[Aperocky]

This only works when the difficult drop rates are below miner leaving rates.

Which in normal times, are something taken for granted, but once it does happen, the edge case collapse the entire system.

edit: the earlier language is not exact, the scenario is an exponential drop of value that results in exponential drop in miner willing to mine until this discrepancy can be resolved. i.e. the system is not protected against extreme volatility (e.g. -99% over a block cycle)

[samrus]

No but if more miners leave then dofficulty with drop faster right? Its modelling supply and demand curves which are a stable equilibrium in these circumstances

[RichardLake]

Might be wrong about what Aperocky is alluding to but there is an entirely theoretical edge case. The time to the next difficulty adjustment is based on the current speed of mining, and the possible change in difficulty is capped. With enough minors leaving it will drop the speed of mining/network speed/ and push out the expected time to the next difficulty adjustment. I can't think of any realistic way this can occur given the miners that stay will (personally) be producing blocks as often, the increase in time being balanced out by being a larger proportionate of the mining rate. They don't care if they get 1% of the blocks, which average about 20 mins per block or 5% of the blocks that average 100mins per block.

[the_mitsuhiko]

Difficulty only adjusts every 2016 blocks. If the system gets out of whack enough it could slow down to a crawl for an extended period of time.

In practice it’s not much of an issue because bitcoin is not use for commerce but it’s a store of value and it some of the trades are not even on chain.

[embedding-shape]

> but once it does happen, the edge case collapse the entire system.

Which is when exactly, and how likely is that to happen? It hasn't happened yet in ~14 years, but I guess "never say never". There is a lot of money saying it won't happen very soon though.

[rcxdude]

If it happens it'll probably the result of a positive feedback loop forming: miners leaving slowing down transactions and affecting utility/faith in the system resulting in people selling, meaning more miners leaving, etc. That said, I don't know of any clear examples of this happening to any other proof of work coins: I think in general other parts of a cryptocurrency tend to fail first, it requires a particularly fast death for this kind of thing to happen.

[bombcar]

It's also a side-effect of apocollapse of bitcoin itself; it becomes worth so little that nobody is mining means nobody will mine to a new block difficulty; but the collapse already occurred.

[derangedHorse]

I don't think you know what you're talking about. If the difficulty lowers at a lower rate than miners leaving then the difficulty rate will stop dropping.

[knocte]

> below miner leaving rates.

What does this mean, sorry?

> the edge case collapse the entire system.

If you mean that if it reaches a certain point, the entire system will collapse, it means you don't understand the difficulty adjustment. If it's too expensive to mine, then some miners leave, which makes blocktimes be longer, but not to worry because the consequence of that it just that difficulty will go down, which means that you need less hashrate to mine (and maybe some of those miners that leave will come back because it is profitable again for them). This means that it is essentially impossible for all miners to leave at the same time; some of them stay even if at a loss, and some of them are just hobbyists that can already feed their miners with solar power (so there's really no loss for them in leaving them connected).

[Aperocky]

This makes sense but what if nobody get the system to the next checkpoint where the difficulty is allowed to go down?

[raverbashing]

Yup

The problem with BTC going down is that it's a double whammy of not only BTC going down but also the cost of its shovels going up

Before: BTC pays $100k but a shovel costs $300

Now: BTC pays $70k but a shovel costs $$??

Bitcoin asked the right questions but came back with the wrong answers

[andai]

What's a shovel?

[metrix]

They're using the analogy of mining for gold. the cost of a shovel/pitchfork goes up when the price of gold goes down - which is a double whammy

[shlant]

you didn't answer the question. A shovel in this case is the equipment + energy needed to mine (GPU's etc.)

[raverbashing]

Which is pretty much obvious to anyone who has heard of bitcoin in the year of our lord 2026

Especially since the "sell shovels during a gold rush" has been used to apply to nVidia

[latexr]

But the person upstream hasn’t. It’s not obvious to them. Which is why a good answer has to include the detail.