What would happen to Bitcoin if the world were without internet for a day?

Original translation by Chopper, Foresight News

Imagine the global internet backbone collapsing in a single day.

Whether it’s human error, catastrophic software vulnerabilities, malicious computer viruses, or direct military conflict—what fate awaits Bitcoin if the physical internet hub connecting the world suddenly goes dark?

If Frankfurt, London, Virginia, Singapore, and Marseille were to simultaneously lose internet access, the Bitcoin network would split into three separate partitions.

Communications along the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and major trans-Pacific routes will come to a standstill, and the Americas, Europe and Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and the Pacific will each form their own independent trading histories until network connectivity is restored.

Within each partition, miners will continue to produce blocks based on their remaining computing power.

Based on the goal of producing blocks every 10 minutes, regions accounting for 45% of the hash rate produce approximately 2.7 blocks per hour, regions accounting for 35% of the hash rate produce approximately 2.1 blocks per hour, and regions accounting for 20% of the hash rate produce approximately 1.2 blocks per hour. Since nodes cannot exchange block headers or transaction data across partitions, each region will independently extend into a valid blockchain without the other party’s knowledge.

Ultimately, as time and computing power distribution change, the length of the natural fork will continue to grow.

This partitioning rhythm inevitably leads to chain splitting. We assigned approximate hash rate percentages to each region: Americas 45%, Asia and Oceania 35%, and Europe and Africa 20%, using this as a benchmark for simulation.

The Americas region adds approximately 6 new blocks every two hours, the Asia-Pacific region adds approximately 4-5 new blocks, and the Europe-Africa region adds approximately 2-3 new blocks.

After a full day, the number of chain-split blocks will exceed one hundred, which is beyond the scope of normal reorganization, forcing the service to treat the area confirmation as a temporary confirmation.

The potential reorganization depth of failed partitions increases linearly with isolation time.

The local memory pool will immediately split. Transactions broadcast in New York cannot reach Singapore, so receivers outside the sender’s partition will not see the transaction at all until the network is restored.

The transaction fee market within each partition exhibits local characteristics. Users compete for limited block space with the hash rate of their region, so transaction fees will rise fastest in regions with a low hash rate but high demand.

When transaction confirmation loses global finality, exchanges, payment processors, and custodian wallets typically suspend withdrawals and on-chain settlements; Lightning Network counterparties face uncertainty—transactions confirmed in minority partitions may become invalid.

Automatic coordination after network recovery

When network connectivity is restored, the nodes will initiate an automatic coordination process: each node will compare different blockchains and then reorganize into the valid chain with the largest cumulative workload.

The actual costs are mainly reflected in three aspects:

• Reorganization can cause blocks in minority partitions to become invalid, and the depth of invalidation depends on the duration of the split.
• Transactions that were only confirmed on the failed chain need to be rebroadcast and prioritized.
• Exchanges and custodians must conduct additional operational checks before resuming services.

During the 24-hour network split, dozens to hundreds of blocks from minority partitions may be orphaned after connections are restored. Related services will also require several additional hours to rebuild the mempool, recalculate balances, and restore withdrawal functionality.

Because fiat currency channels, compliance checks, and channel management require manual review, the full normalization of economic activities often lags behind the protocol level.

Simulating the isolation state using “reachable hash rate percentage” rather than the number of hubs makes its dynamic changes easier to understand:

• With 30% of the hash rate isolated, the minority partition produces approximately 1.8 blocks per hour. This means that the standard 6-confirmation payment within that partition will be at risk of becoming invalid after about 3 hours and 20 minutes—if the remaining 70% of the network builds a longer chain, these 6 blocks may become orphaned.
• In near 50/50 split scenarios, the cumulative workload of the two partitions is similar. Even a brief split will result in both sides having “confirmed” competing transaction histories, and the result after reconnection is random.
• In an 80/20 split scenario, the majority partition almost always wins; the approximately 29 blocks produced by the minority partition in a day will be isolated during the merge, causing many confirmed transactions in that region to be reversed.

The risk of reorganization is the product of “time” and “minority partition hash rate”. The most dangerous situation is “long-term isolation + near-equal hash rate split”.

The role of existing resilience tools

There are currently various tools available to improve network resilience, and these tools will affect the actual impact of network outages:

Alternative transmission methods such as satellite downlink, high-frequency radio relay, delay-tolerant networks, mesh networks, and Tor bridging can transmit block headers or streamline transaction flows over damaged routes.

These paths have narrow bandwidth and high latency, but even intermittent cross-partition data transfers can reduce fork depth by allowing some blocks and transactions to permeate other partitions.

The diversity of node interconnections in mining pools, as well as their geographical distribution, can increase the probability of some data being transmitted globally through side channels, thereby limiting the depth and duration of reorganization when the backbone network recovers.

Therefore, during network fragmentation, the operating principles for market participants are simple and clear:

• Cross-regional settlement is suspended, all transaction confirmations are treated as temporary, and the fee estimation mechanism is optimized in response to soaring local transaction fees.
• Exchanges can switch to proof-of-reserve mode when withdrawals are suspended, extend confirmation thresholds to address minority partition risks, and issue clear policies—setting the required number of confirmations based on the duration of the quarantine;
• Wallets should clearly inform users of regional finality risks, disable automatic channel rebalancing, and queue time-sensitive transactions for rebroadcasting once the network is restored.
• Miners should maintain diverse upstream connections and avoid manually modifying the standard “longest chain selection rule” during the coordination process.

From a design perspective, the protocol itself is sustainable—after nodes reconnect, they will automatically converge to the chain with the largest cumulative workload.

However, the user experience will be greatly diminished during the period of division, because the economic outcome depends on the consistent dissemination of global data.

In the worst-case scenario of a multi-hub outage lasting up to a day, the most likely outcomes are: a temporary collapse in cross-border availability, a sharp and uneven increase in transaction fees, and a deep restructuring that renders regional confirmations invalid.

Once the network is restored, the software will definitively repair the ledger, and all related services will be restored to full functionality after operational checks are completed.

The final step is to reopen withdrawals and Lightning Network access once the balance and transaction history on the winning chain are consistent.

If the division can never be repaired

What would happen if those backbone network hubs mentioned at the beginning could never be restored? In this dystopian scenario, the Bitcoin we know would cease to exist.

Instead, permanent geographical partitions exist, which function like independent Bitcoin networks: they share the same rules but cannot communicate with each other.

Each partition will continue mining, adjust its difficulty at its own pace, and develop its own independent economic system, order book, and fee market. Without restoring connectivity or manually coordinating the selection of a single chain, there will be no mechanism to reconcile the transaction histories of different partitions.

Consensus and Difficulty Adjustment

Before each partition completes the next round of difficulty adjustment for 2016 blocks, the block generation time may be faster or slower depending on the reachable hash rate. After the adjustment, each partition will stabilize its local block generation time at around 10 minutes.

Based on previous hash rate estimates, the timing of the first difficulty adjustment for each partition is as follows:

After the initial adjustment, each partition will maintain a block production time of approximately 10 minutes, followed by independent halving and difficulty adjustments.

Without transoceanic connectivity, it would take the respective regions 31 days, 40 days, and 70 days to reach their first challenging re-target.

Because the halving of difficulty was achieved at different rates before the first difficulty adjustment, the halving date for each region will gradually deviate from the actual time.

Supply and the “Definition of Bitcoin”: Fees, Mempools, and Payments

Within each partition, the 21 million coin supply cap per chain remains in effect. However, globally, the total Bitcoin supply across all partitions will exceed 21 million—because each chain distributes block rewards independently.

This creates three incompatible BTC assets at the economic level: they share addresses and private keys, but have different sets of unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs).

A private key can control tokens in all regions simultaneously: if a user spends the same UTXO in two regions, both transactions are valid on their respective local chains, ultimately forming “split tokens”: they have the same pre-split history, but completely different post-split histories.

• The memory pool will be permanently localized, preventing cross-partition payments from propagating. Any attempt to pay users in other partitions will fail to reach the recipient.
• The transaction fee market will reach a local equilibrium: in the long period before the first difficulty adjustment, the capacity of partitions with a small hash rate will be more strained, and will return to normal after the difficulty adjustment.
• Lightning Network channels across partitions cannot be routed: Hash Time Locked Contracts (HTLCs) will time out, the counterparty will issue a commitment to trade, and closing the channel is only effective within the local partition, causing cross-partition liquidity to stagnate.

Security, Markets and Infrastructure

The security budget for each partition equals the sum of the local hash rate and transaction fees. For regions with hash rates only in the top 20% of the split, the cost of attacking them will be far lower than the original global network.

In the long run, miners may migrate to partitions with “higher token prices and lower energy costs,” thereby changing the security landscape of each partition.

Because block headers cannot be transmitted between partitions, an attacker in one partition cannot tamper with the transaction history of another partition, thus limiting the attack to a specific area.

• Exchanges will become regionalized, and trading pair codes will differentiate – in reality, there will be different prices such as BTC-A (Americas version), BTC-E (Europe and Africa version), and BTC-X (Asia and Oceania version), even though each region will still refer to it as BTC.
• Fiat currency deposit and withdrawal channels, custody services, derivatives markets, and settlement networks will focus on chains in specific regions. Index providers and data service providers will need to select a single chain for each platform or publish aggregated data from multiple regional chains.
• Cross-chain assets and oracles that rely on global data sources either fail or split into regional versions.

Protocol rules will remain consistent without intra-partition coordination changes, but an upgrade in one partition will not take effect in other partitions, which will lead to a gradual deviation of the rule set in the long run.

Mining pool software, block explorers, and wallets need to build independent infrastructure for each partition. Without manual strategies, multi-homed services cannot coordinate balances across chains.

Can partitions be reorganized without a hub connection?

If the communication path can never be restored, convergence at the protocol level will be impossible.

The only way to return to a single ledger is through social and operational means: for example, coordinating all parties to choose a particular partition of the chain as the orthodox one, while abandoning or replaying transactions from other partitions.

After weeks of deep disagreement, it is no longer feasible to return to a single chain through automatic reorganization.

Key points of operation

We must treat permanent splits as “hard forks that share a pre-split history”:

• Manage your private keys carefully to ensure you can spend the split tokens securely;
• Use only transaction outputs unique to a single region to avoid accidental replay of transactions in different partitions;
• Establish independent accounting, pricing mechanisms, and risk control systems for each region.

Miners, exchanges, and custodians should select a primary partition, issue chain identifiers, and formulate deposit and withdrawal policies for each chain.

In short, if the backbone hub can never be restored and there is no alternative path to bridge the communication gap, Bitcoin will not die; it will evolve into multiple independent Bitcoin networks that can never be reunited.

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