Bitcoin Mining Just Stopped?

[tertius993]

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)

Except that the difficulty adjustment is limited to x4 or /4 - so if 90% of the network disappeared for some reason, it would take 10 times as long to get to the next difficulty adjustment, which would be to 1/4 of the previous difficulty and then, assuming the same level of mining, another 5 weeks or so to get to the next adjustment after that, before it was back in equilibrium.

You can look at coins like UNB, to see what happens when they get parked at high difficulty with a very slow difficulty adjustment algorithm.

[altcoinhosting]

Except that the difficulty adjustment is limited to x4 or /4 - so if 90% of the network disappeared for some reason, it would take 10 times as long to get to the next difficulty adjustment, which would be to 1/4 of the previous difficulty and then, assuming the same level of mining, another 5 weeks or so to get to the next adjustment after that, before it was back in equilibrium.

You can look at coins like UNB, to see what happens when they get parked at high difficulty with a very slow difficulty adjustment algorithm.

^^^ This is why i love this forum... I learn something new every day I had no idear the diff adjustment was limited. Thanks for the comment!

[yayayo]

Except that the difficulty adjustment is limited to x4 or /4 - so if 90% of the network disappeared for some reason, it would take 10 times as long to get to the next difficulty adjustment, which would be to 1/4 of the previous difficulty and then, assuming the same level of mining, another 5 weeks or so to get to the next adjustment after that, before it was back in equilibrium.

You can look at coins like UNB, to see what happens when they get parked at high difficulty with a very slow difficulty adjustment algorithm.

^^^ This is why i love this forum... I learn something new every day I had no idear the diff adjustment was limited. Thanks for the comment!

Truly interesting. I wasn't aware of this fact. So if 90% of mining farms are suddenly shutdown, Bitcoin would be rendered effectively unusable for a longer period of time. The effect would clearly be damaging for Bitcoin's reputation, because it shows that the system is fragile to disruptions.

That leads to the question why difficulty adjustments in Bitcoin are done via a step function. Adjusting difficulty continuously using some kind of exponential moving average function would reduce the risks of extreme (mining centralization related) changes in hash power.

Thankfully, hashing power among pools is still adequately distributed. However a lot of mining operations reside in China.

ya.ya.yo!

[skierchewing]

We would go throught a little period a bit difficult, because difficulty would be too high, but then, we would simply get back to the normal after difficulty get adjusted.

[calkob]

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?

this is the strangest question i have seen in ages, its just daft.  if a large miner stopped their would be another 10 smaller miners to take their place. 

[bitbunnny]

Something cataclismic should happen that would stop all the mining. And if few of them stops some other would replace them, so in fact no harm will be done.
But the most big farms are in China and they will not allow that something like this just happens.

[Shady]

Transaction fees and blocks may be easier to mine. We'd see additional farms popping up in other countries.

These companies started due to cryptocurrency becoming more mainstream. Although it sounds scary of an outcome in OP, Bitcoin is now authentically genuine enough to keep booming. Just like the price surge... It will hold value with newfound startups, booming infrastructure as well as spiked development projects to keep it at a new level. There's no way people would shut those rigs down.

Without the fear is how we'll start thinking once enthusiasts and the rest of the BTC community adapt to fresh updates.

Much more is yet to come, don't be afraid if they shut down. Replacements will surely transition us, but there seems to be a bright future for this currency so expect something even bigger on top of it all.

[Oralmat]

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?

this is the strangest question i have seen in ages, its just daft.  if a large miner stopped their would be another 10 smaller miners to take their place. 

Since the halving, i have seen the transactions took a lot of time to be confirmed. And it is due to the fact that the mining reward is halved from 25 to 12.5. and miners have found it now less profitable to mine the bitcoins.
I wonder  what will happen in the future when the mining reward will be further reduced to half of what it is now ?

[Dabs]

An equilibrium will be reached. Miners will mine as long as it is profitable for them to mine, and if their equipment is already paid for, they will mine as long as they can cover their current costs.

And there are hundreds (or thousands) of hobby miners who are actually mining at a loss. In financial terms, they are doing better than calculating prime numbers, goloumb rulers, protein folding, cracking RSA or other encryption, or looking for extra terrestrial aliens in space, all of which are not doing their activity (similar to bitcoin mining) for profit at all.

All those college students with "free" electricity will still be mining with their single unit "space heaters". There's enough hash power to keep the mining going and difficulty will adjust accordingly.

If the big mining farms were suddenly attacked by nukes or drones or some natural disaster wipes them out. ... Maybe we have other problems by then.

[Doamader]

Well sure the big miners will keep their mining process, because the most of them if not all has already roi, if they just stop mine and turn off all miners we will get a big problem in hands as an attack can be made into bitcoin.

[digaran]

Then I guess I'll become the authority of bitcoin by running 50 operating miners.

Though can't understand why would someone decide to stop mining?

[Xenophoto]

Then I guess I'll become the authority of bitcoin by running 50 operating miners.

Though can't understand why would someone decide to stop mining?

The very same reason why someone who already has a job would quit his job -- Because he found something better. There are investments in the real world that are more profitable than when you mine bitcoin. Sometimes even if it doesn't pay as much, people switch from an investment to another because he's passionate about the new one. It's also possible that the mining rig owner needs some urgent money and had to sell his mining rig for a quick money.

[2double0]

Lots of people are asking the same question, I think you should try to google it first.

Referred links:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8743/what-happens-to-the-bitcoin-network-when-the-miners-all-stop-in-the-future
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5275/what-will-happen-to-mining-after-the-20-999-999th-bitcoin
https://news.bitcoin.com/what-happens-bitcoin-miners-all-coins-mined/

[xdrpx]

If miners stopped mining, which obviously wouldn't happen all at once, Bitcoin transactions would eventually take longer to confirm. The good part about this would be that others would then have an opportunity to mine with a lower specification hardware and less power usage as the difficulty to mine would reduce and hence costs to mine would as well. The chances of this happening are limited as more advanced and power saving technology and hardware would be made available and people would eventually be mining a lot for a lot less.

[kanazawa]

Ha, no way bro, mining with total power. The system had slow down a little but it's very normal. It happens sometimes and the causes are varied. Stay cool, your medium profits will be the same. If the whole mining system were stopped, nearly a war will start and this forum would become small.

[mindrust]

I am not really sure about this but weren't the confirmations being made by miners? If everyone stops mining, how would we get our confirmations? I probably miss something because if it is true, when all the bitcoins get mined, there won't be anybody to confirm transactions anymore...

[raphma]

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.

the problem is the time between these 2016 blocks... if big miners decide to stop at same time we would have a big delay until these 2016 blocks move.

I am not really sure about this but weren't the confirmations being made by miners? If everyone stops mining, how would we get our confirmations? I probably miss something because if it is true, when all the bitcoins get mined, there won't be anybody to confirm transactions anymore...

not exactly that but if EVERYONE stops the network would stop and that would mean no confirmations.
When all bitcoins get mined, miners will do it for transaction fee's.

[lionheart78]

i would go with the idea of , when a large mining farm shutdown, there will be 10 or more smaller miners to take their place.  Reason is that when this large miner close, they have to at least have profit with their miners.  So basically they will go on for a "sale"  to be able to sell their used miners asap.  This is the opportunity this miners wanna be is waiting, to buy second hand cheap miners.  More probably bitcoin will have some issue in a short time ( changing owner of the mining machine ) then eventually all these sold miners will be functional one by one.  and bitcoin will be back to where it was before the shutdown.  

[mindrust]

When all bitcoins get mined, miners will do it for transaction fee's.

So the miners will mine for the little fees? I don't think anybody will do such thing unless the fees are increased a lot more than what they are now which is going to harm bitcoin considering that the price will probably have reached to the moon when all the coins are mined.

[altcoinhosting]

When all bitcoins get mined, miners will do it for transaction fee's.

So the miners will mine for the little fees? I don't think anybody will do such thing unless the fees are increased a lot more than what they are now which is going to harm bitcoin considering that the price will probably have reached to the moon when all the coins are mined.

That's the idear, yes... When all bitcoins are mined, an equilibrium will be reached.
A lot of miners will stop mining because it's unprofitable for them to mine for those fees, lowering the diff, making sure the leftover miners will find more blocks with the same hashrate, thus collect more fees.

This is a process that will start long, very long before the block reward will go to zero tough.
It's 12.5 now, but only 6.25 in less than 4 years. 3.125 in less than 8 years, 1.5625 in less than 12 years, 0.78125 in less than 16 years.

https://www.smartbit.com.au/charts/transaction-fees-per-block tells us the current fee is about 0.5 BTC per block and rising, so i guess in about 12 years a miner would get at least half of his income by collecting fees and half of his income by the block reward...