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What would happen if suddenly everyone stops transferring bitcoins so that there is no work for miners (no transactions to be grouped into blocks)? Would mining be possible in that conditions? How exactly?

Of course, I realize this is impossible, I am interested in the theory behind it.

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Yes.

Miners would just produce empty blocks. They would only be paid a subsidy (12.5 BTC per block, currently) and not any fees from transactions.

In its early history, Bitcoin had many empty blocks.

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    A link to an empty block on one of the explorers would make this a perfect answer. – 4276 Dec 10 '17 at 23:28
  • It seems that "many empty blocks" is an understatement, the first real transaction appears to be blockchain.info/block/… 170 transactions after the genesis block, which is indeed empty blockchain.info/block/… (except for the transaction that outputs the newly generated coins) – berdario Dec 11 '17 at 4:56

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