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Not quite. Bitcoin difficulty adjusts every 2000 blocks, which typically happens every two weeks. If the hashrate drops, those blocks happen less often, so the
by ItsMonkk 4y ago
Not quite. Bitcoin difficulty adjusts every 2000 blocks, which typically happens every two weeks. If the hashrate drops, those blocks happen less often, so the adjustment happens less often.
These past years the Bitcoin ASICs have been tremendously profitable, and as a result the demand for the hardware goes up, leading to huge profits for the hardware makers. These past few months have seen a drop in Bitcoin, which drops the profit for miners, but as it is still above electricity prices, only results in cheaper hardware.
If Bitcoin drops below the electricity line, you will see miners all over the world start to turn off their devices. And once that happens, block time will rise, and that will start making the entire network less trusting. This will cause a spike of people selling their coins, and with less blocks this means a packed exit. With the packed exit, you would think this would incentivize mining as transaction fees go way up, but those fees come directly from the value of the coin, so once this starts the value of the coin is going to drop heavily.
With mining profitability dropping the further this goes, the longer block times, the more the price of Bitcoin goes down. If Bitcoin goes below 10k quick enough, it won't ever see another difficulty adjustment, and the entire chain dies. The developers might chose to hard-fork and change the difficulty changes algorithm, but as we've seen with Bitcoin Cash, these changes are political and don't tend to end well.
- latchkey 4y agoThis all sounds good on paper, except for the fact that large miners don't sell their bitcoin. Even when they do, it isn't on the open markets and happens in ways that don't affect the price (OTC) and by selling options.
- tromp 4y ago> Bitcoin difficulty adjusts every 2000 blocks It's 6*24*7*2 = 2016 blocks, the number of 10 min intervals in 2 weeks.