Post
Topic
Board Mining speculation
Re: What if a large number of miners were suddenly forced to shut down?
by
ScryptAsic
on 30/11/2014, 02:08:15 UTC
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.
It would not be that long. As it is now blocks, on average, are much less then the 1 MB size limit, and pools will often broadcast blocks that are well under this limit to avoid risking their block getting orphaned. However this risk would be decreased with the new, temporarily longer block time plus the additional TX fees included in many transactions would result in the blocks generally being much closer to 1 MB, if they are not all filled to 1 MB exactly.