Re:Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to...
by kragen on Saturday July 05, 2025 @06:56PM
(#44476226)
Bitcoin in particular can remain operational in extremely degraded conditions.
Its relatively long average block interval (10 minutes) and strictly limited maximum block size limit the total bandwidth requirement for a full node to a few kilobits per second, and you can easily run that on a laptop that consumes a few watts, easily supplied from a relatively inconspicuous solar panel or handheld gasoline generator run at a 1% duty cycle. Blockstream supplies a satellite feed of the blockchain that requires no internet connection, just a groundstation that costs less than a laptop and uses slightly more power.
Outbound bandwidth requirements from the place where the power has gone out are many orders of magnitude smaller. A Bitcoin transaction is a few hundred bytes, so outbound bandwidth requirements for transmitting one transaction at a time are a few bits per second without adding significant delay, and because the transaction is valid indefinitely in the absence of double-spending, potentially down to a small fraction of a bit per second if further delays of hours or days can be tolerated.
Now, it's true that power needs to stay on somewhere for the miners to keep running, and the miners need to be able to transmit their mined blocks to the rest of the network fast enough to avoid many orphaned forks, which requires bursts of somewhat higher bandwidth. But keeping the power on somewhere is much more likely than keeping it on everywhere.
I don't understand LN2 well enough to do this kind of analysis on it, but I'd expect it to be less tolerant of such extreme infrastructure degradation.
Its relatively long average block interval (10 minutes) and strictly limited maximum block size limit the total bandwidth requirement for a full node to a few kilobits per second, and you can easily run that on a laptop that consumes a few watts, easily supplied from a relatively inconspicuous solar panel or handheld gasoline generator run at a 1% duty cycle. Blockstream supplies a satellite feed of the blockchain that requires no internet connection, just a groundstation that costs less than a laptop and uses slightly more power.
Outbound bandwidth requirements from the place where the power has gone out are many orders of magnitude smaller. A Bitcoin transaction is a few hundred bytes, so outbound bandwidth requirements for transmitting one transaction at a time are a few bits per second without adding significant delay, and because the transaction is valid indefinitely in the absence of double-spending, potentially down to a small fraction of a bit per second if further delays of hours or days can be tolerated.
Now, it's true that power needs to stay on somewhere for the miners to keep running, and the miners need to be able to transmit their mined blocks to the rest of the network fast enough to avoid many orphaned forks, which requires bursts of somewhat higher bandwidth. But keeping the power on somewhere is much more likely than keeping it on everywhere.
I don't understand LN2 well enough to do this kind of analysis on it, but I'd expect it to be less tolerant of such extreme infrastructure degradation.