> For all you Bitcoiners talking about how it's impossible for a government to turn off the internet, this appears to be a counter-example.

I'll bite.

It's not that we don't think it can happen, in fact those of us actually adept in financial censorship as well as physical censorship have actually advocated that we build additional infrastructure for just this occasion.

I've been involved in the HK protests since the inception of the Yellow Movement, where we saw the CCP making its heavy handed presence felt and then had the local police shut down the internet in protest zones. This lead to the use of a bluetooth based app Fire Chat [0], which had also been used in Iraq when governments decided to crack down on 'dissidents' online. I personally never stopped advocatin for them to build meshnets and become familiar with p2p solutions as the financial censorship was soon to follow, and did not long after and still remains to this day: Jimmy Lai's charges is based on Money laundering something they do not have to prove simply claim and they can get away with it.

What came after that, especially for me as a I was involved in the CJDNS project in Switzerland and dabbled with hyperboria as well as Zeronet in the US for a short period, saw the need for the creation of an entirely new Internet.

Meshnets could serve only a limited capability for a short period of time, guifi is a cool project, but it cannot support the types of infrastructure we've all been reliant on for most of modern existence. I hold a lot of hope for Starlink becoming that after it becomes profitable and recovers its investments as we are in dire need of a new system. Or at least leases out some of its satelites for private use to help build something like it.

Thus, we have made progress towards that end in the Bitcoin community, though in my opinion not enough as we've spent countless hours debating BS topics about people and things who don't matter rather on solving some of the more glaring issues.

But Blockstream, even for all their misgivings and are far from perfect, are still moving toward the desirable end of having non-internet based transactions a priority to propagate on the mainchain-layer 1 protocol with their satellite [1]. There are other solutions as well, ham radio based tx etc... but I'll spare you the details of that for now as this is getting long.

In short, you're talking about some of the most paranoid people in tech with an understanding of cryptography based tools and OPSEC who understand the implications of what you've described as a hypothetical situation while some of us have actually lived through this and used this technology to solve some of the most pressing issues in massive Humanitarian crises in the 21st century (Maidan Revolution in Kiev, Venzuela hyper inflation etc...).

We're not all 'moonbois' and scammers though that gets the most headlines (I'm looking at you Micheal Saylor), and our tech, unlike even the stuff you overly compensated guys in FAANG aimlessly build and maintain to the detriment of much of Humanity, has this weird habit of working even when everyone else says it's dead: to this day nothing even comes close to Bitcoin's (the Network) reliability. Nothing.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat
1: https://blockstream.com/satellite/