MINERS STRIKE!

[Sonny]

What would happen if all bitcoin miners unionised and decided to go on strike? Most likely it's highly unlikely to mobilise such a global union but hypothetically what would happen if one day the mining stopped?

If all the miners go to strike i just put my all cards on mining and get 100 btc a day.. or less .. well if one and only user miner was me then i get it .. well the miners not going to strike ..

If you read my post above, you will know you won't get any blocks with your GPUs even if all miners stop mining suddenly.

[ShakyhandsBTCer]

What would happen if all bitcoin miners unionised and decided to go on strike? Most likely it's highly unlikely to mobilise such a global union but hypothetically what would happen if one day the mining stopped?

If all the miners go to strike i just put my all cards on mining and get 100 btc a day.. or less .. well if one and only user miner was me then i get it .. well the miners not going to strike ..

If you read my post above, you will know you won't get any blocks with your GPUs even if all miners stop mining suddenly.

Your assumptions are based on a strike happening at the beginning of a difficulty change and all at the same time.

Although the miners "going on strike" in the middle of a difficulty period would mean that difficulty would decrease by less then it otherwise would.

Regardless the miners have no incentive to go on strike. They have incentive not to

[Shogen]

Regardless the miners have no incentive to go on strike. They have incentive not to

True.
But miners may be involuntarily quit mining for a short period of time in a catastrophic event with electricity breakdown or internet network breakdown

[LYCAN]

I hope that miners have to go on strike .. If they dont want to go on strike they have to go on holiday or cut out the electricity of the whole world excpet my house so i can mine .. bitcoin .. well i can mine too much bitcoin though and donate some and take some.. :_)

[Jabbatheslutt]

Wat. The blockchain isn't an employer and it doesn't hire and fire employees and negotiate pay rises.

[Instamatic]

then id turn on my miner and get the whole 25btc per 10 minutes...

HAHA, exactly what my first thoughts were!

[Instamatic]

It's called a "Disaster recovery plan" Everyone should be discussing such scenarios, to know what to do, IF something like that, could happen.

Would 911 have a bigger impact, if emergency services did not plan for these type of disasters? It's always better to simulate, absurd scenarios, before they happen. And it looks like, these type of scenarios, are tested on smaller Alt coins, just to see, what would happen, and how it could be countered.

So let's discuss this and possible other scenarios. 

Sigh, you're right (and reminding of work).  Based on the calculations Sonny provided (can anybody confirm those?  I'm not knowledgeable enough to peer review it) then a failover system should be considered.  Perhaps the question is not 'if miners go on strike?' but 'how would BTC continue to function if there were an interruption in block mining?'

Are there other scenarios which could lead to an interruption?  Short of a global EMP strike, of course.

1. Regional power outages:  most countries employ some type of redundancy & interconnectivity for their electrical grid.  Even if a massive power failure results it may take a day or so to restore.  Probably not a major concern but could easily disrupt transactions depending on where the major mining hubs are.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_grid
2. Mining Hubs:  speaking of mining hubs, GHash.io and the others all depend on physical hardware to do the mining.  In the event the center is compromised or physical hardware damaged there's not much of a failover for this.  Unlike data which can be backed up in a redundant data center in another city, these hubs are susceptible to many types of disaster.

any other scenarios?

[Harley997]

then id turn on my miner and get the whole 25btc per 10 minutes...

HAHA, exactly what my first thoughts were!

This would not work as the difficulty would still be high.

[zimmah]

Blocks would take very long to confirm for a while until difficulty readjusts.

No reason for miners to strike though.

[Chemistry1988]

then id turn on my miner and get the whole 25btc per 10 minutes...

HAHA, exactly what my first thoughts were!

This would not work as the difficulty would still be high.

I am indeed surprised to see quite a number of people didn't realize that and believed they can get huge profits mining bitcoin in that period...

[Chemistry1988]

2. Mining Hubs:  speaking of mining hubs, GHash.io and the others all depend on physical hardware to do the mining.  In the event the center is compromised or physical hardware damaged there's not much of a failover for this.  Unlike data which can be backed up in a redundant data center in another city, these hubs are susceptible to many types of disaster.

Miners should have set up a few failover pools (easily done with cgminer or bfgminer), so that when the primary pool is down, the hashrate will be pointed to secondary pools automatically.

So, problems on one or a few public pools shouldn't cause too much problem...

[InwardContour]

2. Mining Hubs:  speaking of mining hubs, GHash.io and the others all depend on physical hardware to do the mining.  In the event the center is compromised or physical hardware damaged there's not much of a failover for this.  Unlike data which can be backed up in a redundant data center in another city, these hubs are susceptible to many types of disaster.

Miners should have set up a few failover pools (easily done with cgminer or bfgminer), so that when the primary pool is down, the hashrate will be pointed to secondary pools automatically.

So, problems on one or a few public pools shouldn't cause too much problem...

The pools are also generally located in diverse places throughout the world so in the event of a disaster in one area there is a very small chance that another pool would be affected by the same disaster.

[Instamatic]

2. Mining Hubs:  speaking of mining hubs, GHash.io and the others all depend on physical hardware to do the mining.  In the event the center is compromised or physical hardware damaged there's not much of a failover for this.  Unlike data which can be backed up in a redundant data center in another city, these hubs are susceptible to many types of disaster.

Miners should have set up a few failover pools (easily done with cgminer or bfgminer), so that when the primary pool is down, the hashrate will be pointed to secondary pools automatically.

So, problems on one or a few public pools shouldn't cause too much problem...

I'm not referring to miners pointing their hardware to a pool, I'm referring to the large scale operations that are housing multiple mining hardware in one location.  The farms that rent/sell hashing contracts and the type like the one shown in this video http://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-largest-bitcoin-mining-operation-2014-3.  The one in this video houses 1 petahash of mining power.  While it is a private venture, as long as the security & health of the total network relies on it then it's at least a concern of public nature.  If the site was destroyed, taken offline for any reason, or even seized by force (whether governmental or otherwise) even insurance wouldn't be able to cover replacement of the FPGA's/ASIC's as they're perpetually on back order it seems.

So, just to clarify, I'm not meaning folks should make sure they have failover pools listed in their mining scripts.  Just that farms for mining are here and they'll do nothing but get bigger further centralizing the network power.  Since hardware actually needs to be replaced rather than backed up somewhere it brings with it an inherent risk of failure.

[ShakyhandsBTCer]

2. Mining Hubs:  speaking of mining hubs, GHash.io and the others all depend on physical hardware to do the mining.  In the event the center is compromised or physical hardware damaged there's not much of a failover for this.  Unlike data which can be backed up in a redundant data center in another city, these hubs are susceptible to many types of disaster.

Miners should have set up a few failover pools (easily done with cgminer or bfgminer), so that when the primary pool is down, the hashrate will be pointed to secondary pools automatically.

So, problems on one or a few public pools shouldn't cause too much problem...

I'm not referring to miners pointing their hardware to a pool, I'm referring to the large scale operations that are housing multiple mining hardware in one location.  The farms that rent/sell hashing contracts and the type like the one shown in this video http://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-largest-bitcoin-mining-operation-2014-3.  The one in this video houses 1 petahash of mining power.  While it is a private venture, as long as the security & health of the total network relies on it then it's at least a concern of public nature.  If the site was destroyed, taken offline for any reason, or even seized by force (whether governmental or otherwise) even insurance wouldn't be able to cover replacement of the FPGA's/ASIC's as they're perpetually on back order it seems.

So, just to clarify, I'm not meaning folks should make sure they have failover pools listed in their mining scripts.  Just that farms for mining are here and they'll do nothing but get bigger further centralizing the network power.  Since hardware actually needs to be replaced rather than backed up somewhere it brings with it an inherent risk of failure.

These are mainly used by cloud mining pools/ventures and even cloud mining pools usually have their miners spread out throughout the world. This is an other very good reason to not invest in cloud mining.

[Soappa]

2. Mining Hubs:  speaking of mining hubs, GHash.io and the others all depend on physical hardware to do the mining.  In the event the center is compromised or physical hardware damaged there's not much of a failover for this.  Unlike data which can be backed up in a redundant data center in another city, these hubs are susceptible to many types of disaster.

Miners should have set up a few failover pools (easily done with cgminer or bfgminer), so that when the primary pool is down, the hashrate will be pointed to secondary pools automatically.

So, problems on one or a few public pools shouldn't cause too much problem...

I'm not referring to miners pointing their hardware to a pool, I'm referring to the large scale operations that are housing multiple mining hardware in one location.  The farms that rent/sell hashing contracts and the type like the one shown in this video http://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-largest-bitcoin-mining-operation-2014-3.  The one in this video houses 1 petahash of mining power.  While it is a private venture, as long as the security & health of the total network relies on it then it's at least a concern of public nature.  If the site was destroyed, taken offline for any reason, or even seized by force (whether governmental or otherwise) even insurance wouldn't be able to cover replacement of the FPGA's/ASIC's as they're perpetually on back order it seems.

So, just to clarify, I'm not meaning folks should make sure they have failover pools listed in their mining scripts.  Just that farms for mining are here and they'll do nothing but get bigger further centralizing the network power.  Since hardware actually needs to be replaced rather than backed up somewhere it brings with it an inherent risk of failure.

1 PH/s sounds amazing, but it is indeed less than 1% of the current total network hashrate. (https://blockchain.info/stats)
Unless a significant % of miners (say, 30%) are down, there shouldn't be a big problem and the difficulty could adjust itself in the next period.

[Harley997]

2. Mining Hubs:  speaking of mining hubs, GHash.io and the others all depend on physical hardware to do the mining.  In the event the center is compromised or physical hardware damaged there's not much of a failover for this.  Unlike data which can be backed up in a redundant data center in another city, these hubs are susceptible to many types of disaster.

Miners should have set up a few failover pools (easily done with cgminer or bfgminer), so that when the primary pool is down, the hashrate will be pointed to secondary pools automatically.

So, problems on one or a few public pools shouldn't cause too much problem...

I'm not referring to miners pointing their hardware to a pool, I'm referring to the large scale operations that are housing multiple mining hardware in one location.  The farms that rent/sell hashing contracts and the type like the one shown in this video http://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-largest-bitcoin-mining-operation-2014-3.  The one in this video houses 1 petahash of mining power.  While it is a private venture, as long as the security & health of the total network relies on it then it's at least a concern of public nature.  If the site was destroyed, taken offline for any reason, or even seized by force (whether governmental or otherwise) even insurance wouldn't be able to cover replacement of the FPGA's/ASIC's as they're perpetually on back order it seems.

So, just to clarify, I'm not meaning folks should make sure they have failover pools listed in their mining scripts.  Just that farms for mining are here and they'll do nothing but get bigger further centralizing the network power.  Since hardware actually needs to be replaced rather than backed up somewhere it brings with it an inherent risk of failure.

1 PH/s sounds amazing, but it is indeed less than 1% of the current total network hashrate. (https://blockchain.info/stats)
Unless a significant % of miners (say, 30%) are down, there shouldn't be a big problem and the difficulty could adjust itself in the next period.

What about a cloud mining service that does have a significant portion of the network hashrate?

[Instamatic]

What about a cloud mining service that does have a significant portion of the network hashrate?

That was my thought.  Or a coordinated effort to target & seize multiple cloud minining operations at once.  With the potential to disrupt financial systems comes the incentive for acts of terrorism.

[tymm0]

The reason solo mining isn't a good idea today isn't because the network hashrate is soo high. The reason is because the difficulty is too high for a gpu to hit a block in a reasonable time.  Therefore regardless of when the miners stop, be it just before a difficulty change/just after a difficulty change, the difficulty is still way to high for your gpu to hit anything.  the blocks will halt and nobody gets any block rewards, nobody gets their transactions confirmed.

[cookmac]

If there were no miners, then the network would take forever on sending bitcoins right?

[batmanbad]

Scargill would be proud 

Dumb question to ask, but whos Scargill?