I was curious to learn about the inner workings of bitcoin...Whats actually going on under the hood. I found a great article online and I summarized some of it. I suggest checking the link to the article that talks more in detail about this subject. I filtered out the points I thought were the most important to me. I have some small investment in bitcoin so I was curious to know what will the future bring us regarding the bitcoin network. In my opinion it has to significantly improve in the near future or it will not survive with the rest of the other superior blockchain platforms coming online each month. It has to fork into a system that can fix all the issues with scalelability, transactions fees, difficulty rate as it gets harder to mine, & price manipulation by the whales.
https://www.quora.com/What-if-everyone-stop-mining-Bitcoin
If miners suddenly stop mining bitcoin, the transactions can still be created and broadcast onto the network. However, when there is nobody that creates blocks to differentiate among transactions that are spending the same bitcoins, there will be no way to be certain that any bitcoin you have received are not also being sent to someone else. It would be the same comparison as accepting a dollar bill without knowing whether it’s an original one or one created with a copier.
After this point if people still want to continue using bitcoin is all speculation, for example if someone wants to initiate a new transaction and want it to be mined into a block, they could start mining themselves. When a valid block is found, the transaction is mined. This is how bitcoin could continue working but it will be an extremely slow network. With the current mining transaction landscape, a single miner will have to have an insignificant amount of mining power. So it will probably take way longer than ten minutes to find a block. In fact, it could be months or even years.
As more bitcoin miners join the network, more powerful mining hardware has to be used, they can increase the speed with which they are searching for values to create valid blocks. If the miners start leaving the network, this speed goes down. This would result in blocks being created more often or less often. When bitcoin was designed, it included a mechanism to try to average out the block creation frequency to one block every ten minutes. The network now makes an estimate of the available computation power and adjusts the threshold, such that the block creation frequency will become one block per ten minutes on average. Because this threshold can be adjusted and makes it more or less difficult to find a block, we call it the difficulty rate. Even if only one person or a small group of persons are still mining, such that they can find a block once a month, it will take 168 years to create 2016 blocks. After that, the difficulty will be severely reduced, such that a new block will be mined again every ten minutes on average.
Eventually it's going to become unprofitable to mine a bitcoin and the network will become extremely slow so one way to fix this would be to fork the platform to improve the network or become a proof of stake technology. Even better if they could add an incentive to hold a master node, with this in mind the bitcoin's price will be more stable.
I would like for bitcoin to succeed because it's one of my favorite coins, I would appreciate any insights on this topic, cheersss guys!!
Check this link below for more updated details about mining bitcoin, prices are constantly changing:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/mining-margins-and-where-to-make-the-most-money
The price to mine 1 bitcoin in electricity cost per country:
