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July 10, 2014, 07:55:40 PM |
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Since a lot of people are claiming bitcoin is going to the moon an analysis is in order to discover if this is possible, and, if yes, how much further bitcoin could go.
Fact:
The moon is between 363,104 km and 405,696 km away from earth, depending on the position in orbit.
Even at the maximum distance a radio signal will cover the distance in less than 1.4s, or ~2.7s round trip.
While a 2.7s "ping" would make fast action games unplayable it would not negatively affect transactions. Miners would be at a slight disadvantage, basicly loosing 0.45% of the mining income to signal delay (assuming the mayority of the hashing power stays on earth).
Conclusion:
Yes. Bitcoin can go to the moon without any significant side effects.
But ... can it go further?
Lets check Mars.
Fact:
The distance to Mars is between 78 million km and 378 million km, depending on their relative position to each other.
The delay introduced by radio signals thus varies between ~4.3 and ~21 minutes.
Even at the closes distance this makes mining basicly impossible. It takes 4.3 minutes for a newly found block to reach Mars, and even if a lucky miner would find a block nearly instantaneously it would take another 4.3 minutes for this new block to reach earth. Adding this up we get 8.6 minutes, not much less than the average time to find a block.
And thats at the closest distance. At the other end of the spectrum it would take 21 minutes for a block to reach Mars, or in other words, basicly two blocks behind earth. So basicly you can completely forget about mining bitcoins on Mars. Transactions arent off much better either. At the furthest distance it could easily take an hour for a single confirmation, which is pretty much a deal breaker.
Conclusion:
No. Barring discoveries such as FTL communications bitcoin is condemned to remain a local currency on a small unimportant planet at the edge of the milky way.
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