Bitcoin Forum

Right now, if the internet were to go down, bitcoin would (for the most part) go down with it.

Bitcoin however, can be separated from the internet, and we should probably make a safety net for it.

The next major war will probably involve a lot of cyberwar, and big nations will likely cut of internet of other nations for tactical reasons. For this reason, some organizations have set up their own internet, independently.

Having our nodes interconnected with each other, making our own internet would give many advantages, redundancy only being one of them.

Of course, such a thing has to be decentralized so it would need to be a project driven by the bitcoin community itself, and not a single entity.

A Finnish project is aiming to transmit bitcoin over radio waves. Read more about it here...

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoiners-finland-send-cryptocurrency-radio/

And what would stop the countries at war from cutting your intercontinental wire or shooting down your sattelites?

I don't think internet will be taken down, but internet use over those key lines might be heavily regulated or expensive.

Interesting Concept ... would would it work better... isn't it possible for someone to intercept the signals and steal bitcoins...

But i think the internet isn't going down for a while so we should be fine for now...

I have an idea but I don't know if it is practically possible to be implemented, how mobile phones works, what signals.

Maybe using the same technology as most of the POS use even if there are no internet the payment is processed maybe with satellite antenna something like that?

If the internet goes down then we have a whole load more problems than not being able to use BTC. It would be a bit like having a car and no roads. Even if there was an alternate way of broadcasting them, so much commerce is internet dependent, including fiat, that its purpose would mostly wither.

How run the bitcoin mining protocol without internet?

The only solution would be make our own private network separated from Internet. But it would be too expensive and would cause lots of issues(for example, how would the common user connect to the alternative network without using the internet or the telephone structure?). And the network would be as vulnerable as internet itself

What the world needs is a functional global wireless mesh network.

There is no way to create different network, independent from internet for bitcoin. Not with our current state of technology and resources.
Bitcoin will be linked to internet for many many years and we couldn't do anything to change it.

There are many ways to exchange bitcoin independent of the internet.  The problem is that there aren't enough adopters to make the technology viable because the internet makes BTC transfers so convenient.

Wouldn't that still need to rely on a connection to the internet in order to connect to the rest of the network?

Why not replace the Internet with the electromagnetic spectrum. I have no idea what I just said.

But since wifi uses radio waves to transmit data, it should be easy, just boost the signal.

Let's not lose perspective here .... If the internet goes down... All mayor payment methods like PayPal / Swift / Credit cards / MoneyGram / WU goes down too. This will

effectively stop online transfers and also links to ATM's. Almost every transaction on earth, are reliant on the internet and satellite communication.

Not even radio alternatives will work... because that can be scrambled and radio transmitters can be destroyed in a war scenario. {Just target the towers}

Not to forget about the limited range of the radio waves. You will never be able to pass any big stretch of ocean, basically seperating continents.

I don't think a war proof method of internet can be developed unfortunately.

i was thinking about mesh network, privately used for bitcoin only, after all you need a decentralized network that work with bitcoin, internet is not truly decentalized as it is right now

it's like saying that fiat system is decentralized, because you have many different fiat money in the world, each one controlled by their government...

That would be a great idea and would make killing the network near impossible, but you still have problems with the centralized intercontinental cables in the oceans and sattelites that relay stuff between continents.

Unless you own a cable in the ocean ofcourse.

There are a variety of methods which can be used to seperate Bitcoin from the internet or use the internet as means of communication.
Rather than listing them all it makes more sense to just look in this thread to acquire more information.
Creating a True Coin Network
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1216883.0;topicseen

Exactly this. If it comes to the war, we are all doomed anyways. You need couple of dozen of nuclear missiles and we won't need Bitcoin or Internet, we will be history.

Also I thought that Internet is quite resilient. If they would kill Internet, they wouldn't just kill Bitcoin, they would kill pretty much all the rest since everything is connected to the net these days.

OP, you independent network would also be very, very expensive!

There's just too much to lose not just from an individual but for the government as well so we can't afford to lose internet even for just a day.  Life somehow now depend to internet. Virtual offices are created daily to outsource jobs.

we have to make wider sense, if internet is cut off or down than there are lots of other things which will be unaccesable like bank account,creditcards,data from ancient time,government documents etc. This will cause a bigger tragic than lossing access to your bitcoin.

If war gonna happen than even those radio towers or satellites will get damages.

If it will be only for the blockchain and the new net will be available and accessible in equal way in all the world it will be a good choice. If the same thing it will be applied in the internet I  think that it will be a stupid thing. If every entity or country will have their net the information that everyone will have will be much less than the previous one, the connection between people in two other countries will be more difficult to be realized or even impossible and so on. The world is going toward the integration and the separation. The separation bring only slowdown of development and differentiation. This model it is applied by Kim Jung-Un actually creating an internal internet within the North Korea to separate its people from the rest of the world and, in this way, to control everything they can have from such kind of internet. I thing that this behavior and action of Kim Jong-Un cannot be the example to follow by no one.

Cool! Would be great to have radio receptors that incorporated wallets too :D

If it really goes dark we'll still have carrier pigeons.

And we'll always be able to count on the Bobchain - http://intheoreum.org/#welcome

I think the radiowave idea sounds applicable. Other than that, I can't really imagine other alternatives. Maybe bluetooth will work but not sure if there will be limitations as to how far and how fast information will get transmitted. More or less, if something bad were to happen with all internet connection down, at least the coins are still safe until we managed to find internet connection to access it again.