What happens to Bitcoin / Cryptocurrency when/if all the miners stop mining

[Lakshitha1977]

Today I watched a movie "NERVE" , after watching that I got to thinking about how cryptocurrency transactions work ,

**Spoiler Alert**
The movie is about an online game, when everyone logged out from it the game completely disappeared.

So like that if everyone stopped mining bitcoin at one point (this is much unlikely, but worst case senario), what will happen to the Cryptocurrency market, will it completely vanish, like it never existed? 

[Elachious12]

I think if miners stops mining bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies the circulating supply will be reduced and demand for it will become intense.  I know coin/token with little circulating supply do well because of its minimal circulating supply
 

[Addywealth]

That is a food for thought, i also often imagine that what would happen to the world of cryptocurrency today if the miners stop minning bitcoin, unfortunately i couldn't proffer solution to my thought. Nevertheless i feel there will always be a way around, i know nitcoin can not die it has come to stay.

[hatshepsut93]

1. The difficulty will start gradually dropping, meaning less powerful miners will become profitable. Eventually you will even be able to mine with GPU and CPU if there will be no miners for too long.

2. Without mining there's no new blocks, so no new transaction will be able to get confirmed.

3. Bitcoin will still have network of nodes and each node keeps the whole blockchain history. So even if miners will leave, Bitcoin will not be destroyed, it will be "paused" and will resume as normal as soon as someone will start mining again. To truly destroy Bitcoin you'd need to erase the blockchain file from all computers that have it.

[franky1]

though there are many asics under the control of humans who can switch them off.
there are some asics that are set up to run and reboot automatically, that are powered by renewable sources thus they dont really get a bill which means that a electric company cant just switch them off either. so mining wont stop(theoretically).

what will happen is that the hashrate will decrease and those remaining will find they have less competition.
initially it will take a little longer to mine a block, but with less miners, means its worth it as they would get a bigger slice of the rward when they do get a block..
but because it takes longer to get a block it would take longer to mine 2016 blocks to get to the point where the difficulty will drop to make it easier to get blocks.
in short: expect some slower confirmations for a few fortnights until it finds its natural equilibrium.

also with less cost due to less competition. the miners that remain would be happier to sell for less because it costs them less to mine a block, because they are getting rewards more often. yes they could hoard for profit. but in a scenario of many thousands of people running out of bitcoin, alot of those that remain, will want to cash out asap incase things got worse. EG get their rewards into a functioning exchange at the earliest possible moment

.. what i said above is in a scenario of many deciding to just not mine.
but.. greed is a big thing. and if people se there can be nice profit/gap in mining. many will continue to mine. many will start mining. due to reasons that they dont see any immoral reason not to. as its not like its killing anyone afterall