What if Russia nukes Ukraine?
It could be the end of Bitcoin.
There has been lately a lot of buzz about an imminent nuclear threat by Russia, fact is that, according to various sources, Moscow is subtly moving toward Europe:
- A nuclear train
- A nuclear submarine
- Four “Topol” intercontinental missile mobile launcher
Not to mention that there is a nuclear power plant on the brink of exploding for months.
Probably in times like this, the health of our bitcoins is the last thing we should be worrying about, however, I know that many of you can’t help but wonder, «if the Internet blows up, what will become of my crypto?»
Connect the dots
The Internet backbone consists of many networks owned by numerous companies. Optical fiber trunk lines consists of many fiber cables bundled to increase capacity, or bandwidth. Fiber-optic communication remains the medium of choice for several reasons. The real-time routing protocols and redundancy built into the backbone are also able to reroute traffic in case of a failure.
Those backbones are interconnected at various Internet Exchange Points (IXP) around the world.
The resilience of the network comes from the redundancy of these nodes: they form an Optical Mesh Network.
With mesh networking, the distance between two nodes does not matter as long as there are enough nodes in between to pass the message along. When one node wants to communicate with another, the network automatically calculates the best path.
A mesh network is reliable and offers redundancy. If a node can no longer operate, for example because it has been removed from the network or because a barrier blocks its ability to communicate, the rest of the nodes can still communicate with each other, either directly or through intermediate nodes.
51% bad guys
The blockchain is resilient by definition, as it utilizes peer-to-peer networks and distributed systems which includes registers to store transactions. Its structure is designed as a digital log file and stored as a series of linked groups, called blocks. Each individual block is cryptographically locked with the previous block. Once a block has been added, it cannot be altered, unless the majority of blockchain participants would decide to do so.
The main consensus mechanisms adopted are known as Proof of Work (based on computing power) and Proof of Stake (based on assets).
As a potential security hazard in the transactions field, 51% attack brings huge risks to the continuity of the blockchain system.
There is no rational reason such that someone could think of launching this kind of attack, but humans are only partially rational animals.
Fortunately, in the current state of events, if for some reason, a supervillain were to get it into his head to destroy Bitcoin, he would be required to possess half of the current computational capacity.
So, to recap, the attacker could:
- prevent anyone from mining valid blocks
- reverse its transactions
- potentially double-spending transactions previously seen in the chain.
- prevent other transactions from succeeding
The attacker, though, couldn’t:
- handle non-possessed assets
- prevent or reverse transactions (they’ll show as 0/unconfirmed at least)
- create assets out of thin air
Last but not least, changing historical blocks (namely, finalized transactions before the attack), would be exceedingly difficult even by controlling the blockchain. Older transactions are exponentially unchangeable, and impossible to modify before a checkpoint, where they become permanent.
A Georgian lady
Mining unused copper cables for scrap was a common money-making way in the former Soviet Union. Some entrepreneurs even used tractors to rip hundreds of meters of cables from an abandoned nuclear test field in Kazakhstan.
Entering into this fil rouge, in 2011 an elderly Georgian lady who was scavenging near Tbilisi damaged a fiber optic cable in search of copper to sell as scrap.
It wasn’t an ordinary cable.
Georgia in those days provided 90 percent of the connectivity to Armenia and the disruption was so severe that it also affected Azerbaijan, totaling 4 million people offline for 12 hours, which, all in all, given the damage and lack of redundancy, was not too bad.
It has been 11 years since then, but are we sure that something like this couldn’t happen again?
Net Split
If such a Net Split would happen nowadays, Armenian citizens could continue to send and receive Bitcoins, unaware of being in an exclusively Caucasian network.
Should the Armenian blockchain be brought back online again and able to connect with the rest of the world, the transactions in the blocks that rollback would likely be added to the mempool (in the memory list of unconfirmed transactions).
If the same amount has been spent on both forks (Double Spending), the transaction on the “losing fork” will be lost, since the network will reject it for trying to spend an already spent output.
Furthermore, if anyone would travel from one Split-Country to another, he would inevitably join the other fork.
In the case of a perpetual split, we would be effectively dealing with two different currencies. To avoid chaos, it would be better for one of the forks to use a different client.
The Internet Kill Switch
Governments in the past have decided to pull the plug. It happened first in Nepal in 2005, then 2 years later in Myanmar, up to the striking case we all know about in Egypt during the 2011 Arab Spring.
Interestingly, the provider Noor Data Networks was spared, since it was predominantly used by banks and government agencies.
Obviously, this is not a matter of pushing a button but rather about contacting all the national ISPs and coordinating a general lockdown of online traffic. It is an easy task for a dictatorship to perform, but there is no democracy in the world that has achieved consensuality in this regard.
The U.S. has never reached the last mile, while legislation prepared in 2004 in the U.K. provides that there should be compensations in case of disconnection, but we are talking about billions, moreover, disconnection notices can be ignored by ISPs in the face of a simple fine.
51% POW & POS attacks
The current combined hashrate of the entire Bitcoin compartment is traveling at 235 EptaHash/s, which means that it would take a minimum of $10 trillion in hardware to get to 120 EH/s and launch a 51% attack, without considering the huge costs of power, maintenance, staffing, and cooling.
A similar remark should be made for Ethereum, which has recently moved from POW to POS: whereas before 500 TeraHash/s and roughly $5 trillion in hardware would be enough to launch such an attack, with POS we have almost gone to double that, as $9 trillion stacked would be needed, with the ongoing risk for the attacker to see the rules rewritten, as in the case that led to Ethereum Classic in 2015.
It might seem that in the current state of affairs, it is impossible to launch 51% attacks, but is that really the case?
What would happen in the wake of an extreme collapse of the network’s hashrate?
“I will attack Oceania with five tanks”
Any good Risk player knows that once Oceania is taken, winning the game becomes a piece of cake because it consists of 4 states that are well defensible as they are accessible only from Siam.
But scarcity of connections is not a good thing in all fields.
What if, for some reason, a bad guy would decide to disconnect the whole of Oceania?
Let’s have a look at the Submarine Cable Map in this zone.
Yes indeed, it would be enough to take out 5 IXPs to blow up the internet in at least Australia, New Zealand, all the surrounding archipelagos, and most of New Guinea. We can speculate on the blockchain-level repercussions thanks to an old post of Satoshi Nakamoto:
“It’s hard to imagine the Internet getting segmented airtight. It would have to be a country deliberately and totally cutting itself off from the rest of the world.
Any node with access to both sides would automatically flow the block chain over, such as someone getting around the blockade with a dial-up modem or sat-phone. It would only take one node to do it. Anyone who wants to keep doing business would be motivated.
If the network is segmented and then recombines, any transactions in the shorter fork that were not also in the longer fork are released into the transaction pool again and are eligible to get into future blocks. Their number of confirmations would start over.
If anyone took advantage of the segmentation to double-spend, such that there are different spends of the same money on each side, then the double-spends in the shorter fork lose out and go to 0/unconfirmed and stay that way.
It wouldn’t be easy to take advantage of the segmentation to double-spend. If it’s impossible to communicate from one side to the other, how are you going to put a spend on each side? If there is a way, then probably someone else is also using it to flow the blockchain over.
You would usually know whether you’re in the smaller segment. For example, if your country cuts itself off from the rest of the world, the rest of the world is the larger segment. If you’re in the smaller segment, you should assume nothing is confirmed.”
Exploiting a net split
The Oceania case, applied to the Bitcoin network is not so worrisome, given and considering the low hashrate on that continent: if indeed the two networks were disconnected for a certain amount of time, the one with the chain having done the most work would «win».
Things would not go so smoothly, however, if there were a blackout in North America (45% global hashrate). Russia, Kazakhstan and China (38%) could easily enact a 51% attack on the rest of the world, and even if the U.S. and Canada came out of isolation, the North American fork would still be the loser, causing immeasurable damage to the economies of these countries.
Mix’n’Match
A temporary blackout could be the lesser of evils, however, because if the «Oceania» scenario were to occur, there would be nothing to stop the Asian trio from Double Spending on both branches of the blockchain with the complacency of agents based in North America: all they would need to do is get their act together first.
Rogue miner attempts to overcome the split could be blocked by implementing Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, keeping them from reacquiring control of the chain.
Russia nukes Ukraine scenario
Certainly, Putin was not very happy on his birthday to see his favorite bridge knocked down by Zelensky: he could easily respond, perhaps with a small tactical nuclear bomb on Snake Island.
Of course, the U.S. would respond, while China would try to take over Taiwan. In the best case scenario (i.e., that after a few nukes everyone would stop), we could find ourselves in a similar scenario to the one described above, with a Western and an Eastern Internet disconnected from each other and an Oceania loyal to the U.S. but probably isolated from the rest of the world by 5 well-placed blows.
As we have seen, all the assets on the various blockchains could be double-spent on both forks by those capable of doing so, but it would still be a loss-making move, as a more than 50 percent collapse of both branches is to be expected.
Blockchained Disarmament
Instead of being one of the first victims of a nuclear holocaust, blockchain could be one of the main deterrents.
The verification of the decommissioning of a nuclear warhead implies an enormous amount of data. The inspectors must record status and locations of the warheads, details of the inspections and facilities. To maximize trust in the process, these data must be stored in a reliable and persistent way.
Among other things, a Nuclear Blockchain could:
- Create an immutable, encrypted ledger for objects subject to treaty control.
- Serve as a cryptographic repository for national declarations, allowing parties to disclose sensitive data in a gradual manner
- Function as an international trust-building measure, allowing any third party to verify disarmament data without seeing it.
- Deliver a safe layer for a private IoT composed of location sensors and environmental monitors, enabling real-time tracking of remote sites and automatic alerts to participants in the event of violations.
Space Nodities
Satoshi Nakamoto reminded us earlier that a single globally visible node would guarantee «the unforkability» of a blockchain, so why not actually implement it?
There are already 2300 Starlinks in orbit guaranteeing the resilience of the internet, and it wouldn’t take much effort to make them Bitcoin nodes, perhaps even loading each one with 32 ethereum in POS. They could still become military targets, but would it be worth trying to take them all down, to be faced with a potential Gravity-like scenario?
If the International Space Station were to be abandoned, then the Russians could no longer play clowns in space.
