Blockstream Satellite API: Pay with BTC via Lightning to Broadcast Data Globally

https://blockstream.com/2019/01/16/satellite_api_beta_live/

by grubles • 8 years ago

107 64 8 years ago

The broadcast is global, the ability to recieve the broadscasts is... uh.... an implementation detail left to the user! (NB: involves satellite dishes)

grubles2• 8 years ago

The antennas required are the ubiquitous commercial satellite TV kind which you can probably find on craigslist for free. The other hardware costs < $100. The software is all free (along with the broadcast itself).

RL_Quine5• 8 years ago

Can you link to a single satellite for free on Craigslist?

RL_Quine5• 8 years ago

Buy data transmission for an obscure currency, use obscure lightning software to use the obscure currency to pay a company to transmit data to something you need to buy dedicated hardware for. Hapless optimism aside it’s hard to see what benign purpose this could possibly be used for.

It’s sort of strange to bother with anything custom. Bitcoin signatures have a free, encrypted data channel within ECDSA signatures. You can just broadcast those through the normal bitcoin network without paying Blockstream.

r32a_3• 8 years ago

This is to be used for areas that don't have access to reliable internet

vilaca• 8 years ago

"the ability to receive the broadcasts is left as an exercise to the user"

g45y45• 8 years ago

If bitcoin is to be the global currency, it needs more channels to propagate than just public internet. Public Internet is too censorship receptive for system like Bitcoin. Broadcasting the block and tx data to the world via satellite gets us one step closer. Great work Blockstream!

bufferoverflow• 8 years ago

Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum (and probably other coins) all work over SMS. They are actually substrate-agnostic. You can technically deliver your transaction to a node with a pigeon, as long as the node accepts pigeons.

xorcist2• 8 years ago

You need to process incoming transactions as well. It's inconvenient to receive the blockchain over carrier pigeons.

r32a_3• 8 years ago

Well if Blockstream satellite proves to be a profitable endeavor then you can expect competitors to come.

You can also expect different channels of propagation to emerge if demand builds up.

gukov• 8 years ago

There's also TxTenna (https://txtenna.com).

jstanley• 8 years ago

Counterpoint to this is that the internet is the most censorship-resistant network the world has ever seen.

wmf4• 8 years ago

I wonder why they're using SDR instead of a standard like DVB-S2.

adam3us3• 8 years ago

We tried to keep the equipment cost down, to support emerging market. Reusing existing 45cm/60cm TV satellite dishes is part of it. The usb SDRs cost $10-15 on ebay.

skoold2003• 8 years ago

Was this the motivation for keeping blocks small then? Also, don't you need duplex links to run a node?

martindale• 8 years ago

Congratulations, Blockstream! Great to see this come online. Will Liquid customers pay extra for this, or is it included?

adam3us3• 8 years ago

btw you can see the sent queue and send messages here https://blockstream.com/satellite-queue/

clayrab• 8 years ago

Yeah, but does it support tabs?

lawn2• 8 years ago

For context this is Adam Back who said that instead of raising the block size to avoid the ridiculous fees we should instead use tabs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGfPEZRkn6o

So I mean for today, You could have, some bitcoin business have a tab, so you pay them and you work your tab there and presumably you can cash your tab out if you don't use it. If you have repeat custom... or maybe the shops in the local area could make a shared tab or something in anticipation of... you know somebody in the local area ... technology expert could make a local bitcoin tab that's interoperable between the shops and some sort of app to do it.

adam3us3• 8 years ago

There is a setup guide by grubles https://hackernoon.com/building-your-own-bitcoin-satellite-n... for linux capable people.

abstrct• 8 years ago

Was satellite communication the goal of blockstream all along or did a random thought/opportunity come around at some point over the last couple years and it appeared like a good pivot?

RustyRussell• 8 years ago

Not even a pivot, IMHO (Blockstream employee here). Just cool infrastructure which may even end up paying for itself...

JohnJamesRambo• 8 years ago

No, Lightning Network is a total dud and no one is using it, so they rented some bandwidth from satellites used for lots of other things and are trying to look innovative with this nonsense.

nonamenoslogan• 8 years ago

Hey look, another interesting idea for blockchain based propagation that will be niche and forgotten in a few months. Cool tech, but ultimately fucking useless.

Ihfhcub3• 8 years ago

Uses a satellite to broadcast bitcoin. Nothing novel about the broadcast mechanism and it does not use "blockchain" pseudoscience scam to progagate anything. But bitcoin does have a real blockchain so that might be confusing.

I admit this is confusing as 99.999999999999% of everything with "blockchain" in its name is a scam

knocte• 8 years ago

Granted, there have been a lot of scams in this sector. But to draw a parallel to the previous decades, it's like you were saying that because there were a lot of companies selling scammy ideas about their TCP/IP-based intranets, then the internet is a scam (i.e.: this article is about bitcoin, not about any other altcoin).

ENGNR• 8 years ago

It's still cool though

If civilisation collapsed, as the power grid shut off, sys admins became farmers and ISPs collapsed, satellite ground stations go dark, interstate trade might still be possible through something like this. If it was able to receive messages and payment from unauthorised satellite dishes on the ground rather than through a REST API

Being able to slow the collapse of civilisation, the idea is cool even if not quite this specific implementation

duskwuff• 8 years ago

No, I think you've severely misunderstood what is going on here.

First and foremost: Bitcoin is completely dependent on the availability of lots of power (for proof-of-work calculations) and network connectivity (to distribute unmined transactions). Without both of these, it cannot operate. Adding satellite transmissions to the picture doesn't change this. In any sort of apocalyptic scenario like what you're imagining, cryptocurrency will be one of the first technologies to become unusable.

Additionally, all that's going on here is that a company is using several commercial satellites to transmit the blockchain, as well as some user-specified data. These satellites do not belong to Blockstream, and are not controlled directly by Blockstream's clients.

sparkie5• 8 years ago

If civilization collapsed I think people would have more pressing issues than whether or not they can spend their Bitcoin.

mikeash• 8 years ago

It’s not actually related to blockchains, is it? Aside from accepting cryptocurrency for their fees, anyway.

wmf4• 8 years ago

They also broadcast the Bitcoin blockchain over satellite which makes some sense since the blockchain is public and all full nodes need copies of it. In theory this could reduce the cost of running a full node in places where bandwidth is very expensive. Of course in practice this a zeroth world problem.

DavidShares• 8 years ago

Quote from Jeff Garzik about the Blockstream satellite:

It’s cheap to write a check to another satellite provider to do a broadcast for you. It’s a centralized data service, with a centralized [satellite] provider, and carries plenty of shutdown and censorship risk.
It’s also a great way to centralize everybody on Blockstream’s version of the blockchain, as it appears that Blockstream are the only ones transmitting (uplinking) to the satellite.

Why is Blockstream being disingenuous about their satellite service promoting it as a path to decentralization when in reality it’s a centralized chokepoint?

Also, why is Blockstream actively destroying BTC’s value proposition by turning BTC into a settlement layer for the Lightning Network?

r32a_3• 8 years ago

1) Anyone is free to launch a satellite service to compete with Blockstream. This is called permissionless innovation. If you don't trust their data you don't have to use it.

2) Blockstream is not the only developer working on LN, in fact, the main development team is called Lightning Labs, plus there are many open source developers working on LN. The bitcoin community has decided that it wants BTC mainchain to be settlement layer and the momentum behind LN proves this.

nullc• 8 years ago

Without the satellite a typical node operator has a single ISP that has complete control over their view of the network. If they add a second ISP that will cost them an additional (say) $50 per month, and the second ISP is likely highly correlated with the first (common upstreams, similar response to extralegal pressure by local authorities, etc.). In what way is the satellite, which has a one time ~$100-ish setup cost (assuming you can't get most of the parts for free), not a strict improvement over not having it available?

Garzik has something of a conflict of interest encouraging fudding this effort. After I originally proposed back in 2011/2012 doing a broadcast like the eventual blockstream effort, Garzik ran with it and raised money from the public ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=334701.0 ) to do Bitcoin satellite broadcast. He creeped the scope to the point of proposing to launch a "cubesat" (why? Unclear, it would be a lot less useful due to their short life and the inability to use fixed antennas) and as a result ultimately failed to deliver anything at all.

Blockstream built something more practical and useful than a swarm of cubesats, and instead of just raising money and putting out hype then failing they put out a running system. In fact, Blockstream's system was up and running on the day the very first public announcement was made. I urged Garzik to do something like Blockstream's system as a MVP before sinking a fortune into trying to actually launch satellites...

And yes, absolutely anyone else can setup a similar system (though it isn't anywhere as simple as 'cut a check' unless you want to pay through the nose and don't want to support reception with $100 of deniable commodity hardware)... that isn't a minus, it's a plus and a direct counterpoint to your 'centralized chokepoint' claim if the fact that the next alternative to using the sat is the centralized chokepoint of your ISP wasn't enough.

This blockchain broadcast specific talk ignores the really cool "API" which they announced today: receiving a sat broadcast with commodity hardware is likely the most strongly anonymous communication method available... and this is something they've made available to everyone, paid for with Bitcoin micropayments.

xorcist2• 8 years ago

Wasn't it Garzik who came up with the first proposal to broadcast the Bitcoin blockchain over satellite?

As I remember it he went to far as to solicit donations for the project. There was a lot of articles written about it at the time (Bitcoin! In space!) but nothing ever came of it.

cedivad• 8 years ago

You are confusing leasing bandwidth on a satellite with having a bitcoin satellite.

Ihfhcub3• 8 years ago

What the....kind of logic it that? You on crack?

unrealchild• 8 years ago

for some reason this strikes me as spectacularly unnecessary

NVRM2• 8 years ago

So this seems useless for payment, but here is the real hidden interest:

You can send a file up to 10Kb, and pay for byte sent.

It's cheap, coast looks to be $0.0035 for a 5Kb file.

The receiver can get the file, encrypted, without internet, using only a SDR tv card, amplifier and antenna, worldwide, in 10 minutes.

I see there large possible applications!!!

https://blockstream.com/satellite-queue/

https://github.com/Blockstream/satellite#hardware-requiremen...

https://blockstream.com/satellite-api-documentation/

RL_Quine5• 8 years ago

Name even one application.

NVRM2• 8 years ago

You are not much into electronics as I can see.

sygma• 8 years ago

For those wondering about how much the lightning network is actually used, have a look at the stats [0]. Adoption is growing steadily.

[0] https://1ml.com/statistics

runeks3• 8 years ago

One of the problems with LN is that, in order to actually receive BTC (on the Bitcoin blockchain) that you can sell, you almost certainly need to go through multiple LN nodes. Due to this, the node in this path with the smallest capacity will determine the maximum amount you can transfer (before needing to touch the blockchain). From the stats we can see that "Average Channel Capacity" is 0.025 BTC/$91.77, and that 50% of channels have a capacity of 0.005 BTC/$18.35, which means the minimum, for any given path, is likely close to $20.

So, in other words, you can expect to transfer, roughly, $20 until you need to touch the blockchain again (in order to fund a channel), which means that sending ~$20 over LN is as expensive as doing it in a normal Bitcoin transaction.

LN doesn't scale because of this. People keep pretending that adding new nodes is a sign of success, when in fact adding new nodes to LN decreases performance -- because the smallest-capacity channel on a path determines how much can be sent through that path until you have to touch the blockchain. If two or more channels in a path need to be refilled, you've spent more on a LN transfer than you would have on a regular Bitcoin transaction (on-blockchain).

sparkie5• 8 years ago

The channel capacities in Lightning are currently restricted by an arbitrary limit of 2^24 satoshis which was put there by the developers to prevent people from putting too much into what is effectively a beta test network currently. The limit is already scheduled to be removed in the 1.1 BOLT spec.

There are usually many possible paths for a payment, so the payment limit isn't the minimum of any possible node along the route, but the set of all possible routes from one node to another. However, even this is scheduled to be removed, because LN will get Atomic Multi-Path Payments, which will enable a payment to traverse multiple routes and only succeed if all of the routes are successful.

"Refilling" of Lightning channels does not require new on-chain payments - it can be done directly on the Lightning network by routing payments through paths which require balances moving in one direction or another. You can route payments to yourself to reduce your balance in one path and fill it in another path.

Putting aside large payments for a moment, you're completely ignoring the potential use-cases for small payments. Currently you can make thousands of transactions on the Lightning Network, with fees averaging hundredths of a cent. This was possible on Bitcoin in the early days, but clearly cannot scale because it costs money to store and propagate information on a broadcast network. Lightning doesn't broadcast any transactions, and doesn't need to store old transactions. The use cases are left up to your imagination.

If you wish to learn more I recommend reading the BOLT specifications and subscribing to the lightning-dev mailing list.

wmf4• 8 years ago

Realistically, LN paths will look like Alice -> hub1 -> hub2 -> Bob or maybe even Alice -> hub -> Bob so the capacity of random channels won't matter.

Blockstream Satellite API: Pay with BTC via Lightning to Broadcast Data Globally

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