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...If everyone stops mining, BTC would just stay there, "unmined", until someone starts again. There are enough BTC already to keep it working, but the price would probably go up.
I think you're missing the point here... Altough there are enough BTC into circulation, if mining would stop completely, there would just be unconfirmed transactions sitting in the node's mempool for a while untill they were dropped...If everybody would completely stop mining, the diff would stay really, really high untill the next diff adjustment. This means that if everybody would stop mining, bitcoin would stop... If everybody would stop mining, only one person fired up a GPU miner, he would have virtually no chance of mining a block due to the high diff, let alone mine enough blocks to reach the next diff adjustment.
