Bitcoin Without the Internet

Bitcoin transactions without the internet? Remember Kryptoradio?

Obviously without Internet access the possibility to send and receive Bitcoins is significantly limited. There has been a lot of speculation around the topic with community members trying to imagine what would happen with Bitcoin if the entire Internet shuts down.

Alternative blockchain transports are critical to the success and survivability of the Bitcoin system. -Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell

Apparently, transactions with Bitcoin could still be possible even with no Internet connection. Some companies (such as 37Coins) suggested sending Bitcoin through the use of a third party SMS wallet provider. It never made it and sadly announced closure very soon after appearing.

What really interested me was a Finnish project called Kryptoradio which was researching possibilities of broadcasting Blockchain data over DVB-T. Unfortunately the project is now "dead", but luckily not completely buried. At least, a very interesting study if not anything else.

Kryptoradio project ended in December, 2014 but the project is not entirely forgotten in the last year and a half. The project raised huge audience and there has been some serious commercial interest but nothing I am really interested in because they would destroy the original idea of Kryptoradio – distributing the Bitcoin ledger autonomously without Internet connectivity.

Kryptoradio is a cryptocurrency data transmission system that:

• transmits bitcoin transactions, blocks, and currency exchange data
• does all this in real-time
• uses terrestrial television (DVB-T) transmitters around the world
• Bitcoins in the air, literally speaking

Any unidirectional digital transmission path with a sufficient error correction is suitable for this project. In addition to DVB-T there are many other possible ways to transmit Bitcoin stream like subcarriers of FM radio transmission, amateur radio, and DAB. We chose DVB-T for our pilot project because of its flexibility and wide support in most parts of the world.

The software part of this project consists of two separate applications: serializer and deserializer. The former connects to the the Bitcoin network, receives transactions and blocks, then puts them into a queue, which is then processed according to given priorities and finally serialized to a stream of bytes. The result is passed to transmitter. On the other end, a tuner is connected to the deserializer, which parses the incoming stream and emulates a Bitcoin node serving transactions and blocks to all the connected nodes.

It is still a long way to make this kind of technology global and common. As one of the developers state on their website about the end of the project:

I want to thank all our supporters out there. Many of you really wanted this to happen globally. We were doing this mostly because of interest to the technology. The Bitcoin economy back then and even today is far too small to keep this running just on donations. On the other hand, putting in any subscription model would severely hurt the anonymity aspect of blockchain broadcasting. Therefore I lost interest to the project in beginning of 2015.