Bitcoin Forum

What would happen if all these large mining farms just up and quit business?  They have allow of money in bitcoin and all, but what if one of them decided to try to pump the price and then just stopped mining, or just stopped mining for some reason.   Is there enough power throughout the rest of the world to keep bitcoin running and confirming?

Confirmations would slow down for a while (more than 10 minutes average between confirmations).  Then when we reached the next difficulty adjustment period (every 2016 blocks), the difficulty would be reduced and everything would continue normally once again.

There will be always someone mining. If one farm closes, another is mining at the same time and will make profit. Fool will be the one that stopped mining, he won't make money anymore and he will have a lot of equipments abandoned. And hypothetically, if everybody stops, I think the BTC stay there, quiet, waiting to be mined. And probably the BTC price would go up.

How hard would it be to get caught up though?  I understand that it would slow down, but it is an arm and a let in order to get into mining right now with the difficulty at this point.  I think that it would be harder to get into mining and catch up or would mining become easier?

Correct.  Those that are currently mining profitably would continue to mine and continue to receive profit.

Mining would not get easier until after the difficulty adjustment.


It would not be harder or easier.  It would be exactly the same until the difficulty adjustment.  After the difficulty adjustment, it would get much easier and many new miners would start mining.

The amount of time it takes until the difficulty adjustment would depend on when the mining farm shut down.  The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks.  So, if the shutdown happened immediately after an adjustment, then the network would have to wait until all 2016 blocks were mined for the next adjustment.  IF the shutdown happened 1008 blocks after an adjustment, then the network would only have to wait 1008 more blocks for the next adjustment.

Its no big deal if big miners stopped then small miners will do the mining. But if there will be a mining blackout then its still okay but we will need to return to the older bitcoin process without mining. There will be unsafe transactions, transfer of bitcoin from one wallet to another may be easily traced and hacked. So it is better that mining exist though it may not affect bitcoins existence but it will affect the mindset of people using bitcoins.

The good news is that even in the event mining takes a big hit for some reason, due to the decentralized nature of Bitcoin there'll be next to no issue with having at least one person being able to mine and (hopefully) be able to confirm all the transactions that would be going through.

I doubt there would ever be an issue with this though.

If I understand it right, the network will be vulnerable to attacks if there are less honest nodes in the network. If large miners suddenly stopped mining, then attackers will have a chance to mess up the chain or insert invalid transactions if they have enough power to overcome the remaining miners.
-- https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Honestly, I do not think large mining farms will quit suddenly since they are heavily invested. But if they do, I think it will be bad for bitcoin.

If a big mining company stopped mining, the bitcoin network will adjust the difficulty so the little miners still can confirmed the transactions. Bitcoin is balancing itself everytime.

If everyone stops mining, BTC would just stay there, "unmined", until someone starts again. There are enough BTC already to keep it working, but the price would probably go up.

There would be people spamming this whole forum ranting about how slow the transaction of bitcoin is.

I can't imagine what would happen to the miners once all the bitcoins has been mined. Bitcoin always give miners a reward to continue mining and keeping the network secure. They are only mining to get bitcoins, but what if there's nothing left to mine. In addition to the reasons why would someone stop mining, what if something kills bitcoin? Of course the miners would have to leave mining bitcoins because bitcoin is already dead.

Why would the mining farms, suddenly stop mining? The only reason, I can think of is economical or political reasons. If for some reason, mining becomes unprofitable for some reason, people will pull miners and this will then be balanced out, when the difficulty decrease and less hashing power would be needed to mine the same blocks, and these people will return.

Political reasons, like a absolute ban on bitcoin in a country, could drive the price down and make Bitcoin mining unprofitable, but the balancing will then happen when these mining farms pull out, and then the hashing becomes easier, and the difficulty drop. So these other mining farms makes more profit and expand more, picking up the slack, left by the miners that left. ^smile^

Newton's third law is: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, in Bitcoin too.

Bro its Not a Problem If A Mining Firm Quit Mining Because If One Firm Closes Then the Other Firm Will Opened.....
Its a Daily Process if One Goes then Other Comes in the Market and Mining Will Never End But It Effects the Bitcoin Transactions By Making Them Slower......

For sure it will not affect the existance of bitcoin but it may cause so many problems in terms slow and unsafe transactions. Whatever be the case, the possibility for the mining will get stopped is very then because people make money through mining so how do expect them to stop doing what is profitable to them.

It should be quite easy to calculate how long it would take. Say 50% of hash power is pulled out, it would take approximately 20 min per block until block retarget. If the retarget is 1000 blocks out, it would take 1000*20 min = 20,000 min = 333h = 14 days for everything to go back to normal.

The good thing though is that big mining farms have a very strong financial motivation not to stop mining. As long as they make more than operational costs, they are good to keep going.

I'm sorry, but can you explain?? As far as i know, there is no older bitcoin process without mining ... Mining is the act of verifying, calculating and putting transactions into the very blocks that create the decentralised ledger that is bitcoin. It's more complex than this, but this is what it comes down to. There would be no bitcoin without mining, unless i'm mistaking here... The network would still exist, but the decentralised ledger would remain completely static, no confirmations, just transactions in the mempool using unconfirmed inputs to create transactions...


I think you're missing the point here... Altough there are enough BTC into circulation, if mining would stop completely, there would just be unconfirmed transactions sitting in the node's mempool for a while untill they were dropped...

If everybody would completely stop mining, the diff would stay really, really high untill the next diff adjustment. This means that if everybody would stop mining, bitcoin would stop... If everybody would stop mining, only one person fired up a GPU miner, he would have virtually no chance of mining a block due to the high diff, let alone mine enough blocks to reach the next diff adjustment.

Same question/tought here... What's older bitcoin process? unsafe transactions? Wtf...

And I doubt any bigger miner will stop to mine for longer times, time is money here, blackout or other thing, they will find a way to back to mine asap...

Completely right about the fact that no bigger miner will suddenly stop, altough i don't think it'll hurt to make a theoretical excercise... "what if all bigger miners would suddenly stop mining".
In reality, it might happen that a big miner farm pulls the plug because they can no longer make a profit, but as long as no single mining farm has more than 50% of the hashpower of the network, the worst that can happen is the time between blocks going from ~10min to ~20min untill the next adjustment (a maximum of 4 weeks on average, since i'm assuming worst case scenario of the network hashrate being halved)...
Even if 90% of the hashrate would disappaer (for example, if the chinese governement would make mining illegal and do a big seize of all mining equipment in the course of a single day), it would take ~100 min per block for a couple of weeks-months (depending on when the next readjustment would happen). After this time everything would be "normal" again (albeit, we'd be running at 10% of the previous network's hashrate)

Well, there are also other situations that could possibly halt the big mining operations (WAR, Acts of God) in some jurisdictions but there are those who are prepared and have their smaller rigs setup to take advantage of such situations....Once the big operations go down, the mining difficulty will adjust enough to allow smaller operations to participate.  I don't know if <setgenerate> works anymore, but I'm sure it could be re-implemented, if things got bad enough, then everybody could participate again.

setgenerate from the console of the gui wallet doesn't work anymore... It was removed a long time ago IIRC. I don't think in case of a disaster the main problem would be finding homeminers to start mining with CPU/GPU, but the problem might be finding enough blocks to reach the next readjustment... Unless enough blocks would be found, the diff would stay high... So if every ASIC in the world would stop, and a couple hundred people would mine with their CPU, it would take years to reach the diff readjustment. In the meantime only one block per day/week/month would be found (not really in the mood to calculate how many cpu's we would need to replace a single S9, but i can guarantee it'll be a lot)

Except that the difficulty adjustment is limited to x4 or /4 - so if 90% of the network disappeared for some reason, it would take 10 times as long to get to the next difficulty adjustment, which would be to 1/4 of the previous difficulty and then, assuming the same level of mining, another 5 weeks or so to get to the next adjustment after that, before it was back in equilibrium.

You can look at coins like UNB, to see what happens when they get parked at high difficulty with a very slow difficulty adjustment algorithm.

^^^ This is why i love this forum... I learn something new every day :) I had no idear the diff adjustment was limited. Thanks for the comment!

Truly interesting. I wasn't aware of this fact. So if 90% of mining farms are suddenly shutdown, Bitcoin would be rendered effectively unusable for a longer period of time. The effect would clearly be damaging for Bitcoin's reputation, because it shows that the system is fragile to disruptions.

That leads to the question why difficulty adjustments in Bitcoin are done via a step function. Adjusting difficulty continuously using some kind of exponential moving average function would reduce the risks of extreme (mining centralization related) changes in hash power.

Thankfully, hashing power among pools is still adequately distributed. However a lot of mining operations reside in China.

ya.ya.yo!

We would go throught a little period a bit difficult, because difficulty would be too high, but then, we would simply get back to the normal after difficulty get adjusted.

this is the strangest question i have seen in ages, its just daft.  if a large miner stopped their would be another 10 smaller miners to take their place. 

Something cataclismic should happen that would stop all the mining. And if few of them stops some other would replace them, so in fact no harm will be done.
But the most big farms are in China and they will not allow that something like this just happens.

Transaction fees and blocks may be easier to mine. We'd see additional farms popping up in other countries.

These companies started due to cryptocurrency becoming more mainstream. Although it sounds scary of an outcome in OP, Bitcoin is now authentically genuine enough to keep booming. Just like the price surge... It will hold value with newfound startups, booming infrastructure as well as spiked development projects to keep it at a new level. There's no way people would shut those rigs down.

Without the fear is how we'll start thinking once enthusiasts and the rest of the BTC community adapt to fresh updates.

Much more is yet to come, don't be afraid if they shut down. Replacements will surely transition us, but there seems to be a bright future for this currency so expect something even bigger on top of it all.

Since the halving, i have seen the transactions took a lot of time to be confirmed. And it is due to the fact that the mining reward is halved from 25 to 12.5. and miners have found it now less profitable to mine the bitcoins.
I wonder  what will happen in the future when the mining reward will be further reduced to half of what it is now ?

An equilibrium will be reached. Miners will mine as long as it is profitable for them to mine, and if their equipment is already paid for, they will mine as long as they can cover their current costs.

And there are hundreds (or thousands) of hobby miners who are actually mining at a loss. In financial terms, they are doing better than calculating prime numbers, goloumb rulers, protein folding, cracking RSA or other encryption, or looking for extra terrestrial aliens in space, all of which are not doing their activity (similar to bitcoin mining) for profit at all.

All those college students with "free" electricity will still be mining with their single unit "space heaters". There's enough hash power to keep the mining going and difficulty will adjust accordingly.

If the big mining farms were suddenly attacked by nukes or drones or some natural disaster wipes them out. ... Maybe we have other problems by then.

Well sure the big miners will keep their mining process, because the most of them if not all has already roi, if they just stop mine and turn off all miners we will get a big problem in hands as an attack can be made into bitcoin.

Then I guess I'll become the authority of bitcoin by running 50 operating miners.

Though can't understand why would someone decide to stop mining?

The very same reason why someone who already has a job would quit his job -- Because he found something better. There are investments in the real world that are more profitable than when you mine bitcoin. Sometimes even if it doesn't pay as much, people switch from an investment to another because he's passionate about the new one. It's also possible that the mining rig owner needs some urgent money and had to sell his mining rig for a quick money.

Lots of people are asking the same question, I think you should try to google it first.

Referred links:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8743/what-happens-to-the-bitcoin-network-when-the-miners-all-stop-in-the-future (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8743/what-happens-to-the-bitcoin-network-when-the-miners-all-stop-in-the-future)
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5275/what-will-happen-to-mining-after-the-20-999-999th-bitcoin (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5275/what-will-happen-to-mining-after-the-20-999-999th-bitcoin)
https://news.bitcoin.com/what-happens-bitcoin-miners-all-coins-mined/ (https://news.bitcoin.com/what-happens-bitcoin-miners-all-coins-mined/)

If miners stopped mining, which obviously wouldn't happen all at once, Bitcoin transactions would eventually take longer to confirm. The good part about this would be that others would then have an opportunity to mine with a lower specification hardware and less power usage as the difficulty to mine would reduce and hence costs to mine would as well. The chances of this happening are limited as more advanced and power saving technology and hardware would be made available and people would eventually be mining a lot for a lot less.

Ha, no way bro, mining with total power. The system had slow down a little but it's very normal. It happens sometimes and the causes are varied. Stay cool, your medium profits will be the same. If the whole mining system were stopped, nearly a war will start and this forum would become small.

I am not really sure about this but weren't the confirmations being made by miners? If everyone stops mining, how would we get our confirmations? I probably miss something because if it is true, when all the bitcoins get mined, there won't be anybody to confirm transactions anymore...

the problem is the time between these 2016 blocks... if big miners decide to stop at same time we would have a big delay until these 2016 blocks move.


not exactly that but if EVERYONE stops the network would stop and that would mean no confirmations.
When all bitcoins get mined, miners will do it for transaction fee's.

i would go with the idea of , when a large mining farm shutdown, there will be 10 or more smaller miners to take their place.  Reason is that when this large miner close, they have to at least have profit with their miners.  So basically they will go on for a "sale"  to be able to sell their used miners asap.  This is the opportunity this miners wanna be is waiting, to buy second hand cheap miners.  More probably bitcoin will have some issue in a short time ( changing owner of the mining machine ) then eventually all these sold miners will be functional one by one.  and bitcoin will be back to where it was before the shutdown.  

So the miners will mine for the little fees? I don't think anybody will do such thing unless the fees are increased a lot more than what they are now which is going to harm bitcoin considering that the price will probably have reached to the moon when all the coins are mined.

That's the idear, yes... When all bitcoins are mined, an equilibrium will be reached.
A lot of miners will stop mining because it's unprofitable for them to mine for those fees, lowering the diff, making sure the leftover miners will find more blocks with the same hashrate, thus collect more fees.

This is a process that will start long, very long before the block reward will go to zero tough.
It's 12.5 now, but only 6.25 in less than 4 years. 3.125 in less than 8 years, 1.5625 in less than 12 years, 0.78125 in less than 16 years.

https://www.smartbit.com.au/charts/transaction-fees-per-block tells us the current fee is about 0.5 BTC per block and rising, so i guess in about 12 years a miner would get at least half of his income by collecting fees and half of his income by the block reward...

Your thread title is a bit misleading.

I thought that bitcoin mining really stopped. ;D

It won`t be a disaster if bitcoin mining stops.Bitcoin will continue to exist.

Well, it would be a bit of a disaster, without any mining there would be no network and no transactions. So apart from not being able to send or receive at all ...

Assuming it still exists by then even after the last bitcoin has been generated, mining will still be required to generate new blocks and confirm transactions it is simply that the blocks will have no coinbase reward.

actually it is showing the limit of the new bitcoin to be genrate in the bitcoin market .
the main reason of low Profit in the bitcoin is due to less efficient the miner and high power consuming mimer .

Mining all bitcoin it's not possible before 2050. Let other user how big the system they use  (real scene) because bitcoin mining difficulty had become more difficult  and no one can mine all bitcoin before 2050. Even if it is mining somehow then price will go down because of more supply an less demand.

The OP talks about a large miner stopping mining due to a personal reason, not because of an increase in difficulty.
Difficulty would actually adjust very quickly and other miners would benefit.

Are you saying that difficulty is directly proportional to miners?If there were less miners there would be less difficulty/I think dificulty is related to volume of transaction and block size

Difficulty is nothing to do with transaction volume or block size. Difficulty is determined by how long it takes to find blocks. Measured over a "period" of 2016 blocks, if the average time is more than 10 minutes per block the difficulty will reduce; if less then 10 minutes it will increase - in both cases by the amount estimated to keep the 10 minute average. The time to actually find blocks is directly related to the amount of hash power (i.e. the miners) that is on the network. So yes difficulty is related to miners, or more accurately the hash power those miners are using.

I really don't think it will have much of a effect, it will be a chance for others to occupy his place. And no one in his sane mind will do that, especially when it's booming and after such a lot of investment. So I think you need not worry for this.

A big market does not know that a trader was absent and mining was made for bitcoin and not the other way round, so the remaining miners would have a field day making even more bitcoin should one or a few miners stop mining. Beyond that, new people would see this opportunity to make some extra income and start their own mine.

I agree that bitcoin will be dead if all miners stop mining as new bitcoins will not be created and existing bitcoins can not be moved because it will take forever to confirm

OP  is referring  on  bitcoin miners would stop   to mine  bitcoin  but  it doesnt mean that  bitcoin would be dead  hence  the  transaction   cant be  stopped   and  miners would still  be  profitable   on  transactions  that  have been  made  throughout   the  blockchain.

There are actually more than 5000 nodes right now storing blockchain data in ledger so even if few of those node runner stop recording bitcoin network will not get affected.

In case of miner currently total hashrate bitcoin have is 1,920,252,137 GH/s (source: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty) which is increasing every month if you look at the hashrate chart over last few months. And for sure no any big mining farms are holding 50%+ of this mining power, so even few of those big miner stop mining bitcoin network will function as normal.

yes that is a fact that bitcoin mining still in progress and hope that it will continue for next few decades and the value of bitcoin is also depend on the amount of bitcoin mining, if the supply increase  from demand then the price fell down and when supply is decrease then the value of bitcoin also increase.

wtf are you talking about? difficulty is mutable.. it will vary with the hashpower. and how could you know the demand on 2050? it could be WAY higher than right now.

Smaller miners would swoop in and take the opportunity to make some money off of a decreased competition and increased market share for individuals. Even those with higher electricity costs are suddenly able to be a bit more competitive.

Of course bitcoin miing can only stop when the all the mineable coins have all been completely mined. Even at then, bitcoin transaction will still continue as new blocks will be generated but with zero new bitcoins so stop thinking negative about bitcoin system.