I asked a question on another article and never got an answer. Hopefully some crypto-expert here will see my question and be able to answer it.
Coins like bitcoin are said to have a limited supply and Steem's inflation rate will be reduced year by year until the inflation rate is so small it would be considered negligible.
When that point is reached, or even before, it would be very expensive to mine for new coins. What happens when it is no longer worth mining (or in steem's case) running a witness server? If there is no longer any money to be made from running these servers, who is going to keep them operating and why would they?
If these servers all shut down, what happens to the ledger that stores who owns what? Does the entire system simply disappear?