there are already 18,600,300 bitcoins mined. also there is plenty of miners outside of china, probably about 50%.
so the only thing that will change if china stopped all bitcoin mining is that blocks will take about 20 minutes, instead of 10 minutes. for two weeks.
this wont have much effect on price at all, if anything it could make the price go up since presumably all the bitcoins in china would be inaccessible for a while.
if it is some sort of permanent loss of 50% of mining power and 50% loss of all bitcoins, that would double the value of each bitcoin!
Transaction speeds would plummet without the miners, effectively tanking the utility of it. Bitcoin has died a thousand deaths and has risen from these ashes 1001 times. There would be a significant setback in the short term but bitcoin is forever.
Question: how quickly would the blockchain adjust to a 50% drop in the hashrate? Surely it wouldn't take two weeks?
My (very limited, tech illiterate) understanding is that the algorithm is designed to take 10 minutes, and will adjust the "math" to compensate for any change in overall computing power.
I know this is off topic, but I would appreciate any insight that can help me better understand.
Edit - I agree with the value of BTC rising if China's access to the network is permanently cut.
2nd Edit - what would happen if China continued to run mining, but not integrated with the rest of the network? Would two simultaneous blockchains form? Could they be eventually reconciled?
So many questions....
Agreed, it's not like their bitcoin just go away. In my opinion yes they are technically called miners, but you have to think of it as processing power. If you lose 50% of your ability to process payments, it's going to do more than just double. Let alone if China pulls out it will create so many more transactions due to panic which leads to bottlenecking.
Well if this all comes to pass there will be a lot more than packet storms going on haha :) Thanks for sharing! I'm only 26, and was beginning to think I was going to live in a boring generation. Seeming to think otherwise!
If half of the hashing power falls away, the blocks would take double the time to process and after an x amount of blocks the network will adjust its difficulty, so that the remainder of the network will confirm blocks again on average every 10 minutes.
Why? Why wouldn't you get longer waiting times for transactions to process?
I've never heard of what you're saying before. Are you talking about networks in general?
I've heard all the theories on how Bitcoin could go down, but I've never heard this one. Are you sure this applies to the Bitcoin protocol?
Removed. Please keep posts focused on happenings. Thanks for understanding.
PS I retired off crypto so, I like the posts, but