[amluto]

What’s the bitcoin ecosystem worth as a collectible?

(Keep in mind that BTC at a low enough valuation is either unmineable and thus can’t be transacted or is mineable for very little money and thus subject to 51% attacks by anyone who is inspired to do so.)

[pyinstallwoes]

If you had 100,000 shells and the shells are worth 0, you still have 100,000 shells.

[sireat]

Beanie babies, tulips, German marks from 1920s at least have some physical properties just like shells.

If you have 100,000 cryptocurrency tokens worth 0, that presumably means there is no activity (no transactions, no validations, no mining).

I suppose one could set up a few validators and attempt to restart the chain.

The problem is that for many worthless coins that no one wants to mine, the difficulty is too high to restart.

So that leaves forking the chain with lower difficulty requirements, which is just as pointless.

[amluto]

Indeed. If you have 100k shells, you can at least sell them on Craigslist. With a fully collapsed Bitcoin valuation, the last “good” state of the chain is public knowledge, and you may know the private key associated with 100k BTC as indicated by the last good chain, but you can’t reliably do anything with that knowledge.

So the chain itself could become a fascinating artifact, but the magic that made it possible to move Bitcoin around would be gone.

[pyinstallwoes]

Just because you have the 100k shells doesn't mean you can sell them.