In other words: slower transactions will cost more to send?
he talked about bitshares with 4-6 hours adjustement ... bitcoin would simply be sold off and abandoned if it came to that because 2016 blocks adjustement is two weeks - but only two weeks at normal blocktime. Get the spin?
Network would come to a halt most likely.
My question remains:
does any sudden and harsh drop in hashrate
automatically cause this scenario to happen?
Is a single serious set-back in hashrate the end of BTC? Is it really that easy to knock out? OMFG!
What happens when a large pool with let's say 30% of the network has technical problems and just goes offline and hash isn't replaced fast enough? Bitcoin dead?
Looking for some answers here
The first question to ask is why would miners drop out? That is what causes the drop in hashrate. Miners are profit driven so it might seem reasonable to assume that a sudden drop in price would cause a bunch of miners to suddenly quit. But keep in mind the price has been dropping throughout 2014 and did that cause a slowdown in mining? No - just the opposite. The hashrate continued to climb dramatically. Now maybe a massive, sudden price crash could shake some miners loose. Maybe. The other thing that could cause a massive drop in hashrate would be a shutdown of one or more mining farms due to disaster. But consider the
massive mining farm fire a few months ago - how much did that affect hash rate?
But lets consider there is a sudden drop in hashrate - say 50%. That means until the next difficulty calculation that blocks now take, on average, twice as long to confirm - or ~20 minutes. Far from the "hours" discussed. In fact, a 90% drop in hashrate would be on the order required, as this would make block take on average ~100 minutes, so it could take hours to get a confirmation. But again, is that an expected drop?
And assume 50% of miners stopped mining - what about the remaining miners? Well, if they decided to keep mining, the drop out of other miners would have zero affect on them. Their hashrate and the difficulty remain unchanged, so their changes of finding a block are the same. In fact, they get much better at the next difficulty calculation, so there is all the more incentive for them to keep mining (the sooner the difficulty changes, the sooner their share increases). So if they didn't decide to leave for other reasons, other miners leaving wouldn't make them go,
So I don't think this is a concern. Remember though that the point in time at which this happens matters. It takes a full 2016-block cycle for difficulty to adjust, so it would be over two cycles before things settled down. Of course, a random event would happen, on average, about half way through a block cycle, so the impact would be lessened that much sooner.
