The internet outage strategy: How Bitcoin remains operational during bank and card network failures.

In 2019, Rodolfo Novak executed a Bitcoin transaction from Toronto to Michigan without relying on the internet or satellite communication. He utilized a ham radio, the 40-meter band, and the ionosphere as his transmission medium.

Nick Szabo referred to it as “Bitcoin sent over national borders without internet or satellite, merely utilizing nature’s ionosphere.” The transaction was minimal, the setup was intricate, and the application seemed almost absurd.

Nonetheless, it demonstrated a key point: the protocol is indifferent to the medium that transmits its packets.

This experiment represents one aspect of a decade-long stress test that the Bitcoin community conducts discreetly, functioning as a distributed research and development initiative to assess whether the network can operate when conventional infrastructure fails.

Satellites disseminate blocks to receivers across continents. Mesh radios transmit transactions within neighborhoods without the necessity for internet service providers. Tor navigates traffic around censorship. Ham operators transmit hexadecimal data over shortwave frequencies.

These are not operational systems. They serve as drills for situations that most payment networks consider edge cases.

The underlying question is: if the internet becomes fragmented, how quickly can Bitcoin restore its online presence?

Satellites provide Bitcoin with an autonomous clock

Blockstream Satellite continuously broadcasts the complete Bitcoin blockchain 24/7 via four geostationary satellites that cover most populated areas.

A node equipped with an affordable dish and a Ku-band receiver can synchronize blocks and maintain consensus even if local ISPs become inactive.

The system operates in a one-way, low-bandwidth manner, but it addresses a specific issue: during regional outages or censorship, nodes require an independent source of truth for the ledger’s state.

The satellite API enhances this capability. Anyone can uplink arbitrary data, including signed transactions, from ground stations for worldwide dissemination. goTenna collaborated with Blockstream to enable users to create transactions on offline Android devices, relay them through local mesh networks, and then send them to a satellite uplink for broadcasting without engaging the broader internet.

The bandwidth is limited, but the independence is complete.

This is significant because satellites offer an “out-of-band” channel. When standard routing fails, nodes distributed across various continents can still receive the same chain tip from space, providing a common reference point for re-establishing consensus once terrestrial connections are restored.

Mesh and LoRa create Bitcoin backhaul at a human scale

Mesh networks adopt a different strategy: rather than broadcasting from orbit, they relay packets from device to device across short distances until one node with internet access retransmits to the larger network. TxTenna, developed by goTenna, showcased this in 2019.

Users transmit signed transactions over a mesh network from offline phones, hopping from node to node until reaching an exit point. Coin Center documented the architecture: each hop extends the reach without requiring any participant to have direct internet access.

Long-range LoRa mesh advances this idea further. Locha Mesh, initiated by Bitcoin Venezuela, constructs radio nodes that create an IPv6 mesh over unlicensed frequency bands.

The hardware, Turpial and Harpia devices, can transmit messages, Bitcoin transactions, and even synchronize blocks over several kilometers without an internet connection.

Tests conducted in disaster areas successfully demonstrated crypto transactions across multi-hop networks where both cellular and fiber connections were unavailable.

Darkwire segments raw Bitcoin transactions into small packets and relays them hop-by-hop over LoRa radios. Each node achieves approximately 10 kilometers of line of sight, transforming a neighborhood of hobbyist radios into makeshift Bitcoin infrastructure.

In urban settings, the range decreases to 3 to 5 kilometers, but this is sufficient to navigate around localized outages or censorship barriers.

Academic initiatives like LNMesh have extended this concept to Lightning Network payments, illustrating offline micropayments over local wireless mesh networks during power outages.

The transaction volumes are small and the setups delicate, but they establish the principle: Bitcoin’s physical layer is adaptable. As long as a connection exists between the nodes, the protocol operates.

Tor and ham radio bridge the gaps

Tor serves as a middle ground between the conventional internet and unconventional radio. Since Bitcoin Core 0.12, nodes automatically initiate a hidden service if a local Tor daemon is active, accepting connections via .onion addresses even when ISPs block known Bitcoin ports.

The Bitcoin Wiki and Jameson Lopp’s setup guides outline dual-stack configurations where nodes route traffic over both clearnet and Tor simultaneously, complicating efforts to censor Bitcoin traffic at the ISP level.

Experts caution against operating nodes solely over Tor due to the risks of eclipse attacks, but using it as one routing option among several significantly increases the cost of obstructing Bitcoin infrastructure.

Ham radio occupies the far end of the spectrum. Beyond Novak’s ionosphere experiment, operators have transmitted Lightning payments using amateur radio frequencies.

These tests involve manually encoding transactions, sending them over HF bands using protocols like JS8Call, and then decoding and retransmitting on the other side.

The throughput is minimal by contemporary standards, but the objective is not efficiency. The goal is to illustrate that Bitcoin can traverse any medium capable of transmitting small data packets, including those that predate the internet by decades.

What a global partition truly looks like

Recent modeling investigates the consequences of a prolonged global internet outage.

One scenario divides the network into three regions: Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe-Africa, with approximately 45%, 35%, and 20% of hash rate, respectively.

Miners within each partition continue to produce blocks while adjusting the difficulty independently. Local exchanges establish their own fee markets and order books on diverging chains.

Within each partition, Bitcoin continues to function. Transactions are confirmed, balances are updated, and local commerce proceeds, but only within that isolated area. Cross-border trade halts. When connectivity is restored, nodes encounter multiple valid chains.

The consensus rule is deterministic: follow the chain with the highest cumulative proof of work. Weaker partitions are reorganized, and some recent transactions are removed from the global history.

If the outage lasts from hours to a day and the hash distribution remains relatively balanced, the outcome is temporary disorder followed by convergence as bandwidth returns and blocks propagate.

Extended outages heighten the risk that social coordination will override protocol rules, exchanges, or that large miners will select their preferred history. Nonetheless, even that remains visible and governed in ways that traditional financial reconciliation does not.

Banks lack fire drills for this

In contrast, when payment infrastructure fails, the outcomes are different. TARGET2’s 10-hour outage in October 2020 delayed SEPA files and compelled central banks to manage liquidity and collateral manually.

Visa’s Europe-wide failure in June 2018 resulted in 2.4 million UK card transactions failing outright and ATMs running out of cash within hours after a single data center switch malfunctioned.

The ECB’s TARGET system experienced another significant outage in February 2025, leading to external audits after backup systems failed to activate.

IMF and BIS documentation regarding CBDC and RTGS resilience explicitly cautions that large-scale power or network outages can simultaneously impact both primary and backup data centers, and that centralized payment systems necessitate intricate business-continuity planning to prevent systemic disruption.

The architectural distinction is crucial. Every Bitcoin node maintains a complete copy of the ledger and validation rules.

Following any outage, as soon as it can communicate with other nodes, whether through satellite, Tor, mesh, or restored ISP, it simply inquires: what’s the heaviest valid chain?

The protocol delineates the resolution mechanism. No central operator reconciles competing databases.

Banks rely on a layered, centralized infrastructure that includes core banking ledgers, RTGS systems like Fedwire and TARGET, card networks, ACH, and clearinghouses.

Recovery entails replaying queued transactions, reconciling mismatched snapshots, sometimes manually adjusting balances, and then synchronizing hundreds of intermediaries.

Visa’s 2018 outage took hours to diagnose despite having a dedicated operations team. The ECB’s TARGET incidents necessitated external reviews and multi-month remediation strategies.

Bitcoin prepares for worst-case scenarios

Thus, in a crisis, a plausible scenario unfolds: a subset of miners and nodes remains synchronized via satellite and radio, preserving an authoritative chain tip even as fiber and mobile networks fail.

As connectivity is restored in segments, local nodes retrieve missing blocks and reorganize to that chain within minutes to hours.

Meanwhile, banks determine which payment batches were settled, reschedule missed ACH files, and await RTGS systems to finalize end-of-day reconciliation before fully reopening.

This does not imply that Bitcoin “wins” immediately. Card networks and cash remain significant for consumers. However, as a global settlement layer, it may achieve a consistent state more rapidly than a fragmented array of national payment systems, precisely because it has been conducting continuous fire drills for large-scale failure scenarios.

The ham operators transmitting transactions over shortwave, the Venezuelan mesh nodes directing sats across blackout areas, the satellites broadcasting blocks to dishes aimed at the sky, and these are not operational infrastructure.

They serve as evidence that when conventional channels fail, Bitcoin has a Plan B. And a Plan C. And a Plan D that involves the ionosphere.

The banking system continues to regard infrastructure failures as infrequent edge cases. Bitcoin, however, considers it a design constraint.

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