Quote from: dinofelis on November 28, 2014, 01:27:53 PM

Quote from: raid_n on November 28, 2014, 01:18:22 PM

Quote from: dinofelis on November 28, 2014, 12:31:49 PM

This becomes nitpicking, but OK.

Consider the fixed group of people who will mine "before" and "after" the difficulty drop. Let X be a randomly chosen miner in that group.

For some choice X (say, Alice), the production will maybe increase, but for another choice of X (say, Bob), the production has to decrease.

Somebody has to switch of mining equipment to have the difficulty go down, otherwise it wouldn't go down.

A miner is an entity that is hashing in an attempt to find a block and he is spending resources to hash.
If you treat Bob as two entities (Bob and Bob' where Bob keeps mining while Bob' quits) your problem reduces down to miners that keep mining and miners that quit.

Yes, that's obvious.
You could say that the mining units still running, will mine more coins, while they are consuming the same amount of power. Only, there will be less units running.

If all miners in the world stop, and I keep my PC running, I mine all the coins in the world and my PC will even consume somewhat more (because I don't even run a mining software right now of course).

The important point is that in order for the difficulty to decrease, miners have to stop mining, or to decrease mining, and will hence consume also less or nothing any more.

My point was that if you considered the CHANGE for a given miner "before" and "after", you shouldn't subselect only the sample of those that kept mining. The change for those that stopped mining was also a change: namely from mining (a lot) to mining less or nothing any more.

It would be like saying that soldiers become stronger and more victorious in war time.

No, soldiers that survive are maybe stronger and more victorious, but a lot of others died. If you eliminate those that died, the balance of those surviving is not the "typical evolution" of a soldier in war time. There are those that are victorious, but there are also those that die. If you don't count them "because when they are dead, they are not an active soldier anymore", then of course war looks like a fun party for soldiers :-)

But I think we get each other's points.

You really need to read some factual material. If all miners stop mining and you fire up your PC, the odds are that you will get sweet f$ck all Bitcoins. You will probably never mine a single block let alone the 2016 needed to get to a difficulty retarget. For god sakes man you cant learn a subject by preaching about it. READ:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

You know, I was following what you said after your first post because price does seem to lead difficulty but that soldier analogy is just bizarre. Totally bizarre.