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

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.

I've always wondered why people are bringing this up. If such an event happens, everything would probably collapse. Gold, diamonds, Bitcoin and similar valuable "items" wouldn't be worth anything the 'day after'.

Quote from: Mikestang on February 24, 2015, 07:47:57 PM

Someday a large solar discharge will hit the Earth, it's not a question of if; it will happen. Just like another large asteroid/comet will hit the Earth again, wiping out the majority of species. Will either happen in our lifetimes? Less likely than solo mining a block, but it could happen.

Bitcoin is dead without electricity, SHA256 calcs by hand would be.....difficult.

Nothing surprising there. Almost everything would be dead without electricity, there is no need to specialize the situation with Bitcoin.