Data security is a hot topic these days, but few solutions offer sending information to the Moon.
Yet that’s exactly what a partnership between NASA, Florida-based IT company Lonestar and the tiny British island of the Isle of Man plans to do. The British Crown Dependency will use stamps selected by its Post Office as test data.
The partners will send a “cube” the size of a book, capable of storing about a terabyte of data to the Moon before transmitting it back to Earth, where it will be stored on a medium. blockchain (presumably private).
Why is this attempt being made? It’s part of an effort to protect humanity’s most important discoveries and creations from catastrophic loss, like what happened to Library of Alexandria.
Is this going a bit far? Some skeptics think so, but that has not deterred the partners involved, and the test mission is expected to launch from American soil in February 2024.
So, is blockchain used on the Moon?
Well, not quite. The physical “cube” containing data will be sent to the moon, and once landed, the data will be transmitted back to a blockchain to ensure the data is secure and authentic.
Although not involved in this particular mission, evolving public blockchains like BSV can be used to store data securely to protect it from the type of catastrophic loss that worries mission collaborators.
Blockchains are databases that make it possible to secure data storage on a robust distributed network. Nodes around the world store copies of the ledger, meaning that if part of the network were taken offline due to a disaster, the rest would remain intact.
Of course, if Earth were to face a truly civilization-ending situation, such as being hit by a meteor, it is possible that the blockchain would cease to function in its entirety. However, in this case, data loss would probably be the least of humanity’s worries. The robustness of the BSV blockchain is sufficient for most scenarios and does not involve the costs of sending data to the Moon.
Blockchain can contribute to data security and integrity
While sending data to the Moon may be an extraordinary milestone, the mission uses blockchain technology for its intended purpose. Dr. Craig Wright, who launched Bitcoin under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, explained at length that the coin was the least interesting part of his invention; it is the ledger and its data storage and management capabilities that are truly revolutionary.
To give an example of how the BSV blockchain can ensure that data is secure and has not been tampered with, just look Sentinel NodeA tool using BSV to revolutionize cybersecurity. This tool takes real-time snapshots of files across a computer network, leaving a timestamped record on the BSV blockchain whenever something is accessed, modified, deleted, or otherwise interacted with.
In the example above, even if a file can be tampered with before a network administrator can do anything, there will be evidence that this has happened, allowing everyone involved to verify that a breach has occurred and the data has been modified. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how tools like this can completely revolutionize the world of data, eliminating many of the problems associated with its storage and proving its integrity.
So while I’ll leave it to the experts to say whether it’s really necessary to send data cubes to the moon, I will say that using blockchain to secure and verify it is encouraging. Finally, it seems that at least some understand what this revolutionary technology can do.
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