“And what if the internet goes down?” A fair question, aimed at the wrong target first

This question comes up in almost every beginners’ session, and I like it, because it comes from someone who is genuinely thinking. A money made purely of software, does it not hang entirely on the network? The honest answer has two halves. The first is about what Bitcoin can withstand. The second is about what the rest of our money can withstand, and that one is less comfortable.

There is no off switch for the internet

The internet is itself a decentralised web of tens of thousands of independent networks. A switch that turns it off worldwide at once does not exist. What does exist are regional outages: a country shuts down, a power grid fails, a cable breaks. And that is exactly what Bitcoin is built for. The network keeps running as long as computers anywhere in the world remain connected to each other, and such computers stand in more than 180 countries today, around 23,000 publicly visible ones plus an unknown number of private ones.

The stress test came in January 2022. Kazakhstan, then the second-largest mining location in the world, switched off the internet nationwide during protests. Roughly an eighth of the world’s mining power vanished within hours. And the network simply carried on, block after block, without users anywhere else noticing a thing. An entire country dropped out, and it was an event for trade media, not for the blockchain.

Bitcoin needs a channel, not the internet

A Bitcoin transaction is a tiny packet of data, and the protocol does not care what it travels over. The internet is the most convenient route, not the only one. Since 2017, satellites have been broadcasting the blockchain around the clock across most of the inhabited world, receivable with a small dish and no internet connection at all. In 2019 a transaction was sent from Toronto to Michigan by amateur radio, over nothing but the ionosphere. And in several African countries people send and receive Bitcoin today on basic feature phones through a text menu, with no smartphone and no data plan.

To be honest about it: these are fallback routes, not everyday infrastructure. Radio and satellite are proofs of feasibility, and the feature-phone service holds the coins in custody. But the question was never whether it stays convenient. The question was whether it stops existing. And here is the part that matters most: your Bitcoin does not live “on the internet”. It is an entry in a ledger held on thousands of computers at once, and the keys to it are yours. An outage, even one lasting weeks, erases no balance. It pauses transfers, nothing more.

The uncomfortable half of the answer

Now for the reversal. What actually happens to ordinary money when the internet goes down? Card payments are authorised online. Without the network, the terminals stop, e-banking stops, the exchanges stop. Even the supermarket's sliding doors and the systems of the bank branch around the corner depend on power and connectivity. The question that gets aimed at Bitcoin hits every modern money, and it hits the existing system first.

That is not a Bitcoin source, that is a central bank. And its conclusion is mine too, quite calmly: for the day when power and network are down in your neighbourhood, cash is the right answer, and a small reserve at home is sensible, with or without Bitcoin. For the question of whether a purely digital money survives an outage, on the other hand, Bitcoin is remarkably well positioned, with a better documented record than the system we pay with every day.

• Regional outages are proven survivable, most starkly when an entire mining country dropped out in 2022
• Satellite, radio and text menus are documented fallback routes, though not everyday solutions
• Balances are not lost in an outage, transfers merely pause
• The same question hits cards and e-banking first, on the word of Sweden's own central bank
• A cash reserve at home is sensible, with or without Bitcoin