Does Survival of Cryptocurrency Technology Depend on Human Emotion?

Some technologies continue to exist even if their creators set them aside in favor of something else. A stone wheel remains a stone wheel, regardless of whether you use it. A printing press in a museum still operates precisely as designed, even though it’s been bucked in favor of digital printers. And combustion engines will still run on gasoline, even when the day comes that no one cares to use one anymore.

But this kind of staying power is not the case with the technology that underpins cryptocurrency: blockchain. If people stop caring about a given cryptocurrency, the blockchain that runs it will eventually die out.

How is this possible?

First, let’s review wha…
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