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Comment on When society completely transitions to cash-less, what happens when the power goes down? End of the world?

Same applies to crypto-currencies like Bitcoin - as far as I understand they need constant power and global internet connection to function. Otherwise the network fractures into shards that have different views of payment history.

Maybe if the system breaks, it can be restored to an earlier state, and synchronized with islands which did not have the outage, once power is re-activated.

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explodicle@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
That’s a little bit easier because they’d “only” need a satellite dish and battery backup. It’s less dependent on local infrastructure.

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- glowing_hans@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Interesting did not think about it that way.
  
  that satellite dish will eat a lot of energy for bidirectional communications, starlink requires as much as a refrigerator, if I recall correctly
  
  maintaining that satellite network is quite energy intensive, but requires non local infrastructure
  
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  - explodicle@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Right now it’s mostly unidirectional. There’s a satellite constantly broadcasting the blockchain, and if you want to publish a transaction you need to get it back to civilization somehow. So isolated communities would need payment channels with really slow (weeks) settlements.
    
    You can use Starlink too but yeah like you said that’s not cheap or easy.
    
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