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1 sat \ 26 replies \ @ek 15 Oct 2022 \ on: I think we're all underestimating Bitcoin bitcoin
I ask myself sometimes if Bitcoin could scale to the moon. Like literally to the moon. When we have people on the moon, will they be able to use the same blockchain as the people on Earth do? Light needs 8 minutes from the moon back to the earth. If any serious hash rate is established on the moon, it will fork away from the earth blockchain since it can't profitably mine on earth blocks with such a huge delay. Is the reach of our economical activity limited by the speed of light?
But maybe if people on the moon only transact with other people on the moon, the chains could be merged every day? Meaning that transactions between "moon people" are only mined by moon miners and vice versa. Maybe this is where side chains will come in? ...
But I agree. Will be very interesting so how all of this develops in the next decades.
RTT packet time between the earth and moon is 2.6 seconds.
The sun is 500 light-seconds away from the earth (8 minutes 20 seconds)
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Ah, lol problem solved. I was mistaken
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The distance to Mars varies between 3 and 23 light-minutes away, making 10 minute block times unusable between planets without intermittant forking.
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Yes, problem would come back when Mars is considered.
But with "problem solved" I meant that Bitcoin can indeed literally scale to the moon, haha
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Have ppl already been thinking about solutions to this?
Any articles about the problem?
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Here's an article that thinks about the future of Bitcoin on other planets! https://unchained.com/blog/law-of-hash-horizons/
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I didn't read your link all the way through, but I suspect that bip300 could solve this problem by allowing other planets to branch off into their own independent blockchains but still permit sats to flow between the main earth blockchain and the other planet's blockchain. A layer 2 could be implemented on top of bip300 to allow off chain transactions like lightning, where the transaction between chains would use locked up escrow wallets so you can effectively "email" a UXTO without needing network-wide consensus, and the interplanetary inter-chain channels would only need to be settled occasionally
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cool article, but it just begs the question of why not make the block time longer?
If 10 minutes is arbitrary, it is a little silly to say that Bitcoin encourages far away travel because of it’s block time.
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10 minutes is not arbitrary, it's a design choice.
10 minutes was specifically chosen by Satoshi as a tradeoff between first confirmation time and the amount of work wasted due to chain splits. After a block is mined, it takes time for the other miners to find out about it, and until then they are actually competing against the new block instead of adding to it.
If someone mines another new block based on the old block chain, the network can only accept one of the two, and all the work that went into the other block gets wasted. For example, if it takes miners 1 minute on average to learn about new blocks, and new blocks come every 10 minutes, then the overall network is wasting about 10% of its work. Lengthening the time between blocks reduces this waste.
It's all about security. The 10 minute block time ensures more security for those transacting in the block.
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Lengthening the time between blocks reduces this waste.
So 12, or 15, or heck even 20 minute block times would have even less waste. You didn’t really answer why it’s not arbitrary. But it’s a good reply with good info anyway, so thank you.
Ah thanks, you have a more detailed answer than me, haha
However, I think there are more points than just the one about waste of hashrate mentioned in the article (which references the bitcoin wiki) like not outpricing normal users from running a full node.
There are most likely more that I am missing.
I don't think it's arbitrary. It must be slow enough for block propagation to work properly in a global network and the cost to run a full node for "normal users" not getting too high too fast due to storage tech not keeping up but fast enough to not stall transactions confirmation.
I think I read an article from the blocksize wars era explaining this. Can see if I can find it if you want.
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slow enough for block propagation to work properly in a global network and the cost to run a full node for "normal users" not getting too high too fast due to storage tech not keeping up
but fast enough to not stall transactions confirmation.
It’s kinda impossible to prove that 10 minutes isn’t arbitrary. It could have been 5, 7, 8, 12, 15, etc.
Fast enough to not stall transactions is not valid when talking about 10 minutes. They chose that specifically with the intention of building layer 2
Yes there's lots of discussions but I haven't looked into them lately
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в одном направлении? выходит 16 минут нам не помогут...
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Yes, in one way and you are right, RTT (round-trip time) is the important one. But I just thought light would need 8 minutes for earth-moon (it's 1.3 seconds, therefore RTT is 2.6 seconds) but it was earth-sun.
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For scale, it takes light 134ms to travel the diameter of the earth (if we had no atmosphere). Starlink LEOs' altitude is about 750 miles, which has a mean orbital circumference of 159 light-milliseconds. This is still better than ground transmission since the speed of light in free space is 50% faster than in fiber optic. In single-mode fiber, the circumference of the earth is 200 light-ms.
Curious the distance to the moon happens to be about 10x the circumference of the earth.
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I wonder if one built a large superconducting magnet on the poles of the moon, whether it would enable protection from the solar wind and potentially enable an atmosphere that could support some kinds of life.
Assuming atmospheric pressure is directly proportional to gravity and height, and the gravity of the moon is 1/6 of earth; With napkin math, this puts the potential atmospheric pressure at 1/36th of earth, or 0.41 psi. At this pressure, water is liquid between 32F and 71F. It's likely the moon is too close to the sun to sustain this low of an average temperature, but I don't know the principals behind computing that value.
If the atmosphere contained enough ozone, it might filter out enough UVC and X-rays. Under these conditions, and if somehow we could find a source of CO2, NH3 and O2, the moon could easily support plant life and begin building enough soil to feed any population.
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