Murtaza Hussain pfp
Murtaza Hussain
@mazmhussain
I support the existence of Bitcoin as a limited opt-out from the existing financial system but one thing I do not understand is the idea that it could serve as some kind of post-apocalyptic currency amid a general social collapse. The Proof-of-Work is famously energy intensive and requires gigantic industrial infrastructure to operate, not to mention the significant physical infrastructure of the internet itself to keep the system operating. So if our current mode of government and business somehow implodes who is going to provide and maintain all that? Especially for younger people the idea that Bitcoin is real and going to stick around is already culturally ingrained so as I've said before its unlikely to go anywhere soon. But I actually see it as thoroughly part of our current system rather than a forerunner of some kind of revolution. If this system collapses, indulgently expensive manifestations of it like Bitcoin will go with it too.
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Royal pfp
Royal
@royalaid.eth
Two points, one is Bitcoin can scale up or down so you can have Bitcoin run on much less compute which would be the most likely outcome if suddenly the world's compute was diminished. Second point, it probably won't be possible for Bitcoin to meaningfully survive the apocalypse because the Internet infra/ wireless networks would be fried. It can but it's unlikely. If it did most likely there would be multiple fragmented network that would exist and they would need to be a process to coordinate merging all those forks/ one fork would consolidate at the canonical one.
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ns pfp
ns
@nickysap
If we lose the physical infrastructure and maintenance of the internet we have a lot more to worry about than whether Bitcoin is operable or valuable. But hypothetically as long as there are still a couple of nodes out there, the hashing difficulty would simply drop off to levels that make it possible to mine and find consensus on like… a raspberry pi or something. It would take a lot to completely dismantle it. Hence its attractiveness as a SoV. Shit as a medium of exchange though in either case.
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Sophia Indrajaal pfp
Sophia Indrajaal
@sophia-indrajaal
Spot on! BTC does have two real, real important things that might set it apart tho, it is arguably proof of concept of a DAO and one of the best examples of an organic one. And two, it could conceivably be the currency of a Red Mars style "calorie" based economy of energy consumption/production for the very reason it would fail post apocalypse (I mean, everything fails there, that's the whole idea of an apocalypse).
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Rando
@chasing-pointers
Gold and ammo are for when the grid fails. Bitcoin is for when local communities start coming back up. We don't need a corporate owned internet for the Bitcoin network anymore than do we for SMTP. Ham radio works fine.
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shazow
@shazow.eth
The difficulty level self-adjusts, but you are right--it would be very hard to maintain mining decentralization in a collapsed society. It mainly works if there's aggressive competition upwards. The deciding factor for relatively slow 10 minute block times was to facilitate transmitting over degraded infrastructure in case of global failures, like ham radio or satellite. This would be an amazing premise for a scifi: Society is collapsing, and a bunch of groups around the world are scrambling to take a strong mining position in the bitcoin ecosystem with random cobbled together laptops or whatever. Then at some point someone finds a basement of working ASICs and instantly takes 99.9% of the hashing power
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Catabolismo
@catabolismo
I finally got it after learning about the difficulty adjustment algorithm in btc's PoW. You wouldn't necessarily need industrial-scale levels of electricity for powering bitcoin in a post-apocalyptic world, just whatever's necessary to keep the blocks coming every 10-ish minutes.
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Cyber Paradox
@cyberparadox.eth
I've thought of this too. I think my general answer to this is that Bitcoin (or any major chain, for that matter) is very global, and the idea of a true global apocalypse seems relatively unlikely compared to merely regional disaster and/or collapse. If the U.S. collapses, Americans still have their coins (as long as they have access to their seed phrases), so if they flee or rebuild, eventually they get them back.
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Spaceman Spiff πŸŽ©πŸ– pfp
Spaceman Spiff πŸŽ©πŸ–
@spaceman-spiff
Agreed. The BTC network has already been integrated into the current financial system. It may be able to survive the shock of a titan like the US falling, but it will certainly not be immune to the effects with so much of its value tied into the system.
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adnum pfp
adnum
@adnum
It has all the potential to be anything we want it to be. At the core it is a secure ledger. As the hash rate diminishes so the dificulty to mine decreases. As low as to be mined with bitaxes. The blocks are smaller than the original fork thus it can use alternate means of communication. If the internet (tcp/ip) fails it can use LORA or satellite. Starlink on its own can provide enought coms to let the network survive. The fundamental idea was that every computer could mine it. And in my opinion everybody interested in crypto should have a miner and an eth node (forgetting the 32eth).
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