Bitcoin Forum

It has a very high value-to-weight ratio, thus making transactions much cheaper. It can be transmitted in different ways such as waves or physical data memory, and can survive long periods of time without inflating. In these regards, it beats all other forms of currency. Thoughts?

One problem would be blockchain bifurcation when miners are more than a few light-seconds away.

If miners were say 1 hour apart, you would get substantial forking going on, and although in theory the longest chain would eventually dominate, you might have to wait for quite a few more confirmations.

If you're more than 100 light years away, chances are I'll be dead by the time you get my funds.


If I know about you and you're more that 100 light years away, chances are you're already dead.

A centralized fiat currency can be traded by wave as well.  If you have a stable bank that can be trusted to manage the currency over long time periods, you just radio in your wire transfers.

Bitcoin eliminates the stable organization requirement, but creates a mining requirement.  Mining in its present form would operate poorly on a solar-system scale, but an altchain with a slower block rate would work OK.  Interstellar latencies would completely kill it, though.  Are you going to wait for 6 confirms at 100 years per block?

I would expect trade at such distances would be performed by barter.  The very slow execution and delivery times eliminate most of the advantages of abstracted currency.

Exactly - the habitable zone of stars similar to our sun has a diameter below one light-hour, which would make a 60 minute time between blocks quite practical.

Nice to see people thinking ahead :)

You actually want the block rate to be slower than the max latency.  1h blocks with 1h latency wouldn't break completely, but it'd have a very high orphan rate, and worse, a very high "deep orphan" rate where you end up with abandoned chains several blocks high.  It's mitigated some because average latency will be lower than the max latency, but I'd still recommend keeping the block rate several times the max latency.

With a block rate of 4h the orphans would be tolerable.  6 confirms would be 1 day, which is acceptable for money being sent such long distances.  It's not like FedEx delivers next day to Jupiter.

I was in fact thinking of the average distance being much lower, but you're completely right of course.

Anyway, a real problem might be the "planets on opposite side of the star" situation, which prohibits any direct communication for weeks!

Actually, that's not a problem.  You just reroute the data through a relay that can see both endpoints.  The internet does this all the time.  I'm not sure if the inner planets go into a configuration where one can't see any of the others for an extended period, but if it's a serious problem you just park a relay satellite at Earth's L4 / L5 Lagrange points (about 60 degrees ahead/behind Earth's position), which will guarantee 100% coverage.

Yes, such a relay network would surely be in place once we're talking interplanetary blockchains :)
Would come in handy nowadays as well for the various Mars rovers.

sens.org is working on this problem - but unfortunately they don't accept bitcoin donations (I asked)

agree with OP, bitcoin will fit perfectly for the purpose and we almost got the communications covered (http://www.google.es/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=quantum%20comunicacion%20entanglement&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CEIQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fhomepage.univie.ac.at%2Frupert.ursin%2Fphp%2F%3Fdownload%3DPressespiegel_Fedrizzi_etal.pdf&ei=GxgBT-_YD5O5hAeZuKj_Ag&usg=AFQjCNFEPKiVVA5sAYGBvZS_T0LmRnisLQ&sig2=CbZvLKJEmwU24iJxujwjeA) too with quantum physics of course  ;D

One step at a time...  There already are amateur radio satellites in the low-earth orbit.  Perhaps a good first step would be a bitcoin node in the orbit?  I remember someone on this forum already claiming to have mined using a laptop on the commercial air flight.

So Bitcoin would become Terracoin

Then we will have Marscoin and so on

People on Luna can still use Terracoin, since they are only 1 lightsecond apart

That just describes secure communication. Like https but better. It's still not faster than light.

yeah i was sure that someone would say that, and i say we only know that from public information. You can do really awesome stuff with quantum entanglement when you use particles faster than light, saw that on the inter-webs but can't remember exactly where. And yes they are faster, 10 times at least, as stated in that document.

Btw, at present we don't use the full potential of that technology, but in theory quantum comm. would enable someone to establish a link 100 light years away in just a day, for example, and maintain the channel open for whatever amount of time needed. No fiber optics involved only sub-atomic particles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_particles) that form the "black matter".

There's a lot of pseudoscience involving faster-than-light, quantum entanglement, and black matter. The currently accepted views, i.e., not pseudoscience-fiction blabla, is that quantum entanglement can not send information faster than light, and faster than light particles don't exist, besides hypothetically.

In other words: Pics or it didn't happen.

Yeah. That's how I'd describe the guys at CERN - "psuedo-scientists."   :D

+1 haha, quantum entanglement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement) is instantaneous, atm humans are working on keeping those separated particles stable, that's all. No "pseudoscience" involved like jwzguy said.

Some ref.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos

And btw, Einstein set us back (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/opinion/30iht-eddas30.html) a great deal with his "great" theory. Please note that online documentation and the one that Labs have it's very extensive, so i'm only scraping the surface here.

Yes, quantum entanglement is instantaneous, but what I said was that you can't send information with it faster than light. Let me explain:

You have 2 entangled electrons. Entangled means that if one has spin up, then the other has spin down. Now, you send the electrons away from each other. Then, here on Earth you measure one of the electrons. It turns out to be spin up. Then you know the other one is spin down. The thing is, though, this doesn't send information. You can't force the measurement to come out spin up. If you could force it, then yes, you would send the info of "spin down" to the other electron on Mars. But because it's random, there is no way to send information with it.

Yes, the entanglement is lost pretty soon at the moment, which means that if you measure spin up here on Earth, it's not guaranteed to be spin down on Mars anymore.

Entanglement is not pseudoscience, definitely not. It's proven and shown time and time again. What I meant was, people refer to entanglement to "justify" their pseudoscientific ideas about faster than light communication.

Ugh, that title ("Faster than light particles found, claim scientists"). It's so wrong :/ The scientists specifically said "We have measured particles that seem to go faster than light. We think we're making some error, but we've checked all that we could think of. Does the scientific community have any ideas we could check, or maybe repeat the experiment somewhere else to see if we get different results?"
Note that they do not claim they found certain faster than light particles, only that it seems that way.
Also, this doesn't really have anything to do with entanglement.

What? What?
You do realize that a large part of science up to now has been building on what Einstein did, right? GPS, for an obvious example, is involved heavily in relativity. The first GPS tests were kilometers off within a day, because the scientists back then didn't think relativity would really have that much of an influence.

Or are you just trying to troll here?

Can you please stop linking to newspapers, and start linking to scientific article sources at least (nature.com or something), or journals, even? Newspapers get the details wrong really often.

I realize I may have been a bit unclear about what I meant. Let me restate it:

Quantum entanglement: Actual confirmed science. The "effect" is instantaneous. Does not allow information to be sent faster than light, however.
Faster than light neutrinos: Debated, as of yet unclear. People assume there is some error, but because they can't find it yet, the issue becomes more interesting because it may actually uncover new physics.
Faster than light communication: If the neutrinos turn out to be in error, then this is pseudo-science/science fiction.
Dark matter: Actual science. However, not much is know about it, so there are no "uses" for it yet, because it's not clear what "it" is.

A very good explanation of quantummechanics and related topics can be found here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/
Usually explanations leave you with a "weirded-out" feeling, and tell you to "just accept that that's the way it is". This one actually gives you an intuitive understanding of how and why things work. It's a bit long because of that, because there's some base ground to cover.

what would you buy ?

you should want to buy something that you cant even have invented
here for at least 200 years
(100 years to send money, and another 100 to receive "the goods")

you have no idea what to ask for,
except immortality blueprints or something of similar order of importance,
but I doubt we would have the money to pay for such a "thing"

@BTCurious thanks for your extensive response man, actually i managed to derail the topic "a little", sorry guys, to me this subject is fascinating :)

Like you say BTCurious we have lots of unknown things in today's world. Let's try not to close ourselves into a shell made by laws made after observing the surrounding environment. After all we're all here doing something unheard of or that resembles magic, trading digital tokens for goods or services.

Try imagining yourself trading bitcoins in the medieval times, you could get hanged as charlatan, or go back only 70 years, you could be put in a medical center for a few years. What i mean is that we slowly evolve and start taking things as granted while they were discovered or observed by us only a few hundred years back. What we will have in the future is up to other discoveries we make.
Cheers man.

:)

Yeah, I like seeing "tidbits of future" around me, or if you look closer, whole swaths of future (the internet, for one).
But yeah, my main point was that we don't really have a way to do ftl blockchain synchronization yet, and that there's no science available at the moment that lets us do so (except maybe if you want to synchronize between Geneva and Gran Sasso ;)).

Thinking about it some.. I really don't believe you'd have much of a forking problem, at least at a solar system scale.   Realistically the majority of hashing power will be located here on Earth for the forseeable future.  With that caveat, it'd almost be guaranteed the longest chain would always be the Terra chain.  You are looking at the same 51% attack scenario... in order for a serious fork to happen, you'd have to have close to 50% of total network hash capacity located a significant distance away from Earth.  Actually, for just about any real non terra based mining, you'd have to have a huge investment to start up or you'd be guaranteed to always lose on the longest chain contest.  I can't see this happening.

Sucks for those Martian miners.  But their only chance to make any dough would be a mars-coin branch.

Sigg

We Martians cannot allow a single entity such as Earth control 51% of the network.  We have no reason to question your intentions, but the network's integrity is too important to allow such a situation to happen.

lol, democracy at it's best. Then you prefer to have a local currency (chain fork) and have money changers, or speculators, profit big time ?
or use the same coins when you buy your Terra Playboy Calendar from the Internet or take a vacancy to Earth ?  :D

what i first thought when i read the title:

http://jahworks.org/files/2011/02/stoner.jpg

what i now think after reading some posts:

http://www.filmjunk.com/images/weblog/top10stoner_10.jpg

I feel like there should be some ratio between distance and required hashing power to determine fork probability.  Like if Pluto is 300 light minutes away, if you had 3.3% of the hashing power (10/300) you could have a realistic chance of getting a block beforehand and creating a Pluto fork.

But what this forgets (and you seemed to intuitively understand) is that earth is going to be continually sending those blocks about every 10 minutes, overwriting any short forks that may arise.  Essentially this will make it impossible to mine the farther from earth you are, unless you are large enough to then become the primary node.  It will also take 600+ minutes to confirm any transactions on Pluto.

So yes, and large fraction of distance from the primary network will make mining useless, unless the new locations approach 50%, in which case there is serious chance for the two locations to be 2-3 blocks out of sync and completely fork.

This seems to intuitively support the idea of multi-layers of bitcoin.  One that has for example a 1 day average block creation to transfer between worlds.

Yes, well if you are travelling interstellar distances you probably won't be concerned with waiting a few centuries for block confirmation.  Once every few galactic rotations somebody might find a block of even greater difficulty than the long count block.  Difficulty adjustment for this layer will be slow :)   But what should the reward be?  Hey pass that over here.   

Haha nice thread.

I doubt there will be that much interstellar trade, most things would be done locally.

Even with inter system trade I think different systems would be used for on-planet and interplanetary trade.

Innovations could always be traded though and while individuals might not live long enough, families and various empires might trade before dying.

Since maintaining the block tree would be so hard on galactic scale, I think they would just trade innovation streams directly though.


Unless we make mini wormholes and manage to communicate or even travel through them of course.

:D  Yeah, superluminal travel would change the protocol a bit.  I like the idea of trading innovation streams.  Some authors like Neal Asher have wormholes and coins which are etched crystal or memory of some sort, presumably some private key is etched in the crystal and then if you ever go back to the originating system (with your e.g. "New Carth Shillings") you can make your transaction on the local network.  Verification issues I haven't seen really tackled however.  If you want to get a bit wilder take a look at Charles Stross' "Accelerondo", where virtually captured newly discovered sentient species are used as currency by..  well I won't spoil it for you.     
 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47198.msg562168#msg562168 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47198.msg562168#msg562168)

It is a scifi parable of the history of Manhattan of first being stolen from the original inhabitants and then again stolen by the banksters.