freeonlineuser on Nostr: If the satellites went dark, and the undersea communication were destroyed, bitcoin ...

If the satellites went dark, and the undersea communication were destroyed, bitcoin networks would run independently on each continent. All transactions would be processed by local miners but in regions with less miners the transactions would initially be slow until the difficulty adjustments corrected for this. It would take around a month for a continent with only one percent of miners to adjust back to ten minute blocks. When finally the divided networks rejoin, a process known as a reorg takes place. The 'longest chain' the network with the most mined blocks is adopted by all nodes, the shorter network is discarded but transactions on these short chains are not lost. These transactions are put back into the mempool ready to be confirmed again by the longer chain network of miners.
The dynamics here are amazing to me, larger mining operations in smaller regions will turn off, knowing that their mining reward bitcoins will vanish when the chains rejoin. Hobby miners can keep a functional bitcoin network running after some time passes and difficulty reduces.
Gaming this out this scenario helps understand not only how resilient the bitcoin network is, but also just how bitcoin works and why it is designed the way it is.