Bitcoin Forum

 
 One known cataclysm that could make the whole interruption of all the telecommunications but also every electricity network is a Major big Solar storm that hits the earth!

 But what about Bitcoin..? In such case the bitcoin network would be paused, not all at once., some nodes before others.. Gradually, following the interruption areas of the internet!
 However, after all is reestablished, the normal life resumes and Bitcoin actors want to relaunch the Bitcoin network..  So first: not everybody have the same copy of the blockchain as some nodes continued recording after the others got interrupted !  And what if some entities wanted to fool the word creating completely artificial blocks and adding them to the blockchain ?  How to trust a copy of the blockchain then ?  Do all late copies should not-trusted/canceled ??


 So what of a code would be part of Bitcoin protocol and that would depend on that the network is running that could sign blindly the blocks.. (Putting like a seal on them), include in the blocks a cryptographic signature that works like authentication signature ?

The node with the longest chain will be considered valid in case of such events so any node that doesn't follow it's signature will be rejected by the network. And how it is determined not involved in any dubious activity is exists within the network, the hash of the previous block will be present in the upcoming block making the connectivity unbreakable and tamper-proof.

Anyway, let's wait for the experts to comment on this. ;)

Such shutdown will never be possible, you know why? It will not happen because every sector needs the internet and the electricity. What can possibly happen is the increase in electricity bill which will be an increased cost for miners. Can the whole world go one day without telecommunications and power supply, it's not possible and would not only affect Bitcoin if by chance such thing happen.

Your idea of a built-in signature is basically what blockchain cryptography already tries to do. It doesn't magically solve the problem of a complete network shutdown and potential malicious actors afterward. You'd still need a way to pick the "good" chain after the chaos.

No, not the longest chain is taken as the one to follow as valid but the chain with the most accumulated chainwork. It is an important difference!

If all miners were honest (remember that we don't need to trust them to be honest), then the longer chain will be the one with the most chainwork. But again, length is not necessarily the main criteria to choose the valid chain to follow.

You could've a longer chain with less chainwork compared to a shorter one that accumulates more chainwork. All nodes will follow the (shorter) chain with more chainwork.

It would be too expensive to maintain and implement because of difficulty adjustment
Especially if the black out doesn't last long.
And even if they are able to bypass the difficulty adjustment
Once everything is back online
Offline nodes would sync to the last honest blocks
And as more comes the POW gets higher than the fake block mined.
Most POW wins not first come first served.


That's what the dinosaurs said
The thing is anything can happen. There are lots of things in the universe we still don't know.
 

In a scenario of such magnitude, there should be a "day zero," meaning that regardless of whether half the planet remains without power, Bitcoin should cease to be used, and when it is restored, it should compensate from that point of failure. This way, you avoid 51% attacks or blocks mined at a low difficulty, which would be disastrous—like accidentally putting a product on sale at a low price in a supermarket.

The idea would be that periodically, the Bitcoin network would "mark" a block as a secure reference point. This marked block would act as a global consensus on the state of the chain at that moment. In the event of a catastrophic event (such as a massive blackout or a 51% attack), the network could restart from the last marked block, thus avoiding issues like chain reorganization or mining at an incorrect difficulty.

I don't code, but I don't see it too hard.. The idea is of private (Keys)/ID wich would be built "blindly" inside the Bitcoin protocol (that nobody will know/have access to (blind signing)), and that will depend on many factors of the correct running of the network to appose a seal/Auth. signature over the blocks .. At least will have the blocks (signed), and may btw the way wright some records of activity and so that could help in a case of a reconstruction !

According to Google, cable on sea are mostly safe from big solar storm[1].


That entity still have to produce valid block. It means attack they could do is limited[2] (e.g. creating empty block), while requiring lots of ASIC due to high difficulty.


Trust? Full node software automatically verify whether the block is valid or not. And as stated by other member, node eventually will choose chain with most work after telecommunication problem is solved.


Authentication signature? There's no such thing on Bitcoin protocol.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/are-internet-subsea-cables-susceptible-to-solar-storms (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/are-internet-subsea-cables-susceptible-to-solar-storms)
[2] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/662 (https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/662)

I think it would be good if you start it by explaining what damages can Solar Storm cause to earth in more details but let's take significant solar events as an example. As far as I know, even in the events of significant solar storms, the whole world won't lose the electricity and internet fiber optics will be safe (correct me if I'm wrong). So, since Bitcoin is decentralized, it will survive because some countries will have electricity and they'll be able to keep Bitcoin nodes and miners running. Many people all over the world have solar panels, they'll also be able to run Bitcoin nodes but I think that trading will take a huge hit because these platforms might close for a while and price might significantly crash.

By the way, I'm sure that Bitcoin itself is safe. Even if someone tries to use the advantage of the situation and fork Bitcoin, it will still be safe because every bad action can be reversed once the whole world will return back to normal life.

One thing to keep in mind that if such a thing happened, BTC (and just about everything else) would be worthless.

Everything is so interconnected and needing of the internet that without it there would be such a fundamental change in the way the world operates that things like BTC would not matter.

With that being said take a look at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/169nmlr/the_1st_user_to_propose_to_send_bitcoin/
and
https://prepperpress.com/how-to-send-bitcoin-over-ham-radio/

But at least we could live in The Vaults

https://www.gamesradar.com/fallout-season-2-release-date-cast-prime-video/


-Dave

No internet in the 60s and We sent a man to the moon.

🌖

The biggest issue would be feeding people. as we had less than  3 billion in 1969 and more than 8 billion in 2025

There were systems in place back then that did not rely on the internet.
Back then banks spoke though their own internal systems and such. Today they all talk through the net.

Same with phones. 95%+ of all telecommunications at some point or another cross the public net. If all of a sudden the internet and phones and banks stopped that means just about everything else did too.

So worrying about BTC at that point, nope would not matter.

-Dave

Yes, but as you said, without electricity it worth nothing!  Even if is there some protected structures that will exploit fiber optics, there will privilege to use it to serve iportant communications first than the ordinary Internet!

Yep, it can make down electricity networks, burst any electronics... the most past known and reported event is the Carrington Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event).. But bigger solar eruptions can occur and were observed, in November 4th 2003 an eruption even too big that saturated the measuring instruments were observed, initially estimated to be X28 class it was after reevaluated at X45!





I remembre around 2014 or so a website offering to buy empty used (addresses/wallets) ..  If they do it in a limited network, they will be not in need of very high ressources/hardwares !  (or no?)




And if they are the only actors of the/that network ??




I didn't say there is, It will need to be added !

Interesting discussion Danydee, this is a topic I do not share too much knowledge with so it is interesting to read up on it.

I presume the outcome will heavily depend on how much of the world is disconnected from the internet and for how long.  Also, does this include an electricity drop or are you imagining a scenario where only the internet goes out?

The difficulty is way too high for most of the miners to be able to mine what I call 'evil' blocks.  It will take a significant time to mine a block, which slows down any attack simultaneously.  So if the internet is down for a short while, I suppose no real consequence will be possible and if there was an actual attack, it may be found out in due time once the internet status is restored to normal.

A question I have is what happens if only the internet drops but miners continue their work while different areas of the world come back online at separate times, not all at once.  If mining farm A does the most work but comes online a day after mining farm B which although online is still very behind with the work, what happens?  Do the Bitcoin nodes follow farm B and then move to farm A a day later?

Allright, my consern is about the hypothesis of whole Internet get disconnected  ... A too huge solar storm could cause this in addition to the breakdown of most electrical infrastructures and damaging many electronics!  In this case, after while, the Bitcoin network will have to be restarted from a long interuption.



Good point..  Even if we link (that authentification) to the fact that the network is running at this sole condition, it could be faked if running the (BTC) protocole on a fake reduced network built to achieve the rigged blocks), so maybe could it be formed on a POS protocole in conjoncton with many other condition-Factors ...? or maybe also making an automated diary grouping many vital informations, diary of activity, network power and activity, online actors identifying, noticied changes... n then including this informations hash on the blocks, so even in case of rigging tentative there will be a diary that relates all the activity.. the miners themself forced to host/or ensure the hosting of the diary so the blocks will only have the hash that is added!

It is impossible to predict what we should do because it first has to happen and we first have to see what the situation and the damage is then decide. For example unlike what other users said (follow the chain with the most work) I'd say that rule is for normal times but in case of a catastrophic event, such rules no longer apply. Not to mention that in certain scenarios you may not be able to convince others to give up their chain even if it is the one with less work. For example in case global internet is shut down but locally the miners continue communicating with each other and grow their chain and that lasts for a long time (like months or a year). They will never roll back so many blocks and bitcoin would effectively be split into many chains...

I would still argue that if the internet breaks down, we'll have more serious problems than what happens to Bitcoin. But I understand that this isn't a satisfying answer. So I'll try to elaborate beyond that.

Hypothetically: no internet, but somehow magically power network is still in some decent shape (unlikely scenario, though).
Bitcoin nodes can't talk via internet with each other, no software updates can be distributed or published. Bitcoin miners are isolated and it doesn't really make sense to work on an isolated chain, because every miner would work on an isolated chain and risking that some other miner's chain could be the heaviest (PoW-wise).

The miner with the biggest hash rate available at one single geographical spot (not needing internet to pool hash power) would be in an advantageous position. They could possibly mine the heaviest valid chain and be sure it will survive when nodes get reconnected again.

All isolated miners would mine more or less "empty" blocks (only with a coinbase transaction) or with some (silly?) own transactions because no other nodes can provide pending transactions to go into a mempool.

In such a hypothetical situation it doesn't make much sense to me to continue to mine as long as nodes can't talk with each other.


From my understanding of Bitcoin (if I'm wrong, I'm more than happy to be corrected) the current protocol has no really working things to cope with a major disruption event that would shatter the current network hashrate or connectivity issues (network connectivity is beyond the scope of node software, that's another layer).

Current difficulty needs a global hashpower in the ballpark of 820+ EH/s to produce on average one block per 10min (more accurate 2016 blocks per two weeks). Difficulty is only adjusted every 2016 blocks.

Worst case would be a major disruption just after a difficulty adjustment. Assume after a major global disruption event the global hashrate is only 1/10th of current and can't ramp up for whatever reasons: the next difficulty adjustment would take on average 20 weeks, every block would be mined on average after 100min in the difficulty period after "the event".

The next difficulty adjustment can't drop to 1/10th of current, because adjustments are currently limited to max. 1/4th on the low side and 4x on the high side.

If Bitcoin had to deal with some major disruptive event that severely changes global hashpower some node software fork would be required to cope with this quickly.

Sorry, but i fail to see correlation between high mining difficulty and old empty used address. Difficulty isn't affected by what address you use to receive mining reward. Can you elaborate further?


They still need to create valid block, otherwise current full node on that network would reject it.


It looks like i misunderstood your earlier statement. But such addition will add debate such as,
1. It may introduce some centralization.
2. Risk of the private key (used to create authentication signature) got leaked.

And in the opposite case? Where the blackout occurs before the difficulty adjustment.

In the case that a blackout affects the majority (60%) of the nodes and leaves only 30%-40% functional, and this happens right at the moment of the difficulty adjustment, it is highly likely that consensus issues will arise. The remaining 40% could continue producing blocks at lower difficulty, but the chain generated during that time might not be accepted by the 60% of nodes when they come back online.

I still consider the best option to be implementing a checkpoint system, where certain blocks are regarded as global consensus "anchors," for example, those ending in double zero. This could potentially mitigate these situations, creating a fairer environment than simply waiting for things to resolve naturally, which would undoubtedly lead to controversies.

Since we do not know who will be affected, nor when or for how long it will happen, if 60% is interrupted for any reason over a prolonged period, you could always return to the checkpoint established prior to the failure. This would eliminate the need for risk-taking, code modifications, forced adjustments, or entering an unfair situation where bifurcations are debated and lead to significant financial losses. It is not only possible for a catastrophic science-fiction-style scenario to happen but also something akin to the 2010 bug, a vulnerability, or a cyberattack.

My thought is that on a closed reduced "fake" network, even some old Laptops could do the job !  ??  (like just connecting some machines on a single room and tricking the code to think is Internet)!

The *addresses could serve to create just some fake transactions to just fill the blocks to blur the clues, so to fool future watchers ..!






Yes, here is the idea.. it is to use the whole structure, with many departments=conditions, to work like a fingerprint to authentificate /sign, ...
do the cryto-keeys could not be implemented blindly .. using such protocols: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature ??

My take on this is that most likely it would resolve naturally.

Sun storms only last a few hours according to an article I recently read. I don't know exactly how solar storms work but I assume that the part of Earth which is exposed to the Sun at this time will be affected most, but the opposite half will have parts which should be almost unaffected. So if we're not completely unlucky and that unaffected part is just located in Antarctica or the Central Pacific or so, then there will be at least some subnetwork ready to still run Bitcoin, even if they wouldn't be able to mine many blocks during that time.

The big problem imo would be to prevent an 51% attack if the low-difficulty phase really lasts longer than two difficulty periods, but it would also be very difficult for an attacker to realize it in such conditions. But the risk would be a little bit higher. It would be most sensible during that time to rise the number of confirmations to a very high number (100+). This would of course make Bitcoin less usable but it wouldn't be its "death".

---

If the 60% are isolated from another during the outage, then they cannot produce a longer chain than the 40% which are functional. So they will have to accept the 40% chain. The situation will not be that much different from 2021 when the Chinese miners shut down, only faster. Even if the 60% come back online at the same time (highly unlikely), they won't have created any or only very few chain work so they can't "override" the work done by the 40% functional miners.

Mining doesn't work that way. The network size is irrelevant. The relevant parameter is the individual hashrate of each miner compared to the difficulty. Difficulty determines the number of zeroes the block hash must have. And finding a block hash with that many zeroes at the start like now, is very difficult, and only big mining farms can do it constantly and in reasonable time.

Thus, if the difficulty is high, not even if you are completely on your own you can create "fake" blocks with lower difficulty. It may be extremely lucky to find one block hash with the necessary zeroes at the start, but that's very unlikely.

Filling the blocks with fake transactions would not make any difference. Empty blocks can be perfectly valid and they would also be somewhat expected in the doomsday scenario we're speculating about :)

Edit: Or do you mean there could be a way to "reverse" the SHA256 process starting from the block hash, i.e. "fake" the hash first and derive the fake data from it? This is also (to my knowledge) not possible without major computational effort, see for example this thread on Stackoverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55872745/can-we-reverse-second-sha256-hash).

Thank you for your great explanations, it is more clear now  :)

I should admit I have no much technical knowledge on how the Bitcoin network work, I was just wondering what could happen if the whole internet shuts-down.. I was thinking that then some manipulations could happen!





That's not according to him: ( https://youtu.be/GKAyGvHGTyA?t=432 ,  https://youtu.be/TgBJ-w9HSRU?t=254 ).. I'm not sure how reliable this is. Many of the events he claimed to predict and actually took place were predictable, just from intelligence information !!

I've read some more articles and while I haven't been able to find anything about the regional reach of such an event like in 1859, there are indeed networks which could be more affected and others that not. The main problem would be undersea cables due to their reliance on repeaters, and then also long land electricity connections could be affected. This means that "global" Internet could indeed be cut into several subnetworks. But densely populated areas with many short fiber optic and electricity connections would be the least affected because they don't need repeaters.

One of the articles I read mentioned Europe as an example for a network which could stay largely intact, but I guess other examples for such densely populated areas could include the U.S. East Coast, the Chinese coast, Japan, Nigeria for example (Nigeria perhaps has the advantage that they know how to deal with electricity outages :P). Considering the mining concentration, if this is correct, I guess the U.S. miners on the East Coast would become the dominant force as they could mine largely without interruption. Probably the Asian mining farms (#2 currently after the US) would not even bother to mine during that time even if they're locally reconnected to grid and (regional) internet as they'd know they'd be "overridden" by the US miners.

We could then expect that the southern and western US miners would be "trickling in" first, when the overland connections are restored. I don't know if the Texan miners would be able to mine more on their subnetwork than the East Coast miners. It's possible, if they are re-connected fastly, that they could produce more chain work than the East Coast miners because they're more, and thus there could be a "fight" between Texan/ERCOT and East Coast miners. But it would eventually resolve. Then once the undersea cables are re-connected, the Asian mining networks join again. So the recovery would be gradual and only at the start of the process I'd expect some problems for the Bitcoin network.

There will be numerous copies of the blockchain hosted locally by many full node runners, and when problems are resolved, the network will organically continue from where it was stopped, assuming there is a total stoppage of the network. Any wrong-doings coming from this weak period will simply be ignored once the network goes back to normal. If there were people doing 51% attacks and double spending and whatnot, once the hashrate goes up back to normal, than there will be a fork and these blocks will be useless, people will mine on the end of the chain before there were any exploits, so it will continue from were it left. This will happen organically.

This is also why blocks shouldn't be too big. We must keep as many copies of the full blockchain stored on our devices as possible. Everyone should be running a full node, not some lame fake mode node also known as "pruned mode". Pruned mode just means, once you need a backup of the blockchain, you will not have it. So invest drive space and host full nodes if you care about Bitcoin.

If that time was like a day then your speculation could be true. And it wouldn't even matter if they didn't stop mining since it would be rolling back a day's worth of blocks (a couple of dozen).

But in my opinion such a problem is not going to be solved overnight and because it takes a long time, the miners anywhere won't stop mining just because someone else may have a higher hashrate. Bitcoin would definitely split into multiple chains as various miners continue growing their chain and later on they would certainly refuse to roll back what they've mined after connection is restored since we could be talking about weeks worth of blocks (hundreds).

Of course that is speculative, but the approximate hashrate of the different subnetworks should be known according to the data immediately before the split. If it's close to 50:50, then you may be correct that both sides probably would continue to mine, and there'd be a bit of a "clash" when the networks re-unite. But if it's something like 30:70 then I believe the minority subnetwork miners would better wait. Their "service" would also not really make sense, because after a re-unification all transactions would return to the mempool.

I think it could also be possible that the minority subnet miners would try to do everything they can to re-connect to the majority network. Perhaps they would set up a satellite or shortwave broadcasting system from a fullnode operating in the majority network, and vice versa. This fullnode would then send blocks from the majority network and receive blocks from the minority network. While they would be in a disadvantage due to the increased latency, it would be still better than not mining at all.

This could lead to the interesting situation that the Bitcoin network could re-connect even earlier than the general Internet. The good thing is that small-block Bitcoin would allow to do such things, while big-blocker altcoins like Solana would have much more trouble with that situation.

This would require a hard fork. I don't think that the price convolutions after such an event would be worth even a couple of weeks worth of rewards.

In addition, I believe that on the chain which at this moment is to be believed the minority chain -- be it in Asia or the US -- exchanges and merchants would probably not accept mining rewards and thus the miners would sit on them until the network reunites. I think the payment network would very much come to an halt.

So I think the scenario outlined above, the minority network trying to re-establish connection via any means to the majority network is much more likely and it would be also better for Bitcoin as a whole.

The more I think about it, it gets more interesting while still being speculation. As I see it actually the mining pool who knows or thinks they have the largest fractional hashpower compared to other potentially isolated mining entities, they have an incentive to continue mining blocks on their own. Remember, mining costs energy and thus money.

An isolated miner who's not sure to outcompete other miners likely won't have his mined strand or branch of blocks to survive a reunification of the network. If you know you likely will loose your gamble, why start it at all. Smaller miners likely gain more by not mining until reunited with the majority of the network.

The strongest miner has the incentive that his branch of newly mined blocks may likely be the one that is accepted by the reunited network as the branch of blocks with the most accumulated PoW, making it the only accepted continuation of the blockchain. All blocks would be owned by that single most powerful miner. An unique opportunity, indeed, worth the gamble!?

Merchants are unlikely to accept any payments during such a time regardless of where they are. But exchanges will definitely accept those rewards. We've seen this a couple of times in the past when the centralized exchanges created new markets for possible fork coins that didn't even exist. Like the B2X thing back in 2017 https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/223

This is why I believe the exchanges won't hesitate to create a market for coins on both sides of a chain split and that would put a price on those coins making "reuniting" that much more difficult specially if the chain split were to get too long.

Yes, approximately that's what I think will happen, only that I think that even if at the start of the event miners may be completely isolated one from another, after at most a week there would already be larger subnetworks which are able to connect. So yes, I would expect that at the start several miners and/or pools would try to get the big reward ... however, they still are bound by the pre-split difficulty, so the reward would not be that much higher than if they had competition.

You may be correct here actually, and yes, I remember such cases from the past too ... However, what I actually meant was that exchanges and merchants wouldn't accept these coins as "Bitcoin". The forkcoins or "potential forkcoins" would probably be worth much less.

But yes, it is likely that if the exchanges manage to set up their business rapidly again, they would be eager to accept such an opportunity to create new means for speculation (and that's what they benefit from most ...).

Maybe the best option for the miners on the "minority" networks would be indeed to prepare a swap to a new blockchain to fork into if their chain doesn't get accepted as the "canonical" Bitcoin chain. Or, if their subnetwork is already known to have a much lower hashrate than another one (e.g. if we talk about current European miners), to fork directly into a new altcoin (to benefit from a lower difficulty) and mine that one.

I guess however that the reunification on the "Bitcoin" network would still be quite straightforward. While it's possible that the regional chains fork away and survive as altcoins, miners would eventually try to mine on the main chain again to get a full-fledged Bitcoin reward, because it very likely will be worth much more. And I still think the scenario of the minority-network miners trying to compete via alternative communication channels is also likely.

A Carrington-level solar storm (X100+) wouldn’t wreck everything the same way—some stuff would get hit harder depending on where it is, what tech it uses, and how backup-ready it is.

This monster storm’s index was off the charts, somewhere between -850 to -1,050 nT (nanoteslas). For comparison, the 2003 Halloween Storms peaked at -383 nT, and the 1989 Quebec Blackout hit -589 nT. The Carrington Event was on another level.

Back in 1859, this thing was so wild it lit up the sky with auroras as far south as the Caribbean (around 10° magnetic latitude). That kind of light show only happens when the sun throws an absolute tantrum a massive solar proton storm slamming into Earth.
Roughly four times stronger than the 1956 flare (which was around X30), so yeah, X100+ sounds about right.

Undersea Internet Cables have repeaters (boosters every 50–150 km) that hate geomagnetic currents (GICs). A Carrington-level storm could fry a ton of these, slicing up the global internet.

Result? The internet splits into regional bubbles. Europe might stay connected internally but lose links to the Americas or Asia. Places like Australia, islands, and Africa? They could get totally cut off.

Fixing this? Not quick. Replacing fried repeaters takes weeks to months—there aren’t many repair ships, and manufacturing backups takes forever.

But honestly? The internet going down is just the start. The real nightmare? Supply chains collapsing—no GPS, no shipping, no fuel deliveries. Basically, modern life grinds to a stone age.

Of course the supply chains would be affected, but is the dependancy on Internet and GPS "that" high that they would collapse completely?

I'd believe that people would very fastly switch to some kind of backup communication system, like shortwave. That's what I also think could happen with Bitcoin (see above), although perhaps not immediately. And while I'm not an expert in seafaring, I think to command a ship, your professional instruction should still include non-GPS methods. Yes, large-scale electricity blackouts would be a challenge but from my own experience with such events it wouldn't take too long to re-establish service.

My own interpretation is that it would be slightly worse than Covid, chaotic in the first week or so, but also faster to recover.

Agree with the rest of your post - that's also what I read roughly about the effects of such events.

But who exactly should mark the blocks? Who would assess whether such a mark is valid or forged? Who flips the off switch? Who decides when to turn it back on and how to "make up" for lost time?  You are proposing a centralized kill switch in a decentralized system - its a contradiction in terms.

well here's hoping we miss out on a first hand experience for this event.

I do think that if it caught the world and satellites correctly we could lose 2 thirds of the satellites but there is still a lot of hard wire cabling and I wonder what it would do to the fiber optic cables under the seas.


@ stalker its a none issue as to which block if 66% of the nodes are knocked out along with 66% of the hash. the rest of the blocks would be 3x slower in time with only 1/3 of the gear on line.

if it was day 1 of a new epoch it would take close to 30 minutes a block and the develops would likely set s top after under 20 blocks were made which would take more than 10 hours time. Since a ton of gear is off line.


to amend this if it were day 13 and 144 blocks to go that would take 3 days not one and the next diff would drop about 2/14 in number.  but I doubt they would let things run longer than 10 to 20 blocks.

User @PortBy plagiarize this post.


So your question should be directed to @mcdouglasx instead. As for idea of "mark" a block, i guess it could be as simple as choosing block with 2000 block height lower than most recent ones.

When the whole world have big problems with complete Internet shutdown, there are globally issues that bigger than Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin network. It can possibly be a catastrophe or even more terrible than that, like an apocalypse and massive living organisms on Earth will be at very high risk of extiction.

If the future is not too gloomy like this, Internet won't be shutdown globally, and from cable Internet, we will be able to use alternative Internet like Satellites.

Bitcoin blockchain will continue moving with new blocks and Bitcoin mining will continue solving new Bitcoin blocks and transactions.
[Total privacy Bitcoin]: off grid Transactions LoRaWan/goTenna. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5230202.0)

Yes, but if we avoid the worst-case scenarios, there will be a sure return to the nomal life.. That is the point !

Reviving the topic, the case of the "electric zero" in Europe intrigues me.

I'm curious to know how it impacted users during the massive power outage, primarily in Spain and Portugal.

Although the scenario did not show tension in the market, this could give us a small sample scenario if information from those affected is collected.

Power grids won't fail simultaneously, around the globe. The only real risk is more to satellites, really.

Lets approach this from a physics side instead;

If the earth is hit by a solar storm that is energetic enough to blow away earth's magnetic field and knock out every single electronic device,
then in that case, my greatest worry would be about my broiling skin, not my Bitcoin stash. But that is unscientific.

Yes, powerful solar bursts are possible but Earths magnetic field is quite an amazing "shield". Most very powerful CME's can compress it for a little while, at most.

Edit: Now a nuclear war... That would likely kill the internet as well as all the humans.

Not really . A world wide blackout of,all electronics would mean huge disasters.

It may even mean the chain could be erased.

So the real question is does a paper printout exist?

You can wipe all digital out with the right energy so did anyone print the block chain?

You're kidding right? You know how many millions upon millions of pages it would take? Even if printed out - have fun re-entering the data back into digital form....

How should that happen? What could possibly trigger my nodes to fry or erase their storage in the context of a blackout event?


Who knows? But I doubt that someone was that crazy. (Just in case: make the printout reliably machine-readable with enough error correction stuff so it can auto-correct scan and ocr errors.)


C'mon, seriously? That sounds a bit far fetched to me. I can't prove it, but it's highly highly unlikely that any digital copy of the Bitcoin blockchain worldwide could be erased within a short timespan.


You're probably kidding, too.

There's computer technology for this, humans make too many typing errors. I'm old enough to have typed in hex listings for some machine code stuff on my Z80 powered home computer some decades ago. It's unlikely to avoid typos for even very few KiB of such stuff. You quickly learn that you want to have checksum bytes to quickly spot typos on-the-fly.

LOL, printing the blockchain... that's so day before yesterday. Burn it on archival grade optical media or something like that.

Someone for sure has offline backup media of the blockchain, too. I have monthly full backups with a retention time of one year with the previous from current month's copy stored outside my home. The town I'm living in would need to be obliterated to loose a copy, but then I'm gone anyway if I'm not on travel. And if some energy blast or alien death-rays would erase my backups, I'd have to worry about a lot of other stuff happening than about the blockchain.

Someone could just store whole blockchain on data on long lasting storage such as M-Disc or LTO. You also can store those storage on secure location with proper protection (including EMP protection). But it feels like we're talking about post-apocalypse scenario.


Probably no, unless you count people who print genesis block and use it as decoration.


Not if you use QR code or other machine-readable format :P.

Bitcoin would be completely fucked, the only thing more fucked would be the users.

Bitcoin is not designed as an apocalyptic, non-electricity work. Those scenarios are mad-max like and in that scenario not even gold will be relevant since most likely the world will be ruled by thugs that go around terrorizing people to steal resources. Bitcoin is for developed societies that may become increasingly tyrannical against financial freedom and freedoms in general. You don't want to end up without an alternative to CBDCs and Bitcoin is that, and as it stands, it's the only real alternative. In this context, Bitcoin remains undervalued since this is not priced in.

Oh yeah, because before the internet, we were all just grunting in caves and clubbing each other, right? LOL!  The rule of law didn't suddenly materialize with dial-up. It's almost like societies functioned perfectly well for millennia without the ability to argue with strangers on Twitter. Shocking, I know. So, no, the internet going down wouldn't magically turn us into Mad-Max like society. Some of us might actually have to, you know, talk to each other face-to-face again. The horror!  :D

My point was the op is pretty ridiculous with the question so I was more ridiculous with my reply

I think you guys do realize that my point is who worries about the entire block chain being halted and no internet>

I don't  worry which is why I do not have an ultra super protected blockchain on paper or a node.

Or on multiple hard drives.

kind of what happens to the blockchain if the sun goes nova?

who cares  ;D