The internet blackout playbook: How Bitcoin stays alive when banks and card networks go down

In 2019, Rodolfo Novak despatched a Bitcoin transaction from Toronto to Michigan with out internet or satellite tv for pc. He used a ham radio, the 40-meter band, and the ionosphere as his relay.

Nick Szabo referred to as it “Bitcoin despatched over nationwide border with out internet or satellite tv for pc, simply nature’s ionosphere.” The transaction was tiny, the setup finicky, and the use case borderline absurd.

Yet, it proved one thing: the protocol doesn’t care what carries its packets.

That experiment sits at one finish of a decade-long stress check the Bitcoin neighborhood runs quietly within the background, a distributed R&D program testing whether or not the community can operate when the standard infrastructure fails.

Satellites broadcast blocks to dishes throughout continents. Mesh radios relay transactions throughout neighborhoods with out the necessity for ISPs. Tor routes site visitors round censors. Ham operators faucet out hexadecimal over shortwave.

These aren’t manufacturing techniques. They’re hearth drills for situations most cost networks deal with as edge instances.

The query driving all of it: if the internet fragments, how briskly can Bitcoin come again on-line?

Satellites give Bitcoin an impartial clock

Blockstream Satellite broadcasts the complete Bitcoin blockchain 24/7 through 4 geostationary satellites protecting most populated areas.

A node with a reasonable 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, but it surely solves a particular drawback: throughout regional blackouts or censorship, nodes want an impartial supply of fact for the ledger state.

The satellite tv for pc API extends this additional. Anyone can uplink arbitrary knowledge, 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 internet.

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 completely 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 distinct method: as a substitute of broadcasting from orbit, they relay packets device-to-device throughout brief hops till one node with internet entry rebroadcasts to the broader community. TxTenna, constructed by goTenna, demonstrated this in 2019.

Users ship signed transactions over a mesh community from offline telephones, hopping node to node till reaching an exit level. Coin Center documented the structure: every hop extends attain with out requiring any participant to have direct internet entry.

Long-range LoRa mesh pushes this idea additional. Locha Mesh, began by Bitcoin Venezuela, builds radio nodes that type 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 internet connection.

Tests 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. Each node reaches roughly 10 kilometers of line of sight, turning a neighborhood of hobbyist radios into advert hoc Bitcoin infrastructure.

Urban vary drops to a 3 to five kilometers vary, however that’s sufficient to route round localized outages or censorship chokepoints.

Academic tasks like LNMesh prolonged this logic to Lightning Network 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. As lengthy as there exists a path between the nodes, the protocol capabilities.

Tor and ham radio fill the gaps

Tor represents the center floor between the common internet and unique radio. Since Bitcoin Core 0.12, nodes routinely begin a hidden service if an area 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 site visitors over each clearnet and Tor concurrently, complicating efforts to censor Bitcoin site visitors on the ISP degree.

Experts warn in opposition to operating nodes solely over Tor resulting from 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. Beyond Novak’s ionosphere experiment, operators have relayed Lightning funds through beginner radio frequencies.

These assessments contain manually encoding transactions, transmitting them over HF bands utilizing protocols like JS8Call, then decoding and rebroadcasting on the opposite aspect.

The throughput is laughable by trendy requirements, however the level isn’t effectivity. The level is demonstrating that Bitcoin can transfer throughout any medium able to carrying small knowledge packets, together with ones that predate the internet by many years.

What a world partition truly seems like

Recent modeling explores what occurs throughout a chronic international internet outage.

One state of affairs splits the community into three areas, Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe-Africa, with roughly 45%, 35%, and 20% of hash fee, respectively.

Each partition’s miners proceed producing blocks whereas adjusting the issue independently. Local exchanges construct their very own payment markets and order books on diverging chains.

Within 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: comply with the chain with probably the most cumulative proof of labor. Weaker partitions are reorganized, and some current 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.

Prolonged outages create the chance that social coordination will override protocol guidelines, exchanges, or that enormous miners will select their most well-liked historical past. Still, even that is still seen and rule-bound in ways in which conventional monetary reconciliation will not be.

Banks don’t have hearth drills for this

Contrast that with what occurs when cost infrastructure breaks. TARGET2’s 10-hour outage in October 2020 delayed SEPA information 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 knowledge middle change died.

The ECB’s TARGET system suffered one other main outage in February 2025, prompting exterior audits after backup techniques did not activate.

IMF and BIS documentation on CBDC and RTGS resilience explicitly warns that large-scale energy or community outages can concurrently hit main and backup knowledge facilities, and that centralized cost techniques require complicated business-continuity planning to keep away from systemic disruption.

The architectural distinction issues. Every Bitcoin node holds a full copy of the ledger and validation guidelines.

After any outage, as quickly as it might 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 reminiscent of Fedwire and TARGET, card networks, ACH, and clearinghouses.

Recovery includes replaying queued transactions, reconciling mismatched snapshots, generally manually adjusting balances, then bringing a whole lot of intermediaries again into sync.

Visa’s 2018 outage took hours to diagnose regardless of a full-time operations crew. The ECB’s TARGET incidents required exterior evaluations and multi-month remediation plans.

Bitcoin practices for worst-case situations

So, in a disaster, a believable state of affairs 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.

Meanwhile, banks work out which cost batches settled, reschedule missed ACH information, and look ahead to RTGS techniques to finish end-of-day reconciliation earlier than reopening totally.

This doesn’t imply Bitcoin “wins” immediately. Card rails and money nonetheless matter for shoppers. But as a world settlement layer, it would attain a constant state sooner than a patchwork of nationwide cost techniques, exactly as a result of it’s been operating steady hearth 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 standard 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.

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