Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on February 23, 2015, 08:21:45 PM

Quote from: Beliathon on February 23, 2015, 08:12:34 PM

Quote from: R2D221 on February 23, 2015, 08:08:43 PM

This is not ~~realistic~~ feasible

It's not ~~realistic~~ feasible today under present conditions because you'd be competing with the network of computers. But if the difficulty were to drop down to the same level it was at one hour after the genesis block was mined, it would become possible to mine this way. Remember, not so long ago "computer" was a job title!

Well not exactly. First difficult wouldn't adjust downward until 2,016 blocks are completed and then it only adjusts downward by a factor of 4. So just to get back to difficulty 1 would require more than 32,000 blocks to be completed. The first would be at the current difficulty and difficulty would only decline slowly. Mining even the genesis block by hand is simply not possible. Difficulty one requires an average of 4 billion hashes. Completing even a single sha256d hash by hand is measured in hours (more realistically a day or more).

Still the good news is that only half of the earth is facing the sun at any given time so destruction of the entire planet's computing resources would multiple solar storms on a massive scale. The other thing to consider is that under any civilization ending solar storm you will be to busy fighting and killing for clean water and sufficient food to worry about the bitcoin network halting.

So are you saying we need to stash old hardware away in a bunker just in case? Otherwise it will take ages to get back to difficulty 1 Cheesy

Yep, realistically if this happens, traditional banking will stop working waaay before the internet stops working so no worries

also it would probably be possible to use a hard fork to move existing BTC to a new blockchain with difficulty 1. Wink