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If every single Bitcoin miner were to stop mining altogether, how would this effect the Bitcoin network?

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Transactions would never acquire any confirmations and the network would be essentially useless. In principle, people could still accept transactions if there were no conflicting transactions, but anyone could perform a transaction and then undo it if they wished to do so.

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    Transaction fees would accumulate in this situation, eventually creating a huge bounty for mining again.
    – theymos
    Oct 15, 2012 at 2:09
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    The only way this scenario could be at all realistic is if the value of a bitcoin dropped very, very low very, very quickly such that even with high transaction fees there still wouldn't be enough incentive to get people to mine enough blocks to bring the difficulty back down. For example, if the total value of all outstanding bitcoins wasn't enough to justify mining a single additional block, it's quite possible that no more blocks would be mined. (Though nobody would care, since all transactions would be effectively worthless.)
    – David Schwartz
    Oct 15, 2012 at 2:30

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