Print out of the blockchain. LOL. If there is an issue with electricity BTC dies instantly and no one will give a damn about them when they can even find gas,food or water.
[E]MP = DEATH lots and lots of death. The panic alone will make everyone and anyone in the area of effect either loot,move out fast or wait until the bad guys with guns come to take your food, water, life, etc.... In the first week alone do any of you have an idea of how many people will die because they cant refrigerate or get the medicine they need. Dialysis anyone? It could and likely would take weeks for any help to arrive. NO ONE will give damn about funny money or the internet.
This. Bitcoin won't survive a global EMP, the internet won't, the modern world won't, hell even current nation states won't. Integrated circuits are in everything. A hundred million people will die almost instantly billions as society breaks down. Some from the initial failure, lots more from starvation and disease, and violence and war.
Imagine an EMP powerful enough to warrant a paper blockchain hit globally right now. The first thing is that the internet is toast. Not just your PC but hundreds of billions of dollars in switches routers, network interconnects, datacenters, etc. Gone. Turned into scrap metal. Rebuilding isn't going to be easy. Guess what is used in semiconductors FABS? Yup integrated circuits. The FABS that build computer chips need computer chips which will also be destroyed.
Ok so we can live without computer right? Well it goes way beyond computers. Integrated circuits are a critical component of everything from communication systems, to the electrical grid, to transit systems, to the water supply. They will all fail massively, catastrophically, and simultaneously. Planes will literally fall out of the sky, and every major highway in the world will turn into a parking lot but not before killing tens of millions of people. The electrical grid will acts as an giant antenna and huge amounts of current will cause it to tear itself apart. If lucky, nuclear powerplants will SCRAM hard and be idle for a lifetime, and if unlucky will meltdown due to a combination of uncontrolled decay heat and widespread equipment failures which overwhelm even triple redudant systems. The imbalanced grid will collapse and the world will go dark except for the electrical fires everywhere, from destroyed transformers, and powerplants. Restarting it will be impossible without replacement parts on a scale never seen in the history of mankind.
All that will happen almost instantly but the failure of society will take longer. If you have any pressing medical condition more complex then setting a broken bone your fate is probably already sealed. With the transit systems down hospital will run out of supplies quickly and then people will start dying like they did two hundred years ago. Once the fires start they will burn out of control. What are fire departments going to do? Send fire trucks down miles and miles of streets clogged with cars that won't start? Get water out of fire hydrants with no functioning pumps. Whole cities will burn to their foundations.
The big killers will be starvation and disease. Cities will become graveyards in a matter of weeks. The average urban area only has enough food to feed the population for a couple weeks. That is everything, the food in homes, in stores, and in distribution centers. With transit, electrical and water systems in ruin the never ending stream of consumables into a city will stop, as will the never ending stream of waste out. Without a functional water system, lack of sanitation means age old killers like dysentery will burn through the populace (weakened by malnutrition and over reliance on antibiotics) like a biological weapon.
Governments will try to restore order but it will require martial law. I don't mean call out the national guard because there was a hurricane I mean executing "enemies of the state" by the tens of thousands in the street. It won't be enough though at least not on any large scale, although pockets may maintain some level of order in a police state. Modern nationstates with hundreds of millions of people can't survive on a pre-industrial technological base. Troops and police will desert by the thousands to return home and protect their families.
The strong will band together and take resources from the weak. Our modern society can't survive significant supply disruptions so for the first time in a century there really won't be enough to go around. Not enough food, not enough water, not enough scarce resources (medicine, shelter, good tools, etc). The strong taking from the weak ensures some will die but some will survive. The surviving people will abandon the urban areas (graveyards) that are a product of a technology base which no longer exists and move back into rural areas. The human race will survive and in time society will rebuild itself starting back at city states (a stable political structure which can operate at a minimal technological level).
If anyone finds a surviving printed copy of the blockchain (under the corpse of some nerd who's skull is caved in by a cinderblock) they will either use it to wipe their ass or burn it to stay warm.
Nope, Bitcoin won't survive a massive (and unlikely) global scale EMP or other end of the world type event. Bitcoin can survive temporary outages but it is a product of a computer aged civilization and if that civilization dies so will Bitcoin.
I suspect that after an "earth-level" EMP, bitcoins, gold, paper fiat will all become useless as currency. People will quickly revert to trade in the things they need to survive: weapons, ammunition, fresh water, food, building supplies, etc.
I think you've forgotten why money appeared in the first place: because the guy with ammunition who wants fresh water can't trade with the guy who has ammunition unless that guy wants fresh water.
Maybe in a couple decades or a century after the event. In the short term your dilemma is easily solved. The guy with the gun puts two rounds into the chest of the guy with the water and now the guy with the gun has a gun AND water.
