Explained: Blockstream Satellites
On today’s Bitcoin Fundamentals Show, Preston talks with Blockstream’s Samson Mow about Green and Aqua. Samson is the Chief Strategy Officer and he talks about Blockstream satellites.
Preston Pysh
One of the things that for anybody that’s new to the space, and they hear this for the first time, I think it’s eye opening. Blockstream has satellites in space that are broadcasting the blockchain, that anybody can set up a satellite receiver on the ground and tap into this feed that’s being transmitted by one of the six satellites that are going around the Earth. I’m assuming that you guys are licensing this bandwidth off of these satellites. These aren’t like… you don’t own the satellites. You’re just licensing a certain portion of the bandwidth that’s coming off. I don’t suspect it’s a lot of bandwidth. So the costs isn’t like if you’re streaming video, right? But talk to me about the ROI. Blockstream’s ROI for something like this.
Samson Mow
Right. I think it comes down to it’s augmenting the Bitcoin network. So the biggest benefit to the network of there being these Bitcoin satellites in space is that you can prevent network splits. So if an undersea cable is cut to some country, or region, and there’s a decent amount of hashing power there, you can potentially be split off for the rest of network. And you might say a transaction is valid when it’s not. But as long as one person in that region is running a Blockstream satellite dish, then they can keep that whole area in sync with the rest of the network. And I think that’s valuable, especially when we are spending, and investing so much money in building on top of Bitcoin, if there are splits in the network, that will impact your peg in transactions on Liquid. That’ll impact a lot of things like Lightning. And if we have securities issued on the Liquid Network, that will impact those too.
Samson Mow
So we want to make sure we’re stable all through the entire stack. And that is the main benefit. But for… actually it benefits everyone else too. So a lot of people don’t understand how all the different parts of what we’re working on at Blockstream, how they all fit together. But you can also use the Blockstream satellite service for mining. So if you have access to cheap power, and someplace with poor internet, or even no internet, let’s say there’s a solar farm installation in the desert, there’s no internet, you can still mine there, you can broadcast the block you find over cell phone signal, and you can get the entire Bitcoin blockchain through satellite.
Samson Mow
The cool thing is, we’ve recently upgraded to Blockstream satellite version 2.0. With this version, you can go into the middle of desert, set up a dish, download the entire Bitcoin blockchain from the Genesis block without any internet and keep in sync with the Bitcoin network through this service. So that’s actually really cool. So it opens up the door for mining in various parts of the world that you probably would not consider mining in previously.
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