Quote from: franky1 on May 09, 2017, 04:16:47 PM

Quote from: dinofelis on May 09, 2017, 03:41:24 PM

Nope, it won't win anything more than if it were keeping his agreement with other miners, because it has only a fraction of the hash rate, and can hence only provide just as many blocks as it would when with his peers. In other words, that pool is betting on making a very short chain, with much less PoW than the rest of his peers, and breaking his agreement.

In other words, if this pool has 10% of all the hash rate, when his peers have mined 90 blocks on the new chain, he will have mined 10 blocks on the old chain. Most merchants and exchanges will not see their transactions on this small chain because the blocks are too full. So merchants and exchanges would still be locked out of bitcoin for 90% - while they would be running entirely NORMALLY if they simply upgrade their node to the majority hash rate of the miners' rules, and see all their transactions.

you have no clue..
now you are meandering into trying to argue about hash power.. yet you dont even understand hashpower either

you are presuming if it takes pool A 10minutes.. then it would take pool B 20 minutes, pool C 30 minutes.
that is not the case.
pools B and C could have found a block just SECONDS later.. but because there is only 1 winner. no one cares about the runners up timing.

if you take 1 pool away its not going to take 20 minutes to make a block. it can still take 10 minutes average block, just less competition so that the runners up now become winners more often, without affecting the average time much

You have visibly a fundamental misunderstanding about mining blocks.

If you have hash power that is so that, with a given difficulty, on average, you find a good block, say, every hour, which means that you have about 1/6 of the total hash power *when the difficulty was determined*, then it doesn't matter whether others are mining or not, you will win, on average, one block every hour - minus those few seconds that you were mining on the wrong block each time.

What does it mean, having hash rate that gives you a good block every hour on average ? It means that you need to hash about 60 minutes on average, to find a hash that satisfies the difficulty. Whenever that happens, you win a block - unless this happens during those few seconds when your block will get orphaned, which means that you've wasted a few seconds of hash rate.

Your chances don't increase when you've been mining for 20 minutes on the same block. It doesn't matter on which block you mine. You could change every 20 seconds the block on which you're mining, and you would STILL be finding a block, on average, every 60 minutes.

So if all other miners shut down, the only thing that happens is that THEIR blocks don't appear any more. Yours will. On average, every 60 minutes.

Other miners disappearing doesn't make you win more blocks (except those few that were orphaned). Other miners not being there any more will make you win more blocks AFTER DIFFICULTY GETS LOWERED, but not before.

If you have hash rate to win a block every 60 minutes with a given difficulty, that's what will happen, *independent of others*. The fact that others are NOT mining, doesn't make you, by miracle find solutions faster. It is not a competition of the BEST solution: it is a competition of finding A solution. If another one found a solution after 10 minutes and you didn't, it means that you, well, didn't. So if he wasn't there, you still wouldn't have a solution.

To take the example of your dice, if the game is: you have 5 dice, and you need to throw at least 4 times a 6 (difficulty) to win a point, then the number of times you will have to try on average before winning a point, is independent of the number of players you play with.