Even if a third world war breaks out, Bitcoin will continue to exist… but it may not exist in the form we know today.
Written by: Liam 'Akiba' Wright
Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News
Imagine the global internet backbone collapsing in a single day.
Whether due to human error, catastrophic software bugs, malicious computer viruses, or direct military conflict—if the physical internet exchange hubs connecting the world suddenly go dark, what fate awaits Bitcoin?
If Frankfurt, London, Virginia, Singapore, and Marseille all lose internet connectivity at the same time, the Bitcoin network will split into three independent partitions.
Communication across the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and major trans-Pacific routes will come to a halt, and the Americas, Euro-African continent, Middle East, and Asia-Pacific region will each form independent transaction histories until network connectivity is restored.
Within each partition, miners will continue to produce blocks based on the remaining hash power.
With a target of producing a block every 10 minutes, regions with 45% hash rate will produce about 2.7 blocks per hour, regions with 35% hash rate will produce about 2.1 blocks, and regions with 20% hash rate will produce about 1.2 blocks. Since nodes cannot exchange block headers or transaction data across partitions, each region will independently extend a valid blockchain without being aware of the others.
Eventually, as time and hash power distribution change, the natural fork length will continue to grow.
This partitioning rhythm makes chain splitting an inevitable result. We allocate approximate hash rate shares for each region: Americas 45%, Asia-Pacific 35%, Euro-African continent 20%, and simulate based on this.
The Americas partition will add about 6 blocks every two hours, the Asia-Pacific region will add about 4-5 blocks, and the Euro-African continent will add about 2-3 blocks.
After a full day, the number of blocks in the chain split will exceed one hundred, surpassing the range of conventional reorganization, forcing services to treat regional confirmations as temporary confirmations.
The potential reorganization depth of failed partitions will increase linearly with isolation time.
Local memory pools will immediately split. Transactions broadcast from New York cannot reach Singapore, so the recipient outside the sender's partition will be completely unaware of the transaction until the network is restored.
The fee markets within each partition will exhibit localized characteristics. Users will need to compete for limited block space with the hash rate in their region, leading to the fastest fee increases in areas with low hash rate but high demand.
When transaction confirmations lose global finality, exchanges, payment processors, and custodial wallets typically suspend withdrawals and on-chain settlements; counterparties in the Lightning Network will face uncertainty—transactions confirmed in minority partitions may become invalid.
Automatic Coordination After Network Restoration
When network connectivity is restored, nodes will initiate an automatic coordination process: each node will compare different blockchains and then reorganize to the valid chain with the highest cumulative work.
The actual costs will mainly manifest in three aspects:
Reorganization will cause blocks from minority partitions to become invalid, with the depth of invalidation depending on the duration of the split;
Transactions that were only confirmed on the failed chain will need to be re-broadcast and prioritized;
Exchanges and custodians will need to perform additional operational checks before resuming services.
During a 24-hour network split, dozens to hundreds of blocks from minority partitions may be isolated after connectivity is restored. Related services will also require additional hours to rebuild memory pools, recalculate balances, and restore withdrawal functions.
Due to fiat currency channels, compliance checks, and channel management requiring manual review, the complete normalization of economic activity often lags behind protocol-level adjustments.
Simulating isolation states using "reachable hash rate share" rather than the number of hubs makes it easier to understand their dynamic changes:
When 30% of the hash rate is isolated, minority partitions will produce about 1.8 blocks per hour. This means that a standard 6-confirmation payment in that partition will face a risk of invalidation after about 3 hours and 20 minutes—if the remaining 70% of the network builds a longer chain, these 6 blocks may become isolated.
In a near 50/50 split scenario, the cumulative work of the two partitions will be similar, and even a brief split will lead to both sides having a "confirmed" competitive transaction history, resulting in randomness after reconnection.
In an 80/20 split scenario, the majority partition will almost certainly prevail; the minority partition will produce about 29 blocks in a day, which will be isolated upon merging, causing many confirmed transactions in that region to be reversed.
Reorganization risk is the product of "time" and "minority partition hash rate," with the most dangerous situation being "long-term isolation + nearly equal hash rate split."
The Role of Existing Resilience Tools
There are currently various tools to enhance network resilience, which will affect the actual impact after disconnection:
Alternative transmission methods such as satellite downlinks, high-frequency radio relays, low-latency networks, mesh networks, and Tor bridging can transmit block headers or streamlined transaction flows over damaged routes.
These paths have narrower bandwidth and higher latency, but even intermittent cross-partition data transmission can reduce fork depth by allowing some blocks and transactions to penetrate into other partitions.
The diversity of node interconnections in mining pools and the geographical distribution of mining pools can increase the probability of partial data being globally disseminated through side channels, thereby limiting the depth and duration of reorganization when the backbone network is restored.
Thus, during a network split, the operational guidelines for market participants are clear and straightforward:
Suspend cross-partition settlements, treat all transaction confirmations as temporarily valid, and optimize fee estimation mechanisms in response to local fee surges;
Exchanges can switch to proof-of-reserve mode while suspending withdrawals, extending confirmation thresholds to address minority partition risks, and issuing clear policies—setting the required number of confirmations based on isolation duration;
Wallets should clearly inform users of regional finality risks, disable automatic channel rebalancing, and queue time-sensitive transactions for re-broadcasting after network restoration;
Miners should maintain diverse upstream connections and avoid manually altering the standard "longest chain selection rule" during the coordination process.
From a design perspective, the protocol itself can persist—after nodes reconnect, they will automatically converge to the chain with the highest cumulative work.
However, the user experience during the split will be significantly diminished, as the finality of economic layers relies on the consistent propagation of global data.
In the worst-case scenario of multiple hubs being disconnected for a day, the most likely outcomes are: temporary collapse of cross-border availability, sharp and uneven fee increases, and deep reorganization leading to the invalidation of regional confirmations.
After the network is restored, the software will deterministically repair the ledger, and related services will resume all functions after completing operational checks.
The final step is to reopen withdrawals and Lightning Network channels once the balances and transaction histories on the winning chain are consistent.
If the Split Can Never Be Repaired
What if the backbone hubs mentioned at the beginning can never be restored? In this dystopian scenario, the Bitcoin we know will cease to exist.
Instead, there will be permanent geographical partitions, functioning like independent Bitcoin networks: sharing the same rules but unable to communicate with each other.
Each partition will continue to mine, adjust difficulty at its own pace, and develop independent economic systems, order books, and fee markets. Without restoring connections or manually coordinating to select 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, block times will be faster or slower based on reachable hash rates. After the adjustment, each partition will stabilize its local block time back to around 10 minutes.
Based on previous hash rate share estimates, the timing of the first difficulty adjustment for each partition is as follows:
After the first adjustment, each partition will maintain approximately 10 minutes per block, then independently undergo halving and difficulty adjustments.
Without transoceanic connections, each region will take 31 days, 40 days, and 70 days respectively to reach its first difficulty retarget.
Due to the varying speeds of reaching halving heights before the first difficulty adjustment, the halving dates of each partition will gradually diverge in actual time.
Supply and "Definition of Bitcoin": Fees, Memory Pools, and Payments
Within each partition, the supply cap of 21 million coins for a single chain remains valid. However, from a global perspective, the total amount of Bitcoin across all partitions will exceed 21 million—because each chain will independently issue block rewards.
This creates three mutually incompatible BTC assets at the economic level: they share addresses and private keys but have different sets of unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs).
Private keys can control tokens across all partitions simultaneously: if a user spends the same UTXO in two regions, both transactions will be valid on their respective local chains, ultimately forming "split tokens": they share the same pre-split history but have completely different post-split histories.
Memory pools will become permanently localized, and cross-partition payments will not propagate; any attempts to pay users in other partitions will not reach the recipient.
The fee market will form a local equilibrium: during the long period before the first difficulty adjustment, the capacity of partitions with a small hash rate share will be tighter, returning to normal after the difficulty adjustment.
Cross-partition Lightning Network channels will be unable to route: hash time-locked contracts (HTLCs) will time out, counterparties will publish commitment transactions, and closing channels will only be effective in the local partition, causing cross-partition liquidity to stagnate.
Security, Markets, and Infrastructure
The security budget of each partition equals the sum of local hash rate and fees. The hash rate in regions that were only 20% of the pre-split network will have attack costs far lower than the original global network.
In the long term, miners may migrate to partitions with "higher token prices and lower energy costs," thereby changing the security landscape of each partition.
Since block headers cannot be transmitted between partitions, an attacker in one partition cannot alter the transaction history of another partition, so attacks will be confined to specific areas.
Exchanges will become regionalized, and trading pair codes will diversify—different prices will emerge, such as BTC-A (Americas version), BTC-E (Euro-African version), BTC-X (Asia-Pacific version), even though each partition will still refer to it as BTC.
Fiat deposit and withdrawal channels, custodial services, derivatives markets, and settlement networks will focus on specific regional chains. Index providers and data service providers will need to choose 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 will either fail or split into regional versions.
The protocol rules will remain consistent unless changes are coordinated within the partitions, but an upgrade in one partition will not take effect in others, leading to a gradual divergence of rule sets over the long term.
Mining pool software, block explorers, and wallets will need to build independent infrastructure for each partition, and multi-host services will be unable to coordinate balances across chains without manual strategies.
Can Partitions Reorganize Without Hub Connections?
If communication paths 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 parties to choose a particular partition's chain as the legitimate one while abandoning or replaying transactions from other partitions.
After several weeks of deep divergence, automatic reorganization back to a single chain will no longer be feasible.
Operational Key Points
We must treat permanent splits as "hard forks sharing pre-split history":
Properly manage private keys to ensure safe spending of post-split tokens;
Use only transaction outputs unique to a single region to avoid accidentally replaying transactions across different partitions;
Establish independent accounting, pricing mechanisms, and risk control systems for each partition.
Miners, exchanges, and custodians should designate a main partition, publish chain identifiers, and formulate deposit and withdrawal policies for each chain.
In short, if the backbone hubs can never be restored and no alternative paths fill the communication gap, Bitcoin will not perish; it will evolve into multiple independent Bitcoin networks that can never be re-merged.
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