CAN BLOCKCHAIN & CRYPTO SAVE US FROM THE SUN?

It’s 3 am here in Malta, and I’ve found myself awake, fitting a new plug to a dubious electric heater, and pondering the Sun. Specifically, the unnerving likelihood that, at some point in the near future, our star will send at least some of us back to the Stone Age. And, I wondered, could decentralized blockchain tech save civilization?

Warnings from our past: the Carrington Event and other geomagnetic storms

On the 1st and 2nd of September 1859, the Earth experienced the most intense geomagnetic storm ever recorded. Known as the Carrington Event, after British astronomer Richard Christopher Carrington, who recorded it along with Richard Hodgson, it resulted from a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun. So strong was the CME’s reaction with our magnetosphere, that brilliant auroras were observed as far south as the Caribbean.

Luckily, in 1859, the Earth’s electrical grid was barely there. Still, telegraph networks across Europe and North America were crippled, with wires sparking and operators receiving nasty shocks. Such was the strength of the induced atmospheric current, that there were even reports of operators being able to send and receive messages even though they disconnected their systems from the power supply!

But, what does this have to do with blockchain and crypto? Well, decentralized blockchain networks may hold the key to digital survival. To appreciate why you need to understand a few things about geomagnetic storms. You see, space weather- the general term for all such things from space - is still a horribly underappreciated thing by most people. More to the point, we now live in a world dependent on vast, intricate networks of wires and microprocessors, all of which are massively more vulnerable to Carrington-type events than were the thick copper cables of the first telegraphs. Obviously, all cryptocurrencies and digital assets exist on vulnerable devices - as does all digitally stored data.

And, strong geomagnetic storms are not as rare as you may think. There was a major one in 1921, and in March 1989 large parts of Quebec’s power grid were disabled by such another. Scarily, on 23rd July 2012, unbeknown to most people, our planet almost received another Carrington-level hit. In fact, researchers studying carbon-14 in tree rings and beryllium-10 in ice cores, have found evidence to suggest there was a storm at least 10x as strong as the Carrington Event in the year 775, and one even bigger in 7176 BCE. Doubtless, we'll find evidence of many more in due course.

At this point, it's important to appreciate that it doesn’t really matter which side of the planet is ‘hit’ because the electrical currents are induced through the atmosphere and Earth itself. This means it is virtually impossible to figure out which areas are most vulnerable, beyond looking for particularly overloaded or ramshackle systems - for example, the Pakistani or Nigerian power grids, which have repeatedly failed in normal times. Of course, if the storm is strong enough, then electrical devices everywhere on the planet could well be destroyed, but there’s also the possibility that effects are localized or regional.

Could decentralization save our data?

Given this, it's not hard to see that data stored centrally is vulnerable. If a business, government, or bank has all its data stored on a single, or even multiple servers, but they are all within a region that is badly hit by the next geomagnetic event, it could be game over. Now, again, it is important to realize that an event could simply overload the grid and cause power failures - blowing transformers and such. In this case, data likely won’t be lost, and systems will eventually be restored. But, it's a game of Russian roulette. If the storm is strong enough, data could be lost forever - with devices literally melting.

What would happen, for example, if Europe, North America, or Southeast Asia took the brunt of a major geomagnetic storm, and governments, businesses, and banks lost vast amounts of data? Even if the various entities had multiple backups in remote data centers across several regions or countries, they could all be affected by a single event. The damage that could be caused in today’s digital age is hard to imagine, and even a regional event could trigger compounding crises affecting all economic, social, and security realities.

Assuming the event was regional, help could come from other areas to get grids back up and running (although even this may take a long time), but lost data would be gone forever. And here is where decentralized blockchains may save the day. From the outset, cryptos and their underlying blockchain technology were designed to be censorship resistant. Granted, the perceived threat came from malicious actors of the human kind, whether that be governments, central banks, businesses, or individual criminals. This inevitably required geographical decentralization and resulted in the decentralized ledgers we see today. For example, the Bitcoin network is estimated to have somewhere in the region of 14,000 nodes right now. Granted, not all nodes on all blockchain networks are full or archival nodes, and many networks have far fewer, but the key when it comes to space weather resistance isn’t so much in huge numbers, but widespread geographic distribution.

Thus, even if an entire region or continent got crippled by a major Carrington-level event, and the banks lost all records of your accounts, as long as you had your crypto wallet keys written down on a piece of paper, you may well be able to access your funds at a later date. Of course, if something of this magnitude happened, you’d probably have more pressing immediate concerns, but the point is, your assets would still be there. The same goes for all kinds of data, from tax and identification records to business accounts and even NFTs. If it was stored on a distributed blockchain network, there’s a good chance it will still be surviving somewhere. It’s interesting to recall that the internet itself resulted from efforts to create a decentralized communication network that would still function after a nuclear war. The idea was that the landline phone network in the United States was so dense, that even if a Soviet strike took out the major cities and hubs, communications would still be able to be routed effectively.

Taken to the extreme, it's even possible that a geomagnetic event may be so severe that it effectively takes down much of the world, leaving only pockets with viable electrical devices and digital storage. In this case, it's conceivable that distributed ledgers may literally hold the key to rebooting civilization. Who knows, maybe right now there are nodes in bunkers and cave systems that will end up being something akin to data arks.

Of course, considering the Earth’s magnetosphere is rapidly weakening and many scientists now expect an imminent geomagnetic excursion (of the type that ominously coincided with the Younger Dryas global catastrophe around 12,000 years ago), this discussion may be entirely academic. If we wake up tomorrow and the entire planet has been thrown back to the Stone Age, no one’s going to remember what cryptocurrency is after a couple of weeks. As for the mining and data centers? Well, they will probably become ‘temples’ in the eyes of archaeologists 12,000 years hence.