Blockstream Satellite coverage:
https://help.blockstream.com/hc/en-us/articles/900004174286-How-do-I-find-out-if-my-area-receives-Blockstream-Satellite-coverage-[.,..]
It’s not fast. Best estimates I can find for IBD from Genesis to tip run about a month (see below). The point is to make it feasible.
my internet sucks majorly bad and it would take months, many months, to dl from genesis. my inet is so bad and the full blockchain stored locally so important i have it backed up so many ways (raidz2, raid5, portables drives, internal drives i rotate etc, all stored in many places) it borders on ridiculous.
Saturating one’s downstream bandwidth (thus probably being unable to do anything else) for “many months” sounds totally infeasible for real-world use. Note that in addition to the question of time to sync, the satellite takes the load off of an Internet connection that may be metered/expensive, and that may be needed for other things! It doesn’t sound like “visiting the local library” to mooch hundreds of gigabytes of their bandwidth is much of an option here, either.
In the past, I’ve run on hardware that takes weeks or a month to validate/index/reindex (CPU and IOPs bottlenecks). So...
Your estimates of bandwidth are not very useful. The v2 satellite system uses special encoding to compress the blockchain transmission. This is reversible, so you wind up with the same data that you would get from the Internet. Here is a highly informative post from Greg Maxwell (nullc) about the encoding, dated 2020-05-04; I don’t know if anything has changed since then:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/gdlk46/were_excited_to_announce_blockstream_satellite_20/fpif0ni/^^^
The thread contains further interesting discussion, including some brief comparison of Blockstream Satellite to Starlink.
A quick non-Google web search found this blog post from 2021-10-03, also published in
Bitcoin Magazine:[...long description/instructions for setup, with photos and screenshots...]
Conclusion
After I get the blockchain synchronized, I plan on setting this up so that my other Bitcoin nodes will continue receiving blockchain data from my satellite node over my local network during an internet outage. But because I'm strictly downloading from satellite signal, this will take roughly a month or longer to get a full sync. That is why I think this is a good stopping point for this guide and I will follow up with shorter guides on useful things you can do with a satellite-connected receiving node.
Also published at: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/guides/how-to-run-a-bitcoin-node-from-satelliteThe same author also has such things as
“Bitcoin Home Mining Network Privacy”. I have not reviewed. It may be interesting to reach out to him for updates on how his satellite setup has worked out, in real-world usage.
Another guide I found (warning: on a retarded webhost that blocks Tor):
https://www.alexanderjsingleton.com/goldeneye-running-bitcoin-from-space-with-blockstream/My searching/browsing just now turned up some other interesting stuff, about
using Bitcoin totally off-grid: Blockstream Satellite for receiving the blockchain as bulk data—mesh networks for anything that needs two-way communication. Will not link, because I am getting way out of my depth. I know some people who do mesh networks; perhaps I should take this as an opportunity to learn.
vapourminer: I do know of some things about LoRaWAN, alternative sat systems for other purposes (not useful for receiving the Bitcoin blockchain), and other things that it seems you would probably find very useful. Not an expert—could give pointers and DYOR leads. Feel free to ping me if curious.
The file option is actually interesting to me. The ability to broadcast data over a wide area for effectively a low one-off fee could have interesting use cases, [...]
I observe that it is a way to broadcast a message to a
completely untraceable recipient. To send the message, your Internet connection could still be traced if Tor is broken, or whatever; but there are various specialized scenarios where message
recipient anonymity is the top priority. Compare dead-drops, or old-fashioned alt.anonymous.messages.
uh, you guys do know im lazy af, right?
ill get right on that after a nap. priority one.
hahahahahaha jk
realistically i have always been interested in it. if i ever do give it a shot i will post it here for sure.
I do NOT want to ask any potentially private/revealing details about your circumstances. But I have a feeling that someday, you may find this very handy. Even as a backup for your multiple backups of the precious, precious blockchain.
Happy to help.
thanks. might take you up on that some time.
Poll
