Topic: Feasibility of a separate BTC payment protocol on Wi-Fi by sattelite (Read 139 times)

Low Earth Orbit (LEO), is at least 160km above the surface... it's not a WiFi signal. It will likely be either a dedicated satellite network... most likely the same one used by aircraft providing "In-Flight WiFi" services, which I believe is generally Immarsat... or, when closer to land, 4G/5G datalinks... or a combination of both.

In either case, it will require specialised equipment like dishes/antennas/adapters to be able to connect to the satellites/cell towers...

Decentralization of the dishes owned is just as important as doing so for the satellite equipment. It's possible to host a collection of dishes without needing a company to do it on the people's behalf, if groups of people can be persuaded to include dishes in their wireless community networks, that'll easily extend the scope of bitcoin payments to everyone in the local area. Though, there aren't many community networks to begin with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region, but at least it takes care of the major locations.

If this idea catches on we might see other blockchain companies making their own satellites to compete with Blockstream as well, so at least we're not stuck with just one vendor.

Blockstream already have a satellite network that work almost everywhere, you only need a dish and a open-source decoder to use.

Also there are some companies that use the satellite technology and a Mesh network to connect to then. The network have a certain degree of redundancy and decentralization, once you can have multiples antennas pointed to the satellite and everyone with access to the mesh network can connect to this nodes, maybe te only problem is the centralization of the satellite operation (only blockstrem, from exemple). If we have multiple satellites and multiples antennas in a large network, it may work!

I'm thinking of another way to transmit transactions without requiring internet connectivity.

A protocol with its own port with which wallet apps can transmit transactions on would be very nice and increase the chances of mass adoption in places with bad or no internet lines, by bypassing the internet and ISPs entirely and using something like mDNS for getting IP addresses to satellites and then use TCP or UDP to broadcast the data, I'm not sure if the bitcoin protocol can afford to lose packets with UDP though. It would be a network that connects devices and hosts to just satellites that advertise their ports with DNS-SD (zeroconf). Since new devices are being made with ever-improving WiFi technology it would be reasonable to think that WiFi has enough range to beam traffic to satellites as long as they are low enough. (I hear yachts do it, and there isn't a separate network connectivity option on computer just for satellites so I'm going to assume it's WiFi. Correct me if I'm wrong)

This protocol won't access arbitrary other hosts except for satellites deployed in the sky which somehow relay this information to other nodes on the standard bitcoin protocol, acting like another peer essentially. I think blockstream's already started designing satellites for this so the thought of using satellites isn't too far-fetched.