pull down to refresh

Once humans have the ability to settle elsewhere in the solar system, if bitcoin adoption continues to grow, then we can expect to see a major changes to the bitcoin ecosystem.
Mining requires a lot of energy and so far we've seen those with the cheapest, most abundant, usable energy stack the most sats. In fact, you can make up for outdated equipment if your energy is cheap enough. If humans settle outside of Earth, then we'd have the tech to run mining equipment in space running on solar power.
If there are colonies on Mars and in the asteroid belt then roughly half the time they'll be on the other side of the Sun from the Earth, so it seems natural that mining equipment would organize centrally in a tighter orbit around the Sun. Those closest to the Sun have higher energy densities and lower latencies between nodes and would have the lowest average latency communicating with the various colonies around the solar system.
Whoever can manufacture the most mining rigs and deploy in a tight orbit around the Sun, would have the most hashrate, so if bitcoin continues gaining value like it has in the past then we'd expect an arms race to capture sunlight. Could this motivate the construction of a Dyson sphere [1]?
In this scenario there are likely far more humans than we currently have and therefore much greater demand for on-chain settlement. Due to limited transaction throughput on chain and the high latencies in interplanetary communication [2] we can expect the vast majority of transactions to take place on higher layers.

Sources

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
  2. https://blogs.esa.int/mex/2012/08/05/time-delay-between-mars-and-earth/
I do think that as civilization colonizes the planets in meaningful ways there will be hard fork considerations for extending the average block time.
I'll leave up to everyone in the future to decide if it's the right thing to do but that fact that some planets are more than 10 minutes away from each other simply makes it impossible for a reasonable chain to be built without regular block reorgs as those miners find and propagate their longest chain to the rest of the solar system
reply
Almost all bitcoiners are missing the giant UFO in the room.
Almost all UFO people are missing the giant fraudulent economic system in the room.
Almost none are putting two and two together.
Former Minister of National Defense of Canada, Paul Hellyer has been the only person so far in 10 months of researching UFOs talking about these two things together.
Now he's gone, so I guess it's just me???
reply
He was already talking about it in 2011... Thanks for sharing, I'm going to watch those videos.
reply
"As always, the aim of the game is to rob the people of the world of their sovereign right to govern their own affairs, and to entrench the power of the international banks, their elite industrial allies, and a small cabal of military and intelligence insiders who run the world as their private fiefdom. The word 'unjust' is too small a word by far to describe what they're up to."
reply
This is an interesting reading about this topic: https://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/posts/bitcoin-interplanetary-frontier
reply
That is not to say that Bitcoin could not be used far from Earth. On the contrary, confirmation time simply becomes part of transaction planning, and second-layer solutions fill in the gap for payments.
I think I disagree with him being able to hand wave away this as not a problem. If the miners (that I could run) or at least be on my planet are not able to confirm and propagate transactions then it is essentially a permissioned system. Earth miners could easily censor transactions coming from Mars and no individual miner on Mars could do anything about it
reply
reply
I don't think this is a reasonable approach to the problem. In this model there is a massive avenue for attacks to occur against "Muskcoin" while the hashrate is small. Additionally, with the manufacturing head start that Earth has over Mars, Earth would be able to over produce Asics for Muskcoin and the hash-center of Muskcoin would likely also be on earth not solving anything.
reply
So everyone just uses Bitcoin?
reply
I think its reasonable to consider lengthening the average block time to give Mars miners a fair chance of being within the hash horizon. I think it's the least combative option even though it does include a hard fork. Especially as the use of main chain adapts in the future I would expect it to be reasonable to allow blocks every ~30-40min to allow miners on Mars to have a fair chance
reply
I don't understand the scenario here. Does Earth have an adversarial relationship with Mars or is it cooperative? Why would Earth miners censor Martian transactions if they are paying the fee?
reply
The point is that they could. It would be a permissioned network on Mars completely at the whim of Earth. I don't see why Earth <=> Mars relations would end up any different than how the relationships of countries on earth work, sometimes good, sometimes bad.
He mentions testing the network pre-genesis against earth hash-bombs. But part of the beauty of Bitcoin is it's release schedule, combined with it's growth in popularity.
reply
Living off of Earth within the solar system is fucking retarded and some fiat nonsense. Going from Europe to America made you rich. Going to Mars from Earth makes you poor. Bitcoin gets people to stop doing retarded shit that makes them poor.
reply
Humans have been interested in space across all cultures for as far back as we have written history. It's only natural for people to want to explore areas they're interested in and haven't gone to before.
Going from Europe to America made you rich.
If you think this then you need to read a history book. Early settlers to America had very few supplies and entire settlements died of starvation after eating even their clothes. In theory bitcoin shouldn't have made it this far and was stupid to even try, yet here we are with the best money ever created.
reply
Get a better theory, bitcoin was inevitable before Satoshi was even born.
reply
By that same logic, space exploration was inevitable before fiat was even born. For someone with a nym based on a prolific physicist you seem to have a distaste for applied physics.
reply
It was, and talking about space travel now would be like talking about bitcoin during Roman times
reply
How did you come to that conclusion? We've got reusable rockets, probes that have left the solar system, retrieved samples from an asteroid, and had people spend over a year in space already. There are many companies building different models of next-generation space stations and lunar landers.
It's nowhere close to the leap required to get to bitcoin from ancient Rome. Given all the technology we provably have and the tech we're confident will be available in just the next 5 years, what major barriers do you think will prevent us from having permanent settlements off-Earth?
reply