What Happens When a Blockchain Dies?

With the recent controversy around ICOs and their contribution to the slowly bleeding price of Ethereum, I've been thinking long and hard about what happens to a blockchain when it falls out of relevance. Despite that, much of this post is a rather long open ended question as opposed to any ephiphanic revelation to be shared with the Steemit community.

One of the touted advantages of blockchains is that they are difficult to shut down. Peer to peer networks pop up all the time and as long as there is an economic incentive to run peers, one government or one entity cannot really shut down a blockchain. The users will simply pick up and move. But what happens when the users abandon the chain? What happens when there are just five guys (or gals) left in the world running a network on life support? Is the chain effectively dead? Or is there always the hope that someone will boot up those machines and start cloning the chain one day?

It seems to me that the only "true death" for a chain, is for every copy of the chain to be irrecoverably deleted. Admittedly this is a high bar and perhaps this may never happen. Does anything truly die on the Internets?

Delisted But Still Around

Thus far, a number of tokens here and there have been delisted from various exchanges but no major blockchain of any kind has really died or collapse. In mid April, Poloniex announced that it would be delisting 17 tokens from its exchange. Predictably, what followed was a dramatic dumping of these tokens, sending their prices to mere pennies or factions of a penny.

On May 2, 2017, the following will be delisted: BBR, BITS, C2, CURE, HZ, IOC, MYR, NOBL, NSR, QBK, QORA, QTL, RBY, SDC, UNITY, VOX, XMG

Poloniex Exchange (@Poloniex) April 19, 2017

Yet, many of these tokens live on. According to coinmarketcap.com, most of them have seen very healthy appreciation since they were delisted on May 2nd. Some of them are dApps but many are actual chains, raising another question -- are there any listed tokens from dead chains on some exchange somewhere? What about dApps that are no longer being worked on?

The Dead, Dead.

So outside of testnets, are there any truly dead public blockchains out there? With the spate of bitcoin clones that emerged in 2013-14, I would imagine that there would have to be at least a few. As a newer entrant into the blockchain world, I'm seeking the community's help in cataloging some of these "dead" chains and tracking down what actually happened to them. Perhaps, the community might even boot one up for some time and run it as a #HipsterChain.

More to come?

I would love to listen to the community and perhaps even collaborate with some of you on tracking down and writing about blockchains that have since faded into the Internet history books. With so many startups launching their own blockchain-based projects, this would be both an interesting resource for investors to understand what to expect when projects fizzle out or archive all the tried and failed ideas for people to look back on.

Thanks for reading!