Bitcoin Mining Just Stopped?

[Conus]

What would happen if all these large mining farms just up and quit business?  They have allow of money in bitcoin and all, but what if one of them decided to try to pump the price and then just stopped mining, or just stopped mining for some reason.   Is there enough power throughout the rest of the world to keep bitcoin running and confirming?

[DannyHamilton]

Is there enough power throughout the rest of the world to keep bitcoin running and confirming?

Confirmations would slow down for a while (more than 10 minutes average between confirmations).  Then when we reached the next difficulty adjustment period (every 2016 blocks), the difficulty would be reduced and everything would continue normally once again.

[mrcash02]

What would happen if all these large mining farms just up and quit business?  They have allow of money in bitcoin and all, but what if one of them decided to try to pump the price and then just stopped mining, or just stopped mining for some reason.   Is there enough power throughout the rest of the world to keep bitcoin running and confirming?

There will be always someone mining. If one farm closes, another is mining at the same time and will make profit. Fool will be the one that stopped mining, he won't make money anymore and he will have a lot of equipments abandoned. And hypothetically, if everybody stops, I think the BTC stay there, quiet, waiting to be mined. And probably the BTC price would go up.

[Conus]

Is there enough power throughout the rest of the world to keep bitcoin running and confirming?

Confirmations would slow down for a while (more than 10 minutes average between confirmations).  Then when we reached the next difficulty adjustment period (every 2016 blocks), the difficulty would be reduced and everything would continue normally once again.

How hard would it be to get caught up though?  I understand that it would slow down, but it is an arm and a let in order to get into mining right now with the difficulty at this point.  I think that it would be harder to get into mining and catch up or would mining become easier?

[DannyHamilton]

I understand that it would slow down, but it is an arm and a let in order to get into mining right now with the difficulty at this point.

Correct.  Those that are currently mining profitably would continue to mine and continue to receive profit.

Mining would not get easier until after the difficulty adjustment.

I think that it would be harder to get into mining and catch up or would mining become easier?

It would not be harder or easier.  It would be exactly the same until the difficulty adjustment.  After the difficulty adjustment, it would get much easier and many new miners would start mining.

The amount of time it takes until the difficulty adjustment would depend on when the mining farm shut down.  The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks.  So, if the shutdown happened immediately after an adjustment, then the network would have to wait until all 2016 blocks were mined for the next adjustment.  IF the shutdown happened 1008 blocks after an adjustment, then the network would only have to wait 1008 more blocks for the next adjustment.

[groll]

What would happen if all these large mining farms just up and quit business?  They have allow of money in bitcoin and all, but what if one of them decided to try to pump the price and then just stopped mining, or just stopped mining for some reason.   Is there enough power throughout the rest of the world to keep bitcoin running and confirming?

Its no big deal if big miners stopped then small miners will do the mining. But if there will be a mining blackout then its still okay but we will need to return to the older bitcoin process without mining. There will be unsafe transactions, transfer of bitcoin from one wallet to another may be easily traced and hacked. So it is better that mining exist though it may not affect bitcoins existence but it will affect the mindset of people using bitcoins.

[Yakamoto]

What would happen if all these large mining farms just up and quit business?  They have allow of money in bitcoin and all, but what if one of them decided to try to pump the price and then just stopped mining, or just stopped mining for some reason.   Is there enough power throughout the rest of the world to keep bitcoin running and confirming?

Its no big deal if big miners stopped then small miners will do the mining. But if there will be a mining blackout then its still okay but we will need to return to the older bitcoin process without mining. There will be unsafe transactions, transfer of bitcoin from one wallet to another may be easily traced and hacked. So it is better that mining exist though it may not affect bitcoins existence but it will affect the mindset of people using bitcoins.

The good news is that even in the event mining takes a big hit for some reason, due to the decentralized nature of Bitcoin there'll be next to no issue with having at least one person being able to mine and (hopefully) be able to confirm all the transactions that would be going through.

I doubt there would ever be an issue with this though.

[jakelyson]

The good news is that even in the event mining takes a big hit for some reason, due to the decentralized nature of Bitcoin there'll be next to no issue with having at least one person being able to mine and (hopefully) be able to confirm all the transactions that would be going through.

I doubt there would ever be an issue with this though.

If I understand it right, the network will be vulnerable to attacks if there are less honest nodes in the network. If large miners suddenly stopped mining, then attackers will have a chance to mess up the chain or insert invalid transactions if they have enough power to overcome the remaining miners.

As such, the verification is reliable as long as honest nodes control the network, but is more vulnerable if the network is overpowered by an attacker.

-- https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Honestly, I do not think large mining farms will quit suddenly since they are heavily invested. But if they do, I think it will be bad for bitcoin.

[ImnotOctopus]

If a big mining company stopped mining, the bitcoin network will adjust the difficulty so the little miners still can confirmed the transactions. Bitcoin is balancing itself everytime.

[Spektrobas]

If everyone stops mining, BTC would just stay there, "unmined", until someone starts again. There are enough BTC already to keep it working, but the price would probably go up.

[Fatanut]

What would happen if all these large mining farms just up and quit business?  They have allow of money in bitcoin and all, but what if one of them decided to try to pump the price and then just stopped mining, or just stopped mining for some reason.   Is there enough power throughout the rest of the world to keep bitcoin running and confirming?

There would be people spamming this whole forum ranting about how slow the transaction of bitcoin is.

Fool will be the one that stopped mining, he won't make money anymore and he will have a lot of equipments abandoned.

I can't imagine what would happen to the miners once all the bitcoins has been mined. Bitcoin always give miners a reward to continue mining and keeping the network secure. They are only mining to get bitcoins, but what if there's nothing left to mine. In addition to the reasons why would someone stop mining, what if something kills bitcoin? Of course the miners would have to leave mining bitcoins because bitcoin is already dead.

[Kakmakr]

Why would the mining farms, suddenly stop mining? The only reason, I can think of is economical or political reasons. If for some reason, mining becomes unprofitable for some reason, people will pull miners and this will then be balanced out, when the difficulty decrease and less hashing power would be needed to mine the same blocks, and these people will return.

Political reasons, like a absolute ban on bitcoin in a country, could drive the price down and make Bitcoin mining unprofitable, but the balancing will then happen when these mining farms pull out, and then the hashing becomes easier, and the difficulty drop. So these other mining farms makes more profit and expand more, picking up the slack, left by the miners that left. ^smile^

Newton's third law is: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, in Bitcoin too.

[wintermeasures]

What would happen if all these large mining farms just up and quit business?  They have allow of money in bitcoin and all, but what if one of them decided to try to pump the price and then just stopped mining, or just stopped mining for some reason.   Is there enough power throughout the rest of the world to keep bitcoin running and confirming?

Bro its Not a Problem If A Mining Firm Quit Mining Because If One Firm Closes Then the Other Firm Will Opened.....
Its a Daily Process if One Goes then Other Comes in the Market and Mining Will Never End But It Effects the Bitcoin Transactions By Making Them Slower......

[lixer]

What would happen if all these large mining farms just up and quit business?  They have allow of money in bitcoin and all, but what if one of them decided to try to pump the price and then just stopped mining, or just stopped mining for some reason.   Is there enough power throughout the rest of the world to keep bitcoin running and confirming?

Its no big deal if big miners stopped then small miners will do the mining. But if there will be a mining blackout then its still okay but we will need to return to the older bitcoin process without mining. There will be unsafe transactions, transfer of bitcoin from one wallet to another may be easily traced and hacked. So it is better that mining exist though it may not affect bitcoins existence but it will affect the mindset of people using bitcoins.

For sure it will not affect the existance of bitcoin but it may cause so many problems in terms slow and unsafe transactions. Whatever be the case, the possibility for the mining will get stopped is very then because people make money through mining so how do expect them to stop doing what is profitable to them.

[NorrisK]

It should be quite easy to calculate how long it would take. Say 50% of hash power is pulled out, it would take approximately 20 min per block until block retarget. If the retarget is 1000 blocks out, it would take 1000*20 min = 20,000 min = 333h = 14 days for everything to go back to normal.

The good thing though is that big mining farms have a very strong financial motivation not to stop mining. As long as they make more than operational costs, they are good to keep going.

[altcoinhosting]

Its no big deal if big miners stopped then small miners will do the mining. But if there will be a mining blackout then its still okay but we will need to return to the older bitcoin process without mining. There will be unsafe transactions, transfer of bitcoin from one wallet to another may be easily traced and hacked. So it is better that mining exist though it may not affect bitcoins existence but it will affect the mindset of people using bitcoins.

I'm sorry, but can you explain?? As far as i know, there is no older bitcoin process without mining ... Mining is the act of verifying, calculating and putting transactions into the very blocks that create the decentralised ledger that is bitcoin. It's more complex than this, but this is what it comes down to. There would be no bitcoin without mining, unless i'm mistaking here... The network would still exist, but the decentralised ledger would remain completely static, no confirmations, just transactions in the mempool using unconfirmed inputs to create transactions...

If everyone stops mining, BTC would just stay there, "unmined", until someone starts again. There are enough BTC already to keep it working, but the price would probably go up.

I think you're missing the point here... Altough there are enough BTC into circulation, if mining would stop completely, there would just be unconfirmed transactions sitting in the node's mempool for a while untill they were dropped...

If everybody would completely stop mining, the diff would stay really, really high untill the next diff adjustment. This means that if everybody would stop mining, bitcoin would stop... If everybody would stop mining, only one person fired up a GPU miner, he would have virtually no chance of mining a block due to the high diff, let alone mine enough blocks to reach the next diff adjustment.

[MONKEYJUNK]

Its no big deal if big miners stopped then small miners will do the mining. But if there will be a mining blackout then its still okay but we will need to return to the older bitcoin process without mining. There will be unsafe transactions, transfer of bitcoin from one wallet to another may be easily traced and hacked. So it is better that mining exist though it may not affect bitcoins existence but it will affect the mindset of people using bitcoins.

I'm sorry, but can you explain?? As far as i know, there is no older bitcoin process without mining ... Mining is the act of verifying, calculating and putting transactions into the very blocks that create the decentralised ledger that is bitcoin. It's more complex than this, but this is what it comes down to. There would be no bitcoin without mining, unless i'm mistaking here... The network would still exist, but the decentralised ledger would remain completely static, no confirmations, just transactions in the mempool using unconfirmed inputs to create transactions...

Same question/tought here... What's older bitcoin process? unsafe transactions? Wtf...

And I doubt any bigger miner will stop to mine for longer times, time is money here, blackout or other thing, they will find a way to back to mine asap...

[altcoinhosting]

Its no big deal if big miners stopped then small miners will do the mining. But if there will be a mining blackout then its still okay but we will need to return to the older bitcoin process without mining. There will be unsafe transactions, transfer of bitcoin from one wallet to another may be easily traced and hacked. So it is better that mining exist though it may not affect bitcoins existence but it will affect the mindset of people using bitcoins.

I'm sorry, but can you explain?? As far as i know, there is no older bitcoin process without mining ... Mining is the act of verifying, calculating and putting transactions into the very blocks that create the decentralised ledger that is bitcoin. It's more complex than this, but this is what it comes down to. There would be no bitcoin without mining, unless i'm mistaking here... The network would still exist, but the decentralised ledger would remain completely static, no confirmations, just transactions in the mempool using unconfirmed inputs to create transactions...

Same question/tought here... What's older bitcoin process? unsafe transactions? Wtf...

And I doubt any bigger miner will stop to mine for longer times, time is money here, blackout or other thing, they will find a way to back to mine asap...

Completely right about the fact that no bigger miner will suddenly stop, altough i don't think it'll hurt to make a theoretical excercise... "what if all bigger miners would suddenly stop mining".
In reality, it might happen that a big miner farm pulls the plug because they can no longer make a profit, but as long as no single mining farm has more than 50% of the hashpower of the network, the worst that can happen is the time between blocks going from ~10min to ~20min untill the next adjustment (a maximum of 4 weeks on average, since i'm assuming worst case scenario of the network hashrate being halved)...
Even if 90% of the hashrate would disappaer (for example, if the chinese governement would make mining illegal and do a big seize of all mining equipment in the course of a single day), it would take ~100 min per block for a couple of weeks-months (depending on when the next readjustment would happen). After this time everything would be "normal" again (albeit, we'd be running at 10% of the previous network's hashrate)

[cjmoles]

Well, there are also other situations that could possibly halt the big mining operations (WAR, Acts of God) in some jurisdictions but there are those who are prepared and have their smaller rigs setup to take advantage of such situations....Once the big operations go down, the mining difficulty will adjust enough to allow smaller operations to participate.  I don't know if <setgenerate> works anymore, but I'm sure it could be re-implemented, if things got bad enough, then everybody could participate again.

[altcoinhosting]

Well, there are also other situations that could possibly halt the big mining operations (WAR, Acts of God) in some jurisdictions but there are those who are prepared and have their smaller rigs setup to take advantage of such situations....Once the big operations go down, the mining difficulty will adjust enough to allow smaller operations to participate.  I don't know if <setgenerate> works anymore, but I'm sure it could be re-implemented, if things got bad enough, then everybody could participate again.

setgenerate from the console of the gui wallet doesn't work anymore... It was removed a long time ago IIRC. I don't think in case of a disaster the main problem would be finding homeminers to start mining with CPU/GPU, but the problem might be finding enough blocks to reach the next readjustment... Unless enough blocks would be found, the diff would stay high... So if every ASIC in the world would stop, and a couple hundred people would mine with their CPU, it would take years to reach the diff readjustment. In the meantime only one block per day/week/month would be found (not really in the mood to calculate how many cpu's we would need to replace a single S9, but i can guarantee it'll be a lot)