Nobody cares about who finds it first.
They care about blocks per hour.
> If all miners dropped off (or 99%), blocks won’t keep getting mined every 5 minutes. They’ll take forever to mine until the network adjusts the difficulty, which takes awhile - 2016 blocks, to be precise.
And until that difficulty changes, the remaining miners will find they still get the same number of blocks per hour. In the time the network used to find 1000 blocks, of which they got 10, the network will now find 10 blocks, and they will get... 10.
Since SHA256 has not yet been broken, it will over time be in proportion to each miners contribution to the overall hash rate. By design.
If someone gets a valid value for a block and gets it in the chain (mines the block) is 100% dependent on if anyone else finds it first and gets it accepted by the network.
As to the rest of it - yikes. Not only is there no mechanism whatsoever that would do what you seem to think happens, but it makes zero sense if you have a cursory idea of how Bitcoin is constructed, or what miners even do.
Good luck, and adios!
They want to find A block.
So two seconds after someone else finds a block, they're working on the next block. They don't care about the event at all. Their expected reward per hash doesn't change at all. Their expected reward per hour doesn't change at all.
Finding a hash "first" is an irrelevant idea, because everyone stops searching for that block instantly, and starts searching for the next block. Roughly zero hashes get wasted.
> As to the rest of it - yikes.
I'm quoting the scenario in your earlier post, you goofus.
> The time you could expect that to take, if all but 1% of the hashrate disappears, is going to be 100x of the time (on average) it would take with the original hashrate. Unless it takes so long the difficulty target reduces, of course, and the odds change.
It takes the remaining miners 100x as long to find blocks.
But they get to keep 100x as many of the found blocks.
So they still get the same reward per hour. Until the difficulty adjusts.
This is basic arithmetic.
> Since SHA256 has not yet been broken, it will over time be in proportion to each miners contribution to the overall hash rate. By design.
In proportion to each miner's contribution, and also in proportion to how many blocks per minute are being found.
If you don't wait for a difficulty update, then removing some amount of miners changes the block-finding rate in exact inverse proportion. So the blocks-per-hour of each miner stays exactly the same.
Remove half the miners, blocks are found half as fast until difficulty updates.
Triple the number of miners, blocks are found three times as fast until difficulty updates.
2x win rate * 1/2x block rate = 1x
1/3x win rate * 3x block rate = 1x
Until the difficulty updates.
But, unless difficulty changes, the blockrate changes.
If you keep the entire existing network, and say I'm 0.002% of the hashpower; I'll win 1 block per year, losing 99.998% of blocks.
If the whole rest of the network goes away except me, it'll take me 1 year to mine a block. I lose 0% of blocks.
But in either case, I mine one block per year.
This is wrong. Each of your hashes (the number of which in a given period is fixed as you admit) either meets the difficulty target or not. If it does, you win a block reward. Otherwise you don't.
The only impact other miners have on this is how often you have to rebuild your candidate block in order to always mine on top of the latest block.
Please just think this through before replying...
You will not win the same number of blocks per year, and fundamentally can’t, unless you have the same share of the overall mining hashpower that entire time.
Bitcoin literally could not work if that was not the case.
If your share of the hash power doubles, because your total hashes stayed the same but the overall hash power halved, you’ll ‘win’ twice as many blocks.
Changing difficulty does not change this.
Changing difficulty only changes how much hashpower is required (on average) to mine a block, and indirectly the number of blocks produced over over time, for a given hashpower.
Difficulty changes the odds of any given hash attempt winning. It does not change the odds you will find a winning hash before anyone else does. That is based on your proportion of the overall hash rate.
This is why there is such strong incentive to add more hashpower at lower per-hash price to mine Bitcoin. Because it increases individuals share of the overall hashrate, they end up mining more blocks, and they get more block rewards for it.
Less efficient hashers get less and less share of winning blocks as this happens, until it becomes uneconomic for them to hash at all.
If all miners dropped off (or 99%), blocks won’t keep getting mined every 5 minutes. They’ll take forever to mine until the network adjusts the difficulty, which takes awhile - 2016 blocks, to be precise.
In fact, with a sufficiently high hash rate setting a high difficulty, then dropping to a sufficiently low hash rate right after a difficulty adjustment, it might never adjust back, and it could be years or decades to mine the next block.