This happens all the time on the alt chains, which is one of the good thing about having alternative crypto currencies.
Basically a coin might be very profitable to mine so miners flock to it and drive the difficulty up. Then when it adjusts the difficulty spikes and it is no longer profitable so everyone changes to another coin. So you are correct that the difficulty will drop back down but there is a major issue.
The difficulty change is defined as every 2016 blocks not a set amount of time. So when the difficulty is low and everyone flocks to it the 2016 blocks get mined very quickly. Then difficulty rises and everyone leaves and it takes proportionally more time. So if only 10% of miners are left it will take 10x more time to mine the next 2016 blocks. Once those blocks are mined the difficulty readjusts and it gets easier again. So you see everyone doesn't really get more blocks in the end because the easy blocks go quickly and the hard blocks take forever.
The other issue is that blocks are slow to get on the chain so sending coins takes forever to get confirmations and it slows down using the coin. I remember terracoin had a big problem with this back in the day and it was a vicious cycle as miners kept coming and going in swarms.
Topic: if miners worked together - page 2. (Read 1906 times)
If a block is found under 10 minutes it would adjust the difficulty again upwards and so on. It's an interesting question, it would probably cause all sorts of problems for awhile on the bitcoin client network for awhile. In reality, no one would stop mining to see what would happen.
ok so if every miner switched off there miners at the same time,the difficulty would go back down right to a very low level,so once the difficulity has gone all the way back down and then miners startup again which in turn drives the difficulty back up after 12 days or so again why wouldnt miners then switch off there miners again and wait 12 days or so for the difficulty to go back down again, so everytime you do this you get 12 days of mining at full capcity at a low difficulty because the difficulty is not instant and changes overtime. you could do this over and over if all miners colabrated together and you would make alot more coins.
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