The difficulty adjustment is capped at 20% or so, it would take FOREVER to adjust it down sufficiently for our pen and paper speed.
Someone tried to gotcha me with "how do we use bitcoin without electricity or internet" and I sent them nostr:npub1dergggklka99wwrs92yz8wdjs952h2ux2ha2ed598ngwu9w7a6fsh9xzpc 's article here where it talks about doing SHA256 by hand https://dergigi.com/2021/08/02/implications-of-outlawing-bitcoin/
Is it really so weird to think we could do bitcoin by hand on paper? Everything used to be that way. Just because math is involved for bitcoin doesn't make it less useful on paper. It actually makes it more useful because the math can be verified. I don't think it is likely that we ever need to do bitcoin by hand but it isn't unreasonable to think we could.
Imagine the difficulty adjustment after the power goes out tho 🤣
Discussion
Wow I never knew about the cap! Always learning something new everyday about #bitcoin .
Actually, it's limited by a factor of 4, here's the code
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/57b34599b2deb179ff1bd97ffeab91ec9f904d85/src%2Fpow.cpp#L57
It would only take a little longer than a decade 😜
I doubt that...
A human can do what, 1 hash / day, and there's a lot of hashes in 100s of exahash...
How long did it take to go from basically zero difficulty to where we are now? ;)
It's more like, how long would it take you to find 2016 blocks of the current high difficulty on pen an paper?
Then there's the first difficulty adjustment, down by maximum a factor of 4.
And again, how long would it take to find 2016 blocks of this still damn high difficulty.
Then there's the second difficulty adjustment, down by maximum a factor of 4.
There will be many adjustments before it's back down to genesis difficulty, but it would take decades, centuries?
Plenty of time to re-invent generators and semi-conductors! 😂