Bitcoin will go extinct due to mining!
@wizard sleeps and dreams of crazy statements like - a desert will soon be where warehouses and mining facilities once stood...wtf?
Apparently Bitcoin will go extinct due to miners leaving....Can someone please tell me if this true?
Back when I first researched bitcoin I believed it was written into the algo to reduce the difficulty in the event that miners stopped competing..
Yet there are articles on the internet everywhere telling investors - don’t go near crypto as the minors are running at a loss and will soon disappear... gosh I mean I feel sorry for those who bought hardware etc, but confused how this can remain true?
Ok I get competition has pushed mining difficulty up and these powerful machines are needed, but shouldn’t the algo eventually just go back to point where a kid with an iPhone can mine (worse case).
How’s does difficult expensive mining equal complete extinction?
Cheers for views and improvement to @wizardzaps understanding
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If the average time per block is less than 10 minutes, the protocol increases the difficulty and vice versa.
It looks at a 2 week period (2016 blocks), so if the price drops gradually, the miners stop mining gradually, the blocks take longer to mine gradually and the difficulty reduces gradually, then we don't have a problem.
If 2/3 of miners all switched off at once, blocks would take 30 mins to mine and those 2016 blocks would take 6 weeks to be mined before the difficulty could adjust. A lot can happen in 6 weeks, and if the price drops as a result, and more miners leave, we could have 1 hour block times, and the difficulty adjustment timeline can blow out to 12 weeks.
Blocks fill up, fees go through the roof. Miners continue to pull the plug, or leave for an alternative coin or fork for either economic or malicious reasons; things get ugly.
Essentially bitcoin gets trapped in its own difficulty.
It's called a hashrate death spiral and if it ever happens everyone's bitcoin gets locked in place forever. You can't spend it, it loses all its value and the experiment is over.
It's one of the reasons I moved away from bitcoin not long after these different forks started coming out.
Cool! Glad I’m in with Steem and not a coin with POW; yet means nothin if altcoins painted with same brush as bitcoin
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I'm not 100% sure if bitcoin would ever go through this, but I think this is the advantage of POS and POB block chains.
I like my cryptocurrency but don't really bother doing any research, I just read articles here and there