If the Chinese Gov cuts the power , you are looking at over 65% of the bitcoin mining disappear overnight.
Are you sure about that? What proof do you have that 65% of the hash power is actually running on ASICs in China AND is running in farms that the Chinese government can identify, find, and shut off power?
This alone will freeze the network, and no transactions will be possible for months, unless the hard fork difficulty adjustment occurs.
Nonsense. Even if we accept your assumption that China could identify and shut power off to 65% of the global hash power, that would simply increase the average confirmation time from 10 minutes per confirmation to 28.5 minutes per confirmation. 28 minute confirmations aren't going to "freeze the network" or result in "no transactions . . . possible for months". That's just silly.
Furthermore, it's going to take less than 40 days until the normal difficulty adjustment gets things sped back up to an average of 1 confirmation every 10 minutes.
I think most people are going to be able to tolerate half hour confirmations for less than a month, especially since:
- The MAJORITY of confirmations will still take LESS THAN 28 minutes.
- Many transactions occur off-chain anyhow (through services such as Coinbase and/or through lightning network).
- People already tolerate long confirmation times during periods of high activity when low fee transactions are delayed.
- It will be clear that speed will return to normal again soon
- Professional mining organizations will learn to spread their risk around the globe more
* If Attackers are earning money by doublespending, then they can continue indefinitely by using their ill-gotten gains to fund future attacks.
First of all, I thought we were talking about shutting off power, not double spending.
Secondly, those attackers will need to:
- Gain more from the double spend than they would have from simply mining the block.
- Avoid getting caught by law enforcement for fraud/theft.
- Find a way to keep their double spending scam going after users learn to be MUCH more careful about avoiding scammers
- Risk angry victims finding and destroying their mining operations
The Traders will cause a blood letting like you never dreamed possible, in that scenario.
Anyone that waits patiently will hold nothing but broken dreams.
And I'll be able to pick up thousands (or millions) of bitcoins for pennies! That way, I'll be quite wealthy when the system recovers after a decade or so.
See, I KNOW for a FACT that bitcoin will NEVER drop below an exchange rate of 100 BTC per $0.01. I KNOW this because, at that price I will buy every bitcoin I can find. This creates a permanent floor at that exchange rate, and creates a scarcity such that if ANYONE else wants ANY bitcoins at all, they'll have to pay AT LEAST that much. I'm pretty confident that there are others with more resources that are willing to do the same at a higher exchange rate. Therefore, there will be competition for the scarce bitcoins, and the price WILL eventually rise again.