Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by hwbunny | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

hwbunny

But it's unusable in a warlike scenario. During war there is no internet...

View on HN

Bitcoin doesn't require internet, the blockstream satellites broadcast the block chain as well.

https://blockstream.com/satellite/

Approximately nobody will have that during wartime either.

this is hilarous, I mean, there's a literal satellite constellation beaming the blockchain and the argument is "nuh-uh!"

I guess that until a satellite shoots a wad of bills through your window some people won't give it credit.

A satellite constellation is only half of a network. And a system that nobody can actually use is not a useful or functional system. Approximately nobody has a receiver for this network today. The receivers won't fall out of the sky tomorrow if war breaks out.

And even if everyone did have receivers, commercial satellites are highly regulated by most nations, likely will be targeted during any future major war, and there's no guarantee they won't be coopted for other uses by their host nations. Blockstream is a tiny company and doesn't even own or operate any of these satellites. You might as well just use viasat or iridium.

No Internet required - just a $500 "Blockstream" Satellite receiver device!

IIRC you could build your own kit with a software defined radio device.

you just needed a recycled satellite dish and some other off the shelf components.

If people need to put in that much work, it won't be of much use to buy groceries with it, as the kid at the grocery store can't even spell SDR. If it were me, I'd spend my effort rebuilding terrestrial IP networks over copper instead. It would be more useful.

This is why Bitcoin maxis are ultimately delusional. They think the world revolves around them and, no matter what happens, they will always be at the top.

Stocks and bonds and commodities and 401ks and CDs aren't useful in that scenario either, but it doesn't stop people from putting most of their money into those.

Yes but techno-anarchist fetishists don’t line up to spout the immovable perfection of government-controlled fiat currency.

Maybe not techno-anarchists, but there's plenty of people on the internet that are loud and vocal advocates of stocks and 401ks as well (nothing against them, most of my savings are in that myself).

But they are backed up by SIPC/FDIC which is effectively backed up by the world's most powerful military.

The US's financial power is strongly linked with their ability to project military power.

When the war has gotten so bad that there's no internet? That's what the parent was arguing (and yeah, sure, bitcoin can't really work that well without the internet).

I've got a little precious metal in case of a SHTF situation, although I'm not sure how useful even that would be.

People probably care more about food or fuel or maybe some pills than they do about bartering for silver or gold in that situation. Might be able to convince a few people to go for it, but still might be difficult.

Yeah, 401ks and CDs are stores of value and not spending mechanisms, so it was a bad comparison to begin with. But physical paper cash, backed by an organization with many nukes and the means to use them, is probably the best thing to hold during war. Besides useful commodities.

You can buy and hold bitcoin and eventually cash it out just as you can a 401k or a CD. Now that there are bitcoin ETFs many people and organizations are treating bitcoin as if it's a store of value (whether that's wise or not is arguable, but that doesn't stop people from seeing it as such).

But if there's no internet, there's no way you can eventually cash it out.

I think the US government/military is stronger than the Internet. Shit the Internet isn't even that strong.

In a real "collapse of the US government STHF situation" you're going to want to invest in beans and bullets, not crypto.

I guess my point is our world is so intertwined with the internet that if it permanently goes away we're pretty much in a 'the next war will be fought with sticks and stones' situation anyway, so what does it matter how well the military can defend those bonds and fiat.

Re:SHTF for sure, which is why it's not really worth considering, unless you're so sure it's going to happen and you're already accumulating those beans and bullets (also nothing is stopping you from doing that while also buying other things in case it doesn't happen, or takes a lot longer to happen than you predict).

Your specific country not having internet is basically a configuration issue; you can achieve that with a great degree of accuracy without cutting a single cable and without disrupting service to anyone else. There are multiple examples of this in the past 15 years,ranging from active monitoring like China does to pontual disruptions like many goverments adopted during the arab spring.

I'm aware of governments (or other situations) leading to a temporary shut down of their internet, that's why I said permanently.

If it's temporary or limited to a country, then bitcoin doesn't really suffer much from that either. The blockchain will continue elsewhere and can be synched back up for your region later, or if it's everywhere, then it will just stay in a frozen state until the internet is back.

So you can go to a country where there's still internet (assuming you can, you might not be able to), or wait until the internet is back up.

Hopefully you have other assets or goods to get you by in the meantime. Bitcoin is too volatile for it to make sense putting all of your wealth into it anyway.

Lets assume a state-sponsored threat model, with AS blackholing. It may happen the node you connect to sparsingly to sync your ledger is a malicious one, and does not represent the main ledger.

Lets assume you are in a country at war, with poor conectivity and you receive money via blockchain; Poor conectivity means the local places where you can spend your virtual money aren't synced, possibly for weeks. What good is for you money you can't access?

There are far better ways of carring value in warzones. Crypto currency is the most useless one - specially because you can't easily bribe anyone with it.

Imagine having to awkwardly sit there with the person you're trying to bribe while you wait for your transaction to synchronize. This is where someone says something about L2 or whatever, usually.

I suppose for the Internet to _permanently_ go away that would mean frying every device with a TCP/IP stack and network hardware. I think every nation-state could shut down their own Internet indefinitely and the maybe top 5 most offensive-cyber capable countries could shutdown the global Internet for as long as they desired.

Internet is hands-down the most fragile communication backbone a country can have; you can easily blackhole a whole country (satellite included) by just propagating "configuration". Most physical communication can easily be disrupted by cutting cables or by dragging an anchor at the bottom of the ocean.

In contrast, a vlf transmitter can cover the globe consuming the same power as an old tv set. Its not high bandwidth, but enough for teletype.

Everything that requires stable power is able to function in modern warfare scenarios, as long as UN rules apply; ukranians have internet, palestinians have controlled internet, and sudan victims have neither.

> ukranians have internet, palestinians have controlled internet, and sudan victims have neither

Well in that case, there are people in Sudan that are using bitcoin[1], especially to help others escape the region.

And there are people in Africa using bitcoin without reliable internet access[2] (not just Sudan) using various methods mentioned in that article.

So it seems that bitcoin is not totally useless for a region that has limited or no internet access, as long as it's operating elsewhere.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/07/05/how-b...

[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/03/15/how-a...

There are people all over the world using bitcoin.

Speaking of Sudan, woman are also using their body. What do you think is more popular, bitcoin or prostitution?

How many Sudanese do you know that are using bitcoin right now instead of money on their pocket? Yah, the article is about sending money to their families (since traditional wire transfers are not working -I wonder why?), not that people can actually cash it in.

Oh and lets not even talk on the fluff promotion piece of a L2 startup with gasp 3000 users across 7 nations - none of which are Sudan. Nigeria alone has 218 MILLION people. Are you kidding me?

Bitcoin transactions work via satellite, ham radio, or cellphone. If there is any form of working communication you can send or receive Bitcoin.

If comms are temporarily disabled, your Bitcoin is still safe on tens of thousands of nodes.

Would you mind sharing any examples of somebody accepting transactions on behalf of the Bitcoin network over HAM radio?

Obviously it's possible, if you can make a TCP connection over carrier pigeon, you can make it over anything. I'm curious to see a working example however.

https://survivedoomsday.com/how-to-send-bitcoin-over-ham-rad...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com