<p>In the early days of Bitcoin, sure. Today, not so much.</p>
<p>Back when Bitcoin was only being mined by a few individuals on their home PCs, it would have been &quot;relatively&quot; easy to use a supercomputer, mine for one difficulty adjustment period, and then stop mining, leaving the network in a state where mining another 2016 blocks could easily take years. (Correction: It would take more than one difficulty adjustment period to do that.) What the community could then do is to deploy a fork that would deliberately ignore the longer chain, making mining possible again.</p>
<p>Today, even the largest general-purpose supercomputers cannot compete with miners using ASICs built specifically for mining bitcoin. If you wanted to get orders of magnitude more computing power than the rest of the network, you would need orders of magnitude more ASICs, at a time when ASIC manufacturers barely keep up with demand from actual miners.</p>
<p>Of course, if you have more computing power than the rest of the network combined, you can execute a 51% attack, which might be a lot more damaging to Bitcoin than the attack you've described.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-12-15T08:14:48.180Z
actually i am asking this because i am developing my own little hobby blockchain based cryptocurrency with some of my friends. Currently even though we are all making transactions here and there, i am the only one running a miner on the network. The miner is only a small raspberry pi b with very little compute power. Thats why i am worried someone will come along with alot more compute power and stagnate our little hobby currency. But i guess there is nothing i can do? other than to hard fork if it ever happens
stav
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-12-15T08:18:05.053Z
As an interesting side note, the largest downward difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin was 28% in May-June 2021 when China banned mining.
Vojtěch Strnad
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-12-15T08:26:11.340Z
@stav A cryptocurrency with a single mining Raspberry Pi is probably much worse in terms of security than a centralized currency with a single server holding everyone's balances. Of course if it's a hobby currency with no real value then security really doesn't matter.
Vojtěch Strnad
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-12-20T17:15:37.173Z
It would be hard to increase the difficulty so far that "mining another 2016 blocks could easily take years" in one dififculty period, since each adjustment is capped to a 4× increase. It would be possible if a huge amount of mining power mined multiple consecutive difficulty periods and increased the difficulty by e.g. 64× or even 256×.
Murch
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-12-20T17:56:27.653Z
@Murch Thanks for the correction, I didn't know that.
Vojtěch Strnad
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-12-20T17:57:47.587Z
Oh, yeah, the difficulty adjustment is limited to the range of `0.25×oldDiff <= newDiff <= 4×oldDiff`
Murch
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-12-15T07:59:52.603Z
2021-12-20T18:00:06.770Z
2021-12-20T18:00:06.770Z
Vojtěch Strnad
<p>So im mainly thinking in the very early days of bitcoin when the networks compute power was minimal.</p>
<p>What would happen if say a big organization with exponentially more compute power than the network, were to join for a little while, raise the difficulty, and then promptly leave?</p>
<p>Since the difficulty is only re-calculated every 2016 blocks, couldn't this effectively stagnate the entire network since mining 2016 might no longer be feasible?</p>
<p>Is there something in the protocol that prevents this? also does such an attack have a name?</p>

<difficulty><attack>
can the network stagnate if the difficulty grows too big?
stav
# can the network stagnate if the difficulty grows too big?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2021-12-15)

So im mainly thinking in the very early days of bitcoin when the networks compute power was minimal.

What would happen if say a big organization with exponentially more compute power than the network, were to join for a little while, raise the difficulty, and then promptly leave?

Since the difficulty is only re-calculated every 2016 blocks, couldn't this effectively stagnate the entire network since mining 2016 might no longer be feasible?

Is there something in the protocol that prevents this? also does such an attack have a name?

**Tags:** difficulty, attack


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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2021-12-15. Score: 3 | Accepted answer

In the early days of Bitcoin, sure. Today, not so much.

Back when Bitcoin was only being mined by a few individuals on their home PCs, it would have been "relatively" easy to use a supercomputer, mine for one difficulty adjustment period, and then stop mining, leaving the network in a state where mining another 2016 blocks could easily take years. (Correction: It would take more than one difficulty adjustment period to do that.) What the community could then do is to deploy a fork that would deliberately ignore the longer chain, making mining possible again.

Today, even the largest general-purpose supercomputers cannot compete with miners using ASICs built specifically for mining bitcoin. If you wanted to get orders of magnitude more computing power than the rest of the network, you would need orders of magnitude more ASICs, at a time when ASIC manufacturers barely keep up with demand from actual miners.

Of course, if you have more computing power than the rest of the network combined, you can execute a 51% attack, which might be a lot more damaging to Bitcoin than the attack you've described.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: actually i am asking this because i am developing my own little hobby blockchain based cryptocurrency with some of my friends. Currently even though we are all making transactions here and there, i am the only one running a miner on the network. The miner is only a small raspberry pi b with very little compute power. Thats why i am worried someone will come along with alot more compute power and stagnate our little hobby currency. But i guess there is nothing i can do? other than to hard fork if it ever happens  
> **username_1**: As an interesting side note, the largest downward difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin was 28% in May-June 2021 when China banned mining.  
> **username_1**: @username_0 A cryptocurrency with a single mining Raspberry Pi is probably much worse in terms of security than a centralized currency with a single server holding everyone's balances. Of course if it's a hobby currency with no real value then security really doesn't matter.  
> **username_2**: It would be hard to increase the difficulty so far that "mining another 2016 blocks could easily take years" in one dififculty period, since each adjustment is capped to a 4× increase. It would be possible if a huge amount of mining power mined multiple consecutive difficulty periods and increased the difficulty by e.g. 64× or even 256×.  
> **username_1**: @username_2 Thanks for the correction, I didn't know that.  
> **username_2**: Oh, yeah, the difficulty adjustment is limited to the range of `0.25×oldDiff <= newDiff <= 4×oldDiff`  

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