What would happen if suddenly a revolutionary mining technology was found?

[maokoto]

This is something I have been thinking at times. What would happen if suddenly someone came up with a new algorythm/technology that could mine Bitcoin much faster? I see all those predictions about mining ending by 2100 ... but Isn't it possible that some new miner comes up raising the mining speed a lot?

No idea about it, just asking 

in 2009 CPU mining was the big thing.. difficulty was low but kept on par with the estimates.. then.. (shock, horror)
GPU mining hit the scene.. and the difficulty raised to compensate..
then FPGA, then more specialist stuff doing terra and peta has speeds.. and each time the difficulty changed to compensate..

.. so mining coins still is and always will be inline with long term estimates. as the difficulty changes to compensate

I see. I was totally ignorant about that (been in bitcoin about 7 months now). I thought that the diffuculty escalated more "naturally" not because better equipment was found. I thought equipment was developed in order to keep up with difficulty, not that difficulty raised due to the equipment.

What an enlightening post!

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[franky1]

I see. I was totally ignorant about that (been in bitcoin about 7 months now). I thought that the diffuculty escalated more "naturally" not because better equipment was found. I thought equipment was developed in order to keep up with difficulty, not that difficulty raised due to the equipment.

What an enlightening post!

if bitcoin was mining with just satoshi and halfinney on a CPU each.. the difficulty would remain at just 1. for however long as they stuck to it just being them mining with the same equipment forever..

this is why if banks make their own blockchain. and only have 2 systems mining it. they can easily manipulate data as they control the difficulty, keeping it low to make it easy to re-write blocks. which is why decentralised mining is soo important. and why new faster tech to mine with it is important too..

to prevent any one person from having enough power to manipulate it

[JeWay]

As we know, more mined Bitcoins means more difficult the algorithm. So when this person(s) mined a lot Bitcoin with the machine, it will at least just last once/twice because the algorithm of Bitcoin would become more difficult.

[Soros Shorts]

If a faster hardware or algorithm is developed, the difficulty will rise. The same amount of bitcoin will be mined.

No. There'll be a transition process. There's some limits now;
For instance; If the hashrate doubles, may be found 2x more blocks in a day but diff will be adjusted only +25%. (This is programmatically upper limit). Diff can't spike 50% at once.

LoLz really. Please take a break and learn a bit or two about bitcoin. You are posting pure BS.

Difficulty adjustment takes place every 2016 blocks and there is no such upper limit of difficulty spike.

Do you know how to read code? If your answer is yes then check this;
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/pow.cpp#L53

If you don't know how to read code then ask someone who knows and you're full of BS.

The lower limit (in the same block of code as the upper limit) is more of a concern, because if most of the hash rate drops suddenly you could have slow confirmation times for multiple 2016-block periods.

Code:

    if (nActualTimespan < params.nPowTargetTimespan/4)
        nActualTimespan = params.nPowTargetTimespan/4;
    if (nActualTimespan > params.nPowTargetTimespan*4)
        nActualTimespan = params.nPowTargetTimespan*4;

Also I believe max difficulty increase is +300% (4x). Difficulty can drop down to 25% but not lower.

[rickadone]

I badly look for such kind of invention to make bitcoin community a boom. Because when ASICs arrived big price movements were seen. So, hash rate rise is the needed thing to get better price.