Re: What if a large number of miners were suddenly forced to shut down?
95% of miners are suddenly offline.
Be it a new law or an EMP strike. What would happen to bitcoin?
Be it a new law or an EMP strike. What would happen to bitcoin?
Confirmation of transactions would take longer untill we hit the next difficulty adjustment. After that difficulty would be decreased. I am not 100% certain if there is a maximum the difficulty can change per adjustment, but I suspect there is.
There is. The difficulty may not increase or decrease more than 4-fold. If the hashrate drop occurs when we're more than about 400 blocks from a difficulty change and the hashrate stays down then we'll endure a few months of 8-block days (1 block every 3 hours on average) before retargeting to grind through 2 months of 45-minute blocks.
In its 6-year life Bitcoin has only once experienced a full 4-fold difficulty change.