Bitcoin would be perfect for inter-planetary trade

[paraipan]

@BTCurious thanks for your extensive response man, actually i managed to derail the topic "a little", sorry guys, to me this subject is fascinating

Like you say BTCurious we have lots of unknown things in today's world. Let's try not to close ourselves into a shell made by laws made after observing the surrounding environment. After all we're all here doing something unheard of or that resembles magic, trading digital tokens for goods or services.

Try imagining yourself trading bitcoins in the medieval times, you could get hanged as charlatan, or go back only 70 years, you could be put in a medical center for a few years. What i mean is that we slowly evolve and start taking things as granted while they were discovered or observed by us only a few hundred years back. What we will have in the future is up to other discoveries we make.
Cheers man.

[BTCurious]

Yeah, I like seeing "tidbits of future" around me, or if you look closer, whole swaths of future (the internet, for one).
But yeah, my main point was that we don't really have a way to do ftl blockchain synchronization yet, and that there's no science available at the moment that lets us do so (except maybe if you want to synchronize between Geneva and Gran Sasso ).

[siggy]

Thinking about it some.. I really don't believe you'd have much of a forking problem, at least at a solar system scale.   Realistically the majority of hashing power will be located here on Earth for the forseeable future.  With that caveat, it'd almost be guaranteed the longest chain would always be the Terra chain.  You are looking at the same 51% attack scenario... in order for a serious fork to happen, you'd have to have close to 50% of total network hash capacity located a significant distance away from Earth.  Actually, for just about any real non terra based mining, you'd have to have a huge investment to start up or you'd be guaranteed to always lose on the longest chain contest.  I can't see this happening.

Sucks for those Martian miners.  But their only chance to make any dough would be a mars-coin branch.

Sigg

[Revalin]

We Martians cannot allow a single entity such as Earth control 51% of the network.  We have no reason to question your intentions, but the network's integrity is too important to allow such a situation to happen.

[paraipan]

We Martians cannot allow a single entity such as Earth control 51% of the network.  We have no reason to question your intentions, but the network's integrity is too important to allow such a situation to happen.

lol, democracy at it's best. Then you prefer to have a local currency (chain fork) and have money changers, or speculators, profit big time ?
or use the same coins when you buy your Terra Playboy Calendar from the Internet or take a vacancy to Earth ?  

[gewure]

what i first thought when i read the title:



what i now think after reading some posts:

[CoinSpeculator]

Thinking about it some.. I really don't believe you'd have much of a forking problem, at least at a solar system scale.   Realistically the majority of hashing power will be located here on Earth for the forseeable future.  With that caveat, it'd almost be guaranteed the longest chain would always be the Terra chain.  You are looking at the same 51% attack scenario... in order for a serious fork to happen, you'd have to have close to 50% of total network hash capacity located a significant distance away from Earth.  Actually, for just about any real non terra based mining, you'd have to have a huge investment to start up or you'd be guaranteed to always lose on the longest chain contest.  I can't see this happening.

Sucks for those Martian miners.  But their only chance to make any dough would be a mars-coin branch.

Sigg

I feel like there should be some ratio between distance and required hashing power to determine fork probability.  Like if Pluto is 300 light minutes away, if you had 3.3% of the hashing power (10/300) you could have a realistic chance of getting a block beforehand and creating a Pluto fork.

But what this forgets (and you seemed to intuitively understand) is that earth is going to be continually sending those blocks about every 10 minutes, overwriting any short forks that may arise.  Essentially this will make it impossible to mine the farther from earth you are, unless you are large enough to then become the primary node.  It will also take 600+ minutes to confirm any transactions on Pluto.

So yes, and large fraction of distance from the primary network will make mining useless, unless the new locations approach 50%, in which case there is serious chance for the two locations to be 2-3 blocks out of sync and completely fork.

This seems to intuitively support the idea of multi-layers of bitcoin.  One that has for example a 1 day average block creation to transfer between worlds.

[hashman]

Thinking about it some.. I really don't believe you'd have much of a forking problem, at least at a solar system scale.   Realistically the majority of hashing power will be located here on Earth for the forseeable future.  With that caveat, it'd almost be guaranteed the longest chain would always be the Terra chain.  You are looking at the same 51% attack scenario... in order for a serious fork to happen, you'd have to have close to 50% of total network hash capacity located a significant distance away from Earth.  Actually, for just about any real non terra based mining, you'd have to have a huge investment to start up or you'd be guaranteed to always lose on the longest chain contest.  I can't see this happening.

Sucks for those Martian miners.  But their only chance to make any dough would be a mars-coin branch.

Sigg

I feel like there should be some ratio between distance and required hashing power to determine fork probability.  Like if Pluto is 300 light minutes away, if you had 3.3% of the hashing power (10/300) you could have a realistic chance of getting a block beforehand and creating a Pluto fork.

But what this forgets (and you seemed to intuitively understand) is that earth is going to be continually sending those blocks about every 10 minutes, overwriting any short forks that may arise.  Essentially this will make it impossible to mine the farther from earth you are, unless you are large enough to then become the primary node.  It will also take 600+ minutes to confirm any transactions on Pluto.

So yes, and large fraction of distance from the primary network will make mining useless, unless the new locations approach 50%, in which case there is serious chance for the two locations to be 2-3 blocks out of sync and completely fork.

This seems to intuitively support the idea of multi-layers of bitcoin.  One that has for example a 1 day average block creation to transfer between worlds.

Yes, well if you are travelling interstellar distances you probably won't be concerned with waiting a few centuries for block confirmation.  Once every few galactic rotations somebody might find a block of even greater difficulty than the long count block.  Difficulty adjustment for this layer will be slow    But what should the reward be?  Hey pass that over here.   

[Realpra]

Haha nice thread.

I doubt there will be that much interstellar trade, most things would be done locally.

Even with inter system trade I think different systems would be used for on-planet and interplanetary trade.

Innovations could always be traded though and while individuals might not live long enough, families and various empires might trade before dying.

Since maintaining the block tree would be so hard on galactic scale, I think they would just trade innovation streams directly though.


Unless we make mini wormholes and manage to communicate or even travel through them of course.

[hashman]

Haha nice thread.

I doubt there will be that much interstellar trade, most things would be done locally.

Even with inter system trade I think different systems would be used for on planet of interplanetary trade.

Innovations could always be traded though and while individuals might not live long enough, families and various empires might trade before dying.

Since maintaining the block tree would be so hard on galactic scale, I think they would just trade innovation streams directly though.


Unless we make mini wormholes and manage to communicate or even travel through them of course.

  Yeah, superluminal travel would change the protocol a bit.  I like the idea of trading innovation streams.  Some authors like Neal Asher have wormholes and coins which are etched crystal or memory of some sort, presumably some private key is etched in the crystal and then if you ever go back to the originating system (with your e.g. "New Carth Shillings") you can make your transaction on the local network.  Verification issues I haven't seen really tackled however.  If you want to get a bit wilder take a look at Charles Stross' "Accelerondo", where virtually captured newly discovered sentient species are used as currency by..  well I won't spoil it for you.     
 

[cbeast]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47198.msg562168#msg562168

It is a scifi parable of the history of Manhattan of first being stolen from the original inhabitants and then again stolen by the banksters.