So, in this recent videoNeil Woodfine is talking about how Bitcoin will withstand an attack on the Internet infrastructure we have learned to rely on for so much in our daily lives.
How realistic do you see the assumptions being made here? While I agree that having for example ways to connect to the Bitcoin network via satellite is better than not having it and it certainly is useful to people in places like Iran, Egypt, Turkey etc. where the Internet access gets restricted by authorities at times of public upheaval... - if one day some powerful nation/nation-like entity like the U.S., China (just see what happened around the recent NBA-related censorship... - pleasing Beijing matters these days if you want to keep the $$$ flowing) or even the EU decides to force the satellite providers to suspend those services to Bitcoin-related companies, this part of the infrastructure is likely also going to fall away.
Unless we start launching our own rogue satellites which might just be shot out of the sky by then...- not a "space expert" here though; so I hope somebody who dived deeper into the matter can possibly explain how relying on Satellites as backup helps us to make the network sufficiently antifragile when "the shit *really* hits the fan".
The internet is very hard to shutdown completely to begin with. Made to withstand nuclear blasts, it was designed as a military network without a central point of failure. As they say, "the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it".
For the most part, States can cause harm to their population in attempts to isolate it from the rest. If politicians had it their way, they would all be like North Korea, which is essentially a glorified LAN where only the approved content gets copied in.
But the good news is that not all countries are willing to accept this level of police state politics. And as long as they exist, the internet (and Bitcoin) will. Those living under oppression will have more difficulty, but with difficulty and skill still able to keep connected. Tools like Tor were designed for this very purpose. Even if it needs to be thru "hidden" services, the network will go on. Indeed there are many nodes there.
Satellites are pretty much useless for many reasons. Sure you could get an updated blockchain, but what about your own transactions? And can you even hide the antenna? Just pointing the thing is incredibly hard. Maybe those low orbit satellites from the likes of SpaceX and Google can use a simpler antenna, but so far the classic method which is similar to a satellite tv service is way too difficult for the average Joe (and if you have ever pointed your own sat tv, you still don't have the skill to do the same for a sat uplink, because that's only the first part, the "easy" part). Oh and imagine smuggling the parts in, it reminds me of smuggling asic miner parts...
Its not impossible, to have a "snapshot" of the blockchain, take it to an offline site perform some transaction, and later broadcast it when you get online. I think there is a BIP for that as well. imagine a bus that only gets connected at bus stops to update its transactions.
The unreliable link scenario is the first more common use, and this would simply extend that. Of course this still needs internet, just not all the time. You can in theory use other networks, but the world has far abandoned the idea of networks outside of Internet, because they would recreate the single point of failure problem. You don't want anything you can knock out and shutdown.
Oppressive governments naturally hate this freedom of information flow, of course they are also going to get the freedom of money flow.
