Author: Dan Maloney / Source: Hackaday
Cryptocurrencies: love them, hate them, or be baffled by them, but don’t think you can escape them. That’s the way it seems these days at least, with news media filled with breathless stories about Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies, and everyone from Amazon to content creators on YouTube now accepting the digital currency for payments.
And now, almost everyone on the planet is literally bathed in Bitcoin, or at least the distributed ledger that makes it work, thanks to a new network that streams the Bitcoin blockchain over a constellation of geosynchronous satellites.Blockchain Everywhere
Ardent supporters of Bitcoin often tout the robustness of the underlying network as one of the many advantages of cryptocurrencies: being built on the Internet, itself a decentralized network originally designed to provide connectivity in times of crisis, they provide a means of exchange independent from central authorities and resistant to any sort of capital controls that might be enacted by them.
But the comeback to those arguments is obvious: since Bitcoin relies on the Internet, a government intent on clamping down on the use of cryptocurrencies could simply turn off the Internet, at least theoretically. And even absent an authoritarian dystopia situation, Internet access is still far from universal. There are many places in the world where access is limited, at best, and often expensive, especially for the proof-of-work (PoW) transactions needed to mine Bitcoin. This necessarily limits the Bitcoin network mainly to the developed world.
Blockstream, a company set up in 2014 by crypto-hacker Adam Back, aims to change that. They announced in 2017 the launch of Blockstream Satellite, a one-way broadcast of blockchain data over four commercial geosynchronous satellites. At the time of the system’s launch, about two-thirds of the landmass of the…
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