(Note: not sure exactly why, but my reply got posted to the crypto currency fraud thread instead of this one; copying it here)
Yeah – I didn’t think you’d answered it (I probs should have mentioned that).
The post you linked has problems IMO; not sure if you consider them relevant or not to the discussion, though.
Bitcoin isn’t dead between blocks – there’s no way for it to be alive without gaps, so logically it can’t be dead in those times. There is still an ongoing process – miners are hashing – but the results of that process are stochastic (next block could be in 20 seconds or 20 minutes).
The above is one reason, but another is that there’s a sense of financial continuity – but that wouldn’t necessarily be the case 2, 20, or 200 yrs later. I don’t think we need to agree on that much here btw, like roughly day-to-day continuity is enough (e.g., stock markets often close overnight, so it seems like day-by-day continuity is good enough for most finance stuff).