We’ve all heard the phrase “Bitcoin is unstoppable” or something equivalent. People in the space like to point it out whenever they get a chance, but I think a lot of people who haven’t dived deep into Bitcoin and blockchain, the underlying technology, don’t really understand why that is.

In this post, we’re going to look at what makes Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies for that matter, unstoppable.

The post is heavily influenced by Andreas Antononopoulos’ talk at the Bitcoin South Conference in Queenstown, New Zealand on November 2014, and I’ve condensed and simplified a lot of the things you can also read in his book, The Internet of Money.

Bitcoin: Money as a content type

An important thing to understand in order to get why Bitcoin is unstoppable and uncensorable is what a Bitcoin transaction essentially is. Bitcoin transactions are signed data structures that can be executed anywhere in the world, through any medium.

For the first time in history, money is completely independent of the underlying transport medium and is now a stand-alone content type.

Contrary to what most people think, a Bitcoin transaction doesn’t have to be transmitted on the Bitcoin network to be valid. It does have to reach the miners and be included in a block on the Bitcoin network, but the method with which it reaches the miners is irrelevant to the execution and therefore the transaction's validity.

A Bitcoin transaction can be transmitted over any form of communication medium.

What’s even more mindblowing is that regardless of the medium, the transactions are secure and cannot be compromised, even if the medium itself is compromised. As we saw in my previous post “Transactional Security of Credit Cards vs Bitcoin”, there’s nothing that can be compromised in the transaction - the security of the transaction comes from the network, not the transaction itself.

Transactions through any communication medium

Since the transaction itself comes as a message, and therefore as content that cannot be compromised because there’s nothing to compromise, and since messages can be transmitted through various communication mediums, that means transactions can be executed through any medium available.

As long as the message reaches a node that contains a copy of the blockchain, the transaction will be verified and executed.

Think about what a transaction message is for a second: it’s 250 bytes of data - that’s it. You can encode that data into any character set you wish.

Bitcoin transactions in emojis sent over email

If you look at the transaction from an information-content perspective, all you need to do is encode the 250 bytes of data into the character set you’ve chosen - in this example, emojis. Since we have an encoding scheme, we’d be looking at about 500 emojis to encode the transaction.

You can do that by running a Python script, and with the increasing popularity of tools like ChatGPT, even the non-tech-savvy could run such a script. The script would basically take the hexadecimal representation of the Bitcoin transaction and encode it in emojis. You’d then copy-paste that into an email, and voila; a Bitcoin transaction over email.

The recipient would have to copy-paste the email into a decoder-script and then inject the decoded format into the Bitcoin network, and the transaction would go through. In Andreas Antonopoulos’ words:

Money is now completely disconnected information content. There is absolutely nothing you can do to stop information from traveling from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world when you have an abundance of fully interconnected multimedia communication mechanisms as we do today.

Bitcoin is censorship resistant

Let’s say you live under a tyrannical government and you are not able to transact freely with others. If you use Bitcoin, you can transact with whomever and however you want and there’s nothing the government can do to stop that.

Let’s say that in the above example, they block emails. You’ll use Skype. If they block Skype, you’ll use Twitter or Facebook. If they block those, you’ll post your transactions on public websites like Craigslist. They block that too, and you post your transactions in the comment section of YouTube videos.

Any attempt at blocking the transaction will be futile and it’ll be like playing a game of whack-a-mole. You block one medium, and people simply use another. You can’t block everything.

And even if you did, a Bitcoin transaction can be transmitted even through Morse code or shortwave, frequency-hopping, burst radio. As long as there’s a receiving station somewhere within your range (which can be several thousand miles away) that is connected to the Bitcoin network -and you can hide a receiving station anywhere since it’s just a passive listener and it can’t be triangulated- the listening device can inject the transaction into the network and it will be executed. There’s no stopping that.

Epilogue

So now you know the technological premise on which people base the phrase “Bitcoin is unstoppable”. Bitcoin and generally blockchain technology aren’t just unstoppable in the metaphorical sense. They are also if need be, unstoppable in the very practical sense.

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Cover image by Cointelegraph