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.