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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Human beings grow up around tangible things. So it’s normal to find it strange to store your wealth in something you can’t see or touch. It’s also normal to be concerned that since you can’t touch Bitcoin or see it, maybe it can somehow be blocked or that it might just disappear altogether. Does Bitcoin live on the Internet, and if the Internet goes down, then does it just disappear?The Internet Itself Was Designed to Not Go Down: Even in the Event of Nuclear WarTo start, we should define what the “internet going down” actually means. Like Bitcoin, the Internet was designed for maximum survivability. It has no center. Any computer in the world running the Internet’s protocols, which are themselves open-source software that can connect to any other computer doing the same thing, is ‘on the Internet.’ It may not have access to every other computer on the Internet, but it really isn’t possible for the whole Internet to go down unless no computer in the world is running at all.So when we talk about ‘the Internet going down, ’ we usually refer to something quite a bit different. Broadly speaking, the spectrum of scenarios includes:Local Outages: a power cut or other technical problem causing electricity, data transmission or another critical service to go offline in a certain area until technicians can fix the problem; Censorship: internet censorship where a company or government blocks selected parts of the internet but allows others to continue as normal; or Total Collapse: some sort of unforeseeable technological problem that causes every single device in the world to go offline for an extended period of time. Local OutagesLocal outages of Internet service happen all the time. You’ve probably had your Internet connection ‘down’ for some time at some time in the past year. Or you may have experienced an outage of some service who themselves suffered some kind of temporary outage, like when all of Facebook’s services went down for over six hours on October 4th, 2021. If an outage like this was widespread in your area, you might be very annoyed, and your access to all kinds of services might be disrupted, including access to your bank website, the Visa payments network, and more. This is, as you’ve come to know, temporary. If you are experiencing a local outage, your ability to spend your Bitcoins might be delayed until you can access the Internet again to transmit transactions to the network. However, since Bitcoin is decentralized and runs all over the world, neither your ability to receive or store Bitcoin is impaired at all. Your stored Bitcoins remain stored and secure. And if you are signed up for regular recurring purchases to be sent to addresses you control, even if you do not have access to the Internet, your addresses will continue to receive the bitcoin you’re purchasing, which will then be available to you to spend when you regain access to the Internet.Assessment: In the event of a local outage, you
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