Hypothetically, what happens when bitcoin miners stop mining.

[Caxton10]

I know that miners process bitcoin transactions and get paid for it. And that got me thinking since there is so much cost in mining bitcoin, what happens when miners stop mining.

[ccgllc]

If miners stopped mining, the difficulty would drop until it was profitable enough for some remaining miners to stay at it.

[Potato Chips]

Since there is no one mining, there will be no one to confirm transactions. Hence, no one will be able to receive and send bitcoins

But what are the odds of it happening? I believe that was already answered by a user above.

[pooya87]

when you say "miners" you are not talking about a small number of people (like 10-20 person) mining bitcoin. you are talking about thousands of people who are from literary all over the world. and being from different places means they have different costs. for instance electricity is ultra cheap somewhere, cheap another place, expensive in some other place. and so on.

when you talk about miners stopping, it won't happen all of a sudden by everyone in one big move! IF the costs grow and miners feel that it won't go back up (because you can always mine and hold and then sell when the recovery happens and make the profit, there is no rush to sell) then those with more cost will get out and total hash rate will go down. as a result difficulty will decrease and it becomes easier to mine bitcoin.

in case of an extreme scenario where a lot of miners leave the difficulty can come down enough so that you can start mining with your PC. in the end as long as there is only 1 person using bitcoin he can also mine bitcoin like Satoshi in first block, he was alone and was mining bitcoin then other  came, difficulty grew and the rest is history.

[HabBear]

If miners stopped mining, the difficulty would drop until it was profitable enough for some remaining miners to stay at it.

Does this contradict the question...there are no remaining miners to "stay at it" if all miners stopped mining.

Since there is no one mining, there will be no one to confirm transactions. Hence, no one will be able to receive and send bitcoins

^^^ This is the answer.

Transactions halt because no transactions can get confirmed. Transactions continue to back up (presuming people continue to try to make transactions). The system relies on miners confirming transactions, hence the block award to incentivize the activity. And when all bitcoin is mined the miners will rely on their fee to compensate them for their work.

[kitty94]

I hope this answers your question,!
For more info please refer to the original post of the below thred which was created by Jetcash.

I am going to break down the scenario as this is meant to be a learning moment for all the crypto newbies.

Q1) What are miners doing?

They are finding a special number to add to end of a block. Once they have successfully find that number we call “A block has mined”.

Q2) That answer leads to the next question, What is a block? What does it consist of?

A block has three major components,

1.   Hash of the previous block (Not applicable for genesis block)
2.   Set of bitcoin Transactions (Though It does not happen nowadays, Blocks can be generated without any transactions, You can go to blockchain.info and search for first few hundreds of blocks and see!)
3.   Proof of work (This is the special number miners try to find using SHA256 function)

Q3) what would happen if miners stop mining?
The blockchain technology solely depends on the blocks, once there are no miners, the basic concept of blockchain vanishes, which is the decentralized trust!

Q4) In the present it takes about 10 minutes to a block to be mined. Once there is a lesser number of miners will it be increased?

No, The Administrators (I do not know how exactly to call them) of Bitcoin will announce that they have reduced the hash difficulty. They will say something like this,

“Hey Dear miners, Instead of finding a number with 30 zeros at the front (Finding a such number has a probability of 1/Billion! ) Now you need to find a number with only  ‘x’ (Where x is a variable which is less than 30) zeros at the front since we have lesser manpower now, Hope you guys will stay with us!  ”

With less hash difficulty the amount of time to be mined a block will not vary. This case also applies in the other way too, when the number of miners are increasing the hash difficulty is also increased to make sure the blocks are not mined too quickly.  


Do you know?

A long time ago there was a miner called Satoshi Nakamoto and he single-handedly mined more than 1 million bitcoins! Oh, I forgot to tell you, there were no other miners at that time, He was the only miner in the world! Lucky guy!!

Q5) Now to the original question, How would the decreasing value of bitcoin effect on miners?

Why would miners mine with investing their resources, time on mining? For a reward of course! Once they successfully mined a block they are rewarded with Bitcoins!

This answers our question if the BTC value is dropping why anyone would want to be paid with BTC! They will stop BTC mining, which we have discussed in question 3.

Bonus:

Miners Reward for mining a block.

From 2009 -2012 – 50 BTC
From 2012- 2016 – 25 BTC
From 2016- 2020 – 12.5 BTC
From 2020- 2023 – 6.25 BTC

References

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOVAbKKSH10