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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Blockchains are inefficient always-on distributed systems. If people stop paying to run all of that infrastructure, it's effectively dead even if someone else did make a copy unless they can afford to run a scaled down version — and with little demand, the ceiling for that is quite low.

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You don't need much infra because of how difficulty adjustments work... consistently less hashpower -> it becomes easier to mine

You’re still talking a networked system which needs to be internet-accessible. Servers, bandwidth, storage, and operators are not free and that means someone has to see some value to running them.

The point is that the rewards are elastic. If less people run them, rewards increase, so more people run them again. Obviously the currency rewards are denominated in could hit $0, but that doesn't seem likely to most people at this point.

That's a distraction from the real problem: what value does someone get for keeping a blockchain running? If the founders of the project have walked away from it, how many volunteers are going to care to support an orphaned system at all rather than putting their resources into something they can get paid more for?

The usual answer would be to keep a pet project alive but that runs into the realities of blockchains: the technology is inefficient by design and that means that most of the real work and data happens off chain. Having a copy of the chain itself is likely of minimal value if the company hosting referenced data stops paying those bills, an oracle is no longer available, the client application stops being developed or is not released by its owner, etc.

This means that you can't say anything about the long-term survivability of the chain itself without saying what it's used for because that'll tell you both how many people care about it at all and how committed they'll be to continuing to maintain the chain and its clients.

Do you mean people running the infrastructure? Or developing the software? We don't have to speculate on either. The infrastructure / nodes are paid for by some combination of inflation (block rewards) and transaction fees, depending on the network. The software is pretty similar to any other open source software. There are open source devs who will contribute for free, companies who will give grants for features they have a vested interest in (or will pay their own engineers to develop them directly), and organizations with funding to pay engineers.

Again, we don't have to speculate. We don't even know who the founder of Bitcoin is and it's still under active development.

In case you're interested, the mailing list is a great way to see what's happening in Bitcoin development: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/

For Ethereum: https://ethereum-magicians.org/

I'm aware but that wouldn't apply if Google launched a blockchain, which was the origin of this thread, and it wouldn't help with the details I listed where key parts of the system are not stored on the blockchain. If Google introduced, say, oracles which their smart contracts relied on you'd need a way to provide a new service and permission to update those contracts (this is, of course, a massive risk for fraud so that can't be done lightly).

Similarly, even if they used someone else's chain like Ethereum, if the data stored on the chain references something like a CDN endpoint where the real payload is available, the fact that the blockchain itself is still running wouldn't help you much if you didn't have a compatible alternative with a copy of the data.

Yeah maybe, I'm really having trouble imagining what Google could be building here so can't say either way.

Yeah, I would definitely not want to say anything other than “it depends” until details emerge. This isn't even an official announcement yet so anyone who knows presumably is under legal constraints not to say anything.

Major blockchains are by definition the survivors at this point, but a great many have already bit the dust. In the end the single point of failure is always going to be the value of the coin on the open market, 100% of 0$ doesn’t pay server costs.

Sure but it's not exactly random which chains went to zero. BTC isn't going to hit $0 due to chance, not sure if that's what you're implying.

By the same token, BTC or other coin hitting zero is not just a question of chance. Suppose BTC had a large dip in value and a similar drop in mining. What are the odds people would focus on repeated double spend attacks for the lulz thus dropping the value to zero?

I am not saying that’s likely today, but rather that it’s easy to over estimate resilience in the case of black swan events.

No need to speculate, look at the price and hash rate charts in 2017. The more recent hashrate drop was even bigger. Still no successful attacks.

There's a disincentive for people with mining power to attack the network (assuming they even have enough). It makes their hardware worth less so I can't imagine anyone doing it for kicks.

Agree though that something similar to what you're saying is what Bitcoin hitting $0 would look like. Certainly not impossible but I think it's extremely difficult attack. Even more so now than in 2017.

Yea, I think that’s more a risk of dropping the last 1% in value rather than a significant risk to current prices.

The real issue for current owners is Crypto seems to have lost it’s grip on the popular imagination. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bitcoin What happens from here is likely a question of utility rather than speculation.

Try "web3", "smart contract", or "NFT" though. I think there's a shift from focusing on the protocols themselves to stuff built on top.

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