The previous part, check it out here.
Installed in Elysium Planitia, I took the first five days to rest and regain my energy. I had lost a lot of fluids, which resulted in generalized swelling and a loss of minerals in my body. While I'm now writing effortlessly in the gravity capsule, I remember those days sleeping more than 24 hours straight—something that had never happened to me before.
Once settled and rested, I found that Elysium had several neighborhoods (sectors) divided among different international organizations. On Earth, once space exploration became a priority for many governments, they began to ally in blocs, pooling technologies, money, and patents to be the first to leap to Jupiter's moons. I still don't understand that move; I think we found non-human life near some of the satellites. Even so, in the AMEURSAM1 sector and in other sectors, they are currently in another fight: the fight for commercial dominance of the neighborhoods.
Despite the fact that the CHINRUBRAIN2 sector also adopted Bitcoin as the main currency, let's remember that at the end of 2034, Elon Musk adopted the millenary currency DOGE as his own and fought to the end to have it take his form in the primitive colonies of Mars. The reason we didn't agree is because of the Great Injustice. Remember that Elon's followers, as well as the governments, all agreed that on Mars, we needed non-terran currencies—our own local currencies that are not attached or linked to Earth but without losing our identity.
What problems do we have with this? Bitcoin is the main money, and we were able to atomize the tiny parts of satoshis as well as create a sidechain so that Bitcoin has the very principle of proportionality to the 18 billion inhabitants, including us, the colonists. I have told you about the problems of the Great Injustice, but I haven't explained it yet. These are the data I have collected:
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On Earth, we generate a new block approximately every 10 minutes, which has remained unaltered until today.
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We owe that propagation to the high internet speed, given advances in latency and satellite communication.
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Between Mars and Earth, we have 55,000,000 kilometers when we are close and make the journeys, and 400,000,000 kilometers at the farthest point.
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Light travels at 299,792 kilometers per second, but this is simply light; we are not considering the information load it carries and the points where Mars is. Consequently, we have:
where
This implies a synchronization delay of 3 to 22 minutes, which has already caused failures at other times, putting non-terran miners at a disadvantage despite having certain satellite elements to improve the link. But the problem is not communication; it's the distance. Today, that delay is being used in different scam schemes, where the information cutoff has been conducive to supposed double-spends. The alert is there.
However, the Bitcoin colonists, who have lived through the last stage of the Great Fracture3, know the effects of recreating the same pyramidal scheme of terran currencies. Therefore, in my sector, I have found programmers who have been using Lightning Network as the main solution, greatly improving the quality of life. For this, channels have been created with local nodes, and UTXO intermediation4 in Bitcoin has taken shape—an idea propagated by honest Earthlings who see Mars as a human place as well, unlike companies that see us simply as test products.
Hence, the idea that propagating Bitcoin on Mars has been a very negative one, given that many people have burned significantly expensive nodes, and commerce has been largely delayed. I hope you understand, whoever you are reading this, commerce continues in all galaxies; it's just that we humans wrap it with concepts far too advanced for our evolution. Tell me, whoever you are reading this, what's happening on Earth? What solutions have you found? Here we are growing; I hope you are too.
Footnotes
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AMEURSAM: Americas, Europe, and the Samurai (independent Japanese) scientists who, unlike the rest of the population that wanted to stay on Earth to inhabit it, pooled vast resources to build a launch base in the Atacama Desert. I haven't read much about the political consequences, but among them, they gather many bitcoins. ↩
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CHINRUBRAIN: China, Russia, India, and Brazil joined resources to also have their sector. Although this sector has much more interest in military exploration and space mining, they do not stop investing money. Brazil is the main proponent country of using Bitcoin, which India does not like, since they wish to have a multitude of currencies. This is also because, in traditional banking companies, many of the executives surrounding them are from India. ↩
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The Great Fracture occurred between 2042 and 2050, when the economies that did not adopt Bitcoin were gradually destroyed by their own consumption power. There are quite a few academic writings that to this day try to blame the currency itself for the fall of the American Empire (so to speak), but today those of us who took refuge in Bitcoin are leading the economic and judicial reconstruction of Earth and wish to expand our knowledge to Mars. ↩
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Idea born on a primitive site called Stacker News and promoted by one of its users named @supertestnet; you can read his primitive idea here. ↩