Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

in normal world money is printed and it has a value. And it doesnt bring problems when money burns. But bitcoin is different because the amount of bitcoins is limited.

So when in real world someone dies, leaving behind a bank account, the money wont be stranded. Except its black money. But even then more money can be printed.

But what about bitcoins that lie at addresses that doesnt have owners anymore? I mean wallets can be lost because pc crash and no backups. Or user dies and no one knows he has bitcoins. That means there must be a growing number of bitcoins that lie on addresses without owners. And noboday can take these bitcoins away.

So when this is true its only a matter of time until the bitcoins that can be used are going to an end. So bitcoins will raise in value because people need them to pay. But btc only has 8 numbers behind the dot and this will stop at some point too. So...

Am i wrong?

Thanks!

Money is not value; it is not wealth.  Nothing important is lost when money is destroyed, not dollars, not bitcoins.

I think you dont see what i mean. I mean that at some point the useable bitcoins are way less. And the more far it goes in the future the worse the problem should become.

Or is there a way to get the money from an address that cant be accessed by his owner anymore? These bitcoins cant be used anymore. Maybe at the moment its only 100BTC but at some time it will be 100.000 and so on. Because no one can claim them anymore.

Its not that the value is gone. The medium to pay vanishes bit by bit.

Wrong?

2100000000000000 is a lot of medium, it's going to be ok.

So?  The medium that remains becomes worth more in proportion to the amount lost.  And we can renormalize if necessary to make the 1 remaining BTC divisible to more places.

You don't need to worry, for several reasons.
1) As stated, we have 21,000,000 BTC which are divisible to 8 decimals. As Bitcoin has matured, the rate of loss has gone down significantly, which makes sense. The more valuable something is, the more careful people are not to lose it.
2) As some is lost, the rest becomes more valuable. In the case that BTC is worth "too much" at the 8th decimal place for practical use, because we've lost "too much", we can make a change to the protocol to allow for dividing farther. This is the type of change that would not have opposition, so it wouldn't be impossible to make. However, this is not likely to be a concern in our lifetimes.

Same thing occurs with gold. Gold is used up, lost at sea, stolen, etc. At the end of the day, when the prices rise, the costs people will spend to recover hard to reach resources goes up...

Imagine a future where Bitcoin miners no longer only run the network... but mine through e-waste dumps for harddrives with old Bitcoin wallets on them.

Interesting point, I see where you're coming from... that its a shame that so many bitcoins will never be realized as they're just forgotten about.

Just a thought... if an expiry system was introduced, similar to land leases, 99 years would be a good benchmark for expiry... and the miners could once again mine the coin. Not sure if this would be technically possible though.

That way the reintroduction will be very slow and not affect the economy a huge amount, however it would ensure 100% circulation of all 21million bitcoins each 100 years.

If in the future you have old coins that are > 90 years old, I'm sure it wouldn't be too much trouble to send them to a new address or re-create that new offline wallet.

No different to dollar bills lost or stuffed into mattresses that were forgotten. :)

Seriously dollar bills don't have an expiry date so why would we want them for bitcoins?

I guess it is perhaps likely that within 100 years the ECDSA used for the key pairs will have become insecure and another algo will be needed (effectively forcing all to "upgrade" their bitcoins or risk losing them).

Why not 80? 40?

If you could make changes like that it would break trust, can't so won't so we're fine.

Historically I'm using an age old concept as a suggestion of how the policy could work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99-year_lease


Who's trust would it break given that the owner of the coins would have died meaning the coins will be out of circulation anyway?

Redistribution of expired coins can be done once again through mining such as how coins are currently distributed.

So the 8 digits behind the dot can be extended. That could solve the problem, thats right. Because the loss of bitcoins that cant be accessed for live will lead to the remaining bitcoins have a higher value because they are needed for transactions. So have more digits behind the dot can solve this.

But i think the 99-year-idea is nice too. Because it could run miners make a bit more profitabel once all 21.000.000 BTC are mined. I mean miners are needed then too and they would only get money from fees. I think bitcoin will face a problem then. This idea could make it a bit more profitabel to help let the network live.
Second good thing is that the amount of useable bitcoins remains the same.
And i dont think this will break trust. No bitcoinuser will have bitcoins at an address for 99 years without moving it. The only trustproblem could be when this is a securityrisk.
But i think its not doable. If it was possible to kill btc from an address i imagine this will be a security risk to the network. So i doubt it will happen.

E-Waste-Dumps... hacking old wallets or what? :) But anyway... there are enough ways to lose a wallet completely. So no one can access it anyway.

I dont think its the same like with gold or dollars. Because gold isnt used for payment widely. Plus the worldwide amount of gold is raising always. That means because of too less gold there isnt a lack of medium for transactions. Gold is unusually for transactions, there is enough anyway and its growing.
Dollars are used for paying but even when millions are burned its not a problem. They are printed all day long. So there will never be a problem that not enough dollarpapers are available to do transactions.
Bitcoins are different. They are 21.000.000. And thats it. There cant be more if im not wrong. So its not like with dollar where new dollars can be printed when some are lost or with gold where you can find it somewhere.

This will never, ever, ever, ever happen.  If the network can steal coins from any transaction, it can steal coins from every transaction.

I thought so when it would mean taking away... but how about every transaction has a timeout? So that an amount of bitcoins sent to an address has a timeout of 99years. And as long as the btc arent send into another transaction the timeout isnt set back. So after 99 years the btc simply vanish and can be mined again. When the timeout cant be manipulated there shouldnt be a risk anymore am i wrong?

Won't happen, same reason.

I learned that there is already a coin age. Im not sure but its the time when a transaction for a satoshi was made the last time. So assuming that after 99years without a transaction the btc are abandoned the network could say they vanish. How could this be used to steal money? I mean it would be a rule in the net that btc that are older than 99years at one place vanish. The coin age cant be faked because the time of block creating would be taken in account. So i dont see where a security risk is. But im not into the techniques of the net. Care to elaborate whats the risk? :)

We don't want our coins stolen, not after a day, not after 99 years, not after a million years.  We will not support a change to the protocol that would allow that.

The only way that coins can be spent is by signing a transaction for them using the private key.  The network will never allow any other way to spend coins.  If you feel strongly about stealing coins, feel free to create your own network.  Plenty of others have done so, and no one uses any of them.

The risk is that some miners won't want to use this new protocol that you are designing, and some users won't want to use it either.  Then you will have some miners and users using the old protocol and some miners and users using the new protocol.  Both will probably want to draw on the brand recognition of the "bitcoin" name by calling their protocol "Bitcoin".  By changing the protocol in this way you are creating a new coin type. Should your new coin type that isn't bitcoin be called bitcoin just because you want it to be?

Of course miners won't stop minting new coin until the year 2139, 127 years from now, so none of us really need to worry about it.  If Bitcoin becomes popular enough to be in widespread use by then, they can decide for themselves how they want to deal with the deflationary nature of the coin.

Soon we will mine old addresses with coins in them :D. But computers need to get faster than what they are now.

Define "soon".  No matter how fast computers get, this won't happen until/unless someone finds a weakness in the key and hashing algorithms that allows shortcuts to solving.

I understand that such change wont happen because many wont accept it. May it be fear or elsething. Its only an idea. And maybe there will be a coin someday that will use it... i dont know.

But i dont understand your fear kjj of "stealing". How can it be stealing when bitcoins lay 99 years at an address? Do you await to have bitcoins 99 years at the same address from now? That cant happen in my opinion. So stealing cant happen too. If bitcoins are lying at an address that long its a pretty sure sign that they are abandoned.
And its not about taking them away... they vanish for the net. Its not someone who takes them out. The net says they are vanished because they are too old and they can be mined from a random miner then.
Stealing would imply a owner. Where should this owner be?

DannyHamilton... im not sure what will happen once 21.000.000 btc are created. I fear a bit that forced fees will follow when the transactionfees that are normally around arent enough to hold the network stable. And that could mean bitcoin is losing acceptance because there are enough paymentproviders that eat fees anyway. Bitcoins charme lies for many users in the costless transactions. I know how i felt when the standard wallet and multibit wanted to force me to pay a fee. And i see what people write that find that they have to pay a forced fee in btc. When this will be more after all btc are mined the follow ups could be not so cool for the network. Only saying. :)

Bitcoin can be divisible to a monster degree. This is impossible. Even if 90% of the coins were lost, the remaining 10% would simply readjust it's value and account for the lost coins. This is pretty standard and is exactly how gold has functioned as a currency for over 6000 years, even in it's insanely limited quantity. The prices simply adjust by the free market.

The owner that they would be stolen from is either my estate, or my heir.  Or, if medical technology makes a decent leap forward in the next couple of decades, me.

You don't have to agree with me on any part of this.  I'm just telling you that there have been many proposals to do exactly this, and (approximately) no one here is interested.

Can you imagine the day hundreds of years from now when more zeros need to be added?  I wonder if the world will really come together to make that change or if another digital currency takes its place with a larger limit.  It'll be difficult to convince 51% to add more zeros, not because it doesn't make sense, but because they will just be too lazy to upgrade their bitcoind/libbitcoin/bitcoinj/etc or can't agree on how many zeros to add.  That would definitely be a defining moment in history.

Could people hundreds of years ago imagine what the state of technology would be like today?  Things hundreds of years from now could work very differently than they do now.  Entire industries currently unimagined could be built up around bitcoin.  It could be impossible to modify the system to handle smaller divisions of bitcoin, or it could be so easy to do that nobody gives it more than a few seconds of thought.

I too don't understand your fear. My suggestion was merely to keep all coins in circulation and is more based upon wishful thinking as opposed to actual implementation.

I stand by the concept though, like a house, if you are still living in it after 99 years(!!!) surely you would have renewed its lease. The analogy is relevant to bitcoin... that is, if coins have not been sent in 99 years, then the likelyhood of them still belonging to somebody alive are near zero. If you are not dead and you've not moved the coins in that long, then you have either forgotten about or lost them.

To keep the coins circulating, I don't see how redistribution would be unfair.

It would be unfair because it is changing the rules after the fact.  Essentially the first "post ex facto" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law) rule for Bitcoin.

It also creates a horrible precedent.  Once you show that you can get away with changing the rules to 99 years their will always be pressure from others to change them further.  Why 99 years?  In some years when after a decade or so there are x million unmoved coins there will be pressure to change it to 50 years or 20 years or even 1 year.  There will be pressure to raise the cap, to change the distribution amount ("isn't it also unfair that 75% of all coins were mined in the first 8 years). 

The end result would be a banking elite who can change the minting or deminting rate so that growth and contraction of the money can optimally match the estimated growth or contraction of the Bitcoin economy.  Sound familiar?

Some of us feel it is immoral to take what isn't yours when the social contract between members is that tx are irreversible and that includes if I want to move my coins to an offline wallet for 100 years I can.  Any change violates that social contract and it is a slipperly slope.  Still to change it when it doesn't even need changing makes it even worse.  It shows future generations that the social contract means nothing and Bitcoin can be changed for small or trivial reasons.

Agree with DeathAndTaxes 100%

Well said! ;)

Bitcoin would only die if every single fraction of a bitcoin was lost. 0.0000000001 total bitcoins would still work fine, but not 0.

This question has been asked repeatedly, repeatedly, and repeatedly; and the answer is no, no and no

I wouldn't worry about it. The more sparse the resources are the more valuable they are. There are a lot of BTC and a you can divide them very well so no worries here.