Topic: If Bitcoin network would have stopped to work, would it be destroyed ? (Read 2250 times)

so how is the information about the payment exchanged?

Lightning network enables user on channel to make Bitcoin payment and send it to merchant without internet connection.

No, I meant if Bitcoin would have stopped like for exemple for a few hours, would it be able to restart. All my questions has been answered by DannyHamilton. That's sure that if internet disappear, Bitcoin will do the same, but this is another debate and this was not what I've asked here !

explicitly.  

if bitcoin stopped to work then it would be completely worthless.
not only this, we risk that the blockchain collapse as well.

I think yes, bitcoin is a digital currency its mean that bitcoin only exist in internet,

so when the internet is destroy its mean we cant do anything with our bitcoin, we cant view or do any transaction

if this keep happening the trust for bitcoin will drop and eventually people will leave bitcoin

Ok, now I understand more your reflexion. I think that answering again and again to the same question has a benefical aspect. This way more people have knowledge and thus they are able to help other people. Any way, you're doing a good job, keep it going !

Sticky wouldn't help.  The stuff that's pinned already gets asked about all the time anyhow.

Honestly, I don't mind helping out and answering questions like this (again, and again, and again). If it really bothered me, I'd just leave the forum or stop responding to these kinds of questions. I'm happy to help. It's just human nature to ask a question when wanting to understand something.  Some people are motivated to search, study, learn, and understand on their own, but most people just want a straight answer to the few things that they happen to have on their mind at the moment.  There generally isn't much interest in a deep understanding of how the entire system works.

My response wasn't really meant to be a criticism of your question.  It was just meant to point out to btcdevil that this conversation is very helpful to the people that are viewing this thread right now, and not very helpful to anyone else.  In a few days we'll all stop posting to this thread and it'll move down the list of active threads until it is a page or two deep.  Then new people won't see it, and someone wondering the same things will ask the question all over again.

Maybe next time you'll be the one to answer, now that you've gained some understanding.  Maybe I'll just answer it again.

You already know the solution to the problem, so that's sure you know which questions you can ask to Google. I'm sorry, it seems I've looked to the whitepaper too quickly, and I didn't see it. Maybe a sticky that would stock all the questions would be a good idea, but that's just a suggestion.




If banks take too much time to get back to normal status, it may help some people to rejoin Bitcoin.

I think the question is "would it kill the internet"?
Assuming the electricity came back on, then I think the internet and bitcoin would bounce back quickly. However it may hurt adoption to see a real loss of service for any length of time. 

If the forum created a sticky for every basic question that anyone asks, then there'd be so many posts pinned to the top of the forum that it wouldn't help you find what you are looking for.


I see what you mean.  All these sigmas and math equations in this quote from Section 5 of the whitepaper make it very difficult to understand that the longest chain wins:


I can also see how all these sigmas and math equations in this quote from the wiki make it very difficult to understand:


And after clicking the top result from Google when searching for "bitcoin isolated network" I can see how all these sigmas and math equations also make it difficult to understand:


As a bonus for the confusion, this Google search result has this very complicated explanation about how blocks might be slow until the difficulty adjusts:

If there electricity cut lasts only a few hours, the world won't collapse. There will maybe have a bit of anarchy, but since people won't have news from outside, they won't know this would have happened worldwide, so damages will be none or really low. I thought Bitcoin will collapse if there is an interruption in the network, but now I'm confident .

I would not worry about bitcoin then but whole world, normal markets would crash also, everything would crash actually, hospitals (power generators don't work long) etc.

So there should have a sticky about this. I find that the whitepaper doesn't obviously reply to this question. Also common terms are better than sigmas and math equations.

This thread has helped the OP and a few people that bothered to take the time to read it.  That is all.

If discussions like this actually helped "all the users", then this thread wouldn't even exist.

These same questions have been asked MANY times in the past and have been answered hundreds of times (probably a few dozen times by me).

The same questions will be asked by someone new in a few weeks.

Most new users don't understand how bitcoin works and don't want to bother taking the time to read the whitepaper, the wiki, or using Google to search and learn the technical details on their own.  Instead they make incorrect assumptions or ask hypothetical questions.  They all tend to make the same assumptions, and ask the same questions.

this thread and the conversation has helped a lot for all the users of bitcoin network about the doubt of if their is any natual calamity of internet or electricity.

yours replys are very informative. thanks for all the information and doubts clearing

Difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks, so you would have to wait for at least 2016 blocks solved at the lower hash rate (which would take a very long time) before difficulty adjusted back to a rate where the individual could solve a block every 10 minutes.

If someone has enough hash power to solve 1 block per month all by themselves at the current difficulty, it would take at least 168 years (and probably longer) until the difficulty dropped low enough for them to solve a block every 10 minutes.

Note that if that much hash power actually somehow disappeared from the existing network and it was confidently believed that it would not return, there would almost certainly be a lot of people that would demand a protocol change to force an easier difficulty.  As long as nearly everyone upgraded to the new protocol, the difficulty could be forced to the easier value.

In your example, there is no good way to communicate with everyone else (since the network is "down") so there is no way to be confident that everyone else is adopting your new easier difficulty.  If you mine at an easier difficulty and others don't update their software to use the same, then they will all reject your blocks as invalid.  All your mining effort will have gone to waste and you would have accomplished nothing but burning a lot of electricity.

Interesting, this answers one of many questions I have about bitcoin.  I love the concept but my background is not in computers. 

Can bitcoin network working in big LAN networks so miners can confirm the transactions?
But with my logic if there is no network there is no confirmation and there is no use of bitcoin at that time.

If there is no competition at all shouldn't be the difficulty ridiculously low ? If there is only one guy that mine, even with a smartphone CPU shouldn't he be able to solve any block ?

And yes, I know it is very unlikely to happen, but sometimes really rare cases theory can help use understand eventual problem that could occur soon.

Correct.  The fork that occurs during the outage will resolve itself once it becomes possible for the blocks to be shared between the two networks.


The number of nodes doesn't matter.  The longer chain (the one with a larger proof-of-work) will win.


Block solving is a random process.  There is no way to know exactly how long it will take.  Therefore, while it is possible that they might solve blocks at the same time, it is unlikely.

When the networks are finally connected to each other, if both chains are the same size, then each "home" will work on it's own chain until it solves a block.  Then it's chain will be the longest and it will "win".  If, after being connected, both "homes" just happen to solve a block at almost the exact same moment, then both chains will grow by one block and they will continue to remain forked until the next block is solved.

This process will continue until one of the "homes" solves a block first and has the longest chain.  Then it will win.

Note:

All of this is very hypothetical and not very realistic.  Something like what you are describing would certainly never occur.

However, if it did then the current proof-of-work difficulty is VERY VERY HIGH.  If all nodes could no longer communicate, then mining pools could no longer exist (until the communication was re-established).  Anyone with hash power could solo mine their own blocks, or they could just shut down their mining.  The person that has control of the largest amount of hash power, and continues mining, would have the best chance of finding a block while the entire network was down.

With such a high difficulty, it would require a person to either have a LOT of hash power, or to be VERY lucky to find a block.  If someone had control of 168.7 TeraHash per second of hash power (that's 22 of the fastest hashing ASIC currently available), they'd solve (on average) about one block per year.