[ekianjo]

> If a crash happens it'll probably happen before people realise it, but suddenly there just won't be anyone wanting to buy coins anymore.

Not sure how true this is. Bitcoin has been going through a few major crashes in the past 3 years, yet the demand was still strong after it went down.

[celticninja]

I dont think the person you replied to meant a crash, but rather an implosion. i.e. a massive failure in the bitcoin protocol that renders it useless. This is the only way in which no one will want to buy coins. In that situation your best bet is sending your coins to an exchange and selling them into the listed buy orders which have not been removed because the person who listed them is either asleep or unaware of the news.

However this is incredibly unlikely, bitcoin went though a fork last year that caused some problems but was quickly rectified, this current maleability issue is also being worked on to get a resolution. These sort of network wide problems are problems with the fundamentals of bitcoin and should, by right, affect the price of bitcoin much more than say government regulations in China or India, that they dont is because most holders of bitcoin understand that these problems can be resolved with some dev time and BTC has some great and comitted devs working on it.

Namecoin (NMC) had a similar issue where it meant that web addresses linked to NMC were not secure, that caused a crahs but no where near going to zero and that is a coin with minimal developer support.