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244 sats \ 4 replies \ @pillar 17 Sep 2022 \ on: Lightning Network and Interplanetary Settlement bitcoin
Could we also create another blockchain (some sort of layer below the main chain) with a longer average time between blocks (let's say 24 hours, to make it exaggerated) to settle transactions between the planets? I'm wondering the pros and cons of such solution. Sorry for not providing ideas, my knowledge doesn't go that deep.
BTC Astronomy Part 2 calls these Type II blockchains. They're slow enough to allow a star system to settle on base layer.
To me, Solar Coin, sounds like a shitcoin.
I think humans will find a way to use the Blockchain of their home planet. Even if it requires centralized interplanetary settlement entities. I.e. A few Mars' importers could run a LN/on chain swap service and send infrequent batched transactions back and forth to earth. While customers pay for shipments using LN for their convenience.
If Mars was more energy abundant, and miners were confident that +50% of hash could be produced from Mars, it could be possible to move the hash horizon away from the home planet.
This would lead to more orphaned blocks and may provoke a hard fork to increase block times. So Bitcoin could "grow into" a Solar Coin of its own.
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You wouldn't need all of this. You could just use atomic swaps with longer HTLC parameters.
Martians are not going to do all of this extra crap just to carry your BTC bags. This attitude is delusional at this point, the universe does not revolve around bitcoin's brand recognition.
The obvious solution is to just fork BTC again from genesis to make some sort of "MarsCoin" and then do atomic swaps between Bitcoin and MarsCoin.
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The universe doesn't have to revolve around BTC. All it takes is a couple bitcoiners on mars to establish a martian lightning network. MarsCoin will certainly exist (it already does). But getting people to use it (even if its martian mineable) might be harder than just using another lightning network. Issue the mars coin on taro if you want!
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I think what you would end up seeing in reality is that the second-biggest coin on the market, (say, litecoin or something similar to bitcoin that has a significant market share) would take over the market segment while bitcoiners are still trying to figure out how to sync the network over massive interplanetary latency.
This would cause litecoin (or whatever other cryptocurrency) to piss off a lot of earthlings because the latency would get higher for them as 51% of blocks are mined on mars. Eventually litecoin (or whatever) would be as unusable on earth as bitcoin is unusable on mars.
I also say litecoin because the BTC<->LTC atomic swap is one of the oldest and most well established, using the HTLC method, and like bitcoin they are ASIC mined.
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