Bitcoin: The Interplanetary Money

Imagine a future where humanity thrives on Mars, and money flows seamlessly between planets. How would we send Bitcoin from Earth to the Red Planet, given the immense distances and communication delays?

The journey between Earth and Mars isn't just long in distance, it's long in time. With one-way light time (OWLT) ranging from 3 to 22 minutes, traditional synchronized Bitcoin transactions simply can't work across planetary systems. This presents a huge challenge for establishing Bitcoin as a universal monetary standard beyond Earth.

This video dives into a revolutionary architecture that makes Bitcoin the shared monetary standard between Earth and Mars possible! This isn't science fiction; it's a meticulously designed system to overcome deep-space communication constraints while preserving Bitcoin's core principles.

The video explores three core pillars of this interplanetary financial system:

Proof-of-Transit Timestamping (PoTT): The Secure Space Ledger
◦ Learn about PoTT, a novel primitive that provides cryptographic, tamper-evident audit trails for Bitcoin data traveling across high-latency, intermittently-connected links. Think of it as a super-secure, verifiable chain-of-custody for your data bundles in space, ensuring reliability and accountability for every hop, even across millions of miles. PoTT allows us to know when a message arrived relative to a deadline, crucial for resolving disputes.

Latency-Aware Lightning Network: Fast Payments on Mars
◦ Discover how the Lightning Network can be adapted for rapid, local payments on the Martian surface. The system introduces latency-aware policies for transaction timelocks (CLTV/CSV), carefully calculated to account for the unique round-trip light times (RTT) and potential communication jitter between planets. This enables near-instantaneous retail transactions on Mars, even with Earth being minutes away.

The Interplanetary Internet (DTN): Connecting Worlds
◦ See how technologies like Delay/Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN), often referred to as the "Interplanetary Internet," form the robust transport substrate. DTN handles the challenges of long delays and disconnections, ensuring that data bundles, including PoTT receipts and Bitcoin information, reliably reach their destination. Our architecture also prioritizes header-first replication, sending essential block headers (approx. 4.2 MB/year) ahead of larger data like compact filters, allowing Mars to maintain crucial chain awareness.

The most exciting aspect? This entire architecture functions without altering Bitcoin's fundamental consensus rules or its monetary base on Earth. Instead, it preserves Bitcoin's base-layer parameters and shifts necessary adaptations to higher layers and the PoTT-based transport accountability. This means Bitcoin's scarcity, decentralized verification, and predictable issuance remain untouched, making it a natural choice for a universal monetary standard.

Read the Full Research Paper: "Bitcoin as an Interplanetary Monetary Standard with Proof-of-Transit Timestamping" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20591).