What does transaction speed depend on?

[radres]

Hello and excuse my newbieness,

I know that the miners are taking care of the transactions. Does that mean, in the halving, if many miners shut their miners down, the verification time of the transactions will go up?

[achow101]

Briefly, yes. Transactions confirm when they are included in a block. The difficulty of finding a block of dependant on the hash power, which is partially dependent on the number of miners. The target is to find a block every ten minutes on average. The difficulty to force that target time changes every 2016 blocks which should be roughly 2 weeks. If a number of miners dropped off, then from the time to the next difficulty retarget, the confirmation times will be longer due to a high difficulty and a lower hash rate since blocks are being found less quickly. However after the difficulty retarget confirmation times will go back to normal.