Bunkercoin
When the internet dies, shortwave still reaches. Bunkercoin is a WW3 reading of Anatoly Yakovenko's BunkerCoin — a blockchain protocol designed to fit inside a 300-byte radio frame and survive ionospheric noise.
Originator: Anatoly Yakovenko (Toly) · paper dated April 1st, 2024
Bunker miners
Operators grind a Poseidon PoET VDF for a golden ticket. The winner seals the block with Groth16 and puts it on the air — watch the race, then tune the receiver below.
Simulated bunker operators racing a Poseidon PoET VDF. The winner finds a golden ticket, seals with Groth16, and broadcasts 32:96 frames into the HF receiver. Not a live mining network.
Shortwave desk
A paper-faithful HF desk: 300-byte frames, 32:96 erasure coding, five-minute window. Lock 7.040 MHz when a miner broadcasts to assemble the block.
- Standby · tune to HF packet band
Simulation of Anatoly Yakovenko's BunkerCoin paper — Poseidon PoET VDF, golden ticket, recursive Groth16, 32:96 erasure coding over a five-minute window. Miner winners above broadcast into this receiver. Not a live shortwave network. Tune near 7.040 MHz to decode frames.
What BunkerCoin is
Toly's repo aeyakovenko/bunker_coin holds one document: a short protocol paper titled BunkerCoin: A Low Bandwidth, Shortwave Radio-Compatible Blockchain Protocol. There is no node binary in that repository — the paper is the source of truth for what BunkerCoin claims to be.
The idea is blunt: run a chain over HF shortwave, the same bands civil defence and amateur radio use when fibre and satellites are gone. Bandwidth is tiny. Packets drop. Latency is measured in ionospheric hops. The protocol is shaped around that.
300-byte MTU
Every block must travel as shortwave frames. The paper sets a 300-byte maximum transmission unit — packet-radio scale, not datacentre scale.
Shortwave radio
Blocks are meant to propagate over low-bandwidth shortwave channels, not over the public internet. If the grid fails, the radio path remains.
32:96 erasure coding
Each block is sent as a series of 32:96 erasure-coded frames across a fixed five-minute window, so receivers can rebuild the block even when many frames are lost.
Nakamoto longest chain
Fork choice follows the classic Nakamoto longest-chain rule, aligned with the radio transmission and proof schedule.
How it works
Mechanics below are taken from the abstract of Toly's paper — nothing added that the repo does not state.
Poseidon PoET VDF
A recursive Poseidon hash underpins a proof-of-elapsed-time verifiable delay function. Miners grind that VDF to find a valid block.
Golden ticket
A valid find is a "golden ticket" — a bit sequence that proves the block and ties to the miner's public key plus how long a given amount of coin has been held.
Groth16 recursive ZKP
A recursive zero-knowledge proof (Groth16) lets the miner prove the golden ticket exists and seal the transaction block's hash without revealing the ticket itself.
Broadcast over the air
The sealed block is erasure-coded into 32:96 frames and pushed over the shortwave channel for five minutes, matching the 300-byte MTU.
Field extract · abstract
"BunkerCoin [is] designed to operate under the constraints of low bandwidth networks, specifically through shortwave radio channels… recursive Poseidon… proof of elapsed time (PoET) verifiable delay function… 'golden ticket'… recursive Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP), constructed using the Groth16 proving scheme… 300-byte Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU)… 32:96 erasure coded frames over a fixed five-minute interval… Nakamoto-style longest chain rule."
— Anatoly Yakovenko, bunker_coin.tex, April 1st 2024
Source dossier
Bunkercoin exists to put that paper on a civil-defence desk: clear claims, no invented throughput numbers, credit where it belongs. Toly wrote the protocol. This site is the WW3 briefing.
Contract address
FAQ
Who invented BunkerCoin?
Anatoly Yakovenko (Toly), co-founder of Solana. The paper in aeyakovenko/bunker_coin is dated April 1st, 2024 and lists him as sole author.
Is the original GitHub a running chain?
No. Toly's repository contains the protocol paper (bunker_coin.tex). It describes how a shortwave-compatible chain would work; it does not ship a production radio network by itself.
What does "300-byte MTU" mean here?
The paper designs block propagation for a 300-byte maximum transmission unit — typical of packet radio — so frames can fit the shortwave modem path.
What is the golden ticket?
Per the paper: the output of the Poseidon PoET VDF that marks a valid block. It is bound to the miner's public key and to how long a specified amount of coin has been held. A Groth16 proof attests to it without revealing the ticket.
Why the WW3 framing?
Shortwave is what remains when cables and satellites do not. The paper already aims at bandwidth-constrained, hostile channels. Bunkercoin states that plainly, in civil-defence language, without adding fake metrics.
What is the $BunkerNet coin?
The Solana mint shown in the top strip and section 04. It is the site's official CA. Holding it is not described as a consensus requirement in Toly's paper; treat it as the project coin for this briefing site.