Will more Forks lower the total hashing power & difficulty for Bitcoin?

[Kprawn]

We are seeing several forks in the road ahead and miners are Chain hopping between these forks. Every time we fork, a

percentage of the total Bitcoin hashing power is sacrificed to mine these forks. If we have enough forks, miners might assign

dedicated miners to mine these forks and the original Bitcoin will have less hashing power. If this is sustained, the difficulty

might drop.... right. 

Is this the main idea behind these forks. { Breaking up the hashing power and weakening the security by having less nodes

dedicated to the original Bitcoin? } 

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[alani123]

If 2x receive support form at least some miners that are to leave the bitcoin network, the difficulty would only fall if the gap wasn't filled. In so far, due to the purported difficulty rules of a supposed 2x fork I don't think that it'd gain too much support from miners that are on bitcoin. And that'd be the case for at least a couple of difficulty re-targets unless an exception is made in the rules.

[mocacinno]

Theoretically, yes, you are right... Each time there is a sustained fork, and the fork decides to use the sha256(sha256()) POW algorithm, there is a portion of the miners that mines the fork (if not, the fork would not be sustainable), thus cannot mine the original BTC.
That's the thing that happened with bitcoincash in the past.

However, the more i read about the coming forks, the more i believe that after a while almost nobody will still be mining them. I strongly believe that after the initial fad has worn off, most miners will see there is no profit in the forked off coin, and revert to mining BTC.

Also, don't forget: bitmain is still producing batches of S9's, so more hashpower is added to the network on a daily basis. As long as "the amount of miners mining the new coin" < "the amount of hashrate added at the same timespan" the diff will still rise.

[squatter]

We are seeing several forks in the road ahead and miners are Chain hopping between these forks. Every time we fork, a

percentage of the total Bitcoin hashing power is sacrificed to mine these forks. If we have enough forks, miners might assign

dedicated miners to mine these forks and the original Bitcoin will have less hashing power. If this is sustained, the difficulty

might drop.... right. 

I think that buying demand for BTC and hash power pointed at the BTC chain will both, to some extent, continue to suffer from competing forks. We can't ignore the fact that Bitcoin Cash is the #4 coin. That means there must exist demand to buy up the available supply -- more so than the vast majority of cryptocurrencies. A lot of that money would otherwise have gone into BTC. Same goes for hash power when BCH is more profitable to mine.

Take a look at Segwit2x futures. BT2/BTC is currently trading at 0.264. That means that the futures market is pricing in a 26% decrease in demand for BTC because of the existence of BT2. All this money might flow back to BTC someday, but that's impossible to predict. For now, we can't deny the realities of supply and demand.

[xFiber]

We are seeing several forks in the road ahead and miners are Chain hopping between these forks. Every time we fork, a

percentage of the total Bitcoin hashing power is sacrificed to mine these forks. If we have enough forks, miners might assign

dedicated miners to mine these forks and the original Bitcoin will have less hashing power. If this is sustained, the difficulty

might drop.... right.  

Is this the main idea behind these forks. { Breaking up the hashing power and weakening the security by having less nodes

dedicated to the original Bitcoin? }  

I never really learned under what circumstances the difficulty of bitcoin drops. Does it drop if less hashing power is dedicated to the network? Or does it stay at the same level until it increase again due to high amounts of has power being dedicated to the network?

[HeRetiK]

We are seeing several forks in the road ahead and miners are Chain hopping between these forks. Every time we fork, a

percentage of the total Bitcoin hashing power is sacrificed to mine these forks. If we have enough forks, miners might assign

dedicated miners to mine these forks and the original Bitcoin will have less hashing power. If this is sustained, the difficulty

might drop.... right.  

Is this the main idea behind these forks. { Breaking up the hashing power and weakening the security by having less nodes

dedicated to the original Bitcoin? }  

I never really learned under what circumstances the difficulty of bitcoin drops. Does it drop if less hashing power is dedicated to the network? Or does it stay at the same level until it increase again due to high amounts of has power being dedicated to the network?

The difficulty of Bitcoin drops whenever the average time between blocks within a given difficulty period (~ 2 weeks, as determined by block height) exceeds 10 minutes. Thus it drops if less hashing power is dedicated to the network, but only at the end of a difficulty period and only if the hashing power stays low until then.

If a significant amount of hashing power is lost, difficulty can take longer to re-adjust, due to the increased time between blocks (while the duration of a difficulty period strives to be 2 weeks, it is actually determined by block height, not by timestamps).

[Kprawn]

We are seeing several forks in the road ahead and miners are Chain hopping between these forks. Every time we fork, a

percentage of the total Bitcoin hashing power is sacrificed to mine these forks. If we have enough forks, miners might assign

dedicated miners to mine these forks and the original Bitcoin will have less hashing power. If this is sustained, the difficulty

might drop.... right.  

Is this the main idea behind these forks. { Breaking up the hashing power and weakening the security by having less nodes

dedicated to the original Bitcoin? }  

I never really learned under what circumstances the difficulty of bitcoin drops. Does it drop if less hashing power is dedicated to the network? Or does it stay at the same level until it increase again due to high amounts of has power being dedicated to the network?

The difficulty of Bitcoin drops whenever the average time between blocks within a given difficulty period (~ 2 weeks, as determined by block height) exceeds 10 minutes. Thus it drops if less hashing power is dedicated to the network, but only at the end of a difficulty period and only if the hashing power stays low until then.

If a significant amount of hashing power is lost, difficulty can take longer to re-adjust, due to the increased time between blocks (while the duration of a difficulty period strives to be 2 weeks, it is actually determined by block height, not by timestamps).

So in theory, if these miners support a specific fork and they dedicate a bunch of miners to that fork, we will soon see a

decline in the difficulty of the Legacy Bitcoin. Yes, they do jump back and forth... but we still lose hashing power to these

forks every time a new chain is formed. This is the point I am trying to make. {temporary or permanent loss... we still lose

some hashing power} 

[HeRetiK]

The difficulty of Bitcoin drops whenever the average time between blocks within a given difficulty period (~ 2 weeks, as determined by block height) exceeds 10 minutes. Thus it drops if less hashing power is dedicated to the network, but only at the end of a difficulty period and only if the hashing power stays low until then.

If a significant amount of hashing power is lost, difficulty can take longer to re-adjust, due to the increased time between blocks (while the duration of a difficulty period strives to be 2 weeks, it is actually determined by block height, not by timestamps).

So in theory, if these miners support a specific fork and they dedicate a bunch of miners to that fork, we will soon see a

decline in the difficulty of the Legacy Bitcoin. Yes, they do jump back and forth... but we still lose hashing power to these

forks every time a new chain is formed. This is the point I am trying to make. {temporary or permanent loss... we still lose

some hashing power}  

Yes. That in itself is not the problem though. The part where it gets nasty is that a significant hashrate decline will increase block times and thus decrease transaction throughput until the end of a difficulty period. Arguably this will help kill off the minority chain rather sooner than later though, making sure that only one chain survives.

[Kprawn]

The difficulty of Bitcoin drops whenever the average time between blocks within a given difficulty period (~ 2 weeks, as determined by block height) exceeds 10 minutes. Thus it drops if less hashing power is dedicated to the network, but only at the end of a difficulty period and only if the hashing power stays low until then.

If a significant amount of hashing power is lost, difficulty can take longer to re-adjust, due to the increased time between blocks (while the duration of a difficulty period strives to be 2 weeks, it is actually determined by block height, not by timestamps).

So in theory, if these miners support a specific fork and they dedicate a bunch of miners to that fork, we will soon see a

decline in the difficulty of the Legacy Bitcoin. Yes, they do jump back and forth... but we still lose hashing power to these

forks every time a new chain is formed. This is the point I am trying to make. {temporary or permanent loss... we still lose

some hashing power}  

Yes. That in itself is not the problem though. The part where it gets nasty is that a significant hashrate decline will increase block times and thus decrease transaction throughput until the end of a difficulty period. Arguably this will help kill off the minority chain rather sooner than later though, making sure that only one chain survives.

Ah, Good point.. I also hear Bitcoin Gold will adapt the difficulty much quicker than the legacy Bitcoin, but it will not use the

same Algorithm, so it is not a problem for the Legacy Bitcoin. The proof-of-work that they’ve chosen is Equihash, a memory-

hard algorithm that’s fairly ASIC resistant. We only have to worry about SegWit2X....