Researcher Says Elon Musk's SpaceX Starlink Service Can Improve Network Connectivity Among Dogecoin Crypto Miners

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has been an avid supporter of Dogecoin, the Shiba Inu meme-inspired cryptocurrency that has climbed over 26,000% in value over the past six months and now has a market capitalization of about $92 billion. Musk shared that he is working with Dogecoin developers “to improve system transaction efficiency,” he said, “Potentially promising.”

If you’d like to help develop Doge, please submit ideas on GitHub & https://t.co/liAPQMFaQB @dogecoin_devs

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 24, 2021

This week, Musk welcomed people’s suggestions on how to improve the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. –“If you’d like to help develop Doge, please submit ideas on GitHub,” he Tweeted. Dogecoin supporters have been submitting their suggestions for the past couple days. A particular suggestion caught the eye of the original Dogecoin creator, Billy Markus, who no longer works in the project but is enthusiastic about Dogecoin’s sudden popularity. He shared the interesting GitHub suggestion in a Twitter post, linked below. The GitHub suggestion was submitted by Arthur Gervais, whose research is focused decentralized technology. Gervais says that internet speed between crypto miners was one of the most “overlooked bottlenecks” and that a way to “speed up a blockchain” without any protocol change is to improve connectivity between crypto miners. “This is where Starlink, the satellite-based Internet from SpaceX could help Dogecoin to be closer to the moon,” Gervais said. SpaceX is building a megaconstellation of internet-beaming satellites that will connect users to globally. The researcher says Musk's SpaceX Starlink service can improve network connectivity among crypto miners.

https://t.co/u9Tr75V7wE

That. That is cool af.

— Shibetoshi Nakamoto (@BillyM2k) May 26, 2021

Gervais explains that “the slower the Internet between the miners is, the less synchronized they become, and the more the blockchain security degrades,” he wrote, “That is one of the fundamental reasons why it’s not trivial to scale Doge or Bitcoin by simply increasing the block-time frequency and the block size.” He said that SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellites could help provide crypto miners with low-latency, high-speed connection compared with terrestrial internet infrastructures. Gervais estimated that the round trip time (RTT) broadband connection between London and Singapore would be 108ms (milliseconds) on Starlink compared the 159ms on fiber optic internet. “Dogecoin could very well scale its transaction throughput by orders of magnitude, if its miners were to engage in a dedicated Starlink relay network,” he wrote. “Starlink is certainly already highly anticipated by traditional financial institutions to perform lower latency arbitrage across the major financial exchanges. Using Starlink as a network to propagate blockchain peer-to-peer data among miners would equally help speed up substantially the current blockchain throughput, without deteriorating its security,” Gervais said. Author's note: Thanks for supporting TESMANIAN! Twitter: Evelyn Janeidy Arevalo