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Topic: Bitcoin Mining Just Stopped? - page 2. (Read 2547 times)

legendary
Activity: 3276
Merit: 2442
October 28, 2016, 01:10:56 PM
#36
I am not really sure about this but weren't the confirmations being made by miners? If everyone stops mining, how would we get our confirmations? I probably miss something because if it is true, when all the bitcoins get mined, there won't be anybody to confirm transactions anymore...
hero member
Activity: 756
Merit: 500
October 28, 2016, 01:04:29 PM
#35
Ha, no way bro, mining with total power. The system had slow down a little but it's very normal. It happens sometimes and the causes are varied. Stay cool, your medium profits will be the same. If the whole mining system were stopped, nearly a war will start and this forum would become small.
hero member
Activity: 616
Merit: 603
October 28, 2016, 08:45:20 AM
#34
If miners stopped mining, which obviously wouldn't happen all at once, Bitcoin transactions would eventually take longer to confirm. The good part about this would be that others would then have an opportunity to mine with a lower specification hardware and less power usage as the difficulty to mine would reduce and hence costs to mine would as well. The chances of this happening are limited as more advanced and power saving technology and hardware would be made available and people would eventually be mining a lot for a lot less.
hero member
Activity: 826
Merit: 502
October 28, 2016, 04:40:33 AM
#32
Then I guess I'll become the authority of bitcoin by running 50 operating miners.

Though can't understand why would someone decide to stop mining?
The very same reason why someone who already has a job would quit his job -- Because he found something better. There are investments in the real world that are more profitable than when you mine bitcoin. Sometimes even if it doesn't pay as much, people switch from an investment to another because he's passionate about the new one. It's also possible that the mining rig owner needs some urgent money and had to sell his mining rig for a quick money.
copper member
Activity: 1330
Merit: 899
🖤😏
October 27, 2016, 12:10:41 PM
#31
Then I guess I'll become the authority of bitcoin by running 50 operating miners.

Though can't understand why would someone decide to stop mining?
hero member
Activity: 756
Merit: 501
October 27, 2016, 12:04:32 PM
#30
Well sure the big miners will keep their mining process, because the most of them if not all has already roi, if they just stop mine and turn off all miners we will get a big problem in hands as an attack can be made into bitcoin.
legendary
Activity: 3416
Merit: 1912
The Concierge of Crypto
October 27, 2016, 11:57:11 AM
#29
An equilibrium will be reached. Miners will mine as long as it is profitable for them to mine, and if their equipment is already paid for, they will mine as long as they can cover their current costs.

And there are hundreds (or thousands) of hobby miners who are actually mining at a loss. In financial terms, they are doing better than calculating prime numbers, goloumb rulers, protein folding, cracking RSA or other encryption, or looking for extra terrestrial aliens in space, all of which are not doing their activity (similar to bitcoin mining) for profit at all.

All those college students with "free" electricity will still be mining with their single unit "space heaters". There's enough hash power to keep the mining going and difficulty will adjust accordingly.

If the big mining farms were suddenly attacked by nukes or drones or some natural disaster wipes them out. ... Maybe we have other problems by then.
hero member
Activity: 588
Merit: 500
October 27, 2016, 11:33:50 AM
#28
What would happen if all these large mining farms just up and quit business?  They have allow of money in bitcoin and all, but what if one of them decided to try to pump the price and then just stopped mining, or just stopped mining for some reason.   Is there enough power throughout the rest of the world to keep bitcoin running and confirming?


this is the strangest question i have seen in ages, its just daft.  if a large miner stopped their would be another 10 smaller miners to take their place. 

Since the halving, i have seen the transactions took a lot of time to be confirmed. And it is due to the fact that the mining reward is halved from 25 to 12.5. and miners have found it now less profitable to mine the bitcoins.
I wonder  what will happen in the future when the mining reward will be further reduced to half of what it is now ?
full member
Activity: 294
Merit: 100
Life is a game, you either play it or get played.
October 27, 2016, 11:31:19 AM
#27
Transaction fees and blocks may be easier to mine. We'd see additional farms popping up in other countries.

These companies started due to cryptocurrency becoming more mainstream. Although it sounds scary of an outcome in OP, Bitcoin is now authentically genuine enough to keep booming. Just like the price surge... It will hold value with newfound startups, booming infrastructure as well as spiked development projects to keep it at a new level. There's no way people would shut those rigs down.

Without the fear is how we'll start thinking once enthusiasts and the rest of the BTC community adapt to fresh updates.

Much more is yet to come, don't be afraid if they shut down. Replacements will surely transition us, but there seems to be a bright future for this currency so expect something even bigger on top of it all.
legendary
Activity: 2912
Merit: 1068
WOLF.BET - Provably Fair Crypto Casino
October 27, 2016, 10:50:29 AM
#26
Something cataclismic should happen that would stop all the mining. And if few of them stops some other would replace them, so in fact no harm will be done.
But the most big farms are in China and they will not allow that something like this just happens.
hero member
Activity: 1106
Merit: 521
October 27, 2016, 09:22:27 AM
#25
What would happen if all these large mining farms just up and quit business?  They have allow of money in bitcoin and all, but what if one of them decided to try to pump the price and then just stopped mining, or just stopped mining for some reason.   Is there enough power throughout the rest of the world to keep bitcoin running and confirming?


this is the strangest question i have seen in ages, its just daft.  if a large miner stopped their would be another 10 smaller miners to take their place. 
sr. member
Activity: 338
Merit: 250
October 27, 2016, 07:53:20 AM
#24
We would go throught a little period a bit difficult, because difficulty would be too high, but then, we would simply get back to the normal after difficulty get adjusted.
legendary
Activity: 1806
Merit: 1024
October 27, 2016, 07:12:39 AM
#23
Except that the difficulty adjustment is limited to x4 or /4 - so if 90% of the network disappeared for some reason, it would take 10 times as long to get to the next difficulty adjustment, which would be to 1/4 of the previous difficulty and then, assuming the same level of mining, another 5 weeks or so to get to the next adjustment after that, before it was back in equilibrium.

You can look at coins like UNB, to see what happens when they get parked at high difficulty with a very slow difficulty adjustment algorithm.
^^^ This is why i love this forum... I learn something new every day Smiley I had no idear the diff adjustment was limited. Thanks for the comment!

Truly interesting. I wasn't aware of this fact. So if 90% of mining farms are suddenly shutdown, Bitcoin would be rendered effectively unusable for a longer period of time. The effect would clearly be damaging for Bitcoin's reputation, because it shows that the system is fragile to disruptions.

That leads to the question why difficulty adjustments in Bitcoin are done via a step function. Adjusting difficulty continuously using some kind of exponential moving average function would reduce the risks of extreme (mining centralization related) changes in hash power.

Thankfully, hashing power among pools is still adequately distributed. However a lot of mining operations reside in China.

ya.ya.yo!
hero member
Activity: 896
Merit: 1006
October 27, 2016, 05:07:54 AM
#22
Except that the difficulty adjustment is limited to x4 or /4 - so if 90% of the network disappeared for some reason, it would take 10 times as long to get to the next difficulty adjustment, which would be to 1/4 of the previous difficulty and then, assuming the same level of mining, another 5 weeks or so to get to the next adjustment after that, before it was back in equilibrium.

You can look at coins like UNB, to see what happens when they get parked at high difficulty with a very slow difficulty adjustment algorithm.
^^^ This is why i love this forum... I learn something new every day Smiley I had no idear the diff adjustment was limited. Thanks for the comment!
hero member
Activity: 1029
Merit: 712
October 27, 2016, 04:51:00 AM
#21
Its no big deal if big miners stopped then small miners will do the mining. But if there will be a mining blackout then its still okay but we will need to return to the older bitcoin process without mining. There will be unsafe transactions, transfer of bitcoin from one wallet to another may be easily traced and hacked. So it is better that mining exist though it may not affect bitcoins existence but it will affect the mindset of people using bitcoins.
I'm sorry, but can you explain?? As far as i know, there is no older bitcoin process without mining ... Mining is the act of verifying, calculating and putting transactions into the very blocks that create the decentralised ledger that is bitcoin. It's more complex than this, but this is what it comes down to. There would be no bitcoin without mining, unless i'm mistaking here... The network would still exist, but the decentralised ledger would remain completely static, no confirmations, just transactions in the mempool using unconfirmed inputs to create transactions...

Same question/tought here... What's older bitcoin process? unsafe transactions? Wtf...

And I doubt any bigger miner will stop to mine for longer times, time is money here, blackout or other thing, they will find a way to back to mine asap...

Completely right about the fact that no bigger miner will suddenly stop, altough i don't think it'll hurt to make a theoretical excercise... "what if all bigger miners would suddenly stop mining".
In reality, it might happen that a big miner farm pulls the plug because they can no longer make a profit, but as long as no single mining farm has more than 50% of the hashpower of the network, the worst that can happen is the time between blocks going from ~10min to ~20min untill the next adjustment (a maximum of 4 weeks on average, since i'm assuming worst case scenario of the network hashrate being halved)...
Even if 90% of the hashrate would disappaer (for example, if the chinese governement would make mining illegal and do a big seize of all mining equipment in the course of a single day), it would take ~100 min per block for a couple of weeks-months (depending on when the next readjustment would happen). After this time everything would be "normal" again (albeit, we'd be running at 10% of the previous network's hashrate)

Except that the difficulty adjustment is limited to x4 or /4 - so if 90% of the network disappeared for some reason, it would take 10 times as long to get to the next difficulty adjustment, which would be to 1/4 of the previous difficulty and then, assuming the same level of mining, another 5 weeks or so to get to the next adjustment after that, before it was back in equilibrium.

You can look at coins like UNB, to see what happens when they get parked at high difficulty with a very slow difficulty adjustment algorithm.
hero member
Activity: 896
Merit: 1006
October 27, 2016, 04:23:12 AM
#20
Well, there are also other situations that could possibly halt the big mining operations (WAR, Acts of God) in some jurisdictions but there are those who are prepared and have their smaller rigs setup to take advantage of such situations....Once the big operations go down, the mining difficulty will adjust enough to allow smaller operations to participate.  I don't know if works anymore, but I'm sure it could be re-implemented, if things got bad enough, then everybody could participate again.

setgenerate from the console of the gui wallet doesn't work anymore... It was removed a long time ago IIRC. I don't think in case of a disaster the main problem would be finding homeminers to start mining with CPU/GPU, but the problem might be finding enough blocks to reach the next readjustment... Unless enough blocks would be found, the diff would stay high... So if every ASIC in the world would stop, and a couple hundred people would mine with their CPU, it would take years to reach the diff readjustment. In the meantime only one block per day/week/month would be found (not really in the mood to calculate how many cpu's we would need to replace a single S9, but i can guarantee it'll be a lot)
legendary
Activity: 1176
Merit: 1017
October 27, 2016, 04:13:40 AM
#19
Well, there are also other situations that could possibly halt the big mining operations (WAR, Acts of God) in some jurisdictions but there are those who are prepared and have their smaller rigs setup to take advantage of such situations....Once the big operations go down, the mining difficulty will adjust enough to allow smaller operations to participate.  I don't know if works anymore, but I'm sure it could be re-implemented, if things got bad enough, then everybody could participate again.
hero member
Activity: 896
Merit: 1006
October 27, 2016, 02:25:56 AM
#18
Its no big deal if big miners stopped then small miners will do the mining. But if there will be a mining blackout then its still okay but we will need to return to the older bitcoin process without mining. There will be unsafe transactions, transfer of bitcoin from one wallet to another may be easily traced and hacked. So it is better that mining exist though it may not affect bitcoins existence but it will affect the mindset of people using bitcoins.
I'm sorry, but can you explain?? As far as i know, there is no older bitcoin process without mining ... Mining is the act of verifying, calculating and putting transactions into the very blocks that create the decentralised ledger that is bitcoin. It's more complex than this, but this is what it comes down to. There would be no bitcoin without mining, unless i'm mistaking here... The network would still exist, but the decentralised ledger would remain completely static, no confirmations, just transactions in the mempool using unconfirmed inputs to create transactions...

Same question/tought here... What's older bitcoin process? unsafe transactions? Wtf...

And I doubt any bigger miner will stop to mine for longer times, time is money here, blackout or other thing, they will find a way to back to mine asap...

Completely right about the fact that no bigger miner will suddenly stop, altough i don't think it'll hurt to make a theoretical excercise... "what if all bigger miners would suddenly stop mining".
In reality, it might happen that a big miner farm pulls the plug because they can no longer make a profit, but as long as no single mining farm has more than 50% of the hashpower of the network, the worst that can happen is the time between blocks going from ~10min to ~20min untill the next adjustment (a maximum of 4 weeks on average, since i'm assuming worst case scenario of the network hashrate being halved)...
Even if 90% of the hashrate would disappaer (for example, if the chinese governement would make mining illegal and do a big seize of all mining equipment in the course of a single day), it would take ~100 min per block for a couple of weeks-months (depending on when the next readjustment would happen). After this time everything would be "normal" again (albeit, we'd be running at 10% of the previous network's hashrate)
sr. member
Activity: 434
Merit: 250
October 27, 2016, 02:15:43 AM
#17
Its no big deal if big miners stopped then small miners will do the mining. But if there will be a mining blackout then its still okay but we will need to return to the older bitcoin process without mining. There will be unsafe transactions, transfer of bitcoin from one wallet to another may be easily traced and hacked. So it is better that mining exist though it may not affect bitcoins existence but it will affect the mindset of people using bitcoins.
I'm sorry, but can you explain?? As far as i know, there is no older bitcoin process without mining ... Mining is the act of verifying, calculating and putting transactions into the very blocks that create the decentralised ledger that is bitcoin. It's more complex than this, but this is what it comes down to. There would be no bitcoin without mining, unless i'm mistaking here... The network would still exist, but the decentralised ledger would remain completely static, no confirmations, just transactions in the mempool using unconfirmed inputs to create transactions...

Same question/tought here... What's older bitcoin process? unsafe transactions? Wtf...

And I doubt any bigger miner will stop to mine for longer times, time is money here, blackout or other thing, they will find a way to back to mine asap...
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