Jeff Bezos and others are talking about 1 tril humans living in the Solar system (mostly on O'Neill cylindrical colonies, depicted in the "Intrastellar" movie):
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/jeff-bezos-plays-down-ai-dangers-and-says-a-trillion-humans-could-live-in-huge-cylindrical-space-stations-78058437My question is: what would be the longest distance of such colony to Earth (or maybe between different colonies) to still maintain a common bitcoin ledger?
I am not exactly sure how nodes "decide" which miner was the first to the block.
For example if one miner is on The Moon, which is 1.28 sec away by the light pulse: would that miner always lag and, therefore, not able to claim a block?
Or, is there a 'compensation' mechanism that would take the 1.28 sec delay into the account (in case of a Moon miner)?
Of course 1.28 sec is much less than 10min between blocks, so theoretically, this still can be sorted IF there is a mechanism to compensate for that 1.28 sec delay due to the speed of light transmission limit.
I also found this description (
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/84412/how-does-a-node-decide-whether-a-block-is-valid):
This is also true in a tie. If two blocks are mined by different miners at the same time, each participant assumes that the first block they received is the valid one, and they continue the Proof-of-Work process from this valid block. The next miner to create a valid block ends the tie by creating the longer chain, and any miner who was working on a block other than the one referred to in the new block's header will discard the work they have done so far on the shorter chain, and continue working on the longer chain.
The problem is with the term "at the same" time, imho. Relative to what?
In any case, if this cannot be counteracted, then only the O'Neill structures that are closer than Moon to earth could participate, but I doubt that they could be allowed in such a close proximity because of a possibility of those structures colliding with Earth (if they would be built so close).
The Muskcoin Revolution of 2140
In our view, Clark is partially right. Earth will remain the dominant bitcoin mining planet. But one day Martians will stage a revolution in support of their own token: Muskcoin. If they succeed, then Mars will become the dominant Muskcoin mining planet. The Muskcoin Revolution of 2140 will become a template for other colonies of Earth to follow, just like the American Revolution of 1776 was in its age.
Why Martians will want Muskcoin
Transaction without settlement is tyranny.
Martian revolutionary slogan, 2138
After the revolution, everyone will understand that successful human colonies near locations with abundant natural resources that are able to attract settlers and build industry will launch their own blockchains once they have sufficient political will and hashrate. Indeed, becoming a peer in the Solchain network will become the definition of what it means to be a successful colony.
Awesome..
1. Looking at the graph it seems that it shows somewhat strange numbers. For example, a pool with a theoretical 15% hash rate produces "only" about 9% of the blocks.
Maybe this explains why block production was always lagging in more minor pools that I favored, probably erroneously (but it never was less than 90-91% of "theoretical"). I guess large pools gobbled the "extra".
2. The graph "starts" at 50 light seconds (by eyeballing the graph). I assume that anything less that this would not affect the effective hash rates, so, multiplying this by the speed of light, it gives us a "sphere" with the radius of 50sX299792.458km/s=14989622.9km or 9334119.85 miles, with the sphere's volume of 1.41X10^22 km
3. The volume of earth is 1.086X10^12 km
3, which, if my rough calculations are correct, bitcoin mining could be done in a volume of space around Earth that exceeds Earth's volume by a factor of ~12.9 billion (X12900000000), which roughly corresponds to the distance of up to x39 the distance between the Earth and the Moon. In other words: plenty of space to put O'Neill structures there that would still be able to hash the common bitcoin chain (Mars is out of luck, though..too far).
Even if numbers presented here prove to be a rough estimate, in my mind I already "see" it (O'Neill[space cylinders with gravity on the surface due to rotation] colonies in space hashing bitcoin for trading, etc): the "Nakomoto sphere".
