Can Bitcoin Survive a Carrington Event That Knocks Out the Grid? – Cointelegraph Magazine

“In a massive solar storm, which would be massively damaging to the infrastructure of a modern economy, the blockchain parts may well be the only parts that survive.” – Jason Potts

What was the Carrington Arrangement?

At a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in November 1859, the British astronomer Richard Christopher Carrington reported to the recognized scientific body that “on the morning of Thursday, September 1st, when I took my usual observation of the shapes and positions of the sunspots, appearances were seen as I believe is extremely rare.”

The phenomenon caused brilliant northern lights across the globe, some as far south as Cuba, which were so keen observers were able to read newspapers by their light at night.

It was the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, likely the result of a coronal mass ejection from the Sun colliding with Earth’s magnetosphere — and one with worrying implications for the cryptocurrency industry if it were to happen again today. A storm of such intensity would have the potential to affect most electrical systems in use today: satellites, internet providers, power supplies and all forms of communication.

The geomagnetic disturbances were so strong that telegraph operators in the United States reported sparks flying from their equipment, which in some cases even caught fire. Telegraph systems across Europe and North America failed.

Similar events were seen throughout the 20th century. In 1921, a solar storm was observed in and around New York City in the USA. The electrical disturbances knocked out the signaling and switching operations of the commuter train system, blew fuses and set fire to the Grand Central Terminal signal tower. Telegraph wires crackled as communication ground to a halt.

And in 1989, a storm knocked out power over large parts of Quebec in Canada. Scientists believe that an event even more massive than the one at Carrington occurred in 774, called the Miyake Event.

As Mississippi State University professor David Wallace wrote on Astronomy.com, the potential consequences could be catastrophic:

“It is only a matter of time before Earth is hit by another geomagnetic storm. A storm the size of the Carrington Event would be extremely damaging to electrical and communications systems worldwide with power outages lasting for weeks. If the storm is the size of the Miyake event, the results will be catastrophic for the world with potential blackouts lasting months, if not longer.”

What would happen to Bitcoin after a solar flare?

From personal computers in the home to the internet and the birth of cryptocurrencies, an economic and technological revolution occurred around the turn of the 21st century, one that is entirely dependent on an interconnected web of global communication systems.

Within these systems, traditional payment providers such as credit card companies, banks or payment firms form “payment stacks” – blocks of trusted, interconnected entities that process and settle electronic payment transactions.

Experts from Amazon Web Services have reported that most of this is still stored on aging banking systems built early in the second half of the 20th century. While some banks have tried to upgrade, “the vast majority stuck with the proven mainframe, which they rely on to this day.”

In contrast, Satoshi Nakamoto aimed to create a payment system that is decentralized and distributed across a network of computers, or nodes, rather than relying on a verticalized system stored in a single device server or data center. There is no single point of failure when it comes to the Bitcoin network’s ledger – a feature that leads many to characterize the network as more robust and flexible than other payment systems.

So, which would fare better in a Carrington event? Or would both not survive?

Sunspots and the “golden question”

The traditional payment system has certain redundancies and security measures built in to ensure that the networks, and their nodes, are protected from unauthorized events such as hackers, weather, power outages, power surges and others force majeure.

But a Carrington Event-level solar storm presents an extreme scenario on a much larger scale, the effects of which experts can still only estimate despite years of constant study.

“We monitor the sun continuously,” William Murtagh, program coordinator at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, told Magazine. Another event will happen – it’s just a matter of when and how intense it will be.

When it comes to solar magnetic events, researchers at SWPC look for large sunspots, some larger than Earth, that tend to form at the end of the 11-year solar cycle when the sun’s dipole magnetic field (think north and south poles) completely reverses.

Sunspots appear “all the time,” Murtagh notes, but are mainly observed when the sun is near its “solar maximum” — the peak of the 11-year cycle of solar activity. The next such maximum is estimated to occur sometime between 2024 and 2025.

“We’re watching it closely and all of a sudden the outbreak happens,” says Murtagh. “When this burst happens, we get a series of emissions. We get the electromagnetic emissions, light-speed loads.”

“We feel it here on Earth, and it affects some technologies a couple of hours later – energetic particles that flow in from this eruption. So, now we’re talking about subatomic particles. We get protons and electrons that flow in, and that will affect other different types of equipment, like satellites, like our astronauts in space, like planes flying over the polar region. Everyone can be affected by these energy particles.”

Following these light-speed projections from the Sun is a billion tons of plasma gas and magnetic fields erupting from the flare source, otherwise known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME. The sun actually shoots a magnet into space.

“The CME comes to Earth as a magnetic host with magnetic fields, so now I have two magnets,” he says. “When they connect in the right way, […] intense currents will form and manifest here on Earth, flow to the ground – depending on the conductivity of the soil below us – and can then damage equipment such as the power grid.”

“So, if we get a Carrington-class event, how big of a radiation storm might we get? That’s really the golden question here, isn’t it?”

Scientists have looked at a range of indicators to try to figure out what effects such an event might have, from ice samples to tree rings, and have identified some events that help them understand “how big, big is”.

NOAA is currently engaged in the Space Weather Benchmarks initiative initiated by the White House to better understand the impacts of these space weather events.

Could a solar flare wipe out Bitcoin?

We know that there will be significant consequences for our technology-dependent economy and communication systems. Anything dependent on the unified power grid and global internet will be particularly vulnerable.

So, how would cryptocurrency fare? Jason Potts, a professor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and co-director of the Blockchain Innovation Hub, tells Magazine that a Carrington Event-level solar storm will certainly affect anything that relies on electronic infrastructure for its administrative capacity, including mainstream finance. and crypto.

“But the difference is that the financial infrastructure of crypto or blockchain is distributed,” he says, adding:

“This is the same reason why the internet is robust. It was designed as a network communication system in the 1960s to be able to withstand a nuclear attack that took out many communication relays. But provided there was enough redundancy in the network paths, a message could get through.”

According to Potts, the thousands of distributed Bitcoin nodes give the network a much better chance of surviving a catastrophic event, as “an attack will almost certainly fail unless it can take them all out. If just one survives, the entire system can be reconstituted from that seed.”

What happens to Bitcoin if the internet goes down?

There are projects that provide a connection to the Bitcoin blockchain without the requirement of internet access, providing yet another level of redundancy.

Fernando Nikolić, director of marketing and communications at Blockstream, tells Cointelegraph that Blockstream’s mission is to broadcast the Bitcoin network worldwide via satellite, “4/27, 365.”

“It protects users from network outages. We started recording certain regions of the world that, for whatever reason, don’t have a reliable internet connection, whether it’s because they’re very rural areas where the infrastructure isn’t very good, or they’re in a place where the government or some kind of entity controls the internet in a more authoritative way than perhaps what we are used to in the West, he says.

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Blockstream uses five satellites that it continuously updates to transmit the Bitcoin blockchain to its users. Downloading the blockchain from one of the satellites is no more difficult than setting up a satellite TV box.

Nikolić says: “Just get a normal dish that you normally use to catch TV channels, and you just need to be able to point it at the satellite that’s best, and you can just connect there with a very cheap laptop. “

Once a user downloads the blockchain, they can begin verifying their own transactions on the laptop connected to the satellite. “If for some reason the internet is down or just doesn’t connect, well, the satellite is really a good backup,” adds Nikolić.

Potts notes that true decentralization of a blockchain network is important, as having nodes spread across the Earth’s four hemispheres would ensure “safety and security through redundancy,” concluding:

“Maybe someone on Mars would be good too. Blockchains aren’t fast or efficient, but they are robust. In a massive solar storm, which would be hugely damaging to the infrastructure of a modern economy, the blockchain parts may well be the only parts that survive enough to be reconstituted.”

The Big Question: Will You Really Need Bitcoin If The World Burns?

Bitcoin’s decentralized, modular nature gives it the best ability to move and improvise based on available connectivity after a significant geomagnetic event.

But if a Carrington-level event renders every phone and computer in an entire hemisphere useless and knocks out the power grids, society could be thrown back to pre-industrial times.

The big question then becomes: Even if the Bitcoin ledger survives, who will have time to use it as we strive to rebuild society?

Aaron Wood

Aaron Wood is an editor at Cointelegraph with a background in energy and finance. He keeps an eye on blockchain’s applications to build smarter and fairer energy access globally.