Would Bitcoin survive a nuclear war?
Several renowned cryptographers, including Nick Szabo and Ralph Merkle (inventor of Merkle Trees), have argued that Bitcoin would survive a nuclear war. Although almost impossible to verify, today Protos asks: Is Bitcoin nuclear safe?
Ralph Merkle’s latest article says, “If nuclear war destroyed half of our planet, [Bitcoin] would continue to live, undisturbed. It will continue to provide its services… The only way to shut it down is to kill every server that hosts it. Which is difficult, because many servers host it, in many countries, and many people will use it.”
While it’s safe to say that under current circumstances the Bitcoin protocol is hosted on “many servers” and that “many people want to use it,” the realities of a nuclear fallout make Merkle’s strong statement moot.
Bitcoin after nuclear war
Much of the concern and criticism of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work concerns the “waste” it creates due to the energy needed to secure the network – which uses more energy than some not-so-small countries.
However, one of the first problems humanity will face in a large-scale, or even medium-scale, nuclear conflict will be a lack of reliable power sources. This will not only be due to a “nuclear winter” – or a cooling of the Earth’s atmosphere due to radioactive soot being thrown into the air, rendering solar energy sources more or less useless – but also due to global equipment shortages and transport shocks.
It would instantly become more difficult and expensive to source fossil fuels, source resources and ship anything. This means everything will cost more and only very special assets will be worth energizing. The main concern when nuclear armageddon begins will definitely not be securing the Bitcoin network — especially when considering another scarce resource: food.
Read more: Husband and wife use peanut butter sandwich to trade nuclear secrets for crypto
In the event of a nuclear war, hundreds of millions of lives could be lost instantly. Only the real death and destruction would occur in the years that followed. Nuclear winter would cause large-scale crop failure and surplus countries will struggle to transport goods due to supply chain constraints and fuel costs.
A global famine would likely kill billions more than the initial attacks, suggesting that any reliable energy source would likely be used to provide more food and drinking water.
The value proposition
Another point of conjecture is the value of bitcoin after a nuclear war. Martin Pfeiffer, a doctoral candidate at the University of New Mexico, researches nuclear weapons fantasies like these.
“Under the conditions that have been set [in this hypothetical]”, says Pfeiffer, “the claim that Bitcoin would survive and be useful in any meaningful sense strikes me as ridiculous.”
Just like the money in our pockets, big, dumb gold bars, or stocks in brokerage accounts, bitcoin will have little use in a world defined by trade and barter, a world where food, water, medicine and weapons are the currencies of choice. This doesn’t mean that the thousands of individuals and companies that mine bitcoin will immediately shut down their ASICs and kill their servers the moment a nuclear war started, but the odds are that such luxury spending won’t last too long.
It’s puzzling why cryptographers suggest Bitcoin would survive a nuclear apocalypse, and why some proponents suggest buying bitcoin to prepare — mostly because it’s hard to tell whether they’re ignorant or want to test another wide-eyed theory.
At the end of the day, banking on Bitcoin for the nuclear apocalypse seems like a mistake, but we wanted to nor test the hypothesis at all. Meanwhile, Martin Pfeiffer agrees with Ralph Merkle in at least one aspect: “The only way to kill Bitcoin is to make it obsolete… like via a nuclear war!”
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