It's really really simple, as shown by Uganda, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, India and many more countries.
Of course, if you don't have a significant economy to begin with or something else has already disrupted it (riots, uprising, etc - which could also be what prompts you to shut down the internet) then it's not a problem.
In most cases you don't need to completely turn everything off, just shut down the mobile networks, and maybe the big domestic broadband networks, and that's good enough.
There's two ways for internet to be shut down.
One is legal -- the government tells registered ISPs "stop forwarding packets". Doesn't matter how good your connectivity is when you simply have to turn it off. Your protection there are courts etc, but it's not technically difficult.
The other approach is extra-legal -- e.g a terrorist attack.
Just look at the effect from a car bomb in Nashville last month, I quote from a newspaper:
> The immediate repercussions were surprisingly widespread. AT&T customers lost service — phones, internet or video — across large parts of Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. There were 911 centers in the region that couldn't take calls; others didn't receive crucial data associated with callers such as their locations. The Nashville police department's phones and internet failed. Stores went cash-only.
> At some hospitals, electronic medical records, internet service or phones stopped working. The Nashville airport halted flights for about three hours on Christmas. Rival carrier T-Mobile also had service issues as far away as Atlanta, 250 miles away, because the company uses AT&T equipment for moving customer data from towers to the T-Mobile network.
The area effected was about 100,000 square miles, roughly the same size as Uganda. From one carbomb outside one building.
I think there's only one major Internet Exchange point in Uganda (just like it seems there was one in the south east of the US), but there's certainly multiple fibres in and out. If you're in Mbarara and sending traffic to Rwanda it's unlikely to go via Kampala.
Here's a network map of one provider in Uganda: https://bcs-ea.com/service/uganda/
The UK has a few exchanges, but almost everything runs through Docklands in London - various Telehouse buildings within a mile of each other, Telecity etc. Almost all internet traffic in the UK runs through London, and the sites that aren't are owned by Linx (IXLeeds is the only one that isn't). A major flood breaching the Thames Barrier will cause chaos.
This only works as long as people respect the law. It wouldn't surprise me if in many countries they'd keep forwarding packets on the down-low. Black market internet access. At least for extended shutdowns. May not be any incentive if it lasts very short time.
They're good for exfiltrating news.
here 500 days and counting of no high speed mobile internet for 8 million + souls. thats worlds biggest democracy for you /s
honestly i have seen how life crashes without internet, its not fun
I'm curious, what business operates online but can't move? Is it a company with large manufacturing that can't pick up and move?
Mh client base is in the valley itself so my moving wouldnt help as my customers wouldnt reach me anyways
Sadly political mismanagement killed it.
Other than that the valley is too little for huge industries geographically.
We have dams built on either side of LOC but the governments take majority share of produce/revenue and locality is left with almost nothing so yeah
Point is, we dont know when schools will open but students are being prevented from getting some semblance of an education. I have a 4 Yo kid in the extended family and he's been in school for 8 days only. Hits out at anyone who mentions school.
Outside of a rogue president that convinces the military to act in illegal activity or a true government overthrow it won't happen.
No running or existing government in the USA will pull the plug because they know that would end their career. All their fundraising gone. Wall Street RIP. Riots all over the place.
That would effectively stop ~99% of the affected populations from using it, no?
What's the counterargument to this possibility? It seems to hinge on getting too big to ban.
Also, drugs are illegal... and it hasn't stopped drugs from trading hands... drugs even manage to make their way into prisons.
[1] https://blockstream.com/satellite/#:~:text=Blockstream%20Sat....
[2] https://blockstream.com/2020/05/04/en-announcing-blockstream...
Not all countries would need to sign on to essentially send it back to the stone age.
Ah yes, like how the US and Europe agreed to ban drugs? How's that working for them?
Bitcoin demand is driven mostly by speculative investors.
Maybe governments can't completely kill bitcoin, but they could certainly drive it back to fringe enthusiasts and criminal activity if they wanted.
Locha.io
https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentatio...
https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentatio...
A Harpia node is a Locha Mesh standalone node which can provide services on the network such as an Internet gateway, Bitcoin transactions broadcast, latest blocks data, Electrum Server, a remote monerod, or any other. This device can have a larger antenna plugged, a power amplifier, or even a satellite dish, extending the transmission range in several kilometers
Any Blockchain operating in a small region would have no resiliency, be vulnerable to 51% attacks, and diverge significantly from the original internet ledger.
I'll bite.
It's not that we don't think it can happen, in fact those of us actually adept in financial censorship as well as physical censorship have actually advocated that we build additional infrastructure for just this occasion.
I've been involved in the HK protests since the inception of the Yellow Movement, where we saw the CCP making its heavy handed presence felt and then had the local police shut down the internet in protest zones. This lead to the use of a bluetooth based app Fire Chat [0], which had also been used in Iraq when governments decided to crack down on 'dissidents' online. I personally never stopped advocatin for them to build meshnets and become familiar with p2p solutions as the financial censorship was soon to follow, and did not long after and still remains to this day: Jimmy Lai's charges is based on Money laundering something they do not have to prove simply claim and they can get away with it.
What came after that, especially for me as a I was involved in the CJDNS project in Switzerland and dabbled with hyperboria as well as Zeronet in the US for a short period, saw the need for the creation of an entirely new Internet.
Meshnets could serve only a limited capability for a short period of time, guifi is a cool project, but it cannot support the types of infrastructure we've all been reliant on for most of modern existence. I hold a lot of hope for Starlink becoming that after it becomes profitable and recovers its investments as we are in dire need of a new system. Or at least leases out some of its satelites for private use to help build something like it.
Thus, we have made progress towards that end in the Bitcoin community, though in my opinion not enough as we've spent countless hours debating BS topics about people and things who don't matter rather on solving some of the more glaring issues.
But Blockstream, even for all their misgivings and are far from perfect, are still moving toward the desirable end of having non-internet based transactions a priority to propagate on the mainchain-layer 1 protocol with their satellite [1]. There are other solutions as well, ham radio based tx etc... but I'll spare you the details of that for now as this is getting long.
In short, you're talking about some of the most paranoid people in tech with an understanding of cryptography based tools and OPSEC who understand the implications of what you've described as a hypothetical situation while some of us have actually lived through this and used this technology to solve some of the most pressing issues in massive Humanitarian crises in the 21st century (Maidan Revolution in Kiev, Venzuela hyper inflation etc...).
We're not all 'moonbois' and scammers though that gets the most headlines (I'm looking at you Micheal Saylor), and our tech, unlike even the stuff you overly compensated guys in FAANG aimlessly build and maintain to the detriment of much of Humanity, has this weird habit of working even when everyone else says it's dead: to this day nothing even comes close to Bitcoin's (the Network) reliability. Nothing.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat 1: https://blockstream.com/satellite/