Aside from HAM radio and the internet, what else do you think will make a suitable transmission medium for the blockchain?
This is a very interesting issue indeed to which I've given considerable amounts of brainpower lately. It happens to be a question I've worked with before when designing emergency communications systems and alike.
HAM would be great as a backup system in many ways, and very limited in others. First of all it's half duplex, i.e. data can move only one direction at a time. All coins in existence today use TCP as their transport layer, and TCP relies heavily in two-way connections. This combined with the fact that a typical speed for a HAM based data connection is anywhere between 300 - 2400 BAUD (anyone remember what BAUD is?
means the transfers would be extremely slow. HAM can and most definitely should be part of the backup plan, but other options are needed as well.
Basically any system that allows transferring data (preferably in full duplex) would be usable as a backup. Solutions that would only be usable as long as at least part of the infrastructure work include mobile data, satellite phones, old school modems, or any Internet based service such as e-mail, irc or ssh. As long as the Net is even partially functional, Tor and I2P can help a lot since they can go around the routing limitations and breakages of the "normal" routing topology - at least up to certain extent.
Hack based systems that would only work over short distances could include ideas such as having two laptops with web cameras pointed at each other, and the data being transmitted by encoding it as a series of blinks displayed on the screen; i.e. white screen = 1, black screen = 0 etc. Doable, even easily, but only works over rather short distances.
The more exotic light based solutions include communications using laser bounce from Moon; i.e. the data would be encoded in laser light that would be pointed to the Moon, and the reflection being read by the receiving end. If both ends have all the gear then two-way connections would of course be possible. This, however, is rather sci-fi stuff - doable and it has been done already, but it requires very expensive gear and lots of expertise.
Since a complete catastrophe that would totally blow out the electricity and the Internet is less likely than something that would only cripple them, even the most simple solutions including Tor with perhaps some modem based backups could save a lot. All that is needed are few well networked "bridges" over the communications gaps.
Altcoin.Center's addnode seed network is one attempt to come up with a backup system that can cope with at least certain level of Internet breakdown. Our seed nodes are connected to each other using a handful of backup channels, although they are all depend on at least some level of Internet connectivity to remain. If something happens that brings down the whole net (or the very high quality server systems where our nodes are hosted) then the situation is probably so bad that block chains are the last thing to think about. However, in a scenario where problems would be in the scale of 90% traffic between US and Europe being lost, solutions such as our addnode seed network could save the day.
We're currently at a beta test phase, hosting a handful of chosen altcoins on our servers. More servers and more currencies will be added shortly, and the network will also be providing backup communications systems in the form of P2P backed up IRC network etc. If anyone is interested in participating by, for example, maintaining a seed node in his or her area, please PM me. We're not getting any money out of this and maintaining the servers do have costs so all kinds of support is warmly welcome.
- Jyri
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Altcoin.Center
