What if a large number of miners were suddenly forced to shut down?

[pandalion98]

95% of miners are suddenly offline.
Be it a new law or an EMP strike. What would happen to bitcoin? 

[AnonBitCoiner]

Value would increase? With a sudden cap on "incoming" currency, I think the economic value would substantially increase.

[shorena]

95% of miners are suddenly offline.
Be it a new law or an EMP strike. What would happen to bitcoin? 

Confirmation of transactions would take longer untill we hit the next difficulty adjustment. After that difficulty would be decreased. I am not 100% certain if there is a maximum the difficulty can change per adjustment, but I suspect there is.

[turvarya]

Value would increase? With a sudden cap on "incoming" currency, I think the economic value would substantially increase.

I don't think so, since it would be bad PR for Bitcoins. Transaction would take longer to confirm, which would really hurt.
But the difficulty is adjusted every two weeks, so the effect on the network would be gone after that period, but still bad PR.

[BitcoinExchangeIndia.com]

95% of miners are suddenly offline.
Be it a new law or an EMP strike. What would happen to bitcoin? 

Some are already down IMO. Hence difficulty is going to drop

[TheNinja]

Value would increase? With a sudden cap on "incoming" currency, I think the economic value would substantially increase.

I don't think so, since it would be bad PR for Bitcoins. Transaction would take longer to confirm, which would really hurt.
But the difficulty is adjusted every two weeks, so the effect on the network would be gone after that period, but still bad PR.

I'm still a somewhat novice to the whole process, but do transaction confirmations require miner interaction?

[shorena]

-snip-
I'm still a somewhat novice to the whole process, but do transaction confirmations require miner interaction?

Yes, you broadcast your transaction (TX) to all nodes you are connected to. These check if your TX is valid and safe them in memory, if they also meet the relay criteria they are broadcasted to all other nodes they know. This will - for regular transactions - result in the whole network knowing about your TX in a few seconds. The miners are those that take these TX and put them into a block. Once your TX is in a block it has its first confirmation. Each block after the first will increase the number of confirmations by 1.

The picture shows the number of TX my node knowns about. If they suddently drop a block was found and confirmed those you no longer see on the graph.

[Bullioncoin]

I am sure the prices will go straight up, as the sellers would decrease as well.

[herzmeister]

We'd feel a great disturbance in the Blockchain, as if millions of miners suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced  

[FattyMcButterpants]

Value would increase? With a sudden cap on "incoming" currency, I think the economic value would substantially increase.

I don't think so, since it would be bad PR for Bitcoins. Transaction would take longer to confirm, which would really hurt.
But the difficulty is adjusted every two weeks, so the effect on the network would be gone after that period, but still bad PR.

This is not true. The difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks so that the previous 2016 blocks would have been mined in two weeks had the difficulty be what it was changed to. Assuming that 95% of the miners go offline exactly as the difficulty chances and ignoring variance, and assuming that no additional miners come online or go offline then it would take 40 weeks for the difficulty to adjust.

However the likely result of the miners going offline is that the TX fees would skyrocket which would entice other miners to go online as the EV of mining would increase.

[pandalion98]

Value would increase? With a sudden cap on "incoming" currency, I think the economic value would substantially increase.

I don't think so, since it would be bad PR for Bitcoins. Transaction would take longer to confirm, which would really hurt.
But the difficulty is adjusted every two weeks, so the effect on the network would be gone after that period, but still bad PR.

This is not true. The difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks so that the previous 2016 blocks would have been mined in two weeks had the difficulty be what it was changed to. Assuming that 95% of the miners go offline exactly as the difficulty chances and ignoring variance, and assuming that no additional miners come online or go offline then it would take 40 weeks for the difficulty to adjust.

However the likely result of the miners going offline is that the TX fees would skyrocket which would entice other miners to go online as the EV of mining would increase.

Does this mean confirmation will take about 3-4 hours?

[shorena]

Value would increase? With a sudden cap on "incoming" currency, I think the economic value would substantially increase.

I don't think so, since it would be bad PR for Bitcoins. Transaction would take longer to confirm, which would really hurt.
But the difficulty is adjusted every two weeks, so the effect on the network would be gone after that period, but still bad PR.

This is not true. The difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks so that the previous 2016 blocks would have been mined in two weeks had the difficulty be what it was changed to. Assuming that 95% of the miners go offline exactly as the difficulty chances and ignoring variance, and assuming that no additional miners come online or go offline then it would take 40 weeks for the difficulty to adjust.

However the likely result of the miners going offline is that the TX fees would skyrocket which would entice other miners to go online as the EV of mining would increase.

Does this mean confirmation will take about 3-4 hours?

On average a confirmation would take 200 minutes, yes.

[pandalion98]

Value would increase? With a sudden cap on "incoming" currency, I think the economic value would substantially increase.

I don't think so, since it would be bad PR for Bitcoins. Transaction would take longer to confirm, which would really hurt.
But the difficulty is adjusted every two weeks, so the effect on the network would be gone after that period, but still bad PR.

This is not true. The difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks so that the previous 2016 blocks would have been mined in two weeks had the difficulty be what it was changed to. Assuming that 95% of the miners go offline exactly as the difficulty chances and ignoring variance, and assuming that no additional miners come online or go offline then it would take 40 weeks for the difficulty to adjust.

However the likely result of the miners going offline is that the TX fees would skyrocket which would entice other miners to go online as the EV of mining would increase.

Does this mean confirmation will take about 3-4 hours?

On average a confirmation would take 200 minutes, yes.

That'd be a hassle I guess. Zero-confirmation services would then explode, correct?

[Flashman]

EMP only tends to affect "live" electronics seriously. Bearing in mind that there's probably a lot of 1st gen stuff and GPUs sitting around unplugged at the moment, many of those would probably come back online in event of a huge hashrate drop.

Also I think even a severe "carrington event" would only impact half the planet, even if it managed to zap US and China at the same time (midday over pacific) then Europe may escape severe effects, so I think the maximum that would get taken out is about 70%.... ~30 minute block confirms for a while.

[inBitweTrust]

95% of miners are suddenly offline.
Be it a new law or an EMP strike. What would happen to bitcoin? 

Most EMP strikes are trivial to defend against with a properly grounded Faraday cage. Many datacenters are protected against EMP's as well.

[shorena]

-snip-

That'd be a hassle I guess. Zero-confirmation services would then explode, correct?

I suspect there would be more demand for offchain services but at the same time 51% attacks and other possible attacks would be easier, thus requiring for more initial confirmations to mitigate the effect.

IMHO the best action would be to reactivate old mininghardware and only spend btc if you absolutly have to. If I had to make or accept a TX, Id require more confirmations than now. Not sure about how many, probably over 10. A deal would take over a day under those conditions, even longer with escrow.

[pandalion98]

EMP only tends to affect "live" electronics seriously. Bearing in mind that there's probably a lot of 1st gen stuff and GPUs sitting around unplugged at the moment, many of those would probably come back online in event of a huge hashrate drop.

Also I think even a severe "carrington event" would only impact half the planet, even if it managed to zap US and China at the same time (midday over pacific) then Europe may escape severe effects, so I think the maximum that would get taken out is about 70%.... ~30 minute block confirms for a while.

That is still a lot 

[Velkro]

95% of miners are suddenly offline.
Be it a new law or an EMP strike. What would happen to bitcoin? 

That is impossible to happen and even if it would, nothing impotant would happen , new miners would rush for free money.

[shorena]

95% of miners are suddenly offline.
Be it a new law or an EMP strike. What would happen to bitcoin? 

That is impossible to happen and even if it would, nothing impotant would happen , new miners would rush for free money.

So you are saying there is an equivalent of 95% of todays hashingpower somewhere in a warehouse just waiting for this to happen?

[Velkro]

So you are saying there is an equivalent of 95% of todays hashingpower somewhere in a warehouse just waiting for this to happen?

Nope, im saying if mining would be 95% easier new miners would pop quicker than you can think of