>As others have pointed out, the difficulty adjusts both up and down depending on the total work being done by the network, so no death cycle is possible. It's

>As others have pointed out, the difficulty adjusts both up and down depending on the total work being done by the network, so no death cycle is possible. It's true that the difficulty adjusts both up and down, however it does so over 2016 block intervals. If a sufficiently fast and large drop in value/hashrate occurs, the chain could well 'death spiral'. The drop simply has to occur within the adjustment interval (2016 blocks- or 14 days). That said, recovering from a death spiral is as simple as a new Bitcoin Core release that hard-forks the difficulty to a new, workable level, so the fatalistic view of death spirals is still wrong.