Faster recovery; just in case

[Lander12]

Long time no post on this but need to ask a question on the topic of mining.

Hypothetical - if Bitcoin takes a hard of enough crash that stop 95% of miners from mining it stops the block-chain from publishing new blocks and paying the other 5% of miner which makes less miner "downward spiral". I see this with other dead or dieng sha-256 coins out there which the block chain is frozen because the difficulty is "stuck" at a high level where its going to take years for the 2016 blocks to be reached. If BTC falls into this situation are there any plans to keep blocks moving at 1 per 10 mins if a crazy drop in mining power would happen and average block time goes into weeks or months before a difficulty change? I was looking at the failure byte coin which got me thinking....

By thinking of this now we could avoid a long hard grid of recovery. Any thought or am I just not educated on bitcoin?

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[jonald_fyookball]

I don't know ..

If miners dropped out they would be selling their rigs to those still in the game so that much of a drop overnight would be unlikely.  Even if mining power got cut by 90%, you'd still get 3 confirmations in 5 hours...so, I don't think too many people are worried about it.  Plus 2016 is worst case, on average will be half that.

[gmaxwell]

This has been discussed many many many times. Please use the search.

Any _automated_ method to lower the difficulty means that an attacker who has isolated a node can cheaply simulate a functioning network in order to rob it.  This is not a good security tradeoff against a speculative risk about an already-broken situation which could be addressed when it arose instead of taking the risk in advance.