Bitcoin Forum

Although it is unrealistic I was curious what would happen to bitcoins mining algorithm and hash rate.

Hash rate will drastically drop. No blocks will be found. Mempool will be full. Mining fee will shoot up.

Bitcoin's mining mechanism is so well-put that there are countermeasures to every dirty tactic that nefarious people can do to stop it from existing, one part of which is bitcoin's difficulty adjustment (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty).

If the cycle of the difficulty adjustment (happens every 2016 blocks) is still far away then large miners decided to 'repent' and stop mining, it will take a long ass-time for the little miners to get the magic numbers and solve blocks. However once the 2016th block is solved, the mining difficulty adjustment would be drastic so as to complement whatever processing power there is left and make sure that every blocks on average is solved at 10 minutes still.

I wonder what would happen if this were to happen on the first block after a re-target as there is a bug in the Bitcoin source code that even the time spent mining the first block after every difficulty adjustment would has no effect on the next Diff calculation.

It's a interesting theory I wonder if someone will come along with the answer to this as it's something I have also wanted to know.

Pretty simple questions, I wonder why you even ask them when it's obvious
- the mining algorithm will still be the same, it doesn't change because of the hash rate
- the hash rate will drop to that of a CPU, to 1-10 Mh/s


If the drop happens only for the first block yeah, it will not affect the difficulty adjustment but some of us might not see the next block in our lifetime. If the drop happens for the entire period..then obviously the difficulty will drop to 2009 levels.

Thanks for clearing that up stompix I did wonder what would be the outcome if it was on the 1st block is there a reason why the first block is not counted towards the next epoch adjustment?

I did some searching but could never come up with the answer to that.

Thanks in advance

Magic

As you said, I don't know how meaningful it is to comment on an unrealistic topic. At worst, however, the difficulty level is adjusted within the next 14 days and mining continues.

It's not changing based on a number of days but on the number of mined blocks (as mentioned above).

It'd be a hell of a time for other Bitcoin users as only 1 CPU has to do the job all the miners in the world were doing before, so it's going to take a long time before the set of another 2016 blocks is mined - which would indirectly rise the number of active miners as the Bitcoin network, my logical thinking tells me, would get clogged.. resulting in our transactions being stuck, so Bitcoin becoming unusable until difficulty gets adjusted.

If Bitcoin ever reaches the point where only 1 CPU in this entire world is mining, I think there are way more things we have to be concerned about! :D Wouldn't the network be exposed to 51% attacks as soon as the difficulty is adjusted? Wouldn't only 1 miner in the world mean nobody cares about BTC anymore (or you're living in a post-apocalyptic scenario)?

The reason is simple, a mistake in coding.
As it was deemed not serious, as a time warp attack (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43692.msg521772#msg521772) is highly unlikely it became more a feature than a bug.
There were quite a lot of bugs in the client some got fixed some were ignored as there aren't posing any danger.

Best case scenario: there's only 1 block left till the difficulty adjustment, so it takes only some years (I'm too lazy to calculate the exact number) to find this block.

Worst case scenario: difficulty adjustment happened just before the miners disappeared, so you take the number from best case scenario and multiply it by 2016.

Realistic scenario: this sole miner will make a hardfork to drop the difficulty and keep mining. Since in your hypothetical scenario it's the only miner, then the non-mining nodes will either stay on a dead chain or will follow the fork.

The hashrate would go to zero/near zero.

I'd have to study the difficulty change algo more, but I think all tx would stop for 4 weeks and a block would never been found.

I see a lot of fellow community members have given technically correct replies. Let me emphasize on the real world scenario. Because It will create an ultimate chaos in crypto market. Below are the possibilities,

1. No block will be mined - it means no transactions will get confirmation from network which will create congestion and increase the transaction fees to an unrealistically high level.

2. Dire consequences on price - bitcoin will be termed as useless because no one would be able to use it. It will result in a huge price crash which may bring down the price to 2 digit level.

3. The halving will be delayed for an unreasonably long time because the halving happens after every 210,000 block. Since no blocks will be mined, the halving will be posponed indefinitely.

In a nutshell, it will create utter chaos in the crypto market.