Bitcoin Forum

Read this article and apply Bitcoin to the writer's suggestion of having a backup plan. Could this be Bitcoin? Would it survive something as described in the article?

http://www.sovereignman.com/trends/nasa-study-collapse-is-very-difficult-to-avoid-13889/

No.

Think about it.

My $.02.

;)

Exhaustively said. Not a single currency will be able to survive it. :)

USD is world fiat reserve currency

Bitcon is world crypto reserve currency

when crypto is adopted bitcoin will be the reserve currency

So just for shits and giggles, let us say that a sunspot storm, terrorist act or mechanical failure knocks out the power grid across the USA.

Where is your Bitcoin God then?

My $.02.

;)

Then I'd say we have much larger problems than our BTC

If you are that paranoid then you might want to hoard some gold and/or silver coins, I guess. Or a bunker full of supplies.

You don't have to be paranoid. A solar flare or CME can easily take out half the world's electrical grid for months and even take years to get back to 100%. If that happened to a developed part of the world (Europe or North America)... the vast majority of wealth would be inaccessible on powedered down computers.

What's that? You think I'm nuts... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm parts of Canada were without power for MONTHS.

The one in 1859 took out large portions of the telepgrah network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

If people think you're paranoid I feel bad for them. It's a viable threat (probable?) and if it happens on a massive scale..........can you say barter system?

I don't think you're nuts. I do think there are probably systems in place to guard against this. Large banks probably synchronize their data to disaster sites... so if the northeast US got hit, they could very likely operate from their DR center in say, Arizona.

Who keeps large amounts of money sitting in the bank anyways? Invest it! A solar flare wouldn't wipe out the fact that you own property, or a business, or even stock - again provided the exchange in question had adequate DR facilities in place which I am sure they do.

If a solar flare hit that was big enough to impact the whole planet, then we would have bigger problems than worrying about whether our checking accounts and/or bitcoin wallets were affected.

You don't seem to understand. 1 solar flare or CME can take out the electric grid for a hemisphere. The damage could range from inconviencing a small area for a day or two to destroying major components of the electric grid causing continental blackouts lasting many months to years until enough tranformers can be replaced, at best you'd have rolling blackouts for large portions of the country within months and full restore not for years. This could happen at any time. Offsite backups for banking data DO. NOT. MATTER. If there is no electricity for months or longer. Most large American cities only have enough food in the groceries to last DAYS, cities like Los Angeles have LESS food than that on the shelves. Knock out power to a large portion of the u.s. via a solar event and inside a week people will be looting. If it happens during winter or the middle of summer you'll have the sick and elderly seeing a mass die off the first few days, in a month you'll likely have lots of dead rotting in their homes simply because emergency services and undertakers can't get to them to deal with the remains, this would cause more deaths from the spread of disease.

To get power restored, you'd need China to co-operate and their factories to start providing the necessary infrastructure... how are you going to pay them, you have the U.S. producing NOTHING. They might not see payment for several years. Bet lets assume they agree to ship them as fast as they can make them, and other countries start shipping over food and personnel for humanitarian effort, the U.N. steps in and handles crowd control. You are looking at 6-24 months or MORE to get the power grid back in a worst case scenario (which is still a quite probable event, sun regular has CME's and flares, they just happen to be pointing the wrong direction most of the time)... so you see 300-350 million people be reduce 10-20% just from exposure in the winter and/or summer. Hell, every single person on life support is dead in the first few days as hospital generators run out of electricity. If it took 2 years to restore the electric grid to what it was at you might see a 50% reduction in U.S. population from starvation/disease/exposure/person on person violence... all because the sun decided to aim a CME/flare at the planet one time.

Doesn't have to just be America either, could be any country or continent in any part of the world.

What good are 1's and 0's on hard drives going to do you without electricity...

Well I was trying to keep it rational but if you want to stay in fantasyland and pretend that real life is something out of a movie then go right on ahead.

You aren't the first person to think of a solar flare as a potential risk and I am confident that there are adequate safeguards in place. And to be frank, I'm just really not that worried. If things got crazy I could always pack up and move my ass somewhere safer. I don't spend my life crouching in a bunker breaking out in a panic sweat over some random even that may never even happen.

OMG OMW YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, there will be NO POWER and and CHINA WOULD HAVE TO HELP US BUT THEY WOULDN'T! THEY WOULDN'T MAN!

Take a freaking xanax. Calm down. Decaf.

There is nothing fantasy about it. It's already happened once in the past 200 years, however at the time the most advanced electrical device on the planet was the telegraph... it electrocuted some line operators, set telegraph lines on fire, etc. It will happen again, it's a matter of when not if. Period. As is another extinction level impact.

If we lose the power grid or the interenet....  People vastly vastly vastly vastly underestimate how much we depend on electricity and the web.  People still do not understand how much the web has changed our lives.  Almost all of my friends think they wouldn't notice if the net just stopped working... "Oh I just couldn't go on the chive"... This is honestly what people think.. the net is just a big toy.

If the net fails, you don't get paid, no one has any idea who owns what... if the web fails.. you better have an army, be part of one or be ready to join one.  We would go back to the era of warlords.. it would be horrific beyond what most people could ever imagine..  The "we are to advance now for......................" is a massive warning sign.

The scary part is peoples ability to defend themselves has been taken from them...  Hitler was the first to completely remove guns from his country, do we remeber how that ended?

If we lose the power grid we are talking a 90% loss of population within a year.  I mean a world wide power loss, not an isolated power loss of several months.

Paranoid?

How little you know!

Try going here:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/sun_darkness.html

"On March 13, 1989 the entire province of Quebec, Canada suffered an electrical power blackout. Hundreds of blackouts occur in some part of North America every year. The Quebec Blackout was different, because this one was caused by a solar storm!"

"On the evening of Monday, March 12 the vast cloud of solar plasma (a gas of electrically charged particles) finally struck Earth's magnetic field. The violence of this 'geomagnetic storm' caused spectacular 'northern lights' that could be seen as far south as Florida and Cuba. The magnetic disturbance was incredibly intense. It actually created electrical currents in the ground beneath much of North America. Just after 2:44 a.m. on March 13, the currents found a weakness in the electrical power grid of Quebec. In less than 2 minutes, the entire Quebec power grid lost power. During the 12-hour blackout that followed, millions of people suddenly found themselves in dark office buildings and underground pedestrian tunnels, and in stalled elevators. Most people woke up to cold homes for breakfast. The blackout also closed schools and businesses, kept the Montreal Metro shut during the morning rush hour, and closed Dorval Airport."

You were discussing paranoia as I recall?

Thanks for reading.

My $.02.

;)

Yes you are right. I think Bitcoin is world crypto reserve currency.

Time for firewood and a tent?

Safe in the block chain.  Can't say the same about USD.  Or GLD.

That is precisely the sort of event you should be preparing for.  I don't mean that channel.  I mean that scale of impact.

Probability of a Russian nuclear attack has increased by a factor of at least 20 in the past 4 weeks.

Technology is one major game changer. The technology exists today to completely revolutionize the way we live and govern ourselves.

Today’s system is just a 19th century model applied to a 21st century society. I mean– a room full of men making decisions about how much money to print? It’s so antiquated it’s almost comical.

But given that the majority of Western governments borrow money just to pay interest on money they’ve already borrowed, it’s obvious the current game is almost finished.

When it ends, there will be a reset… potentially a tumultuous one.

This is why you want to have a plan B

BTC Is Plan B and a Game Changer

Well resetting a civilization usually requires a lot of bloodshed and violence and some people saying these people are crazy don't they realize what they are doing and saying.

But in reality it really is as series of steps and hopefully we learn and get stronger as a species through the lessons we learn from those experiences.
Not pro war mind you but pro change even if its not of the violent type of reset.

In the world as it is today, a strong argument can be made for bitcoin being a viable plan B. A paradigm shift or collapse or whatever you'd like to call it, as described in your article, makes bitcoin an exceedingly less viable plan b.

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-12-04/closing-collapse-gap-ussr-was-better-prepared-collapse-us
This is an interesting article that extrapolates some of the themes touched on in your article.

Sounds like as long as we have computers/internet then BTC is plan A, not B.  :)

I got a little place like that set up in my field as a getaway. 

oh wait

It's also got a Coleman generator soz I can run my laptop.

My $.02.

;)

If we look at the rise and decline of societies, it was because they either obsoleted themselves through too much government waste and spending or they technologically or politically or economically more advanced societies came onto the scene. Food and water should be plan B and bitcoin plan C.

It would be hard to keep bitcoin going in this scenario but it possibly survive in pockets. More likely gold and silver would retain value and other goods would be bartered.