We are nearing the boom of the Space Colonization Era. While it's not mandatory for bitcoin to work outside of the planet, it would be very interesting if it could scale that way. The problem at that point will solely consist on the delay of the signals. In the limit of full Solar System Colonization, asteroids belts included, all signals between celestial colonies will take hours to fully transmit, and full synchronization of the entire network may take days regardless of processing speed. Can bitcoin work with such a latency without becoming temporally exploitable by malicious actors? In the worst case scenario, malicious actors might want to just disrupt the network, not necessarily to take advantage from it, so such latencies might give them enough time to create enough false transactions within large non-yet-synchronized parts of the network to cause a complete Denial of Service? If there's no solution to this, it doesn't have to exist, maybe bitcoin will evolve to work as a network of relatively isolated planetary networks that might occasionally interact with other planets, and if in doubt the planet will become isolated from the multi-planetary network, a risk so big that will force "planetary nodes" to be good actors.
reply
Absolutely fascinating, just read it all, thank you for the link! :)
reply
You're most welcome. Love Dhruv Bansal's work. Brilliant thinker.
reply
And thank you for pointing me to his work, he is quite detailed and strict, I'm bookmarking him to start reading his blog :)
reply
I did!
reply
It will be done with settlements and in large quantities/bulk if at all.
This is how most intercontinental shipping works. The products are made on another continent but when we purchase it, for the most part the stuff is already waiting at local warehouse ready to be shipped. But a lot of this shipping between continents is subsidized in various ways so in an ideal universe most things and resources will probably be produced/extracted locally.
But it seems there is room for delay in payment settlements for the large bulk interplanetary orders if it comes to that, but then locally the transactions will be more instant. Maybe off chain
(searching for container rocket didnt yield any results. but i assume there will be built some really big ones that can transport a ton of cargo if/when the penny for space travel drops)
reply
That's how it's going to work for sure, but managing the cargo is no the problem, not even the delay of transactions themselves. The problem is about the delay of a full sync round, because it could allow for a lot of damage to be done, for even if it's reverted at the end in the blockchain by then such a large time-window could allow many other exploits.
reply
"We are nearing the boom of the Space Colonization Era."
Fucking idiot, speaking with the confidence of Jamie Dimon saying that no one has considered Satoshi coming back and changing the supply cap.
Get your head out of this fiat nonsense. This is a deep fiat meme.
reply
That is very interesting, but maybe a new blockchain would be made for Mars?
reply
I'm sure that's how it will end up in a way or another. But the reason to think about a unified inter-planetary blockchain is that planets will trade with each other, and thus exchanges will be made in currency that will go from a planet to another, and will have to be valid on both. To do that, an inter-planetary blockchain will have to be synchronized, but will now face unavoidable delays, regardless of processing speed.
I think it will have to boil down to planet-specific blockchains, but maybe bitcoin can evolve to have two settlement layers within the blockchain, to allow inter-planetary trade. One settlement layer will be for the planet, nearly instant, and another, more delayed, will be for inter-planetary transactions.
reply
L1 Bitcoin will work just fine on interplanetary scales, you'd just need to wait for extra confirmations compared with Earth time. Mining would only ever happen on Earth, though (maybe on the moon as well). Planets could have their own lightning networks.
reply
Sure thing! The problems I point out appear if mining decentralized among planets is attempted, which you would want if bitcoin is to remain decentralized. Otherwise, as space colonization advances, bitcoin will get increasingly centralized and likely dropped beyond earth, thus leading to a classic "international market exchange" scheme.
reply
That is what I was thinking. Something for each planet. Then maybe a currency exchange, or something similar when you want to trade between planets? Or just trade in goods?
reply
Any sort of currency exchange will imply for the currency to have a validation system in more than one planet, so what you just said seems very likely to me: transaction of goods will be a first robust way to trade. But, of course, it will soon face the same limitations it always had, and as with the economy on earth, there will be demand for a unit of account at inter-planetary scale. There's no reason why bitcoin can't be that unit, but at that point it will for sure imply a major evolution on the protocol, of which the technical aspects I refrain from project for I ignore too much.
reply
I think a major exchange will be goods. But will be interesting to see what kind of currencies pick up. It would have to be all digital, right? I dont see us printing money much longer.
reply
There might be a sort of intermediary currency, or directly replicating foreign exchange markets as @Undisciplined suggested. There will be no issue on trading at all, it will not get delayed a second in it's development. But the question is more about how a system like bitcoin will work in that context too, due to the importance we know it haves for our planetary economy, which will keep being true at inter-planetary scale.
reply
Yeah, I think there wont be a problem. Eventually they will come of with an elegant solution. Maybe they will put some printers up there just like the federal reserve.
reply
I'm certain that will not happen. Inter-planetary commerce will be on full control of entrepreneurship, governments will be powerless in the space-colonization era. Elon Musk will conquer Mars, not the US govt. What are they going to do? Summon him back to Earth? I can imagine Elon response: "Come in and chase me bitch? With what? What rockets? Mines?". Even today the US govt and Nasa can reach outer space solely thanks to Musk's launchers. No capitalist will bow unnecessarily to a FED system which is not only useless but even less powerful. You can safely forget about the pathetic FED era
I'm glad you raised the question. I have no particular insights on it, but it's very interesting and I'm eager to see what others say about it.
I suspect that there won't be significant off-world populations for a long time, so some sort of L2 solutions can probably handle any near term practicalities.
reply
Glad it interests you :) I'm also curious about what more knowledgeable people can say about this.
Without having the required technical background, I can't say much about implementations, but we do can make some affirmations:
  • There will be no issues running a local payment system e-cash style, that's for sure. But the problem will now be at L1 level, that is, the problem will now be solely about final settlement, not the transaction itself.
  • The newly added dimension to the problem is time. Bitcoin solves the byzantine general problem but without considering "large" periods of time, while in this scenario scaling will not be solely about message veracity any more. We can actually go back to the "byzantine general problem" allegory and it will be like: "ok, you can confirm the message is true, but a year later? We are invading now, the defenders might have called reinforcements or abandoned the city, or attacked the other half of the army, etc, and by knowing any of that for sure a year later will imply that going there you will find but ashes". The purism of knowing if a message is true is now being challenged by timing pragmatism. What if a full inter-planetary synchronization round end up taking decades?
  • Maybe by considering a semi-isolated scheme, settlement synchronization rounds will now be defined in layers within L1. There will be an L1S settlement layer for the Solar System, and L2S settlement layers for each planet, both within the blockchain, in a similar fashion on how L1 and L2 transactions are treated now.
reply
I was thinking about something like your third bullet point, but I don't know whether it's feasible or not, technologically.
reply
Let's hope a dev chimes in, would be very interesting to hear 🤞
reply
Maybe they would create a blockchain for each planet? I would think trying to ping data back from mars would be too costly?
reply
The problem there is that you want to be able to do commerce between planets. You could essentially replicate something like foreign exchange markets, but that's not as elegant as solving the problem entirely with bitcoin.
reply
Exactly
reply
Wont there be commerce between the planets, though?
reply
That's what I'm saying. There needs to be currency that is usable between planets in order to buy stuff from another planet.
reply
Sorry, I read that wrong. Yes, you do want to be able to trade between planets.
reply
With Bitcoin's 10 minute blocks, I don't think that the bitcoin network will extend too far beyond earth orbit. While the moon is only ~2 light-seconds away, the outer planets are several light hours away. Transactions could be received but heavily delayed. No node out there could stay in sync. Bitcoin mining could not happen that far out.
If/when we get that far, bitcoin will likely stay earth-centric. Maybe there are other block chains that spin up on each planet that mimics the properties of bitcoin (or are exact copies).
reply
Planetary-specific blockchains are the most probable outcome, that's for sure. Still, if you want inter-planetary trade with a bitcoin-like unit of account, there's going to be a new sort of inter-planetary sync. That's why I think that bitcoin will evolve to have two settlement layers within L1: L1S settlement, at solar-system level, and L2S settlement, at planet-specific level.
reply
Humanity is considered the lowest stage of evolution because of the established rules of market relations on earth. All other systems and galaxies have not used economic models for a long time. Therefore, no bitcoin will ever represent any value anywhere except on earth.
reply
I my openion It will not cause lots of people and country haven't acknowledge bitcoin yet
reply
deleted by author
reply
I don't think that a soft-fork will be needed for that, but the case is not that bitcoin can't keep up pace (it can get as slow as required), but that such long time-windows allow for a lot of damage to be done even if at the end the settlement is correct. I describe the issue better in this comment recurring to the "byzantine general problem" allegory (which is the exact problem bitcoin tackles), and the comment of BitSapien points to an article that describes the technical problems in detail. It's a quick read so 100% worth it.
reply
deleted by author
reply