What If Bitcoin Mining Stops?

[Fragrance1122]

Imagine that tomorrow morning all the miners stop mining. 
No new Bitcoin will be created, and no transactions will be confirmed. 
My question is: will Bitcoin still remain a store of value, or will it just become a dead database? 
And what if after some time 1 or 2 miners come back.. will people still trust Bitcoin, 
or will the credibility of the network be ruined forever?

[EL MOHA]

This is simply just imagining that all business people actually stops doing business which is utterly impossible. Miners are making profits on bitcoin mining, don’t make it look like they are doing bitcoin mining a great favour, it’s a two thing they also earn rewards from both block reward and transaction fees.

If any miner stops mining as long the bitcoin protocol is still like it is then more people will come into mining. If the top miners actually shuts down their mining rigs then the bitcoin mining hashrate power will just simply reduce giving miners with less powerful equipment to come in and mine.

[Hypnotizer]

Imagine that tomorrow morning all the miners stop mining.

Well… it’d be better if you leave the imagination and comeback to reality, realistically it is impossible for “all miners to stop mining”, there are a lot of miners out there!

 

No new Bitcoin will be created, and no transactions will be confirmed.  

As I’ve mentioned above, it is not possible… even if for instance, all the bigger mining pools stop mining at once, there still exist other pools (smaller) and even solo miners. So it is very impossible for that to happen.

If the bigger pools stop mining (imaginative example), the transaction confirmation might probably be slower compared to now but they’ll still be confirmed.

[Knight Hider]

Bitcoin does not mine, miners mine.

[Cookdata]

Imagine that tomorrow morning all the miners stop mining. 

Stop imaginating ideas that are useless, it wouldn't happen.

[OgNasty]

Thankfully the reward setup ensures that there will always be someone willing to mine on behalf of Bitcoin. At some point it becomes so profitable it is hard to ignore.

With all the investment made into Bitcoin mining data centers, I wouldn’t be too worried about them all simultaneously shutting down.

[YOSHIE]

Imagine that tomorrow morning all the miners stop mining. 

If your speculation happens, it means you won't be able to use Bitcoin anymore, you will return to the era before Bitcoin was created, as if you were living in 2000.

If Bitcoin miners no longer exist completely, the existing system is no longer useful, if you want to transfer Bitcoin it is impossible to do, you don't have a network that you can use, that's worse than we can imagine.

For this reason, if that really happens, we will see Bitcoin as a memory of its glory days.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

It's kind of similar to asking, "What if mining gold stops?" Why would they stop in the first place? With how valuable gold is, there will always be someone willing to mine it because of the value. Now apply the same logic to Bitcoin mining

Imagine that tomorrow morning all the miners stop mining. 
No new Bitcoin will be created, and no transactions will be confirmed.

Isn't that obvious?

My question is: will Bitcoin still remain a store of value, or will it just become a dead database?

Just look through the dead blockchains of the past and you will have your answers. But this happens when no one is no longer interested and the coin has completely lost value. Bitcoin has a pretty strong community.

And what if after some time 1 or 2 miners come back.. will people still trust Bitcoin, 
or will the credibility of the network be ruined forever?

When Satoshi was running the network alone at the beginning and then with a few couple of individuals, how come you trust it now. Also mining when you are a few means there are high chances of winning a block reward even a few miners.

If the bigger pools stop mining (imaginative example), the transaction confirmation might probably be slower compared to now but they’ll still be confirmed.

Not necessarily. At least not for long. Difficulty adjustments happen every 2,016 blocks, bringing back the confirmation to the average of 10 minutes.

[Woodie]

Away from the imaginations...

You want to know that at the center of Bitcoins existence we have our miners that keep the network/life of Bitcoin running..without these guys everything on this network stalls! But for arguments sake let's say they hault operations now and with the difficulty already high..it will take more time for confirmations to happen,and if more miners stop and someone with the computing power and knowledge of the Bitcoin network could mint their own coins as the guardians of the network would be on holiday to verify this as the decentralization would move to a centralized setup.. but hey we are all imagining and don't think any of this will happen..almost fell in a rabbit hole with these imaginations

[uneng]

Why would miners stop? There is profit there to be made, so there will be always people willing to do this. It's the same as asking what if any other profitable niches of the market stopped working. It's illogical to think people would suddenly stop doing something which guarantees them an income. The answer is that there will be always someone willing to replace the previous operators if there is still profit to be made with that activity.

[letteredhub]

It's unimaginable and you know why? It's because it's impossible. It's like you asking what would happen to internet platform users should internet providers shutdown and stop providing internet services. Something we know is impossible because they would stop making profit and that would be bad for them there by giving room for new providers to emerge with same value to the service.

[Odusko]

As impossible as it is for all bitcoin miners to stop mining bitcoin at the same time, it is also worth knowing that if that happens, bitcoin will cease to be a store of value because no one will be able to exchange bitcoin and a store of value must be a transferable asset. The block rewards for minners are only obtained when a new block is mined by confirming transactions and in this context, all transactions are already stuck because miners have gone off as assumed.

[The Cryptovator]

Imagine that tomorrow morning all the miners stop mining. 
No new Bitcoin will be created, and no transactions will be confirmed. 
My question is: will Bitcoin still remain a store of value, or will it just become a dead database? 
And what if after some time 1 or 2 miners come back.. will people still trust Bitcoin, 
or will the credibility of the network be ruined forever?

It doesn't make sense to imagine that never going to happen. Because if everyone stops mining, then I won't miss the opportunity to get transaction fees and mining rewards as well. Definitely, I will take the advantage; otherwise, I will teach my next generation to do so. Remember, people trust Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain. Not trusting miners, it's open source; anyone could set up mining if necessary. So you shouldn't worry about that anyway.

[Zoomic]

It's impossible that every miner will stop mining at the same time.

 But just like you imagined, if such thing should occur, the Bitcoin network will stop producing new blocks meaning that every transaction will remain unconfirmed until mining is resumed.

Nothing will happen to Bitcoin, nothing will happen to blockchain and nothing will happen to anyone's Bitcoin. Everything will remain as they are until miners returns then the Bitcoin network will continue from the last valid block.

That said, I don't see any need to imagine things that wouldn't happen though.

[EFS]

Something like that doesn't seem very likely. It's not hard to speculate based on assumptions that seem nearly impossible. If that ever happened, Bitcoin would already be dead. At that point it wouldn't really matter who goes back to mining, because there would be neither store of value nor credibility left.
I don't think anything like that will happen in our lifetime. I'm pretty sure Bitcoin will outlive us.

[STT]

Seems like a scenario that ignores people mined Bitcoin before it ever traded for money and they would do it again.    People right now use their GPU and CPU to do work units for all kinds of things not money related so you easily have a base of miners on reserve in the millions around the world.
   How can we possibly presume there are no miners while acknowledging this is the case.   I'm one of them I left my machine on for many hours 25 years ago, I think we got a thankyou and an awesome  screensaver for our troubles.  You really do underestimate the depth of work that has been around a generation, the mining algo adapts for this reason & they'll always be someone available.

[philipma1957]

Imagine that tomorrow morning all the miners stop mining. 
No new Bitcoin will be created, and no transactions will be confirmed. 
My question is: will Bitcoin still remain a store of value, or will it just become a dead database? 
And what if after some time 1 or 2 miners come back.. will people still trust Bitcoin, 
or will the credibility of the network be ruined forever?

What it the sun goes supernova tomorrow will btc matter.

The chances of either btc mining stopping over nite or the sun goin nova over nite are pretty much next next to nothing.

Every miner would need to break.

The internet would need to break.

[Silikiem]

Imagine that tomorrow morning all the miners stop mining. 
No new Bitcoin will be created, and no transactions will be confirmed. 
My question is: will Bitcoin still remain a store of value, or will it just become a dead database? 
And what if after some time 1 or 2 miners come back.. will people still trust Bitcoin, 
or will the credibility of the network be ruined forever?

Forget about imagination and focus on reality because realistically all bitcoin miners cannot stop mining bitcoin because there are many of them scattered all over the globe, and as long as bitcoin remains volatile and is not dead, bitcoin activities will always go on. Transactions will always continue and there are so many other ways of earning bitcoins and not only through bitcoin mining, you can purchase directly from your local fiat, accepting as a means of payment for services or goods etc, so transactions are will always be confirmed.

[fullfitlarry]

Unlikely though, as others have said, this is pure imagination. Of course if there are no miners then there will be no new bitcoin created and what's left could be worth more than it's previous values.

And we have survived such cases before. I remember at one point in Bitcoin's history, China ban Bitcoin mining and yet we continue. And it doesn't make sense for all miners to suddenly stop, as it's business for them. Just imagine stopping for even a minute, you are going to lose a lot of potential money.

[asriloni]

If none validate bitcoin network, it gets shutdown, and bitcoin can't be transacted.

If there will still or two miners comeback to validate the network, the chain is going back alive. So it becomes transferrable asset again.

However, the shutdown on the chain doesn't really destroy the trust to bitcoin. The Solana chain has ever faced outages a few times, the blockchain got stuck, but people still trust it when it's running back. So it's also applicable to the bitcoin, which is far bigger than solana.