Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Merits 4 from 1 user
Re: What will happen to the Bitcoin network if Russia blocks access to the internet?
by
PrivacyG
on 08/03/2022, 12:39:46 UTC
⭐ Merited by o_e_l_e_o (4)
If there is no communication whatsoever between Russia and the rest of the world (highly unlikely), then the network will fork. The main chain the rest of the world follows will lose the Russian hashrate, resulting in longer block times for a maximum of two weeks until the next difficulty retarget. After that, things would continue as normal. The Russian miners would either stop mining altogether or continue to mine on their own minority chain. Once internet communication is reestablished, then either the minority chain would simply be abandoned in favor of the main chain from the rest of the world, or the minority chain would continue as yet another fork of bitcoin.

What is far more likely is that there would still be a handful of nodes which could still communicate to both sides of the divide, and so the whole network would stay in sync. Users in Russia might see more frequent stale blocks and stale chains if it takes them significantly longer to remain synced with the rest of the network.
What if Russia, like some of the rumors say, will disconnect from the global network and continue with a separate network of their own rather than just censoring and blocking our side of the Internet?

If theirs become a completely separate type of Internet, could that not mean Bitcoin will continue to exist but.. twice?  Like a clone of the real one but in Russia without the possibility of communication between the two?  As if once the separation begins, we lose the Russian hashrate and they lose the rest of the world's and continue to function under the name of 'Bitcoin' although separately.  Since our network is different from theirs, they can not 'see' our Bitcoin and we can not 'see' theirs.  Pretty much like we would simulate the recreation of Bitcoin on a local network.  Is this possible, or is it possible just in my imagination?

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Regards,
PrivacyG