Bitcoin Forum

So in some future may it be near or far away;
A Star Ship sets its path to some planet in the Alpha Centauri Galaxy STAR SYSTEM where they plan to do a 5 year survey, to then return to earth...
They use the common blockchain currency of earth some form of derivative from bitcoin that has taken over the world in a near or faraway future.

Once they return to earth, what would happen to all the inner ship transactions since the nodes within the ship and on earth would not be able to coordinate if they are more than 10 light minutes away?

Please assume that upon the StarShip return, earth is still alive and blockchain currency protocol has not been altered.

EDIT: Alpha Centauri is a star system composed of 3 stars... wikipedia

It will be possible to split and merge it, easily.

Like if you have 20 usd. You give 10 usd to one child, and 10 usd to an other child. Later on, you can ask both of them what they did with the 10 usd and know exactly how much they have, and how much they spent.

Wat?
Nodes accept themselves with a time difference up to several hours.
Even a block can have a timestamp of 2 hours before the previous one.
The funny thing will be the giga fork... Better put some checkpoints.

At some point blocks will have the same timestamp cause of time dilation

Because of time dilation, 100 years may pass on earth time, but only something like 20 years may have passed in StarShip time.
So when the Star Ship returns, there would be a gap within the timestamps of both blockchains.

If you're advanced enough to have ships going so fast as to experience noticable time dilation, you're advanced enough to have abolished all currency and barter systems centuries ago, cause your unlimited power source provides for everyones needs.

*because
*everyone's
FTFY

1) All nodes don't mine.  It would be beyond stupid to try and mine on a starship with minute long latency. 

2) Bitcoins can be used off chain.   If for some reason you needed "Bitcoin spending money" far away from earth the crew would simply escrow their funds and then use an off blockchain transactions.  When the crew returned they would be paid their final balance from the escrowed funds.

I was thinking more of a wage type system. The crew would have to be a live in social enviroment considering the length of the mission.
Escrow is one solution, but they would have to trust the the entity that functions as an escrow.
I am thinking that entire families would go on the mission and create a city in space type of deal, for such a long mission to be successful.

AHH! You beat me to it! I was thinking about starting a thread with this topic, it would have been my first! Heh!

Has anyone read Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood? I believe it might address these points. I think it does mention Bitcoin, and has to do with interstellar forensic accountants. Also the concept of Fast and Slow money. Which is sort of how I think of fiat (fast) and Bitcoin (slow). Don't know if this jibes with Stross's book, which I need to read, soon.

The Lightspeed Barrier. They don't break it in Stross's book, and we may not break it ever (but I hope I am wrong!). Even for a colony on Mars, our own backyard, the lag can be IIRC 3 to 23 minutes. Or even longer, if we have to wait for it to emerge from the other side of the sun...


Excellent. In effect there is also a timelag when we have paper wallets. Not the same, but...

Help me understand this.  Assume no mining is done.  I could still broadcast a transaction from Mars, right? It would take several minutes to get to Earth, and terrestrial miners would then include it whatever block they are working on. Once the block is made and broadcast, I would receive it with a delay, and would be able to check the validity, broadcast it locally, etc. Where is the problem?

Right. But think of it as LOOONNNGGG confirmation time waits. If that’s acceptable, you’re golden.

But in the OP’s scenario, is it not just as if we have a Daughter Blockchain until communications are re-established? It should be possible to re-integrate the chains, since no transactions will occur between the ship and Earth during transit, so no worries about time stamp correlation.

I guess the same thing could pertain to Mars-Earth transactions too.

Sometimes I amuse myself by wondering how Bitcoin would have worked during the Age of Sail, when ships were incommunicado for months or years at a time. (Mining with Abacuses! Babbage Engines! Slide Rules! Anachronisms!)

With the coming interplanetary Bitcoin community, we are heading back to that situation!

Assuming you have no problems paying for the intersteller bandwidth and waiting an extended amount of time there is no problem.

But as you can imagine it would be kinda dumb to record the payment for every cup off coffe on Mars, on the Earth blockchain.  Instead it is highly likely Mars would develop an alt-coin.   Transactions between blockchains would be rare but could be accomplished.  Most people probably never would do it directly rather they would rely on a broker agent who has both access and funds on both chains.

Say you are no Mars and wanted to buy some land on earth.  All your currency is in Mars coins and the land cost 100 BTC.  You would find a broker who would give you an exchange rate, say 18 MRC for 1 BTC which includes their fee/markup.   You would pay the broker 18,000 MRC, they would pay the land owner 100 BTC.   The broker could prove the transaction was completed by giving you the tx id from the "EarthCoin = BTC" blockchain.

While it would be possible to use a single blockchain across vast distances it really would make no sense.   Given the improved utility it is highly likely other currencies would be created to better serve the needs of the users.

We may even see the same thing on earth with a lot of mundane tx going off blockchain.  This could be in the form of private ledgers or in the form of alt-chains which serve specific niches or even geographies. 
   

Well thought out. I sure missed some obvious points. Thanks for pointing them out. Wonder if there are some parallels to be applied to Earth alone re: Alt coins?

Don't spill the beans... this will be a business oportunity some day. Interplanetary cross-chain brokerage.

Guess where I quit reading.

I'm sure he meant "Star System", not Galaxy. The nearest star system is 4.3 l.y. away. Andromeda is, well, if you can just wait a billion years or so, it's going to collide with us anyway...

Taxing my memory, but I think there's already a galaxy intersecting the Milky Way.

I knew about the dwarf galaxies, and the clouds, but didn't know about this one. Pretty cool!

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cms/cpg15x/albums/userpics/canismajordwarf1.jpg

My Bad

I'm kind of disappointed you didn't know that, Dave