If national firewalls go up

[flug]

In a scenario where the USA puts up a national firewall preventing miners/clients in the USA connecting with miners/clients elsewhere, would the blockchain fork into a USA chain and a rest of the world chain? And if so, would my current bitcoins be spendable independently on both chains? And then what would happen when the firewall came down again?

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[BitVapes]

as I understand it as long as one node in the US could still connect to the outside bitcoin world, transactions could theoretically flow

someone will figure out a way to get through the firewall, "internet in a suitcase" type devices will be in the hands of dissident groups.

long range radio wifi links across the border to Canada maybe?

[Xephan]

How about connecting via proxy such as the TOR network for one thing?

[Vladimir]

nahh.. a few "backbone" bitcoin nodes will connect via ssh tunnels/VPN's and that's it.

They are gonna need to shutdown a bunch of satellites and cut a bunch of undersea cables to get somewhere.

In the end of the day (unlike bittorrent) we can dig up old modems and FIDO tech. As long as one can place a phone call bitcoin is going to keep working.

[killer2021]

yea we will just use proxies/tor/encryption etc. and it will all be implemented into the client. Gotta love open source.

[wumpus]

In the end of the day (unlike bittorrent) we can dig up old modems and FIDO tech. As long as one can place a phone call bitcoin is going to keep working.

+1 good old times

[jim618]

You could tunnel the peer-to-peer chat over HTTP port 80
That would be pretty hard to shut down.

[GamblingPurveyor]

I've heard that the US couldn't feasibly put up a national firewall because they have waaaay too many outgoing Internet connections.

[ctoon6]

I don't think a firewall exists today that could block bitcoin at a national or even isp level, and there wont be one for at least another 5 years a minimum. look how hard it is to block BT, this is similar to that, exept BC uses 80% less bandwidth. as said before, we could use phone modems if needed and it would still work.

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Moon Bounce. (EME)
Earth-Moon-Earth communications

This is the terminology for bouncing a radio signal off of, The MOON.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EME_(communications

Maybe, one could modify the ideas brought here http://fabfi.fabfolk.com/
with a ham radio.
Merge this with mesh networking to complete the circuit.

However if the country was very serious it could be a better strategy to bounce through a series of reflectables like planes, boats and whatever else hinted on earlier in the thread by BitVapes.

[ctoon6]

I don't think that eme would work well, it would have a lot of latency, and would still be difficult to get a signal from NA to EUR. because the earth is a sphere, it is not visible from everywhere at the same time. im sure at certain times of the day you would take advantage of this, but not all the time. for BC to work well, we need it to be up 24/7 with few times of interruptions, because in just 30 minutes the chain could fork.

[EricJ2190]

EME would be unnecessarily difficult and unreliable. It would be much simpler just to send the data over HF.

[hugolp]

nahh.. a few "backbone" bitcoin nodes will connect via ssh tunnels/VPN's and that's it.

They are gonna need to shutdown a bunch of satellites and cut a bunch of undersea cables to get somewhere.

In the end of the day (unlike bittorrent) we can dig up old modems and FIDO tech. As long as one can place a phone call bitcoin is going to keep working.

Someone could create a wireless connection from Alaska to Russia and act as a bridge. Sarah Palin says she can see the "other side" from her home...

[wolftaur]

Someone could create a wireless connection from Alaska to Russia and act as a bridge. Sarah Palin says she can see the "other side" from her home...

That wasn't Russia, it was a cerebral hemorrhage. (It's kinda hard to come up with another explanation for someone who can figure out we have elections, but is otherwise so unbelievably stupid...)

[wolftaur]

National firewalls aren't likely to have any real effect on Bitcoin, or for that matter, anything else that people would want to block. Encryption at a protocol level solves a hell of a lot of problems, for starters. And face it, if the government actually put up a nationwide firewall that worked by a whitelist (in which event encryption and the like wouldn't help) then we'd have a new government pretty soon in all likelihood... and even if we didn't, there's so many alternate ways available to send data. Shortwave radio signals might even become interesting again!

[TraderTimm]

Blockchain by short-wave? Packet Radio?

But of course, if such things come to pass we'll have more problems than just how to connect to the rest of the world.

[Xephan]

How about just via email or twitter (splitting the blocks down to fit) or msn or heck like the joke RFC TCP over Social Network using Facebook

[ctoon6]

How about just via email or twitter (splitting the blocks down to fit) or msn or heck like the joke RFC TCP over Social Network using Facebook

that's not nearly as cool as setting up massive mesh networks.

[tvbcof]

I expend some cycles thinking about attacks on the global internet from time to time.  My thoughts always seem to come back to there being a reasonably high likelihood of a successful and lasting attack under two conditions:

 1) Pretty much 100% of governments are on-board and coordinating.  Thus, if it can somehow be the case that some relatively important country or coalition of countries have some interest served by not cooperating, that would be a good thing.

 2) If countries were willing to take very drastic measures to impose their will (i.e., a bullet in the head), _and_ if life was otherwise tolerable without a free internet, I am not sure that there would be a sufficient core of people to keep a mesh network or whatever functional.  I doubt that it will ever be difficult to track down 'terrorist' who are committing the crime of communicating with one another and 'putting the country at risk.'  A country with a developed and technically competent police state infrastructure could likely do so within seconds.  I think that the best counter to this is to work on things now which would make such assertions of 'public risk' appear as clownish and contrived to the general public as they would actually be.

[flug]

And face it, if the government actually put up a nationwide firewall that worked by a whitelist (in which event encryption and the like wouldn't help) then we'd have a new government pretty soon in all likelihood... and even if we didn't, there's so many alternate ways available to send data. Shortwave radio signals might even become interesting again!

I guess I was thinking of this kind of scenario: dollar collapses, US can't repay china, precursor to WWIII is a cyberwar, national internets bolted right down, diplomatic pull back from the brink, national internets reopened after 7 days closed, everyone happy again. Will there be lots of national blockchains suddenly competing against each other for the longest one?