Quote from: cryptopaths on November 29, 2014, 09:38:06 PM

Quote from: pandalion98 on November 27, 2014, 10:47:00 AM

95% of miners are suddenly offline.
Be it a new law or an EMP strike. What would happen to bitcoin? Huh

For one it would take about x20 longer for transactions to confirm until the next difficulty adjustment.

Yes, indeed.

Depending on the details of the scenario, things could get really complicated.

A total "everything down on one blow" would in a way be very simple.

I'd say a much more probable situation is such that the connectivity and/or electricity would come and go while the affected systems would try to manage with the situation. Parts of the electric grid would probably come back online for a while, then crash again under the intensive load. Communications systems would most probably act similarly; when the operators would get parts of the systems back online, the amount of traffic (and overhead caused by routing errors etc.) would soon clog the networks.

This would mean the block chain would be under constant changes as well, nodes and miners appearing and disappearing depending on which parts of the electricity and communications networks would work at any given time. Network hash rate and difficulty would be going haywire. Forking would be virtually unavoidable.

While all this may sound like catastrophe loving fear mongering, to me it shows just as a normal situation given the parameters that affect it. We know how electric grids act when induction currents affect them, and we know what kind of chain reactions overload can cause in them as well. Same goes for communications systems. The only thing we can't be 100% certain of (yet) is how Bitcoin and other crypto currencies would react to the situation - simply because, unlike with electric grid and communication networks, there has not yet been s big scale scenario from which we would have data. A lot can be guesstimated though, since the working logic of block chain based currencies is after all rather simple.

A lab simulation would be an interesting thing to do. It could also be done as a virtual simulation. If anyone has the time and curiosity to take on such project, I'll be happy to participate in the planning and can provide server and network capasity to do it.

- Jyri
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