I’m not entirely convinced, although I’m partway there. When you “have” a Bitcoin, that means you have the private key to a wallet which the blockchain says has such-and-such amount in it. You can have that even if the miners all disappear. You can still use it to sign transactions, although they won’t get confirmed. You can even confirm them by mining a new block yourself with your transactions in it. (If all the miners are gone, the difficulty has hopefully dropped precipitously. And if not, you could always fork it to have a lower difficulty, since the only thing that stops forks currently is network consensus.)
This doesn’t sound super useful, but it sounds about as useful as a bar of gold in a world where nobody considers gold to be valuable.
> it sounds about as useful as a bar of gold in a world where nobody considers gold to be valuable
Nah, if civilization collapses then you'll still be able to use your bar of gold to bash in someone's skull and steal their canned beans (which, in the grim solar-flare induced darkness of 2020, will be worth their weight in bitcoins).
You just sent me down a 3 minute rabbit hole / day dream about Wall-E, the last robot in the universe connected to the blockchain quietly and very easily mining coins from every type of crytocurrency created over the centuries since the early 2000's. Thanks!
If the miners are all gone, there's nothing to stop malicious parties from doing 51% attacks and making the entire thing not only valueless, but also completely unreliable.
At least when you give a person a gold bar, you know that they now have the gold bar.
> If all the miners are gone, the difficulty has hopefully dropped precipitously
AFAIK there is no mechanism for the difficulty of new blocks to fall. And if the only use is creating transactions between yourself and yourself, well you can also collect gravel.
> This doesn’t sound super useful, but it sounds about as useful as a bar of gold in a world where nobody considers gold to be valuable.
Even in a sub-industrial context and ignoring pretty much all of human history and assuming your gold has lost all of its extrinsic worth, your bar of gold could be molded or cast into plenty of useful things (light reflectors, heat shields, baubles, weights). Bitcoins, not so much.
The catch is that the difficulty adjustment only happens every ~2k blocks. If a mass exodus of mining capacity happens really quickly, it could leave the network stranded. But if they leave at a reasonable pace, it will ramp down. That’s why I said “hopefully” before.
This doesn’t sound super useful, but it sounds about as useful as a bar of gold in a world where nobody considers gold to be valuable.