Bitcoin

Making Bitcoin Unstoppable Part One: Mesh Nets – Bitcoin Magazine

July 21, 2022

This article originally appeared in Bitcoin Magazine’s “Censorship Resistant Issue.” To get a copy, visit our store.

In June 2020, people in Ethiopia faced an unpleasant surprise; following unrest caused by the killing of musician and activist Hachalu Hundessa, the Ethiopian government successfully ordered a shutdown of the internet. For close to a month, over 100 million people were cut off from all internet services.

In the same year, people of Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Burundi, Chad, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, Guinea, India, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sudan, Syria, Togo, Turkey, Vietnam, Venezuela and Yemen faced imposed internet access outages in some or all parts of the country.

In 2021, Uganda ordered a complete internet shutdown for four days during its general elections. After elections in Niger, authorities responded to anti-government protests by shutting off access to the internet for ten days. In Jammu and Kashmir, people faced an internet blackout imposed by government decree lasting for 500 days, from the 4th of August 2019 until the 5th of February 2021. In Myanmar, internet access has been shut down for a broad part of the population since 2019, as the military junta whitelists companies and institutions while restricting access for everyone else. In the Ethiopian region of Tigray, internet access has been shut off since November 2020.

As government opposition parties held rallies in Harare, Zimbabwe, in March 2022, internet access via the government-owned internet service provider (ISP) TelOne was throttled, causing numerous outages of services across the country. During planned protests in July 2020, internet access via TelOne was throttled to an unusable degree for 19 hours. Amid fuel price protests in 2019, almost all of Zimbabwe was cut off from accessing internet services for close to two days.

In Burkina Faso, following military uprisings in January 2022, access to mobile internet was cut off for 35 hours, the third shutdown within months, and the second shutdown of the year. After the shooting of protesters in November 2021, mobile internet access, which is the primary source of internet access in Burkina Faso, was cut off for four days.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has reported 196 incidents of internet shutdowns and access limitations in 2018, 213 incidents in 2019, and 155 in 2020. In a report titled “The Return of Digital Authoritarianism: Internet Shutdowns in 2021”, the non-profit digital rights organization Access Now reported 182 internet shutdowns across 34 countries in 2021.

“The Syrian regime was aware, since the beginning of the demonstrations in 2011, that one of the most important steps that its security and military forces must take to suppress any demonstration or peaceful movement is to cut off communications from the crowds, and to stop the movement of news and information flow” (source: https://www.enabbaladi.net/archives/93312# )

Shutting down access to the internet is a viable solution to control social uprisings and limit the flow of information both in and out of certain regions. When people cannot communicate, attempts to organize become close to impossible. Contrary to popular assumption, shutting down access to the internet is a fairly simple task for governments to accomplish. Though we like to think of the internet as a global, decentralized network of individual computers, the reality is that the majority of our internet access is handled via these ISPs subject to government mandates.

ISPs operate in fixed locations, centralizing the internet access of entire countries in very few places, providing a single point of failure in the face of both national and international adversaries. Due to this centralization, internet access in conflict zones can, quite literally, be bombed or threatened out of existence. After a Saudi-led airstrike in the Aden region of Yemen in January 2022, which severed connectivity to the FALCON international cable, the country faced a nation-wide internet blackout that lasted for close to four days. As Israel launched targeted bombings on telecommunications infrastructure in the Gaza strip in May 2021, internet access for much of the population was disrupted for over 10 days. In the West Bank, Israeli forces have previously shut down internet access by simply walking into ISP offices and demanding the disruption of the network.

In 2011, with the beginning of uprisings against the Syrian government, Bashar Al-Assad’s regime cut off internet access via decree, and shortly after began bombing telecommunications infrastructure to prohibit its use indefinitely. In a desperate move, Syria’s opposition led interim government quite literally imported internet access from bordering countries via optical links, such as Turkey. But, as Turkish forces began operating in the Afrin region, Turkey, too, cut off communication services for the entire Northern region of Syria.

While Bitcoin, being a low-bandwidth network, can function perfectly well without the internet, the possibilities of transacting bitcoin without an internet connection are little studied and even less documented. Most solutions to interact with the Bitcoin network depend on an internet connection, presenting no viable option for anyone living in regions affected by hostile governments prone to severing access — that is, if the internet is even available in the first place.

In Eritrea, internet penetration lies around 8% — in South Sudan, it’s 10.9%. Somalia and Burundi have internet access rates of under 15%. In North Korea, access to the internet lies at 0.1%, while the entire continent of Africa has an overall internet coverage of only 22%. The reasons for little-to-no internet penetration vary. In some cases, as in North Korea, governments are simply not interested in permitting citizens to access internet services in order to control the flow of information. In others, as in Zimbabwe, internet access is prohibitively expensive, lying at around $300 per month for non-mobile access; equating to a household’s monthly median income. Mobile internet on the other hand lies at around $60 per 30GB, but often disappears before one could possibly spend 30GB of data, hinting at corruption and meddling in data sales.