Private money… in the sky. Not in the cloud. In the clouds.
I was recently envisioning, and later, sketching a concept for how LEO (low earth orbit) satellites could be leveraged for private money, potentially Zcash, to be literally in the sky, able to be harnessed using a simple dish similar to Starlink anywhere in the world without any censorship at all.
Truly private, truly secure. Even in an apocalypse, the network could stay online for years, even decades, and power private money.
The key concerns could actually be solved in 2026, such as
- Blockchain sync: One could do a slot interval broadcast down without a required uplink, so clients could “hear” the compact blocks to bootstrap a light client efficiently. One only has to wait for the satellite to orbit their area once per 90 minutes for about 10 minutes, and you can bootstrap a new client once or twice a day in a region.
- Inter-satellite consensus: V-wave or small millimeter wave transmission is also getting cheap enough to do.
- Computing power: Chips such as Snapdragon X Elite make it incredibly energy efficient to do it on something as small as a CubeSat, harnessing the small but enough ~100W power generated by the solar cells.
Plus, it is now cheap enough to do (~$800,000 for a demo 12U CubeSat deployment, ~$8-15 million for a full constellation) due to the new space ports, via ridesharing with SpaceX.
I know, I know, Musk and all, but it means a literal “cloud” blockchain could now potentially be a reality.
God this will send ZEC to the moon. Literally.
I’m so excited I’m going to dwell on this, draft schematics and all for a few days before I lose interest (unless others are interested too haha)
If this is something others here are interested in, would love to see interest here. Funnily, the existing ZCG Coinholder Lockbox, with around $250M-300M, can easily fund this long term.
EDIT: For any practical integration, there will need to be ground stations to sync the existing validators with the sky, but systems like AWS Ground Station make this feasible cheaply too. In the future, we could have dedicated ground stations.