Bitcoin Forum

A thought,

If everyone agreed, or most agreed, in the mining world to switch off their machines on a difficulty change period it should set to zero, then restart all the mining operations and everyone could have a bumper 2 weeks :D :D

All in favour say "aye" :D

That would mean huge dumping and value back to single-double digits.

then straight back up again after ;D

It would be great to get difficulty to zero, but it will be notime until all diff goes back.

Yeaahh, that's not how mining works...though it's a fun thought experiment.

Problem #1) Who would mine the last block (#2016) to initiate the difficulty change? Even if "most agreed", the remaining miners (assuming there were very few of them) would take ages to solve the last block. No transactions would be processed on the Bitcoin network and the whole thing collapses.

Problem #2) As far as I've understood it, a change in difficulty doesn't happen based on what's happening on the last block, but rather the culmination of all 2016 blocks after the last change. To cause a drop in the difficulty, the average timestamps on the blocks would need to be greater than 10 minutes apart. Stopping at the last block wouldn't do anything to change the average of the previous 2015.

Nice input

Yes, its based on the collective time of the past 2016 blocks.

So if we all turned off (except 1 miner, because we need to get through those 2016 blocks), it would take....

Well, we need come values here.  Say the last miner was 1 Terahash.  The total network right now is ~300 Peta, so 300 000 tera, so we would be 300 000 times slower.

Instead of taking 14 days to find that 2016th block, it would be 4.2 million days, or 11.5 thousand years.

Then the difficulty would drop to ~137 000, and we could turn all our machines back on.  Once we turned back on that 300 Peta, it would take the reverse!  300 000 times faster to get through those 2016 blocks, 4.667*10^-5 days, or about 4 seconds.  So... whoever turns on "first" will just get every single block, or about 50 000 BTC.

FYI, your method would not make the difficulty zero. Please read more and you will find out that it is impossible to make it zero.

fantastic explanation! Brilliant.

So ideally getting a quarter of the mining power off would be more reasonable and profitable.

Love your chainmail. I wish I had time to do it, but more of the armoire type.

Just to be even more pedantic, I think there are some limits on how big a change there can be in the difficulty for any single change. I may be wrong on the specific of those limits, but it's already clear that it would take a very long time for it to happen. Also, aren't the confirmations of Bitcoin transactions wrapped up in the "mining process". So much for the vaunted "speed of Bitcoin" of you stop things for a few days.

Unless BTC value drops to $0 this will never happen.  You will never reach miner consensus to shut them all down.

The difficulty never changes by more than a factor of 4 (except for in a special case that only applies on testnet).

The code that enforces this is

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/d62a1947be5350ed60066ccacc7aba43bbdf48fb/src/main.cpp#L875 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/d62a1947be5350ed60066ccacc7aba43bbdf48fb/src/main.cpp#L875).

^^^ what he said.

and NAY

It would never happen.  But we can always dreams  ;D

Wouldn't the difficulty jump back to where it was suddenly? :/

Yes we can dream.

If all the miners switch off their machines the bitcoin network will die (or better stop) so no one can "dump" any bitcoin  :D or buy it.

Seems to me that bitcoin price would have to hit 0 before difficulty ever will.  With about a 10 to 30 day delay.