Bitcoin Forum

No.

But here is some food for thought.

What if there was a global black out, some how... wouldn't bitcoin be vulnerable to someone with solar powered computer and internet access?- (an engineered global black out just in case you were going to say that there wouldn't be internet access"

global black out? can you please tell us, what you mean by this term? I never heard about it before...

Do you know what a black out is? Well one of them on a global scale. I.e no electricity. It's a bit post-apolitical to be honest and if that did happen bitcoin would be the least of my worries.

What is a "solar powered computer"?
Solar is just a source of energy. At the end of the day the computer or series o computers are going to need to be more powerful than 51%+ of all existing computers within th Bitcoin network, which is nonsense, because at that point it would be more beneficial to be a good actor than a bad actor, thats why Bitcoin is indeed invulnerable.

Even without bitcoin we are mostly reliant on digital age now.  If stuff gets hacked or goes down there will be big changes and power shifts in the world.  Maybe if bitcoin becomes very popular perhaps the elites in power now will stage some type of blackout and send themselves 50% of bitcoin?

you get it

There is nothing reliable invincible!
The maximum value of the block p2p 32 mb?
What happens if all the people of the earth will move to Bitcoin? All have enough space on the transaction?

ahh and why is OP asking about BTC is this scenario?...as you mentioned, it would be the least thing to care..

There is work to put Bitcoin on satellites.

If there is a global blackout we will have far more things to worry about than see what someone with some solar powered computer is doing to Bitcoin.

Besides once the network gets back it can be easily rolled back.

If there ever happen to occur a global blackout, the less worrying thing would be what happens to the bitcoin network...

You're obviously mistaken about what a 50% attack can do.
Sending 50% of bitcoin to themselves is not what the evildoers could achieve by staging a global blackout.
Double-spending attacks, well, possible, but there would be no targets to launch them at. There'd simply be no one to accept those double-spends.
Receiving 100% of the block rewards for the time of the blackout? Absolutely.
That's somewhat less than 4000 BTC per day of the global blackout.

4000 BTC/day in comparison to the huge negative impact on economy during the global blackout?
Well, no one said powerful elites were smart. But stupid like that? ::)

edit: typos

without internet all transactions will be rejected right? so there should not be any problem about this possible scenario, and what is a engineered global black out? never heard of such thing


he probably means if all the planet remain for a long time without electricity, such scenario seems very unrealistic and almost impossible to me

If we come to a situation when global black out is possible then I think pocket generator will also be available to the people. So I guess it won't be too much of a problem. Technology will always thrive. :P :P :P

this scenario looks science fictiony to me!

but in case that happens and somebody or some group of people that has access to power and mine all the blocks and get the rewards. i think two things can happen:
1) everyone, after knowing this, will dump their coins and bitcoin price will fall.
2) since the blocks witch was mined was by a single person or group, maybe there will be a way to ignore all those new blocks and pick up where we left off before the black out. :D

Only way bitcoin is vulnerable is that internet wouldn't exist,and in that case,you can pray for us

Bitcoin is more and more vulnerable the less nodes it has.
The less nodes it has the more likely a ddos becomes which could have fatal consequences.
This kind of attack where an only medium size enitity (like mastercard or visa for example) could ddos 90% or more of the nodes on the network is highly overlooked and underestimated. That's also a reason a blocksize increase which would further reduce nodes is very unwise.

If there is no internet, Bitcoin is the least of your problems.

this is debatable, if you have a big stash of bitcoin, losing the access to it, indefinitely, it will be one of your biggest problem, especially if those are the only money you have

Not exactly. The difficulty changes only about every 2 weeks, so it will remain at the same level for days after the blackout.
During those days, the people with the "solar computer" will get 100% of the block rewards, but because they are the total hash power working at the same difficulty, it will be much more than 10 minutes between blocks, meaning much less than 4000 BTC per day.

He means that in a world where the internet has disappear, it probably means civilization has gone backwards a couple decades to hundred years, which means guns and food rule the world, not even Gold would be useful there.

well my point stand then, because after everything will be set again, these bitcoin would comes in hand, and makes you rich another time

Had a think about what I would do If I was lucky enough to be be in a position to take advantage of such a global power outage.

Ideas did not include manipulating a decentralized ledger to acquire something that would plunge in value when people the power came back on and everyone realized that someone had manipulated that decentralized ledger.

You probably could still pull it off if all it takes is a few minutes of global power outage for you to acquire your Bitcoin fortune. You'd just need to get ready to dump directly into the existing buy orders on multiple exchanges as soon as power is back on, before anyone figure out what happened.

You're right. Thanks for pointing that out.

With current difficulty?
He would need a ton of PCs and solar panels.

as long as internet conection avaible bitcoin still live

So nobody has generators / Solar powered UPS's / etc. etc? A huge solar flare or something similar could cause that, but there are still alternatives. We have many ways of generating alternative power. <Wind / Waves>
We recently saw the "Power Wall" being introduced by Tesla and the technology to store electricity are getting better day by day. If the main power grid goes down, people would still be able to generate alternative electricity, totally removed from the main grid.  

Also good to remeber that the difficulty would not be adjusted at only one difficulty change.
There's a "min and max" possible change when the new difficulty is calculated.

LOL if internet goes down we all are screwed .... hence my quote "|I can promise you can not do shet anymore without internet|"
My banks, access to governement, insurance, tv everything else i did not mention at this short answer is internet based
So if it goes down bitcoin is not your only concern, your lost i can even promise that alot of jobs can't be done for instance because they work online in the cloud.
For example office360 and much more programs.
Think about how used we are to use the internet, nobody ever goes to loopup info at books anymore ..... WE GOOGLE IT ALL.
You gonna cry if the net is down !!!

I don't understand why suddenly this becomes an issue. Each country in the world have their own power generation capability and capacity. For a global blackout to take place all at the same time, you are talking about probability that is so small that is almost negligible. Unless you are referring to a solar storm which probably is somehow possible but very rare but then, what are the chances for it to hit every country in the world.

if global blackout happens, bitcoin and what happens to blockchain is going to be your least worries since it is going to be chaos everywhere and you have to worry about survival instead of bitcoin.

Do you actually understand what a global black out would do..?

I REALLY don't think you do. 

Little known fact humans need water and food to survive.  I know most people don't know this but it's true!

And in order to get food and water people nowadays needs money. In other words without money it's hard to survive.

Like Amph said if you have a huge amount of bitcoin as an asset this is going to be a huge problem because due to a global black out  you won't be able to access your "DIGITAL"  currency!  There are some thirdworld countries that have no access to generators and solar powered computers.

To survive, yes. but humans do way more than surviving.

I think if there would be a global black out , people who have solar power even if they were mining bitcoin before, they would stop doing it because they are going to need that precious power then.
in the world without power the one with the power has the money, they don't need bitcoin anymore!

It will not work and blackout on a global scale is near impossible. Bitcoin is very safe from any sort of vulnerabilities, there are several ways which bitcoins are vulnerable, if 51% of miners get together and decide to hard fork; or cracking the sha 256 algorithm on whose back bitcoin is build, on which case both are near impossible to do and likely won't happen in the next 100 years.

only true if after the black out, we return to a point where money aren't really needed, and we can just fight our way through the jungle , to get food by hunting and water

do you really think that this scenario is realistic, if a blackout really happens? to me it seems a bit fanciful

Can't the government just spend a bunch of money and overtake the Bitcoin mining world with a 51% attack?

This really seems like a scenario from a catastrophic movie and personally I do not believe it.
What would be the possible motivation of miners to do something like this?
What would they get by killing their ''golden goose'' which brings income to them?
I really don't see any realistic reason for it.

Is it really worth the cost/effort?
Bitcoin is not such a big threat.... yet.

it was already said numerous times, the cost of doing this far exceed the cost of doing the exact same thing, but helping the network instead, thus retrieving profit with the usual mining reward system...

If government want to take over bitcoin; or seriously regulate it, then the best and simplest course of action is to regulate bitcoin mining. The most crucial way is for governments to regulate ASIC manufacturing, for example by forcing manufacturers to add kill switches to the hardware or require end users to have licenses. It would be pretty easy operation, and it can be done without high cost.

I fail to see how regulation of ASICs can be done effectively and affect Bitcoin. It isn't easy at all. Reducing the hashrate doesn't affect much. There are still many other companies all around the world. It will never be possible for every miner to own a license. The fact that you can mine while connected to tor makes it even harder. A simple firmware mod can easily bypass the "kill switch" you said. Furthermore, to regulate mining, you are going to have to regulate the computer industry as a whole too. Don't forget CPU and GPU can also mine.

No, bitcoin is not vulnerable ,but, some associates are vulnerable & they have to fix immediately !

I think bitcoin is very robust as it is decentralize.
It's can't be killed by anyone.

YES ! It's can't be killed by anyone. it's the beauty of bitcoin