Every six hours, at his home in the high desert outside Kingman, Arizona, midway between Phoenix and Las Vegas, Brian Goss downloads the latest blocks from the bitcoin blockchain via satellite. He receives the transmission through a dish he installed this January; it arrives with messages, too---tweets, blogs, odes to Satoshi---sent by bitcoiners around the world. Goss rebroadcasts them from a radio device perched on his roof, in case the neighbors care to tune in. There’s nothing wrong with Goss’ terrestrial internet connection, he assures me---Kingman is not that remote. But if bitcoin is truly digital gold, as he believes, contingencies are important. If the internet goes down, how else will you access your cache?

Gregory Barber covers cryptocurrency, blockchain, and artificial intelligence for WIRED.

For some, the trouble with bitcoin, the internet’s native currency, is the internet. Sure, bitcoin may be “decentralized,” with copies of its ledger stored on computers all over the world. But is it really decentralized if it relies on the pipes of your local internet provider? For those wary of tracking and censorship, analog signals---through satellites and land-based radio devices---offer a welcome buffer from central control. Plus, if you believe that bitcoin, which is again worth more than $10,000, is the right place to store your wealth, satellites offer the comfort of redundancy.

The idea isn’t totally irrational. Consider India, where officials recently proposed jailing people for 10 years for using bitcoin. Or Egypt, where the government unplugged the internet in 2011. Perhaps you live on a remote island tethered to the internet by a single undersea cable, or a place without any internet access at all.

Bitcoin’s celestial coverage comes from Blockstream, a blockchain software company. To be clear, Blockstream isn’t launching satellites itself; it rents a small portion of the bandwidth on commercial satellites, which are mainly used for TV. The data is beamed up with enough bandwidth to ensure the blockchain stays up to date. Users can also send along messages, paid through the Lightning Network, a technology that allows small bitcoin payments. The satellites broadcast the signals back down to whoever might be listening.

Listening is the hard part. “It was super outside my technical skill,” says Goss, a radiologist by day. “I didn’t know anything about any of this.” It took him about a week to install the equipment, which he estimates would cost about $100 to buy new. He mostly used spare parts: a 2014 Mac Mini and an idle satellite dish that came with the house. (“We’re not much of a TV family,” he says.) There was some fiddling with software and a few hours of drilling in the equipment, but most of his time went into figuring out where to point the thing.

“This is why you hire someone to install DirectTV,” says Elaine Ou, a blockchain engineer who set up a receiver, with no small effort, at her Bay Area home. Beyond cypherpunk cred, there are practical reasons for receiving blockchain by satellite, she says. Cryptocurrency exchanges have been hit with so-called partition attacks, where data is surreptitiously delayed or faked, knocking the targeted computers out of sync with the rest of the blockchain network. Those attacks happen over the internet, so having an alternate, analog connection means you’re less likely to be fooled.

Ou first started experimenting with alternative ways to send and receive bitcoin back in 2016, around the time China was considering a cryptocurrency ban. Recalling the difficulty the Soviets had jamming American radio transmissions, she and her colleague Nick Szabo, a well-known digital currency researcher, devised a plan to bypass the Great Firewall by sending bitcoin transactions via ham radio. The method offered at least one advantage over satellite: Satellites let you receive data without an internet connection, but you can’t use them to send.