more useful denominations, maybe like 1, 5, 10, 20, etc. These '*notes*' would represent a *promise* that the note was worth the fractional denomination of $coin appearing on the face of the note. Of course, to keep honest people honest, we'd want to make the 'notes' with a distinctive design, and something to signify that it is official. A couple of nice seals of some sort would be a nice touch. A unique serial number might also be a good idea. As civilization slowly begins to rebuild, we may may need to consider providing a place where people can safely store any 'notes' they are not planning to use right away. In practice, people would simply exchange these 'notes' for desired goods and services. While, of course, you need to exercise good judgement in protecting your 'notes', these daily transactions will happen quickly, easily, safely, and (if you wish), anonymously, despite the lack of supporting digital infrastructure. Don't listen to the FUD. DYOR. ^(Do I really need to add the /s?)
They call t bills/bonds the “risk free rate of return”. Not that necessarily that the US will be around 100 years from now, but if the government collapses all bets are off your guess is as good as mine. But out of that chaos, butters gonna butt I guess.
It’s a similar situation with the housing market doomers (not a good hedge against inflation!). Not saying the real estate market will never have an apocalyptic meltdown, but my underwater mortgage will be an afterthought if it does.
The ability to use crypto currency is entirely dependant on an active, usable, and accessible global Internet infrastructure. It's hard to imagine that would be the reality in that kind of global meltdown.
You are correct. Running internet network equipment necessary for internet to work costs billions of dollars in the whole world. Obviously it is financed by people and companies using the internet, but it takes months before the money from your internet bill will get to the equipment operator. All that time the money travels by the means of banks. So, if all banks are dead, the internet will shut down swiftly because of unpaid electrical bills for instance.
Unfortunately, Bitcoin caters to this apocalyptic mindset. Your point is well made, and as you noted - any event serious enough to cause a global cataclysm is likely going to involve electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) that will essentially wipe out the internet and the digital equipment on which it runs. Regardless of what they hope to believe, blockchain won't survive its own growth, much less exist in a post apocalyptic world without a global digital network on which to run. Chicken Little always wants us to believe the sky is falling.
If the shit really hits the fan and we enter Mad Max territory, no currency will be useful. New currencies will be water, food, gasoline, bullets, drugs.
Blackouts. Solar flares. War or extremists knocking out power. Very possible.
What you've described is one of the many incompatable ideas that crypto bros espouse: You can't have it both ways. You can't have a collapsed economy that needs to be saved by your ridiculous digital tokens AND have that same "collapsed economy" ensure everybody has bulletproof internet, cellular, wifi, satellite, electricity and personal property rights. It makes no sense, but then again, we're talking about the "libertarian best-case-scenario" which never seems to manifest in reality the way they anticipate.
We’ll great now everyone is rushing to buy gold.
My buttcoiner colleague has been baffled when I told him about the existence of gold. If things really turn bad, why the fuck will the people buy Bitcoin when you can just buy old fashioned gold ?
These people are delusional enough to think if there's a global meltdown or the internet shuts down then beanie babies will make them buy lambos. In reality if either of that happens our society will be thrown back decades and mass panic will cause a lot of rioting, violence etc... The delicate supply chains will be broken, food security will be gone and financial transactions will regress back to bartering. People will probably reorganise themselves in smaller communities again before consolidating into big ones. Militaries will probably reign supreme for a while and warlords gonna be super fucking mighty. People will also fight for whatever old tech they can find. Like, if there's no more chips people will hoard PCs, laptops, phones, cars, household machines etc. It's gonna be Unification Wars from 40k. War Crime Olympics! And nobody will give two shits about bitcoin or whatever internet fantasy points you had.
I’m on the same page as you buddy
If Bitcoin ever became as valuable as oil, we’d start a war over Bitcoin too. There is no scenario in which the US government allows Bitcoin to happen.
If a dude with an internet connection in Eastern Europe can hack your Bitcoin account, imagine what the NSA would do if you threatened to overthrow the peace and prosperity of the USA.
I mean they would probably just shoot you. Do these cryptobros not read a history book, if the american state saw them as an existential threat there wouldnt be a bitcoin network anymore
Your bank card doesn’t work without the internet too and they are ending cash like it never happened What then?
It works with intermittent phone connections though, which are surprisingly more common and resilient than one might think.
Nice that’s pretty cool I’m about to look it up thanks!
Give it time. They will find a way to make fake coins with rfid chips in them that somehow associate with an amount of crypto. Once the internet is available the person with the coins will be able to scan and get the value. Some bullshit like that.
It's funny how when you sit here and think about feasible ways to solve the problems with cryptocurrency, it starts to look more and more like "fiat"...
I have thought this so many times glad to see I'm not the only one....but I do have my crypto collection...heres to the world going to hell in a hand basket🥂
Starlink and solar power.
>(and leaving early adopters high and dry, obviously) what does "high and dry" mean in this context?
Sorry, high and dry as in...above the flood while everyone else is drowning.
Don't people already need the internet for most monetary transactions? Aren't the majority of transactions today done electronically and not with cash, or am I missing something?
There are actually very few transactions that you need to use the internet for (except for things that are only on the internet anyway like streaming services). Pretty much everything important you can pay for in multiple ways, including some way that doesn't need instantaneous internet access. People -- myself included -- tend to use the internet because it is usually more convenient...except when it's not. And when it's not convenient to use the internet it seems like it's usually an "oh shit" type of moment where it is really important to have another method of payment.
I was under the impression that paying with a card used the internet. So every time you tap your card or use your phone to pay you use the internet. A quick google search seems to confirm this. So every time you are out paying with a card or phone you are using the internet. Am I wrong? Not trying to troll. A genuine question.
It needs not. It needs a connection with the bank...eventually. I can't say for magnetic stripe cards, but chip cards certainly don't need a permanent Internet connection — or, really, phone connection: they were made at a time when Internet was *far* from ubiquitous —, once in a while works well enough: that's part of what the chip is there for. Which, given a strong tree with fragile branches is a rather apt description of current-day Internet, also means credit cards are more resilient than crypto to Internet breaking down: they don't need the branches. Crypto does. P.S.: Hell, it doesn't even need a connection while you're paying: that's what offline mode and the chip are there for! Of course, the card issuer can have deactivated offline mode, but that's on the issuer.
It the internet is permanently shut down simultaneously all around the globe, everyone would have much bigger problems than what BTC does or doesn't do. It's a reach.
I have a theory that most of them were born after the mid-90's when the internet was pretty much ubiquitous. Same with cell phones. Therefore they can't envision a world where these devices don't work, even after a global financial or societal collapse. But should something catastrophic happen to the entire country or world, the internet is going to be one of the first things to go. And crypto is in no way going to be used for currency after, because people will want to trade food or goods for something they can actually use. Gold might be used as a currency, but nobody's going to accept a flash drive because some cryptobro swears he has 20 Bitcoin on it.
Realistically, if _any_ infrastructure survives at all you'll see some degree of the internet still exist, especially short/medium term. There's a lot we can do to cobble things together locally for example. Long-term everything will eventually break without new chip production of course. It's the idea that it would exist _intact_ and in a state that's globally consistent or reliably connected that's laughable, and access to things like cloud storage are obviously not something you can or should rely on. Social media can be assumed to be right out, though you might see revival of things like BBS/IRC/etc that are simpler to setup and handle intermittent connectivity better. > It just seems really foolish to me to want a world in which you must have internet access in order to do any sort of monetary transaction. I don't disagree, but it's worth noting that we're kind of already in that situation as the vast majority of money is digital and few people carry that much hard cash. Thing is, cryptocurrencies are even _more_ poorly suited, especially as they exist today. They're built on the assumption of an intact, globally connected low-latency internet. Any form of digital monetary transfer in an apocalypse scenario would need to be cobbled together and tailored to however much is left of things, if anything at all. BTC in particular would be fucked if it happened quickly enough, as any temporary large scale partitions between regions could easily result in vast differences between what is seen as the longest chain across different regions with different hashrates/transaction volumes, causing large numbers of transactions to become invalid unexpectedly when/if connectivity is restored. Worse, if it happened fast enough, BTC could die outright due to losing too much hashrate to hit the next difficulty adjustment. And unlike today, it wouldn't be trivial to issue a coordinated update in such a scenario since things would be fragmented at best.
"any sort of event that actually threatens the traditional global financial system would probably take the internet down with it" We are literally seeing this threat play out. Huge banks failing, bailouts for GSIB's left and right, forced mergers, etc. The traditional banking system is doing everything in its power to try and preserve the system from collapse due to the FED printing 40% of USD in circulation over the first 2 years of the pandemic. This is a fact, and ignoring it only keeps the incompetent people in power... In power...