501 sats \ 5 replies \ @nerd2ninja 10 Jul 2023 \ on: How does Bitcoin die? bitcoin
There's a couple of ways Bitcoin could die. At least what we think of as being Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a social contruct you see, like the idea of money itself, or family, the notion of nations, the idea of "hispanic", or "western societies" (the idea that speakers of the same language although not part of the same country are still part of the same culture).
Social constructs can get really messy. They are simply agreed upon rationalizations for organization. So Bitcoin. We think of Bitcoin as a network of nodes with miners that compete to win a block and present their solution to the nodes to collect their prize. What if, a whole generation or 5, all decided, Bitcoin was just whatever was in their bank account. Of course, the idea of a bank account has shifted, we started to call bank accounts wallets for some reason. I'm talking about wallet of satoshi of course. Well lets imagine that not self-custodying Bitcoin was the normal thing, and all custodians got rug pulled, but what if these people decided, actually, whats in these accounts are what Bitcoin is and that they aren't going to listen to these nerds declaring their software is what real Bitcoin is.
Another way, is when humanity ventures into space. I don't think you can soft fork in longer block times. So what would be considered a "new" currency would have to be introduced, or maybe it gets hard forked in somehow, but I don't know how, but I feel as though strong needs tend to shape social constructs. So it may be possible to hard fork Bitcoin on the basis of very strong needs.
Even at long space distances bitcoin would still be bitcoin.The rest of the network might be delayed from our relative positions, but they would be transacting in their own local space time so it would all work out.
For example, at distances where time delays are a factor, it would also take them time to confirm the block, but this does not delay local trade with already confirmed utxos.
It would be like a community breaking off from the internet at block 800 000, never changing the code and the coming back at block 900 000.
As long as they kept security up and code intact, every thing should be settled.
At least with drivechains and lightning.
This is another reason why conservative core development and robust layer2 exploration is so important, not just space travel which is a distant challenge, but local use cases.
If the main society had abandoned the original chain for some reason, that reason would still be valid to the old chain once reintroduced and they would have to integrate whatever upgrades when they learned about it.
If it was for reasons that are invalid to the old chain, such as state capture and disolution, the breakoff chain would be reintroduced into the market as another competing commodity. The same way we would interpret finding gold from a sunken ship (priced in/limited supply) versus discovering nearby comet made of gold. (dissolution/devaluation)
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No lol hard forked off chains can not merge back together like some liquid thing. The chain is a block per block proof of work tie. A merkle tree. You can not shove an entry in the middle of a merkle tree, you would change the hashes of the entries that come after it.
So it is not secure to do what you're suggesting. You would have no sense of final settlement and people would get their transactions reversed all the time.
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I think you should re-read what i wrote. I specifically avoided mentioning merging forks. I'm talking about off chain transactions that are eventually settled on chain which are happening now. In the context of far distances in space, they would also eventually be settled, but much much slower, in relative terms.
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Okay, I misunderstood, "It would be like a community breaking off from the internet at block 800 000, never changing the code and the coming back at block 900 000."
Ignoring the fact that you can't do this with drivechain specifically, it would have to be some other sidechain method, but are you really expecting people to mine these sidechains all across space and not try to also mine the main chain? Earth, with its limited access to electricity to power ASICs, would have to compete with who the hell knows what probably some miner that's set up shop next to a blue giant. Do you understand how huge that re-org would be? I don't mind the idea of fractal off-chain solutions that eventually scale to serve the community of trade it needs to serve, but the base chain needs to be the slowest chain.
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Ignoring for the moment that i am suggesting a slowed peg, and that that is exactly what drivechain a can do...
but are you really expecting people to mine these sidechains all across space and not try to also mine the main chain?
I would if both distance and incentive are at play. A galactic economy based on earth at its core and earth bitcoin, would have to eventually settle in earth bitcoin, but local currencies, colored coins, fiat IDGF would be more available . Bitcoin as final settlement. God can you imagine the fees.
Even if the distant miners were to try and mine bitcoin and somehow use an excess of cheap energy over there to profit here, the distances already exclude any excess amount of energy far from earth from competing with earths miners.
Put another way, c means there is a cost to transporting that information back to the earth. That miner has to expend energy to escape the blue giants gravity well, then travel to us, all before we have significatly upgraded our own miners in the time it takes them to get here. Space-time arbitrage might happen, but not fast enough to cause insecurity in the main chain.
Actually that is an extremely interesting attack vector. If our entire civ was based on expesive energy and someone started broadcasting cheap energy bitcoins it would kill the economy. lol
This is all assuming sub FTL obviously.
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