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According to Vitalik, signals from Mars to Earth can take up to 20 minutes.
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Buterin proposed a futuristic vision of digital societies and Cryptocurrency networks.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum (ETH) network, gave his opinion during an interview about future digital societies and stated that in the future Ethereum nodes could run on the planet Mars. This is thanks to an independent second layer (L2) network of Ethereum.
The Russian-American developer, when answering whether it would be possible in the future to run Ethereum nodes on the red planet, began his explanation by detailing that the problem to be solved is the transmission of interplanetary signals.
According to Vitalik, 400 million kilometers separate the farthest points of Earth and Mars. The distance means a delay in sending these signals of “up to 20 minutes”, traveling at the speed of light. For a network that needs nodes to synchronize quickly to validate blocks and reach consensus, this latency is prohibitive.
Regarding this delay, the co-founder of Ethereum expressed in the reportage that was broadcast on YouTube, that, given these conditions, running nodes of this network on Mars would not be a beneficial procedure.
“This would make Mars blocks difficult to accept, or they might not even compete at all. From an economic and efficiency perspective, running interplanetary Blockchain nodes under the current architecture is unfeasible.”
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.
Next, Buterin emphasized that a viable alternative would be to deploy an independent Layer 2 solution on Mars, configured to operate in an interplanetary environment.
“This Layer 2 network could quickly confirm transactions on Mars and then batch sync with the Ethereum mainnet on Earth at appropriate times. “This would greatly reduce the need for real-time communication and allow Mars and Earth to have their own network rhythms.”
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.
Thus, an independent L2 on Mars could locally process the transactions of the population living there, and only interact with the L1 of Ethereum on Earth when absolutely necessary, minimizing the impact of latency.
In addition to this, an L2 on Mars would act as a autonomous network that maintains its own validation and consensus without relying on constant synchronization with the Ethereum network on Earth.
This independence would allow operate without latency issues and at the same time benefit from the security of Ethereum when a periodic “update” or “synchronization” is performed with the main network on Earth.
Additionally, having Ethereum nodes on Mars could benefit the network in terms of decentralization, safeguarding copies of historical data of the network in distant nodes.
Vitalik believes that an independent second-layer network could operate on Mars in the future. Fountain: YouTube.
An L2 cryptocurrency network is considered independent when can operate autonomously with respect to the main network (L1) on which it is built.
This means that although it uses the main network infrastructure to ensure the security and validity of transactions, the independent second layer network has its own consensus mechanism, validation nodes and operating parameters.
For example, sidechains are a type of second-layer network that function independently. They have their own consensus algorithm and can process transactions off the main chain, which improves scalability.
Censorship resistance in an interplanetary environment
At the same time, Vitalik Buterin stated that the Censorship resistance would present an even more complex challenge in a context in which Ethereum nodes communicate from one planet to another.
What Vitalik Buterin poses It’s a futuristic vision of how decentralization could work. Ethereum if humanity were to have colonies or stations on different planets, like Mars.
Censorship resistance in a cryptocurrency network, then, refers to the network’s ability to operate without any centralized entitysuch as a government, bank or corporation, may interfere, block or control transactions.
Today, censorship resistance in decentralized networks is ensured by a wide distribution of nodes on Earth. The more nodes there are and the more distributed they are, the more difficult it is for a single entity (such as a government or corporation) to censor transactions or control the network.
But in an interstellar context, censorship resistance would be complicated because there would be more entities that could control isolated sections of the network, given the great distance and latency that would exist between nodes on Earth and, for example, Mars.
To address this problem, Vitalik Buterin suggests that networks would need to be divided and connected through multiple nodes in different locations, like space stations or on different planets.
This structure would allow that, even if one planetary region (such as Mars) attempted to control its portion of the network, there would still be other parts of the network (such as nodes on Earth or in space stations) that could intervene and maintain its integrity.
If Mars had its own independent L2, it could maintain its integrity and censorship resistance without relying on nodes on Earth.
Need for new protocols for interstellar connection
The developer suggested that “completely new” protocols will have to be developed to make that possible.
The gigantic distance between planets (for example, the distance between Mars and Earth) implies a significant delay in communications. This delay could render some of the current consensus protocols, which rely on fast communication between nodes, non-functional.
Therefore, it would be necessary to develop new consensus and synchronization protocols. that can operate with very high latenciesallowing transactions and network security to remain effective even when nodes are millions of kilometers away.
In short, although humanity does not yet seem to be anywhere close to inhabiting other planets, Vitalik Buterin’s ideas show us a bold and future vision of how cryptocurrency technology could expand beyond terrestrial limits.
Thus, Ethereum or other decentralized cryptocurrency projects could be key pieces in the construction of a network that could accompany the advancement of humanity, even in the exploration of the universe.
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