In 2019, Rodolfo Novak despatched a Bitcoin transaction from Toronto to Michigan with out web or satellite tv for pc. He used a ham radio, the 40-meter band, and the ionosphere as his relay.
Nick Szabo known as it “Bitcoin despatched over nationwide border with out web or satellite tv for pc, simply nature’s ionosphere.” The transaction was tiny, the setup finicky, and the use case borderline absurd.
But, it proved one thing: the protocol doesn’t care what carries its packets.
That experiment sits at one finish of a decade-long stress take a look at the Bitcoin neighborhood runs quietly within the background, a distributed R&D program testing whether or not the community can perform when the same old infrastructure fails.
Satellites broadcast blocks to dishes throughout continents. Mesh radios relay transactions throughout neighborhoods with out the necessity for ISPs. Tor routes visitors round censors. Ham operators faucet out hexadecimal over shortwave.
These aren’t manufacturing techniques. They’re fireplace drills for eventualities most fee networks deal with as edge instances.
The query driving all of it: if the web fragments, how briskly can Bitcoin come again on-line?
Satellites give Bitcoin an impartial clock
Blockstream Satellite tv for pc broadcasts the total Bitcoin blockchain 24/7 through 4 geostationary satellites overlaying most populated areas.
A node with an affordable dish and a Ku-band receiver can sync blocks and keep in consensus even when native ISPs go darkish.
The system is one-way and low-bandwidth, nevertheless it solves a selected downside: throughout regional blackouts or censorship, nodes want an impartial supply of reality for the ledger state.
The satellite tv for pc API extends this additional. Anybody can uplink arbitrary information, together with signed transactions, from floor stations for international broadcast. goTenna partnered with Blockstream to let customers compose transactions on offline Android telephones, relay them through native mesh, then hand them to a satellite tv for pc uplink that broadcasts with out touching the broader web.
The bandwidth is horrible, however the independence is absolute.
This issues as a result of satellites present an “out-of-band” channel. When common routing fails, nodes scattered throughout totally different continents can nonetheless obtain the identical chain tip from area, offering a shared reference level for rebuilding consensus as soon as terrestrial hyperlinks return.
Mesh and LoRa construct Bitcoin backhaul at human scale
Mesh networks take a unique method: as a substitute of broadcasting from orbit, they relay packets device-to-device throughout brief hops till one node with web entry rebroadcasts to the broader community. TxTenna, constructed by goTenna, demonstrated this in 2019.
Customers ship signed transactions over a mesh community from offline telephones, hopping node to node till reaching an exit level. Coin Heart documented the structure: every hop extends attain with out requiring any participant to have direct web entry.
Lengthy-range LoRa mesh pushes this idea additional. Locha Mesh, began by Bitcoin Venezuela, builds radio nodes that kind an IPv6 mesh over license-free bands.
The {hardware}, Turpial and Harpia gadgets, can carry messages, Bitcoin transactions, and even block sync over a number of kilometers with out an web connection.
Exams in catastrophe zones proved profitable crypto transactions throughout multi-hop networks the place mobile and fiber had been each down.
Darkwire fragments uncooked Bitcoin transactions into small packets and relays them hop-by-hop over LoRa radios. Every node reaches roughly 10 kilometers of line of sight, turning a neighborhood of hobbyist radios into advert hoc Bitcoin infrastructure.
City vary drops to a 3 to five kilometers vary, however that’s sufficient to route round localized outages or censorship chokepoints.
Tutorial initiatives like LNMesh prolonged this logic to Lightning Community funds, demonstrating offline micropayments over native wi-fi mesh throughout energy outages.
The volumes are small and the setups fragile, however they set up the precept: Bitcoin’s bodily layer is fungible. So long as there exists a path between the nodes, the protocol features.
Tor and ham radio fill the gaps
Tor represents the center floor between the common web and unique radio. Since Bitcoin Core 0.12, nodes mechanically begin a hidden service if a neighborhood Tor daemon is operating, accepting connections through .onion addresses even when ISPs block recognized Bitcoin ports.
The Bitcoin Wiki and Jameson Lopp’s setup guides doc dual-stack configurations by which nodes route visitors over each clearnet and Tor concurrently, complicating efforts to censor Bitcoin visitors on the ISP stage.
Consultants warn towards operating nodes solely over Tor attributable to eclipse-attack dangers, however utilizing it as one routing possibility amongst a number of considerably raises the price of blocking Bitcoin infrastructure.
Ham radio sits on the far finish of the spectrum. Past Novak’s ionosphere experiment, operators have relayed Lightning funds through novice radio frequencies.
These exams contain manually encoding transactions, transmitting them over HF bands utilizing protocols like JS8Call, then decoding and rebroadcasting on the opposite facet.
The throughput is laughable by fashionable requirements, however the level isn’t effectivity. The purpose is demonstrating that Bitcoin can transfer throughout any medium able to carrying small information packets, together with ones that predate the web by many years.
What a worldwide partition truly appears like
Latest modeling explores what occurs throughout a protracted international web outage.
One situation splits the community into three areas, Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe-Africa, with roughly 45%, 35%, and 20% of hash price, respectively.
Every partition’s miners proceed producing blocks whereas adjusting the issue independently. Native exchanges construct their very own payment markets and order books on diverging chains.
Inside every partition, Bitcoin continues working. Transactions confirmed, balances up to date, native commerce proceeds, however solely inside that island. Cross-border commerce freezes. When connectivity returns, nodes face a number of legitimate chains.
The consensus rule is deterministic: observe the chain with essentially the most cumulative proof of labor. Weaker partitions are reorganized, and a few latest transactions are faraway from international historical past.
If the outage lasts hours to a day and the hash distribution isn’t wildly skewed, the result’s non permanent chaos adopted by convergence as bandwidth returns and blocks propagate.
Extended outages create the danger that social coordination will override protocol guidelines, exchanges, or that giant miners will select their most popular historical past. Nonetheless, even that is still seen and rule-bound in ways in which conventional monetary reconciliation shouldn’t be.
Banks don’t have fireplace drills for this
Distinction that with what occurs when fee infrastructure breaks. TARGET2’s 10-hour outage in October 2020 delayed SEPA recordsdata and compelled central banks to handle liquidity and collateral manually.
Visa’s Europe-wide failure in June 2018 noticed 2.4 million UK card transactions fail outright and ATMs run dry inside hours after a single information heart change died.
The ECB’s TARGET system suffered one other main outage in February 2025, prompting exterior audits after backup techniques didn’t activate.
IMF and BIS documentation on CBDC and RTGS resilience explicitly warns that large-scale energy or community outages can concurrently hit major and backup information facilities, and that centralized fee techniques require advanced business-continuity planning to keep away from systemic disruption.
The architectural distinction issues. Each Bitcoin node holds a full copy of the ledger and validation guidelines.
After any outage, as quickly as it may well talk with different nodes, through satellite tv for pc, Tor, mesh, or restored ISP, it merely asks: what’s the heaviest legitimate chain?
The protocol defines the decision mechanism. No central operator reconciles competing databases.
Banks rely on a layered, centralized infrastructure comprising core banking ledgers, RTGS techniques comparable to Fedwire and TARGET, card networks, ACH, and clearinghouses.
Restoration includes replaying queued transactions, reconciling mismatched snapshots, typically manually adjusting balances, then bringing tons of of intermediaries again into sync.
Visa’s 2018 outage took hours to diagnose regardless of a full-time operations group. The ECB’s TARGET incidents required exterior critiques and multi-month remediation plans.
Bitcoin practices for worst-case eventualities
So, in a disaster, a believable situation emerges: a subset of miners and nodes stays synchronized through satellite tv for pc and radio, sustaining an authoritative chain tip at the same time as fiber and cellular networks fail.
As connectivity returns in patches, native nodes pull lacking blocks and reorganize to that chain inside minutes to hours.
In the meantime, banks determine which fee batches settled, reschedule missed ACH recordsdata, and watch for RTGS techniques to finish end-of-day reconciliation earlier than reopening absolutely.
This doesn’t imply Bitcoin “wins” immediately. Card rails and money nonetheless matter for customers. However as a worldwide settlement layer, it’d attain a constant state sooner than a patchwork of nationwide fee techniques, exactly as a result of it’s been operating steady fireplace drills for world-scale failure modes.
The ham operators tapping out transactions over shortwave, the Venezuelan mesh nodes routing sats throughout blackout neighborhoods, the satellites broadcasting blocks to dishes pointed on the sky, and these aren’t manufacturing infrastructure.
They’re proof that when the same old pipes break, Bitcoin has a Plan B. And a Plan C. And a Plan D that includes the ionosphere.
The banking system nonetheless treats infrastructure failures as uncommon edge instances. Bitcoin is treating it as a design constraint.
