Topic: According to Nick Szabo “Bitcoin Could Survive Nuclear War” (Read 327 times)

You mentioned correctly and that's why blockchain technologies add an extra layer of protection to information which is stored. But who cares about bitcoin when huge part of us can't survive during nuclear war? I think in any way such case won't happen cause decision isn't only made by one crazy person and usually magic happens behind the scenes, not by the mannequin which you see.
I am amazed, people discuss about things like banks will fail to operate and bitcoin will rise, cmon man.

Ofcourse it will. especially if a nuclear explosion is local or in few places. I wonder though if emp (NEMP) from nuclear explosion will affect data in computers or storage devices like normal electro magnetic pulse would do.  Anyways, the pulse has to happen globally to have the chance of wiping out the entire blockchain.

That's for sure. Even if the ability to maintain the network and use cryptocurrency is technically preserved, in practice it is unlikely that anyone will be interested in it. After a global nuclear war, people will face the challenge of survival. Therefore, everything will be appreciated above all the material that is associated with this. And it is unlikely that after such a war the Internet will still exist. In such wars, communication disappears first of all. Nuclear war will actually mean oblivion for cryptocurrency.

The point is not that after the nuclear war the corresponding nodes will remain and it will be possible to maintain the Bitcoin network. After such events, a reassessment of values ​​will necessarily occur. Part of the world's population will disappear, the climate will change, the so-called nuclear winter will come with a sharp cooling. Items and things that will help people survive will be appreciated, and probably no one will even remember about cryptocurrency. This is even provided that the Internet will continue to work, which I very deeply doubt. In general, after a nuclear war there will be no time for cryptocurrency and because of this it will not have practical value.

The whole bitcoin network and blockchain system is decentralized and split between all the users of the network, and it only exists and operates using the internet and that is one of the main reasons that most people are still using physical money rather than using digital money and crypto, so in case of a nuclear war the blockchain will survive unless it is a mass war where all the systems going down and no internet than the physical money will be the only option.

right, there are a huge number of scenarios that affect the overall outcome very differently.

If Europe was attacked on a large scale, the global internet becomes very damaged. A huge amount of global internet traffic is routed across the Atlantic and through the Middle East/Eurasia through Europe. Under-ocean links through Africa-South America, maybe from Iceland through Scandinavia (although that's kind of an easy target) might survive in optimistic scenarios about attacks that destroy Europe. If there are any pan-Pacific links, I doubt they're particularly high bandwidth or varied in route.

But if Paraguay suddenly revealed it's secret nukes and went rogue, I think the problem wouldn't be so serious, although there'd be alot of people in Brazil/Argentina/Uruguay that'd be kind of pissed off with the outcome.

If the US, Russia or China went nuke-happy, well, good luck everybody. The threat of any one of them doing so serves as basically a veto on any decision made by anyone anywhere in the world, because there's just so little that anyone can actually do about it, there is no way of handling it other than finding somewhere good to wait it out. Internet? Forget it.



The source code is overlooked in it's importance. I doubt it's as well distributed as the blokchain itself, and there isn't an efficient & automated distribution mechanism for the code either. Github really is a terrible model overall, hopefully Github will start interfering in repos and/or censorship soon (a likelihood now that Microsoft bought it), it'll push everyone towards a decentralized git solution.

Yes, why not? We have a decentralized network with nodes in very remote locations. A Nuclear attack are usually targeted at cities with a high concentration of people to increase the damage, so they cannot take out all the nodes that make up the network.

There are even copies of the Blockchain stored in underground bunkers, so the data (Blockchain history) will be safe, even if the physical supporting infrastructure are destroyed.

Let's compare this to Banks and other financial industries and their centralized databases that are stored in centralized data warehouses in large cities and you will realize that the distributed ledger of the Blockchain are more secure than these institutions.  

Nuclear war is a war that is feared by many people of course, maybe when that situation happens everyone will go crazy and it is very difficult to survive because for some people they certainly don't think about bitcoin even though they might have a lot of bitcoin what else at that time if they cannot access it anymore, because at that time they only need their own safety.

As long as someone has a copy of the Bitcoin source code, they can continue to run a node and continue to maintain the network.

It is possible to wipe out the blockchain however. If there isn't anyone keeping a copy of the blockchain secure (from nuclear attacks and to protect it against possible EMP blast), the blockchain could be wiped out. If that happens, all of the transaction history would be gone and Bitcoin would start again from square one. If the blockchain archive lags behind the network by X blocks, the transactions after that would be gone too.

survival is not about someone somewhere storing the blockchain (aka the history) on an offline computer!
survival for something such as bitcoin is continuation of block generation and a healthy number of nodes spread across the globe.
of course it depends on the scale of such a war, would it be a single nuke dropped in a small country or will it be a global nuclear war between the big countries that already have a huge nuclear arsenal?! in my opinion a nuclear war is going to be global even if it starts with a small one, others would join in to wipe out the rogue country who launched the attack to protect themselves. a global nuclear war that could not only take lives but a lot of the infrastructures could easily mean wiping out computers, electrical grid and the internet itself. there is no bitcoin left in that scenario to want to survive!

There are people who hold all the transaction history of bitcoin is like a huge hard drive or something, and a lot of people store the entire blockchain on their devices, so it would survive, sure, although it's more so surviving as a relic.

Because it wouldn't be able to be used. If something catastrophic happened, we aren't going to end up seeing a lot of people using bitcoin, the internet and a lot of useless technology would be abandoned and there would be a focus on a lot of more essential items.

It has the potential to survive, but the real essence of suriving it will not be upon the structure and performance of bitcoin, but through the people who will continue utilizing it after a nuclear war. More of, they will prefer to transact using material things such as gold, silver, or other goods that could be traded when time comes that a war could stop the internet services. It depends, if people will still continue using crypto after all.

It's going to survive in a sense that a few copies of the blockchain will inevitably be retained, and that it can still be used like nothing happened afterwards. Granted, its survival might not mean shit depending on the scale of the nuclear war, but it showcases Bitcoin's resiliency nonetheless.

But yeah, if a nuclear war does break out, Bitcoin will probably be the least of our concerns. There are studies which suggest that even a small nuclear war could have catastrophic ecological impact.

The data of the Bitcoin network is well stored but that doesn't mean the medium of Bitcoin transactions is going to available after a nuclear war. At the bare minimum, you're going to need an internet connection to relay the transactions over the network. No doubt after a nuclear war the infrastructure to relay Bitcoin transactions are going to be decimated. Just because the network data persists does not mean the network will survive. It's an internet currency, do we really expect anything different?

That is a fact and that is the power of decentralization as all the copies are stored around the globe and it will survive a nuclear war.

The communication sector will be partially affected but i do not think that the entire system will get affected even during a nuclear war as the entire blockchain data will be stored somewhere and even in a worst case scenario.

yeah right. if there ever is a Total Nuclear war I don't think Humans will survive. Even the ones who survive would have their days counted. The Bitcoin network would be completely shut as there would be no miners left the process transactions. So, Bitcoin would become useless. Even if the Bitcoin network survived I don't think there will be humans for long to use it.  

well it's equally obvious that the caveat to this scenario is "assuming there are human survivors"



well, assuming there are survivors (), it'd be unlikely that all internet infrastructure would have been destroyed, but of course communications lines are typical targets of all-out war. And optic cables already handle the main routing of today's internet that wouldn't be affected by nuclear fallout out EMP. The electronics that send and process the signals wouldn't survive, but the cabling would be intact and functional.

Having at least some long-distance fibre cables with fried electronics wouldn't be such a terrible starting point. All that's needed is to try to come up with a way of reproducing or mimicking the dead electronics (which would be otherwise preserved in the same physical state as when it still worked).

As mentioned above, lack of internet could lead to delayed transaction and hence unusable blockchain but if you still have an active internet which could even be possible as we have seen internet has been a priority of war struck zones, a nuclear war may boost bitcoin use. Bitcoin is the stability in chaos. We have seen it's use increase in troublesome condition like in Venezuela and Zimbabwe. And also when countries are isolated economically like Iran and Russia.

You guys are getting everything about Bitcoin wrong. How possible is Bitcoin gonna survive nuclear war when it is a digital currency which operates with the help of the internet? What if the internet is shutdown during a nuclear war, how will you be able to make transactions since internet is a basic requirement to make a Bitcoin transaction?  Personally, I don't really think the assumptions made by Nick Szabo regarding Bitcoin survive nuclear war doesn't really make sense to me. He does not have any reasonable argument to back his claims.

I don't think internet would be affected by much. Even if there would be period of bad connection/main network cable cut, it would be fixed.
Its communication not only for civilians but also military and spy agencies (one of many).
If there would be total blackout, bitcoin wouldn't be anyone problem, banks would fail to operate also, gold would be king then and guns.
But this is fantasy, this will not happen.