Bitcoin Forum

Scenario: The state has been holding outright war against Bitcoin nodes and has split the infrastructure in several places, separating the Bitcoin network into two pieces, possibly more.

What are the implications?

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that fraud by the state has gone from implicit to explicit?

I don't know what you mean. First, what is a node? Is this each instance of the client? Second, what is 'infrastructure'? Is this the block chain?

If there is hopes the network will later coalesce again, or there is chance people will be smuggling the blockchain  back and forth between fragments by sneakernet, people who know or suspect they are not in the biggest  chunk of the split network should refrain from mining at the risk of loosing the 50 bucks they earned by the time the chain gets merged, and people receiving money should try to track down when and where those coins were cyberminted and refuse to accept coins that didn't came from the biggest chunk of the divided network nor from before the split.

I'm not quite sure what  happens to transfer fees though.

Meaning shut down the internet? or simply added enough hashing power to dominate the block-chain?

In case 1, it only takes a couple tor tunnels to stitch the whole thing back together.

In case 2 the Gov nodes are ignored as soon as they break the protocol rules and cause a fork, or their work is accepted as the longest block-chain if it is valid.


Each piece will attempt to talk to the others, none of the valid nodes will have an invalid block-chain, and the longest chain will win, and then all the transactions not in that chain will be added in subsequent blocks.


Without physically partitioning ALL data networks at the same division points, splitting at the network level will not work. If this happens bitcoin is the least of our worries.

splitting the block-chain without changing the rules will result in a quick merge, with the slight possibility of a double spend of the gov's own money, but they have to have 50% hash power to pull that trick off.