Topic: How do we deal with an internet blackout? (Read 6791 times)

A good post and comments over at Schneier on Security:

Dictators Shutting Down the Internet
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/dictators_shutt.html

Oh, I don't doubt that we will see them in time, because they certainly do serve a role.  I think that we will see light clients like this that are tied to a trusted full client, whose job it is to load spendable transactions upon the light hardware client that are deliberately spendable in ways that do not require (or often do not require) a change output.  Thus allowing the light device to forget about the spent transactions, because it no longer has a vested interest in them at all.

Damn! Poor Greenland! Must be some awful dictatorial despot up there, keeping a tight seal on internet access, and ruling with an iron lutefisk  

Being an offline client like the one I outlined does not require much memory. 32 bytes for a private key and roughly 100 bytes for each unspent transaction output and 500 bytes for each full transaction, or something along those lines. You can go far with 1Mb flash memory which is nothing these days. I think we will see them within the next year or so if the market demands it. The tricky part is to make it sufficiently tamper resistant (not android phones) and cheap.

That's an interesting map, but it suggests to me that the  size of the geographic area that a particular border incloses might have more to do with the diversity of the cross-border Internet connections than government interference.  If one were to do the same thing examining individual US states, would the diversity be as high?  Also, this map almost cannot include all the pathways, since many of the smaller ones are privately owned by corporations.  This is pretty much how tor can puncture the great Internet wall of china, and exactly how we can reasonablely expect that bitcoin might be unstoppable.  It's not that those slower connections have to be discovered, it's that someone still knows about them, and deliberately moves to take advantage of them when necessary.

EDIT: It's probably got more to do with population than even geographic size.  Otherwise Iceland would be much better.

That's pretty much what a bitcoincard is supposed to do, but it doesn't have the memory for a full client.  An android app could do it using ad-hoc wireless or regular wifi and a piratebox as a hotspot.

To be honest, if there is an internet blackout I believe there are more pressing problems than spending coins. At least for me.

However, let's assume that you have a secure hardware device with built-in radio, that allows you to communicate securely (short distance, authenticated communication) with another device of the same kind, and that device does not allow you to export/import private keys. Then you could do multiple secure transactions from device to device for days or months before finally syncing up with the network.

This could be useful in areas without mobile coverage, such as most of rural US

Rural Area United States

From EconomicPolicyJournal - http://tinyurl.com/cyx8dl6:

Which Countries Are Most at Risk from Internet Disconnection

 Syria recently shut-off access to the internet in its country. This was fairly easy to do because only two firms provided internet service in the country.

James Cowie of renesys writes:

    The key to the Internet's survival is the Internet's decentralization — and it's not uniform across the world. In some countries, international access to data and telecommunications services is heavily regulated. There may be only one or two companies who hold official licenses to carry voice and Internet traffic to and from the outside world, and they are required by law to mediate access for everyone else.

    Under those circumstances, it's almost trivial for a government to issue an order that would take down the Internet....

    With good reason, most countries have gradually moved towards more diversity in their Internet infrastructure over the last decade. Sometimes that happens all by itself, as a side effect of economic growth and market forces, as many different companies move into the market and compete to provide the cheapest international Internet access to the citizenry...Here's a map of the world, with countries colored according to the Internet diversity at the international frontier. We did a census, from our own view of the global Internet routing table, of all the domestic providers in each country who have direct connections (visible in routing) to foreign providers.

I've been looking into running a Bitcoin node on the Hyperboria CJDNS network. The network currently runs on top of the Internet, but it is designed to not depend on any specific underlying network.

Of course, to do this correctly, we would need to get "bridge" nodes that connect to nodes on both the Internet and on CJDNS. Miners would need to connect to CJDNS if the Internet blacked out, but as long as there are bridge nodes between the networks, it would work without miners connected directly to the CJDNS network.

CJDNS is currently under heavy development. It's extremely interesting, very disruptive, and I highly recommend that you look into it if you're interested.

CJDNS Wiki page
Github page
CJDNS info site
Hyperboria website (the actual CJDNS network)
Project Meshnet

True. I guess I meant in the sense that if it needed to run automatically in an emergency, there would already be a pool of knowledge, a reference implementation, and compatible nodes. Otherwise/normally it would just be for experiments and QSOs. Maybe upgrading APRS WIDE to a bigger mesh and a protocol that can operate globally would be a good start.

Well I never mentioned nuclear war. IIRC it was modelled after the original American colonies that could not be conquered easily by the British. Because each state had an independent militia, taking over one state had little affect on the overall campaign. I can't comment on the claim of a former director. It was built on the ideas of many brilliant people with many diverse ideas. I would not discount any claim as being partially true.

The wiki page on D-Star is very interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-STAR



And the section on D-RATS.

What does an Icom ID-1 typically cost? (edit - According to google, around $1000 US)

Compression is not likely to be worth it, and can violate ham rules against encryption.

"Automaticly" isn't really what ARRL is into promoting.

Yes, but keep in mind that your talking about transmitters in the 10's of kilowatts using commercial quality gear and very tall, low angle biased tower antennas.  In order to travel farther than 300 miles, the signal must be able to bounce off the F level of the ionosphere repeatedly without losing too much signal to be picked up by common receiver gear.  IMHO, start with a NVIS setup in order to get a good single bounce.  Keep in mind, a 300 mile radius is a lot of area.  If I did that in my home city near Louisville, Kentucky; using commonly available ham gear and a max PEP of 1500 watts, my signal should be clear from Chicago to Atlanta.  The same setup in Frankfort, Germany should be able to cover from Paris to Prague and Amsterdam, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and maybe Milan.  It's not necessarily more cost effective to set up a full power shortwave station intended to wrap the planet compared to several well placed NVIS transmitters using gear at ham power levels.

Codec2 http://codec2.org/ is the open replacement for AMBE. Sounds (literally) quite promising.

Transmitting the Bitcoin headers on HF would be fun... It seems like the ARRL should be pushing hams to invest in a long-distance mesh packet radio network; even if it was slow, it would provide an incredibly useful service when required. Think of a new generation the radio 'nets' and Field Day setups for that can operate automatically, 24/7. Maybe it would get more people into amateur radio as well. 

Sounds like within reach of modem speeds but don't know if shortwave can handle that. Is compression useful or is it already compressed. If not already, it seems like it should crunch down quite a bit.

If you want to transmit whole blocks, you are looking at 1,000,000 bytes every 10 minutes.

Isn't short-wave the radio that can transmit around the world? When my grandpa was visiting USSR from Ukraine, he brought a shortwave radio with him, and was able to listen to his news stations from back home.

All of this reminds me of those "mysterious" numbers stations that the CIA used to transmit info to spies. I wonder if the same thing can be set up with Bitcoin, transmitting the most recent mined block around the world every ten minutes?

Also incorrect............. (wikipedia after verifying references)

"Although the ARPANET was designed to survive subordinate-network losses, the principal reason was that the switching nodes and network links were unreliable, even without any nuclear attacks. About the resource scarcity that spurred the creation of the ARPANET, Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director (1965–1967), said:
The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them.[13]"

lets face it, in the last 5 years an earthquake off Taiwan  and a few chinks in a fishing trawler,took down the  Asian side of the network for a few hours.