The post If humans vanished, Bitcoin’s block time and difficulty would preserve our collapse appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a speculative report translated for non-specialists. The narrator is an investigator who arrived long after humans were gone. Everything described as measured relies on real Bitcoin mechanics: block intervals, difficulty/target, timestamp rules, and data available from block headers and the coinbase transaction. We arrived on a silent planet. The last clocks still ticking were embedded in a ledger whose authors were gone. REPORT START Team: Survey Unit 3Artifact: Global ledger (“Bitcoin”)Technique: Lightweight chain analysis (headers + coinbase), mapped to solar time Method We analyzed the digital artifact known as Bitcoin using what we identified as block headers (timestamp, target / “bits”, version) and each block’s coinbase transaction (height, output value, and tag text). From our previous initial review we’ve constructed the following data points: Fees were treated as: coinbase output − programmed subsidy (fees actually claimed by the miner). Timestamps were calibrated to the planet’s solar day and year and bounded by Bitcoin’s median-time-past (MTP) rule. Evidence of tip contention (stale blocks) was inferred from timing irregularities and MTP edge effects; where any stale-block archives survived on isolated nodes, they corroborated those periods. Difficulty retargets occurred every 2016 blocks with the actual_timespan clamped to 0.25×–4× of the two-week target, implying a per-epoch difficulty change bounded to at most 4× in either direction. Findings Cessation of payments We recorded ΔH (blocks before present) to be ≈ 86,000. Coinbase outputs were equal to the programmed subsidy, implying fees ≈ 0. Over that same interval, average block spacing settled near ~60–70 minutes with a long-segment mean of ~65 minutes. Interpretation: Human-directed payments had ceased. Mechanical issuance continued.Dating: 86,000 blocks × ~65 minutes ≈ ~10.6 years before our arrival. Power-source timing signatures Post-collapse block arrivals were not memoryless. Diurnal and seasonal cadence encoded the unattended power mix: Daytime clusters with nighttime gaps…

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Filed under: News - @ November 26, 2025 10:28 pm