Quote from: deisik on November 11, 2015, 09:45:57 PM

Quote from: SebastianJu on November 11, 2015, 09:34:12 PM

Quote from: deisik on November 11, 2015, 09:22:45 PM

Quote from: Kozlov on November 11, 2015, 09:18:19 PM

Quote from: deisik on November 11, 2015, 09:10:11 PM

I don't know how the matters stand at the moment, but in August there was a transactional glut, i.e. there were a few thousand unconfirmed transactions that didn't get confirmed in time (up to 50,000, if I'm not mistaken). I got caught too, my ~1 BTC transaction hadn't been confirmed for 2 days. I guess it was a deliberate effort by miners to stimulate the price, since I saw a lot of new blocks with only the miner's TX in them...

Therefore, it is hard to predict what the miners can be up to

The Chinese have a fairly good idea where miners are going, and what they are doing - they make them and have the biggest mining operations in the world. I'd say the Russians are in on this, 100%.

I assume that the Bitcoin network will be paralyzed (at least temporarily) if 70% of miners (i.e. mining pools) decide to call it a day and be done with that

That would be true only for a short time until the difficulty adjusted. If really so many miners stopped instantly, which would not happen in one day timeframe, then it could mean that new blocks are only found every 25 minutes or so. Then when the difficulty adjusted then it should be again at 10 minutes.

Are you kidding? It is not uncommon to see new blocks mined as rare as one per hour. If the major mining pools (which mine over 90% of new blocks) stop operation, the blockchain will be frozen

Yes, it would mean that we would need 10 times the time to find a new block. So 100 minutes per block. But there is simply no reason to believe that something like that should happen. Why should it happen? Only because mining is not rewarding anymore does not mean that everyone disables his miners instantly. That did not happen in the past too.