Coders Used Ham Radio To Send Bitcoin From Canada To San Francisco (coindesk.com)

"In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind transaction, two developers working in separate countries have successfully sent a bitcoin lightning payment over radio waves," writes CoinBase.

An anonymous reader quotes their report: The completed payment effectively moved real bitcoin from Toronto, Canada, to San Francisco, California... But sending bitcoin over radio isn't just fun. Some researchers argue it actually has a necessary use case... The idea is that, while the internet can potentially be censored, it's not the only form of technology that can be used to send data from one part of the world to another, "in case China decides to censor bitcoin via the Great Firewall, or places like North Korea where there is no internet at all," as Bloomberg columnist Elaine Ou put it in an email to CoinDesk.

Technology infrastructure startup Blockstream licensed satellites that beam bitcoin to users around the world for similar reasons.

Comments

Let me think this through

[OzPeter]

TFA is experimenting with using radios to transmit information long distances because they fear repressive regimes censoring data passed through the interwebs.

This makes me wonder about why repressive regimes would allow the use of a communications mechanism that can't be censored in the first place.

TFS mentions North Korea, well the magic interwebs have this to say about North Korea Licensing of Ham Radios:

Only North Korea and Yemen do not issue amateur radio licenses to their citizens, although in both cases a limited number of foreign visitors have been permitted to obtain amateur licenses in the past. HamCall.Net lists 19 amateur stations in North Korea assigned in the P5 series, although the specific call signs themselves remain unknown.[6] A Serbian amateur writes that he was "licensed" as P5A, but that he was not allowed to operate on either occasion he was in the country.