What stops the mining oligarchy from starting again from the genesis block and get 50 BTC block rewards? As soon as they connect to other validating nodes with the full blockchain history they would have to sync to it!
If ALL (or a very large majority) of miners decided to redo the chain, introducing a soft fork on the second block after the genesis block, so that they *would not* accept the traditional chain, then the traditional chain would come to a grinding halt entirely. You would simply not get any block any more on the original chain ; or you would get a block ever so slowly if a small minority of miners decided to continue mining it
I guess you are not telling the whole truth here
And it seems like you do that deliberately so that what you say next should fit better into your logic and sound more plausible. First of all, if all current mining pools decide to leave (let's assume that they just completely shut down their operation, for the beginning), the mining difficulty will quickly adjust (within two weeks)
No, that is not right. Not within two weeks, within 2016 blocks.
You first have to mine 2016 blocks at the old difficulty. That's a "feature" of bitcoin that many altcoins corrected, but it can also be a thing on purpose, to make hard forks very risky and difficult.
So if, say, 95% of the miners stop mining tomorrow, and there are still 1008 blocks to go to the next difficulty adjustment, then you still have to mine 1008 blocks at the *current* difficulty, which was about so that with the previous hash rate, we would get a block every 10 minutes. However, if you only have 1/20 of the hash rate mining right now, that takes 20 times longer. So instead of 1 week before you have your 1008 blocks, you'd be doing this for 20 weeks, before the next difficulty adjustment.
Moreover, a difficulty adjustement can never be more than a certain factor (I think from the top of my head that it is 4, but I'm not sure).
If it is 4, then next time, the difficulty will be 4 times less, not 20 times less as it should be. So the next 2016 blocks will take not 2 weeks, but 10 weeks before you get another difficulty adjustment.
In other words, if 95% of the miners leave in the middle of a difficulty period, you're 30 weeks gone before things return more or less to normal, and in those 30 weeks, you'd mine about 3000 blocks (instead of 30 000 blocks).
(I can be wrong with the factor of 4)