I remember reading somewhere about research regarding internet communication between planets being able to handle long ping durations and high risk for packet loss. Based on this I started thinking about how a project like Cardano would cope under those conditions running some sidechains on each planet but eventually needing to communicate with other sidechains on other planets.
Assuming that the internet communication problem has been solved for this situation, what technical issues would be introduced which are not present today in the context of Earth only blockchains? What assumptions would not hold anymore in, for example, the PoS proofs for Cardano or the overall architecture of the communication protocols?
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I’m interested in this as well.
It seems like the blockchain consensus model fails to scale across partitioned (over space and/or time) systems. While we can all see that using the same blockchain across planets (or galaxies) probably wouldn’t work, most fail to see that we’re dealing with the same kind of problem here on earth, albeit on a smaller scale.
- A community without reliable internet access can’t easily use a “centralized” blockchains.
- People can’t easily execute smart contracts or perform transactions offline.
- Concurrency issues still exist within local computer systems.
It would be interesting to have a truly decentralized alternative to the blockchain, that scales well from tiny local processes to gigantic intergalactic systems.
