My thoughts on how future Martian colonizers could use BTC.
Martians won't be able to mine BTC assuming that speed of light radio communication is the maximum transmission speed available at the time. Read Bitcoin Astronomy to learn about the law of hash horizons.
However, Martians are not blocked from broadcasting on chain transactions and verifying blocks with their own node. They will just experience a significant delay that could have unexpected usability bugs. For example, suppose a corporation has a multisig address and both the Earth and Mars headquarters have keys to spend from it. If the earth HQ broadcasts a TX, it's likely to confirm in 10 mins, however, the martian will not see that anything has been spent from the multisig until 30+ mins later. The Martians will forever be (on average) three blocks behind the main chain.
If the martian HQ attempts to spend from the shared multisig soon after the earthling HQ broadcasts, the martian transaction may be purged from the mempools since it's attempting to spend a UTXO that has already been spent.
In the context of LN channels, a martian should be able to open and close a channel cooperatively (with expected delay) since these actions are just on chain transactions.
However, the martian LN node will start to experience some issues when trying to pay an LN invoice from an earth node.
LN nodes are quite chatty. Each node builds its own model of the network topography by gossiping to all it's peers about the new nodes, channels, TLD (time lock delta) policy updates, and fee policy updates.
So the martian node will have a local network graph that is (on average) 30+ mins out of date for all earth nodes. If the martian attempts to craft an onion for a route using a channel that doesn't exist, or by supplying the wrong fee for a channel, the payment will fail.
That assumes, that the node is even able to craft the onion in the first place. This part might take a while because construction of the onion requires a lot of back and forth communication to generate and exchange shared secrets to do all the encrypting, verification, and byte padding of all the layers of the onion. If we assume a 30 minute delay, construction of an onion with just 3 hops, might take hours. Furthermore, they'd have to be careful not to make a route that goes from Mars to Earth, back to Mars, then back to Earth when routed (for obvious reasons).
So for Earth-to-Mars payments, it's actually more efficient to use on chain transactions.
There's actually no concept of a single "Lightning Network". There are many LNs. Some networks use shitcoins, some use keysend or AMP, some use unannounced channels, some are a subset of what we call "mainnet" and some are not even payable from mainnet.
Martians could leverage this quality of LN to establish their own Lightning Network that exists entirely on Mars. They could use their mainnet to pay other martian nodes with ease. They would establish channels with each other by broadcasting a TX back to Earth. Then, they'd have to increase the time lock deltas on all their channels to give themselves more blocktime to respond to fraudulent force closes.
I love these kinds of interplanetary "theories", keep em coming stackers
reply
Since Bitcoin aliens have a reason to visit Earth because you cant get it anywhere else in the universe
reply
They can't just fork it from genesis and make some sort of AlienCoin? Bitcoin does not have unique properties over other cryptocurrencies besides brand recognition.
reply
Unique property #1: It's the oldest time-chain Unique property #2: It contains the heaviest proof-of-work Unique property #3: Market cap never surpassed by alternative timechains
reply
BTC isn't winning because of branding. It has a brand because its winning.
reply
All three properties you've described here are related to its branding and not its usability.
reply
This is pitiful. None of those are unique properties. These are not fundamental, technical properties of bitcoin. None of these features make bitcoin more useful to martians than a new cryptocurrency which is forked from genesis.
It is trivial to create a cryptocurrency that has all of those properties by simply starting a new genesis block with an old timestamp and spending a ton of PoW to stack blocks with old timestamps on it. Boom, you have something that is indistinguishable from "old" cryptocurrency like bitcoin.
Secondly, bitcoin's market cap is not some feature of bitcoin, it is merely dependent on the price that people trade bitcoin. You have come full circle in explaining why bitcoin is valuable: "it is valuable because it is valuable".
reply
Absolute mathematical scarcity that is 100% verifiable?
reply
Bitcoin's scarcity will kill it due to selfish mining unless miners can scoop up enough fees after block reward dies out. There is no reason to have a hard cap on the supply as it endangers the network for the greed of individual bagholders like you. When bitcoin collapses, just remember that I told you so. Monero's tail emission effect on inflation is nearly identical, the inflation tends asymptotically to zero. All the non-stupid bitcoiners know this, they just can't implement it though hard fork because the bitcoin community is full of idiots like you: https://twitter.com/Truthcoin/status/1552610792998060033
Also, the idea that monero's supply is not as verifiable as bitcoin's supply is simply a lie. If we could not verify monero's supply, then we would not be able to prevent double-spends in the first place: there would be no currency. We have key-images and bulletproofs. It is mathematically verifiable. This is merely a pea-brained take that shows that you are more concerned with the inflation of your bags above all else: the first thing that comes to your mind is the "verafiability of the supply" rather than the security and usabiliy of the network through its ability to prevent double spends.
reply
Good luck with your shitcoin.
reply
We don't need luck. Monero will continue to succeed as long as monero users are diligent, open-minded and altruistic where bitcoin users are lazy, close-minded and greedy.
reply
Could we also create another blockchain (some sort of layer below the main chain) with a longer average time between blocks (let's say 24 hours, to make it exaggerated) to settle transactions between the planets? I'm wondering the pros and cons of such solution. Sorry for not providing ideas, my knowledge doesn't go that deep.
reply
BTC Astronomy Part 2 calls these Type II blockchains. They're slow enough to allow a star system to settle on base layer.
To me, Solar Coin, sounds like a shitcoin.
I think humans will find a way to use the Blockchain of their home planet. Even if it requires centralized interplanetary settlement entities. I.e. A few Mars' importers could run a LN/on chain swap service and send infrequent batched transactions back and forth to earth. While customers pay for shipments using LN for their convenience.
If Mars was more energy abundant, and miners were confident that +50% of hash could be produced from Mars, it could be possible to move the hash horizon away from the home planet.
This would lead to more orphaned blocks and may provoke a hard fork to increase block times. So Bitcoin could "grow into" a Solar Coin of its own.
reply
You wouldn't need all of this. You could just use atomic swaps with longer HTLC parameters.
Martians are not going to do all of this extra crap just to carry your BTC bags. This attitude is delusional at this point, the universe does not revolve around bitcoin's brand recognition.
The obvious solution is to just fork BTC again from genesis to make some sort of "MarsCoin" and then do atomic swaps between Bitcoin and MarsCoin.
reply
The universe doesn't have to revolve around BTC. All it takes is a couple bitcoiners on mars to establish a martian lightning network. MarsCoin will certainly exist (it already does). But getting people to use it (even if its martian mineable) might be harder than just using another lightning network. Issue the mars coin on taro if you want!
reply
I think what you would end up seeing in reality is that the second-biggest coin on the market, (say, litecoin or something similar to bitcoin that has a significant market share) would take over the market segment while bitcoiners are still trying to figure out how to sync the network over massive interplanetary latency.
This would cause litecoin (or whatever other cryptocurrency) to piss off a lot of earthlings because the latency would get higher for them as 51% of blocks are mined on mars. Eventually litecoin (or whatever) would be as unusable on earth as bitcoin is unusable on mars.
I also say litecoin because the BTC<->LTC atomic swap is one of the oldest and most well established, using the HTLC method, and like bitcoin they are ASIC mined.
reply
By the time enough people are on mars to need to use a hard money (i.e. have enough families that everyone doesen't know everyone) , we'll likely have cracked the superliminal nut at least for communication purposes.
reply
This is the kind of scenario where I find a side-chain much more useful actually. Because even if they decide to use lightning for mars-to-mars transactions, nothing really guarantees that a LN peer is actually in Mars. It could be someone on Earth trying to convince a martian to open a payment channel to later try to cheat, taking advantage of the fact that the one on earth is closer to the center of hash.
A sidechain like Liquid would make more sense here. Assuming that all members of the federation are on martian soil, then you can build a lightning network on top of that sidechain and use that instead.
The monetary base doesn't need to be expanded.
reply
Because even if they decide to use lightning for mars-to-mars transactions, nothing really guarantees that a LN peer is actually in Mars
You can prove that a lightning peer is on Mars simply by responding quickly. This prevents faking a Martian peer.
reply
True, didn't think of that. But you'd really want to keep a separate LN for mars and thus making it not interoperable with the one on earth makes sense.
reply
Fun thought experiment!
We’d probably want things like batching/aggregation services to make interplanetary settlement use block space more efficiently. There could maybe even be a less generic payment channel construction, something that isn’t LN and doesn’t require hops, to allow off-chain transactions with different tradeoffs.
reply
It is my belief that for peace in the cosmos, Earth will be required to always wait for the Martian BTC nodes to catch up to our chain. For atleast a few hours daily. This shall be the most important 30 minutes, 40 minutes, whatever (depending on the Earth-Mars separation distance at that time of the cosmic year) ever spent by anybody. Otherwise, nukes and bad blood will fly.
Video gaming to pass the time shall likely get commonplace. Galaga smh.
In a way, it is like the return of slow mail messaging. Instant messaging is great on planetside but cosmic messaging requires waiting. Sit down, be humble. I mean, if you want to transact with Martians and cannot wait for a few hours for your nodes to be in sync, how the hell will you wait for logistics troubles spanning months to years to materialize into profits?
Just shipping things to and fro will take +1 years. Then there is the harsh environment which necessitates ever slower movement to avoid mistakes. Anything multiplanetary level will really upgrade our ability to be patient and to shy away from bullshitting each other (which destroys things quickly). So I really see no future for shitcoins and textbook scams which all need a few hours to pull off. True money like BTC will lead the way by having the hash horizons bridged. Because we need to.
reply
This is interplanetary, how about interstellar. People may want to colonize new stars so that they can start a new Bitcoin there.
reply
Interplanetary payments at best match the propagation rate of interplanetary digital product delivery. Planets have one blockchain, between planets, you need a very slow exchange platform and foreign reserve subchains with interplanetary settlement.
Yes, Mars would need its own Bitcoin.
Unless you have FTL communication, then, only one, but how that pans out depends also on bandwidth.
reply
stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.