A thought experiment!
In an apocolyptic future, where we've all nuked each other (WW3), rising sea levels have destroyed major cities, and a massive solar flare destroys the majority of electrical equipment / data centers / transformers, there will surely (hopefully) be some communities left to carry the torch.
There won't be any chip manufacturers, books, much civilisation to speak of. However there will surely be some preppers who dust off their USBs in Faraday bags, and start to teach their children about Bitcoin before all their circuitry rots into the dusts of time.
Presuming this 'de-progress' takes place over several years, meaning hashing can continue whilst the difficulty adjusts (radically) downward, how will the bitcoin network proceed?
How might new blocks be created (without electronic computers or telephony networks) and distributed to "miners" in other communities?
How would the mempool be handled?
How might the rules (such as 21m cap) be enforced?
5k sats for the best answer :-)
Why aren't there any chip manufacturers in this apocalypse? Somehow, humanity's collective knowledge of how to make computers/adding machines is lost but someone manages to recover the entire 600GB Blockchain even tho there are no books/printed words? I think there are just as many (if not more) offline/faraday backups of Wikipedia than the Blockchain.
Let me present a more likely senario:
Disaster happens and the Blockchain stops adding blocks because every computer on earth has been permanently disabled.
Many people will have cold storage Bitcoin seeds memorized and/or recorded in ways that survive the disaster.
Without new blocks, the coins on these keys cannot be spent. You can't even give someone else your seed in a trade without trust because you also know the seed and could doublespent them once the Blockchain resumes.
Consensus only cares about the Blockchain with the heaviest proof of work. So anyone who decides to try and mine blocks by hand, and distribute the newly found block without internet is wasting their time because all the work they do could easily be undone by primitive adding machines and a network of telegram wires or radio stations.
Even if one community decided this was the best strategy for them, they would struggle to enforce the consensus rules without trust since it's no longer feasible for everyone to validate the transactions themselves without checking all the work themselves by hand. People under this limit, would just trust whoever is disseminating these new "blocks" to people.
It's like trusting the phone companies to make sure there are no typos in the quarterly phone books sent to every household pre-internet. Very centralized. People would have to submit their txns directly to the block factory and hope they get included.
Even if you did find an error in a block, what are you going to do about it? Try to convince everyone in town to discard the last block and force the block production factory to issue a recall and replace it with a valid one? It just wouldn't scale at all without becoming completely trust based.
It soon becomes obvious that Bitcoin was designed for networked computers and humans are really bad at computing/networking. Especially, when most people are just trying to survive and could care less about keeping their ledgers updated and verifying the transactions of their neighbors too!
Instead of doing math by hand or with a slide rule, then shipping tonnes of paper with hashes and hex encoded text to every community on the planet, we would all be better off working towards getting BTC back to running as close as possible to how it was before the disaster.
In the meantime, communities will just use ancient money technologies that run better on the available infrastructure.
At worst case, 2016 new blocks would need to be mined at the pre-disaster difficulty before the next adjustment. The difficulty can only go down 75% at once, so it could take a few adjustments before we're back to 10min block times. The time between those first few adjustments could be decades.
Assuming we have to rebuild global communication infrastructure, there could emerge multiple BTC forks or chain splits as new communities develop the technology to "resume" the Blockchain independently using what they believe is the current chain tip.
These forks could persist forever as national treasuries or lose value to alternative blockchains with greater proof of work as they are discovered and the world reunites.
There would also be a huge opportunity for shenanigans since compute isn't evenly distributed anymore. The earliest miners would be in very powerful positions to reorg the chain that could be very politically impactful since blocks could take years to mine in the beginning.
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I just realised I screwed up when creating this question - I added 5k as a boost, not a bounty
I am giving you all the sats I have (2686) and will send more when I build them up again!!
Thanks for the considered answer.
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+314, 2k to go
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+500, 1.5k to go
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+1000, 0.5k to go
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+500
debt cleared
I can get back to work now instead of shitposting all over SN :-)
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Rai stones used by the people of Yap Island solves this problem in an apocalyptic world
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Begin stacking raw materials needed to manufacture chips alongside your Satoshis, make some friends who know how to work the raw materials into ASICs. Although in your scenario an old laptop would also do the trick once you can find some electricity
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Rai stones are the closest we can get in primitive conditions.
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In an apocolyptic future, where we've all nuked each other (WW3), rising sea levels have destroyed major cities, and a massive solar flare destroys the majority of electrical equipment / data centers / transformers, there will surely (hopefully) be some communities left to carry the torch.
LOL, in such scenario Bitcoin will be my last concern... you better be sure you have a shelter, food and a place to hide from the zombies (they don't give a shit about your BTC)
Anyways, this question of "what will happen in case of no internet" was answered here in one of my guides.
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I'm sure such a future will see darthcoin roaming the badlands like a prophet, holding a sign saying "I told you so!".
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Not just a sign... but a huge one like this
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it's not big enough :-)
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The first problem would be keeping the network alive, not mining/concensus.
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IMO, coz of WW3... we dont need to worry much as everything happens will be happening on the earth. but those satellites and other stuffs in our orbits will be there for backup... we humans have informations to built stuffs again... or whats the point in spending millions of dollars doing research in moon n outer space... using paper and pencil could work if world is like Yapiee(Rai Stones) Island...
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deleted by author
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Which is why Portfolio is important Gold Silver Bitcoin and Ampleforth 25% each
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ampleforth?
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