Topic: Hypothetical question (Read 954 times)

not complaining, just saying that the OP seemed to pose that the blockchain itself is lost, meaning that the wallets lost the db, including backups.  While this is highly unlikely as there are backups, as people have said, and hard wallets on USB's and such, the OP asked what appears to be a educational question. 

the method of the crash would be important, or really the method of how these machines return to service.  the whole system would recover, but if every wallet, every wallet.dat file and every copy of the chain was gone, then yes, that data is gone and the coins were just data, they are gone.  i was going to say that mining would be near impossible until the next difficulty change, but that would be false too as the difficulty is contained in the data.  So, it would be the new beginning of bitcoin, with thousands of wallets, instead of the two or three that Satoshi played with in the beginning.  people everywhere would get popped with full 50 BTC rewards and that would continue until 2016 blocks had been mined and then the difficulty would skyrocket.  the coins would lose their value on the exchanges, just like if someone dumped billions and billions of dollars in FIAT into the streets, it would become meaningless.  But, the interesting thing would be if everything was lost, save for one copy of the chain.  it would be neat to see whether that one machine could propagate its chain versus the thousands of others starting at 0/1

Never say never. If it could happen it can happen.
Don't put all your eggs into one basket as we all know that is a recipe for disaster.

It's like, "What would happen to torrents if there were no seeders?". 

Yes, they would die out temporarily but unless computing went away altogether they do have the ability to come back.

The ledger is only ~100GB, it's most definitely backed up somewhere but the trust factor is the key point in hypothetical situations like that.

Of course it would, but it's almost impossible to happen. It would just happen if all of the data of the internet be wiped, or any other kind of disaster that could interrupt the internet. Because there must be someone out there still keeping the copy of the node such as in a hardware wallet.

If they all crash and lost their copy and nothing remains, then Bitcoin is gone for good.

this is not hypothetical at all, i would call questions like these imaginary. and there are quite a few of them around in this board like the one asking what if internet goes down or aliens attack!

if you lose the copy of a file on your computer (blockchain) you have to either get a copy from somewhere else you stored it like on the cloud or you have to do a recovery!!!

Yes it is likely to happen if we suppose there is no one who have stored updated data offline, but there are already some torrent files from where bitcoin can start again but may be block will be reversed back to the last block in that ledger.

Since you have mentioned that it's hypothetical question so I won't say that it's impossible rather I would say that if this happen then obviously we have to give bye bye to bitcoin which is equal to my should because i earn alot with bitcoin. But thanks GOD that this won't happen in reality. But you could have a dreambor nightmare Or whatever you say.

If all nodes would crash (which is highly improbable--close to impossible, I'd say) at the same time and no one in this world keeps the whole copy of blockchain in their storage, it would be bye-bye for this whole thing then. But before that happens, it needs to have the whole internet crashing as well, which is also close to impossible.

It is hypothetical. Just like - "If all Bitcoin users suddenly died would Bitcoin have any value after that?"

if every active node went offline. there would 'possibly' still be data stored elsewhere. such as some noting torrents and offline media storage.

when those data holders come online. they share the data to complete as much of each others chain as they have to resync to longest chain). yes it may result in the last few hours/days/months of blocks be missing, if no one has uptodate data

EG
if someone had only the first 6 months data.
a torrent had 6 years
and 10 users had 5 years.
the mechanisms of bitcoin would easily verify the 10 users 5 years of data as being correct by checking each other. those 5 users will verify the 6month users limited data is also valid and start giving data to that limited data user

the one with 6 months data resync to the 5 years of data happily.
and then those 11 users would then be checking the 6th year data from the torrent. and as long as it met all of the rules. eventually all 12 would be updated to 6 years of data and new blocks would begin to be added ontop.

the torrent user can create new blocks straight away, happily being ahead of the rest (longest chain) with little to no risk of orphans later as long as their data met the rules. and the other 11 nodes 'could' try making new blocks straight away but while they are still year+ behind the torrent, their attempts would get orphaned because they are way behind the 'longest chain'. only being accepted if the longest chain had bad rule breaking data

 This is more a nonsensical question than a hypothetical one.  Can you posit the mechanism by which this would occur? 

How many nodes are required to run the network smoothly without any loss?Does it mean more nodes,less transaction time?

ah, that's a good point. I guess it would be goodnight for the whole thing in that case. maybe a block explorer keeps an html file of all the transactions or something but that's as good as it's gonna get.

If there was a backup available, we could recover - however in my previous post I assumed that backup copies would also be included as nodes which would be destroyed. Assuming a backup did survive though, this would lead to an interesting issue where we would have to take that backup as gospel, however without any independent verification how would we know that it was accurate. Even if multiple backups survived, collusion between the backup holders could result in the opportunity for fraud. We would lose the decentralised nature of bitcoin up until that point.

Even with the torrent file available, what good would it be without any seeders? Presumably all of the seeders copies were destroyed also?

the torrent would still be out there. I don't know how often people keep the thing updated though.

We all know that it is exceptional to see this happens but even if it happened, if the blockchain is restored again and we have a backup copy, shouldn't this help us to recover our BTC?

You can store copy blockchain and keep it offline on secure device. In case of nodes crash your version might be couple hours/days/minutes old, but it will be still valid imo.

Anyway, crash of every node on earth would mean that humanity is facing some disaster - and then bitcoin survival could be the least of our problems.

I ma not 100per cent sure but i think only the nodes have a complete copy of the full chain, so yeah if they all got destroyed i guess that would be it.  even if some one has a stored copy else where how could we be sure to trust it.?

I'm purely speculating here, but as each node stores a copy of the blockchain, if every single node was destroyed I would think that all data surrounding bitcoins would be destroyed along with it - the same way that if every bank were destroyed (along with every copy of everyones bank statements) we would lose all data surrounding bitcoin. However, in reality this would have an extremely minuscule chance of occurring. I expect copies of the blockchain would be stored on some pretty secure servers, along with non-networked nodes (which may not have the up to date blockchain, but at least may have some data).

If every node which has blockchain information is destroyed at the exact same time, we probably have bigger issues than what happened to the blockchain (namely, what caused it).