> You couldn't trade them normally with the miners off but you could start mining up the day after.

So if we turn off all the bitcoin miners, it wouldn't be possible to transact. All you could do is look at it, like a read-only excel sheet.

But you understand why this hasn't happened yet right? if everyone else turned off their miners, I for one would be interested in money and turn one on

Turning mining back on is entirely changing the parent's statement.

"Well yea you could do that change to tank the value, but imagine if you just undid it huh???"

The point was without mining entirely, there is no value

But there's only ever going to be a fixed number of bitcoin - does it all just stop working when it's all mined out?

The mining reward is not supposed to be the end state of the system. It is a subsidy, reducing over time, to get the system established.

Once established, the idea is that transaction fees are used and the distributed nature of the network causes a natural competition to be the most efficient so miners can charge the lowest fees while making a profit.

Once all bitcoins are mined, miners are supposed to fund themselves solely through transaction fees, as they partially already do today.

Iirc miners get the gas fees

I guess it's a different scenario but if all the existing miners were turned off today, there is nothing to stop me running the open source bitcoin software on a spare computer myself the day after. I guess if you ban that for all time and all places bitcoin would be over.

My impression of the intent of the statement was "disable mining altogether" not "turn off the existing physical mining rigs"

And if you turned off all the electricity in the world a lot of companies would go bankrupt. What's the point? It's not going to happen.