Quote:
Originally Posted by Pasghettos
If there were, say, 1,000 blocks remaining until the next difficulty adjustment, and the major mining operations all shut down as in the hypothetical, it would take a really long time to complete those 1,000 blocks, right? I wonder what the impact of that would be.
I’m not sure what the precise relationship between hashrate and time is (e.g. is it basically linear?).
The difficulty would adjust sharply downward, and if those miners were to rejoin the network they would mine blocks at a far faster rate than 10 minutes per block until the next difficulty adjustment.
You often see this leading up to the halving - miners want to quickly deploy as much hash as possible before the block reward is cut in half so average block time can be significantly faster than 10 minutes.
