Imagine a world where the internet goes dark. Banks falter, card networks cease to function, and digital pathways vanish. While such a scenario spells disaster for most modern payment systems, a dedicated community within the Bitcoin ecosystem has spent years preparing for this very eventuality. This ongoing, distributed research and development program aims to ensure Bitcoin's survival, regardless of infrastructure failures.
A striking example occurred in 2019 when Rodolfo Novak sent a Bitcoin transaction from Toronto to Michigan using only a ham radio, the 40-meter band, and the Earth's ionosphere as a relay. Nick Szabo called it “Bitcoin sent over national border without internet or satellite, just nature’s ionosphere.” Though tiny and finicky, it proved a fundamental truth: the Bitcoin protocol is indifferent to its transport mechanism. As long as data packets move, Bitcoin persists.
This experiment highlights one extreme of Bitcoin's continuous stress testing. From satellites broadcasting blocks globally to mesh radios relaying transactions locally, and Tor routing traffic around censors, these aren't just theoretical exercises. They are “fire drills” for scenarios traditional finance often dismisses as edge cases, all driven by one question: if the internet fragments, how quickly can Bitcoin restore global connectivity?
Satellites: A Global Lifeline
One powerful answer to widespread internet failure comes from space. Blockstream Satellite broadcasts the entire Bitcoin blockchain 24/7 via four geostationary satellites, covering most populated regions. A node with an inexpensive dish and receiver can sync blocks and maintain consensus, even if local ISPs are down.
This one-way, low-bandwidth system provides an independent source of truth for the ledger's state during regional blackouts or censorship. The satellite API further allows uplinking arbitrary data, including signed transactions, from ground stations for global broadcast. For instance, goTenna partnered with Blockstream to enable users to compose transactions offline, relay them via local mesh, and then hand them to a satellite uplink without touching the wider internet. The bandwidth is limited, but the independence is absolute.
Satellites provide a crucial “out-of-band” channel. When regular terrestrial routing fails, nodes across continents can still receive the same chain tip from space, offering a shared reference point for rebuilding consensus once land-based links return.
Mesh & LoRa: Building Local Resilience
Mesh networks offer a ground-level approach, relaying packets device-to-device across short hops until a node with internet access rebroadcasts them. TxTenna by goTenna demonstrated this in 2019: users send signed transactions over mesh from offline phones, hopping node-to-node until reaching an internet exit point. Each hop extends reach without direct internet access for participants.
Long-range LoRa mesh pushes this further. Locha Mesh, from Bitcoin Venezuela, builds radio nodes (Turpial and Harpia devices) forming an IPv6 mesh over license-free bands. These can carry messages, Bitcoin transactions, and even block sync over several kilometers without internet. Tests in disaster zones successfully processed crypto transactions across multi-hop networks where cellular and fiber had failed.
Darkwire fragments raw Bitcoin transactions into small packets, relaying them hop-by-hop over LoRa radios. Each node reaches about 10 kilometers line of sight, turning hobbyist radios into ad hoc Bitcoin infrastructure. Urban range drops to 3-5 kilometers, enough to route around localized outages or censorship chokepoints. Academic projects like LNMesh even demonstrated offline Lightning Network payments over local wireless mesh during power outages. These systems, though small in volume, prove a vital principle: Bitcoin's physical layer is fungible. As long as a path exists between nodes, the protocol functions.
Tor & Ham Radio: The Ultimate Backups
Tor bridges the gap between the regular internet and exotic radio. Since Bitcoin Core 0.12, nodes can automatically start a hidden service, accepting connections via .onion addresses even if ISPs block known Bitcoin ports. Dual-stack configurations, routing traffic over both clearnet and Tor, complicate ISP-level censorship. While exclusive Tor use carries eclipse-attack risks, it significantly raises the cost of blocking Bitcoin infrastructure when used as one of several routing options.
Ham radio sits at the far end of the spectrum. Beyond Novak's experiment, operators have relayed Lightning payments via amateur radio frequencies. These tests involve manually encoding, transmitting over HF bands using protocols like JS8Call, then decoding and rebroadcasting. Throughput is minimal by modern standards, but the point isn't efficiency. It's demonstrating that Bitcoin can move across any medium capable of carrying small data packets, including those predating the internet by decades.
Global Partition: How Bitcoin Recovers
Modeling a prolonged global internet outage, one scenario envisions the network splitting into three regions (Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe-Africa), with miners in each partition continuing to produce blocks and adjusting difficulty independently. Local exchanges would build fee markets on diverging chains. Within each “island,” Bitcoin continues working, confirming transactions and updating balances. Cross-border trade, however, freezes.
When connectivity returns, nodes face multiple valid chains. Bitcoin's consensus rule is deterministic: follow the chain with the most cumulative proof of work. Weaker partitions are reorganized, and some recent transactions are removed from global history. If the outage is brief (hours to a day) and hash distribution isn't extremely skewed, the result is temporary chaos followed by convergence as bandwidth returns. Prolonged outages risk social coordination overriding protocol rules, but even this remains visible and rule-bound, unlike traditional financial reconciliation.
Traditional Finance vs. Bitcoin: A Stark Contrast
Contrast this with payment infrastructure failures. TARGET2's 10-hour outage (Oct 2020) delayed SEPA files. Visa's Europe-wide failure (June 2018) saw 2.4 million UK card transactions fail, emptying ATMs. The ECB's TARGET system faced another major outage (Feb 2025), requiring external audits after backup systems failed.
IMF and BIS documentation on CBDC and RTGS resilience explicitly warns that large-scale outages can simultaneously hit primary and backup data centers. Centralized payment systems require complex business-continuity planning to avoid systemic disruption.
The architectural difference is key. Every Bitcoin node holds a full ledger copy and validation rules. After an outage, it simply asks: “What's the heaviest valid chain?” The protocol defines resolution; no central operator reconciles databases. Banks rely on layered, centralized infrastructure (core ledgers, RTGS, card networks). Recovery involves replaying queued transactions, reconciling snapshots, and manually adjusting balances across hundreds of intermediaries. Visa's 2018 outage took hours to diagnose; ECB's incidents required multi-month remediation plans.
Conclusion: Bitcoin's Continuous Preparedness
In a crisis, a plausible Bitcoin scenario emerges: a subset of miners and nodes stays synchronized via satellite and radio, maintaining an authoritative chain tip as fiber and mobile networks fail. As connectivity returns, local nodes pull missing blocks and reorganize within minutes to hours. Meanwhile, banks would still be figuring out settled payments, rescheduling ACH files, and waiting for RTGS systems to complete reconciliation.
This doesn't mean Bitcoin instantly “wins.” Card rails and cash still matter. But as a global settlement layer, Bitcoin might reach a consistent state faster than national payment systems, precisely because it continuously runs “fire drills” for world-scale failure modes.
The ham operators, Venezuelan mesh nodes, and satellites aren't just production infrastructure. They're proof that when usual pipes break, Bitcoin has a Plan B, a Plan C, and even a Plan D involving the ionosphere. The banking system treats infrastructure failures as rare edge cases. Bitcoin treats it as a design constraint.
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