What will happen if all miners stop mining?

[stompix]

Have you seen anything/any discussion about countering this issue anywhere?

Yeah, tens of times..nothing came out, this is 2011:
Difficulty adjustment needs modifying
Here and here

So, the consensus was and still is that

if we lose 90% of hashing power in a month then there that is a sign something much more serious is wrong with bitcoin than the difficulty algorithm

It makes sense, if 90% of the miners do quit, why would they do that in the first place?
If they would be bribed, they can be bribed to mine empty blocks, to perform an attack, everything else.
If a country or government has the power to bring 90% of the hashrate offline permanently, they could also do a lot more damage than just almost stopping the chain, they would shut down exchanges, throw people in jail, ban possession and usage, which would bring down just as more.

[tvplus006]

We know a few days ago there are completed halving of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. After halving of Bitcoin Cash there was no block created almost two hours. On the other hand, Bitcoin SV lost value after the halving.
I am very curious. What will happen for Bitcoin if all the miners stop their mining?
Will it have value?
will it possible to transfer?

It is difficult for me to make a correct forecast of what will happen to bitcoin after halving. But I think that in the near future, miners who earned Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV will partially switch to mining BTC. And this will continue until halving bitcoin, because the reward for a block before halving will be higher than Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV.

[hatshepsut93]

So, in summary, it's not possible to have no miners. If that happens, as long as one node is alive computing, Bitcoin will stay alive. Anyways, It's not possible because a lot of people are already invested in Bitcoin, especially the miners, and their mining gears are expensive, and it's best not to be put to waste.

Did you read the whole thread carefully? If you imagine only one node left, it would take thousands of years to mine one block on top the last block. This node would have to fork and manually adjust difficulty by changing the protocol if they would want to actually mine blocks every 10 minutes again.

Yes, it sounds too abstract first, but imagine a nuclear war and 99.9% of hashpower instantly going down. Bitcoin would be rendered unusable for years unless there will be a manual fork to adjust the difficulty.

[Darker45]

~snip~

As many already mentioned,  if miners stop bitcoin will survive.
It is not that easy to kill bitcoin. It will survive

Actually it will be not dead and also not alive, more like a virus.
If all miners quit there will be no more blocks, no more confirmed transactions, so no activity on the chain but at the same time, even if 100 years pass and suddenly a single miner decides to mine it will come back..alive.

But with the same difficulty, right? Even after a full century? So he will have to start from step 1 and try to finish mining the entire 2016 blocks before the difficulty is reduced accordingly? But since the hash power is so low it will take forever to finish the whole of the 2016 blocks. So, theoretically, if there is a sudden stop of Bitcoin mining or perhaps exodus of Bitcoin miners for whatever reason and one tries to revive it, is there any point?

[Wenbing]

I love your curiosity. Youur question is in the supply side of bitcoin. These are what will happen if bitcoin mining stops today.

1. The supply of bitcoin will be lower than the demand for Bitcoin.
2. The price of bitcoin will dramatically skyrocket due to the scarcity of bitcoin.
3. Being that there is value in scarcity, that means investors will seek to invest into bitcoin.
4. The whitepaper already pegged the supply of bitcoin to be 21million in circulation, even at that the value of bitcoin will still be high.

Not that good of an assumption. If bitcoin mining completely stops, sure there wouldn't be any bitcoin to enter the markets hence more scarcity. But you're completely assuming that people would want to buy something that no one is mining. Who cares about scarcity if you can't even send out the asset? How will they be able to receive or send the bitcoin in the first place if no one is mining? Take note that we're talking about ALL miners stopping; based on OP's title.

Thanks for the observation. When all miners stop mining the bitcoin transaction operations automatically stops because its miners that perform this tasks.

[XenoFever]

Miners are the ones who are responsible on processing the transactions of different cryptocurrency so basically if there would be no miners at all the bitcoin andnother cryptocurrency will be dead.

But I don't think that this would happen because we have so much miners in this cryptoworld, our big whales will not let this things happen because some people are considered this as their work. There are so many things that this cryptoworld brings to us.

[stompix]

~

But with the same difficulty, right? Even after a full century? So he will have to start from step 1 and try to finish mining the entire 2016 blocks before the difficulty is reduced accordingly? But since the hash power is so low it will take forever to finish the whole of the 2016 blocks. So, theoretically, if there is a sudden stop of Bitcoin mining or perhaps exodus of Bitcoin miners for whatever reason and one tries to revive it, is there any point?

There would be no point in reviving it even one year after if it fails, why go through all the trouble one year after people have ditched it, the whole trust it has build till now would be already destroyed. It wouldn't make any sense to revive it from the economical point of view, nothing other than a hobby project, just like we now play along with classical reenactments of Roman legions or Renaissance festivals. If it failed 100 years ago noting would make it viable a century after.

It was just an extreme example that unless you somehow manage to destroy all blockchain copies this bitcoin will never be truly dead, and besides, in 100 years with the expected improvement in science and technology, you might be able to print at home a miner capable of 1exahash alone  

[figmentofmyass]

Not gonna lie, this is actually pretty scary. I've never stopped to think about this possibility since I always had the idea that difficulty decreases anyways even if the hash power is at zero, but that makes sense since BTC only sees blocks and not time itself. Have you seen anything/any discussion about countering this issue anywhere?

there were some fears among core developers that there would be a severe hash rate drop following the 2016 halving. luke dashjr proposed readying an emergency hard fork to the difficulty adjustment algorithm, in case those fears came to pass. the ensuing discussion is worth a read:  https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-March/012489.html

[bitmover]

Actually it will be not dead and also not alive, more like a virus.
If all miners quit there will be no more blocks, no more confirmed transactions, so no activity on the chain but at the same time, even if 100 years pass and suddenly a single miner decides to mine it will come back..alive.

I don't think what you described can happen.

Even if hash rate suddenly drop very hard  blocks would still be confirmed  at a very slow rate (let's say 1 per hour  , as more people with GPU would start mining.

Additionally , if one block per hour is a pain in the ass and community cant wait until a difficult adjustment, a fork would solve this.

The network could be forked and the difficult adjusted, or mining could be changed to be more GPU friendly.

[Wenbing]

So if everyone stops right now and the hash power of the network is equal to one guy mining with a CPU, it won't adjust after some time? I wasn't aware of this.
It makes sense if the difficulty only changes after X blocks mined (and with a single CPU, it will take a looong time for that to happen). I was thinking this was more time based rather than block based, but thinking now, that makes more sense.

Yeah, it doesn't adjust over time, it adjusts every 2016 blocks.
So, if this doomsday scenario where not all miners, let's just say 90% of them quit the difficulty will now adjust in the standard 14 days but in 140 days with a block every 100 minutes.

A lot of shitcoins have been attacked like that in the early days, with GPU frames switching to mine them, raising the difficulty 10 times and when that adjusted leaving them to die with no blocks being mined. That's when Kimoto Gravity Well, Digishield appeared.

Will the protocol survive? Yeah! Will the confidence and trust behind the coin....I have doubts, depending on the scale.

Fortunately, the scenario is close to impossible right now, and it's because of the good old $.
Not only is there still a financial incentive to mine, but also if some farms try to drop out of the business there is a lot of formerly inefficient gear that was retired (millions of s9) that will come back online since it is again profitable for them to mine.

As many already mentioned,  if miners stop bitcoin will survive.
It is not that easy to kill bitcoin. It will survive

Actually it will be not dead and also not alive, more like a virus.
If all miners quit there will be no more blocks, no more confirmed transactions, so no activity on the chain but at the same time, even if 100 years pass and suddenly a single miner decides to mine it will come back..alive.

Great contribution.

But, have thought of viewing this issue from this angle? Every miner is in a business and the idea of doing business is to be break even and become profitable.

If the mining fee (bitcoin reward) and the transaction fees used for their payment is no longer in place, how will their businesses survive? Also altering the core philosophies of the network is a breach of trust.

What do you think?

[stompix]

~

I don't think what you described can happen.
Even if hash rate suddenly drop very hard  blocks would still be confirmed  at a very slow rate (let's say 1 per hour  , as more people with GPU would start mining.

It's an extreme scenario if the perfect storm happens this will be the result.
If another crash happens, if suddenly Trump comes up saying it will ban bitcoin usage, if China prosecutes Chinese miners at the same time, yeah a 90% drop in mining will happen, but!  at that point, we will have far bigger problems that a block every hour till the next adjustment.
But as I said, it's a scenario of ...what if! Chances of happening are the same as mining a solo block.

But no, GPU mining to reach the next adjustment...nope
An S19 is doing 50Th, most graphic cards on the market are able to perform only 3-4 Gh/h.
The entire hash rate is around 100Exa, so to reach 10% with GPU you would need around 2-3 billion cards  .

But, have thought of viewing this issue from this angle? Every miner is in a business and the idea of doing business is to be break even and become profitable.

If the mining fee (bitcoin reward) and the transaction fees used for their payment is no longer in place, how will their businesses survive? Also altering the core philosophies of the network is a breach of trust.

Two things, in the perfect world I see, a lot of the mining would be done at a loss because it helps secure a lot of wealth, so it would make sense for let's say Coinbase to power up 10k Asics at a cost of 50k a day when it has trillions in wealth stored in the chain. Second, for a period of time, we only need the price to be double that of the last halving, of course, it can't go on like this forever but we have at least 8-12 years to think of a solution. And beyond 20 years...I don't really think I would care myself that much about earthly things! 

[Ryushin]

We know a few days ago there are completed halving of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. After halving of Bitcoin Cash there was no block created almost two hours. On the other hand, Bitcoin SV lost value after the halving.
I am very curious. What will happen for Bitcoin if all the miners stop their mining?
Will it have value?
will it possible to transfer?

The answer is new mining rigs will start entering the market after the halving, miners only need to upgrade and things will be back to normal, only old miners will go obsolete, china companies have already start reproduction of new mining machines