Impact of large scale network disruption?

[hypostatization]

Article: Putin considers plan to unplug Russia from the internet 'in an emergency'

President Vladimir Putin will convene a meeting of his security council on Monday. It will discuss what steps Moscow might take to disconnect Russian citizens from the web "in an emergency", the Vedomosti newspaper reported. The goal would be to strengthen Russia's sovereignty in cyberspace. The proposals could also bring the domain .ru under state control, it suggested.

Article: How Hard Is It to Disconnect an Entire Country from the Internet? - 2012

[image from article]

How would a large scale network disconnect impact Bitcoin?

Disruption of connectivity between nations, based on my understanding, would lead to inevitable blockchain forks. If a large % of hashing power comes from a disconnected nation, then it seems the main network is also at greater risk of 51% attacks. Acquiring enough hashing power to disrupt Bitcoin seems greatly simplified if the underlying communication network itself is vulnerable. A malicious actor may not even need to drive the disruption itself, if ready to take advantage of the opening when an event occurs. A natural disaster may be all that is needed.

If the above is true, how could the network recover once connectivity resumes, would the network effectively be useless until that point in time, and are there any existing plans to deal with such an event?

Based on the global political climate, and recent history of mass scale outages, I find myself frequently thinking about the above scenario.

[Verse]

We would witness allopatric speciation in cryptos.

If Putin is successful we would see a hard fork based on network access between the Russian blockchain and the rest of the world. Each fork would function as an individual currency with a different exchange rate relative to its usefulness. I imagine that, should this occur, BTC's popularity/market valuation in Russia would be overtaken by an altcoin because:

A) In order to preserve wealth, aka transactions, after Russia is inevitably reconnected to the internet, Russian Bitcoin developers (do these even exist?) would have to distribute a version of the core that would refuse to acknowledge the longer blockchain the rest of the world will have at that time. After the event Russia would likely be left with a national RuBitcoin and an international Bitcoin (the "real" one), each with different exchange rates.

B) Putin could likely put measures in place to prevent Bitcoin-like entities from existing, so a specialized altcoin might likely be more resistant to attack. Also does Russia even have Bitcoin devs? They probably have a few Altcoins. Everyone does.



An event like this would demonstrate a fine form of evolution in the crypto market, I am sure. However this is working under the assumption that Russia would run a national intranet rather than shut down communications altogether. Then again, who can predict Putin? WWIII or bust.

[toleng]

I don't think it would affect bitcoin. There are both nodes and miners (and copies of the blockchain) throughout the world. If one country were to "disconnect" from the internet then the rest of the network would be able to continue to operate as normal. Both nodes and miners get disconnected for a number of reasons (they are also brought online as well).

I also don't think that the number of nodes running in Russia is even very large, they are not friendly to bitcoin as it is now so I doubt that many people are wanting to run a node from there.

[H.W.Z]

I don't think it would affect bitcoin. There are both nodes and miners (and copies of the blockchain) throughout the world. If one country were to "disconnect" from the internet then the rest of the network would be able to continue to operate as normal. Both nodes and miners get disconnected for a number of reasons (they are also brought online as well).

I also don't think that the number of nodes running in Russia is even very large, they are not friendly to bitcoin as it is now so I doubt that many people are wanting to run a node from there.

But it does affect the bitcoin development in the country disconnecting from the other counties' network.  A fork will be created in the country and all the trasactions occurring there like off-chain transaction. All the miners will be leaving the mining business. And holders are reluct to take any bitcoin payment rather to hold what they are having in case to lose all the bitcoins from the main chain. It means bitcoin is dead in that country.

[DannyHamilton]

This question was asked in 2010.

It was answered by Satoshi:

It's hard to imagine the Internet getting segmented airtight.  It would have to be a country deliberately and totally cutting itself off from the rest of the world.

Any node with access to both sides would automatically flow the block chain over, such as someone getting around the blockade with a dial-up modem or sat-phone.  It would only take one node to do it.  Anyone who wants to keep doing business would be motivated.

If the network is segmented and then recombines, any transactions in the shorter fork that were not also in the longer fork are released into the transaction pool again and are eligible to get into future blocks.  Their number of confirmations would start over.

If anyone took advantage of the segmentation to double-spend, such that there are different spends of the same money on each side, then the double-spends in the shorter fork lose out and go to 0/unconfirmed and stay that way.

It wouldn't be easy to take advantage of the segmentation to double-spend.  If it's impossible to communicate from one side to the other, how are you going to put a spend on each side?  If there is a way, then probably someone else is also using it to flow the block chain over.

You would usually know whether you're in the smaller segment.  For example, if your country cuts itself off from the rest of the world, the rest of the world is the larger segment.  If you're in the smaller segment, you should assume nothing is confirmed.

[p2pbucks]

according to  getaddr.bitnodes.io , there are only 228 (about 3.29% ) full nodes in Russian Federation . The total nodes number is about 7000+
So not a fking big deal

[leannemckim46]

I don't think it would affect bitcoin. There are both nodes and miners (and copies of the blockchain) throughout the world. If one country were to "disconnect" from the internet then the rest of the network would be able to continue to operate as normal. Both nodes and miners get disconnected for a number of reasons (they are also brought online as well).

I also don't think that the number of nodes running in Russia is even very large, they are not friendly to bitcoin as it is now so I doubt that many people are wanting to run a node from there.

But it does affect the bitcoin development in the country disconnecting from the other counties' network.  A fork will be created in the country and all the trasactions occurring there like off-chain transaction. All the miners will be leaving the mining business. And holders are reluct to take any bitcoin payment rather to hold what they are having in case to lose all the bitcoins from the main chain. It means bitcoin is dead in that country.

I believe that putin actually said that Russia would have the internet turned off 100% in Russia. One of the reasons stated was that he waned to protect the government in the event of social unrest (to stop the flow of information against the government). Therefore any node or miner in Russia would be able to connect to any other node because the internet would be "off" completely.