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

[bajlox]

Summary so far:

•It would take a long time.
•Difficulty would take a long time to readjust.
•Old miners get reactivated.
•Impossible!
•It is possible.
•There are alternative transmission mediums.
•Planet of the apes.

1. maybe
2. maybe not
3. true if someone saved them or kept them in museum
4. --
5.--
6. very possible
7. nope but something similar

[arbitrage001]

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

This would be good news for miners who still on as the reward will go to them.

[Q7]

The remaining 5% of the miners will still continue to mine in order to sustain the network. Transaction confirmation will be slow but that doesn't mean a complete meltdown of the bitcoin network. With that said, block reward is now shared among less people so it's a bigger share of pie for everybody. This means the network will slowly grow again will those who initially dropped out has decided to start anew. And so it moves forward again until we see an equilibrium.

[Flashman]

IMO, it boils down to this...

Bitcoin's chances of survival are about equal to the survival of technological "Western Civilisation" as a whole. Any event large and catastrophic enough to knock us back to the stone age, will shut down everything. At that point, you won't want bitcoin, you should be smart enough not to take scrip, gold and silver may eventually gain value as trading tokens AFTER an agrarian economy re-develops, but in the meantime you'll want canned and preserved food period, everything else will be worthless.


Bitcoin is however antifragile, and due to it's distributed and still decentralised enough nature, may actually stay "up" longer than conventional electronic financial systems, the ATM and payment networks. Which remember are also very proprietary and not amenable to being patched up and adapted by local techs to work with whatever connectivity is available. It could be the case that should North America get a medium power "zap" from the Sun, that it is bitcoin that comes to the fore and keeps the economy working. Sure it might be that sending money from California to New York goes all the way round the world to get there, because everything in the middle US is blown out, but "local" payment networks could never be wired up to do that, whereas bitcoin already is.

[Klubknuckle]

Bitcoin price would crash badly as it is easy for 51% attack.

[Flashman]

Bitcoin price would crash badly as it is easy for 51% attack.

Yes, I do it twice before breakfast every morning  


Edit: Holy crap that's a senior member, how the hell are you around here this long and not even get a clue by osmosis.

[altcoin.center]

Well thinking about it a little bit, I would say that the undersea internet cables would probably go down well after satellites go down. Sure there could be some kind of underwater volcanic activity however this would probably not knock out all of the underwater communications lines, it would probably make the remaining internet infrastructure more strained and potentially increase latency. They are however, to my understanding build to withstand a lot

Yes, different parts of the system are vulnerable to different issues.

The Net was designed to be "nuclear war proof" and many assume that would mean that if one connection breaks down, the traffic would be automatically rerouted elsewhere. However, that's not quite the truth. Some operators have their own backup channels, some operators may have mutual agreements regarding backup routing, but generally speaking much would depend on manual reconfiguration by the operators. That could be challenging should the situation be more or less chaotic.

But yes, underwater cables are less vulnerable to "stuff" coming from the Sun.

- Jyri
--
Altcoin.Center

EDIT: This map is quite informative: http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

[altcoin.center]

Yah, I think undersea cables would be least of worries for sunspot zap. Firstly the large majority are fibreoptic now, and secondly even a few feet of water is a fairly effective screen, so even copper would be protected from picking up stray RF.

RF is not the biggest problem on surface of the Earth or at the bottom of the ocean.

It's the geomagnetic fluctuation caused by CME pushing the Earth's magnetic field over to a point where it "flips" back to it's original position. That's what creates the induction currents to any conductive material - in essence, it's nature's "EMP bomb". Water does not affect magnetic field in any way so underwater cables as well as the related infrastructure is vulnerable to these induction currents.

It's probably pretty much the above surface infrastructure that would take the damage. However, fibre is the go to for that nowadays, and if all the ends are in EMP resistant well shielded data centers, it's only really the local "last mile" bits that are on copper, and could pick up RF.... and of that.. any that are cable TV coax are probably more resistant than UTP, BUT, more UTP is underground than coax so might be a bit of a wash.

Again, RF is not the problem on surface level - it's the magnetic field and the induction currents.

Although this is just an estimate, I would say that it is much more likely that the problems arise from the fact that the electric grid would suffer significantly. It doesn't help much if the underwater cables are ok, if there's no electricity to drive the infrastructure that's needed to make them work. Some (perhaps even most) operators do have backup generators, but those too have limits to how long they can keep the system working. Delivery of oil/gas requires electricity, so when the initial reserves run out there has to be a way to refill - and people motivated to taking care of the refilling in midst of the possibly quite hectic period of global unrest.

Now these are of course just scenarios, and as I've stated many times I do not claim to know the exact scope of what would happen. However, what I do know is that assuming things would be "pretty much ok" in the case of something like direct hit from a Carrington's event simply does not match with what we know from prior experience.

The point is, since there are well grounded reasons to assume that something will at some point disrupt the international Internet connections up to a level that will cause significant problems in connectivity, it would be rather stupid not to at least consider the affects such situation would/will have on crypto currencies. It would be bad enough to cope with the situation of loss of electricity on a massive scale, and the global finances would be a complete mess anyways. If crypto is to replace fiat as the #1 choice of the mankind, then issues like these can not simply be ignored in good faith.

- Jyri
--
Altcoin.Center

[altcoin.center]

IMO, it boils down to this...

Bitcoin's chances of survival are about equal to the survival of technological "Western Civilisation" as a whole. Any event large and catastrophic enough to knock us back to the stone age, will shut down everything. At that point, you won't want bitcoin, you should be smart enough not to take scrip, gold and silver may eventually gain value as trading tokens AFTER an agrarian economy re-develops, but in the meantime you'll want canned and preserved food period, everything else will be worthless.

I do agree up to certain extent. However, there is no knowing of the scope of the blowback that the scenarios discussed in this thread would cause. If "everything" would really be shut down, then crypto would not be at the top of the recovery priority list. Then again, the significance of commerce is easy to ignore particularly in situations that involve any kind of catastrophe. Currency is the means of exchange, and exchange is part of the most basic functions of the mankind. It would not loose it's meaning even in case of dystopic events - in fact it's quite possible that the opposite would happen.

Bitcoin is however antifragile, and due to it's distributed and still decentralised enough nature, may actually stay "up" longer than conventional electronic financial systems, the ATM and payment networks. Which remember are also very proprietary and not amenable to being patched up and adapted by local techs to work with whatever connectivity is available. It could be the case that should North America get a medium power "zap" from the Sun, that it is bitcoin that comes to the fore and keeps the economy working. Sure it might be that sending money from California to New York goes all the way round the world to get there, because everything in the middle US is blown out, but "local" payment networks could never be wired up to do that, whereas bitcoin already is.

Bitcoin is in some sense antifragile due to it's distributed nature, and then again it's that very nature that also makes it vulnerable to problems such as forking. That's the key argument of what I'm trying to say here: it is very important to make sure that Bitcoin and other crypto currencies will be able to maintain their distributed block chains synchronized even in something happens that prevents international Internet connections from working either partially or fully.

It's not too difficult or costly to come up with backup solutions and that's precisely what I'm working on and why Altcoin.Center's seed network was set up in the first place. It's still an alpha state project with very limited capability to remedy the potential problems. If it's for vain then it's for vain; I can live with that. What I could not live with is if something happened and I would not have even tried to do anything while being fully aware that I should have.

- Jyri
--
Altcoin.Center

[funtotry]

It's the geomagnetic fluctuation caused by CME pushing the Earth's magnetic field over to a point where it "flips" back to it's original position. That's what creates the induction currents to any conductive material - in essence, it's nature's "EMP bomb". Water does not affect magnetic field in any way so underwater cables as well as the related infrastructure is vulnerable to these induction currents.

I would think that there would be other "things" that might interfere with any "EMP" in the sometimes miles between the surface of the ocean and the bottom of the ocean where the cables lie. For example there is going to be a large number of species that lives in the ocean as well as underwater "plants" that likely have, overtime grown over many of the underwater cables. I would say that the effect of an EMP shockwave would be unknown to underwater cables and infrastructure as the vast majority of the ocean has not been explored in great detail and it is estimated that we don't even know about the vast majority of the underwater ecosystem.

[Zhan21]

In the price is so low, mining is a loss.

[bf4btc]

The remaining 5% of the miners will still continue to mine in order to sustain the network. Transaction confirmation will be slow but that doesn't mean a complete meltdown of the bitcoin network. With that said, block reward is now shared among less people so it's a bigger share of pie for everybody. This means the network will slowly grow again will those who initially dropped out has decided to start anew. And so it moves forward again until we see an equilibrium.

Well I would argue that the expected mining revenue would increase for the remaining 5% of the miners (because of the expected higher TX fees) - even before the difficulty were to adjust again. This would mean that miners who had previously been taken offline would be restarted again because of the higher potential revenue.

I think this would potentially cause huge swings in the difficulty level, first causing it to decrease substantially and then recover partially the next time the difficulty adjusts

[BitmoreCoin]

Bitcoin price would crash badly as it is easy for 51% attack.

Yes, I do it twice before breakfast every morning  


Edit: Holy crap that's a senior member, how the hell are you around here this long and not even get a clue by osmosis.

It is actually true that one mining entity has over 45% mining power several times in history. If the community does not advocate the miners to leave that entity, it will be over 51%.

[djokica]

Price may fall or rise skyhigh.
Without any mining rigs or some cloud mining or something everything is out.

War will break. We all die. Kidding.

Dont wont this to happen

[bajlox]

Who know what will happen.
None of scenarios here is not good but something similar is about to happen.

Why most countries spend more cash on military arsenal, so we can expect another WW maybe.

[jabo38]

I am in the "price will go up camp".  Right now there are a ton of miners mining.  They need to sell their coins to pay for electricity.  They are constantly dumping so that makes the price so low.  If many miners went off line, the left over pools would be getting a lot more coins for the same amount of electricity.  They wouldn't need to sell so many.  They could hold and watch the price shoot up.  After it was high, they could then sell a few and have lots of money for electricity. 

[allthingsluxury]

The value of Bitcoin would explode for sure.

[azguard]

The value of Bitcoin would explode for sure.

or will go dark.

But more likely will worth over 1 million $ if this to happen off course.

[pandalion98]

The value of Bitcoin would explode for sure.

or will go dark.

But more likely will worth over 1 million $ if this to happen off course.

Or both.

wait. what?

[FattyMcButterpants]

I am in the "price will go up camp".  Right now there are a ton of miners mining.  They need to sell their coins to pay for electricity.  They are constantly dumping so that makes the price so low.  If many miners went off line, the left over pools would be getting a lot more coins for the same amount of electricity.  They wouldn't need to sell so many.  They could hold and watch the price shoot up.  After it was high, they could then sell a few and have lots of money for electricity. 

I don't think that the miners are making up that much of a percentage of the total supply of bitcoin that is for sale. I think that some miners are mining to buy bitcoin at a discount and do not wish to sell immediately