Bitcoin Forum

Over time bitcoins will be lost, and by lost I mean forever.  Inevitably wallets will be corrupted or deleted and can't be recovered.  Inevitably someone with bitcoins will die and their heirs will not know how to recover them, if they know of the coins at all.  In theory this loss could add up significantly over a long period of time.  With the total number of bitcoins capped what are the implications?

At some point in the future if the value of the smallest divisible unit gets too large the users might agree to a protocol change which adds extra decimal places.

Then the dude who secretly saved 1000 bitcoins will be the richest person on earth

I think the chance of every single satoshi being lost within the next 100 million years would be 1 in 1 trillion. As technology improves, we will eventually have no data loss at all.

OK I see what you're thinking.  And the natural forces of the economy would adjust accordingly such that BTC .1 then takes on the same "value" as BTC 1 today.  I know I'm dramatically oversimplifying things, but I think I see your point. Or am I looking at this too much like a currency devaluation?

You got it right, it's simply result of law of supply and demand. It is really that simple.

Forever is a very long time. As the number of "lost coins" goes up, the chances of people opening a new address and finding a pleasant suprise within also goes up.

As the number of bitcoins drops, the value of each bitcoin goes up, so people hold less and less bitcoins in a single place, and so each time bitcoins are lost the number of bitcoins goes down. In addition, as the value of bitcoins goes up, and as knowledge and protocols increase, people will lose less and less of their bitcoins (They are more careful with what they have, since it is worth more, and better layers of protection are invented and used to prevent total loss of bitcoins.) Based on unscientific polls of users of this forum, most bitcoiners are in the 20-35 year old range, these young people do not think about death and wills and providing a means for people to access their bitcoins if they die. However, as the bitcoiner population ages, they will (on average) think more about these things and many will put into place some mechanism for the coins to be passed to their survivors.

Just consider the math behind what you are suggesting. Let's say we have 100 units of currency, and we loose 1% of the outstanding amount every year. After 100 years we will still have 36.6 units of currency. So all the prices will only be about 1/3 as high, and we have had 100 years to be accustumed to the change in price.

Not on any meaningful time scale.

Not just meaningful... on any time scale... heat death of the universe would probably kick in before you'd just randomly find a collision. 

What the bitcoin program needs is a wallet backup to email ability.

Blockchain.info ;)

But where do you think your email is stored? Somewhere in hydrogen atoms that float around in the outer space?. No still harddrives.


Best backup if you ask me is the raid 11111111111 backup. Just copy your wallet to as much storage devices as possible (including CD/DVD that you store in your secret wall vault :P)


I lost 100BTC because of a backup from blockchain.info being captured (probarly by dropbox acount) So now i use client with cold storage linux boot.... (the nice thing about bitcoin is that in fact your coins are stored in the blockchain and you only backup your wallet key)

.. or a permanent block reward of 1 satoshi. This would lead to some equilibrium between the loss rate going up with more coins and the steady creation of new coins. Conceivably a perfect no inflation/deflation economy.

EDIT: On second thought this leads to miner waste, decimal moving is better.

I never thought of a permanent block reward of 1 satoshi before. Interesting concept nonetheless.

i too think that in the future as technology continues to grow. btc will be more stable

It's called backups.

Currency revaluation.  You are right.

I guess it's really not gonna matter how many bitcoins get lost because no one will actually know how many have vanished. That's what is so awesome about the 8 decimal places bitcoin has.

I got a friend into bitcoin mining with about 4GH/s of BFL Singles, but I didn't get around to explaining how the wallet worked.  Shortly after he started mining, he decided to reload Windows on the laptop that contained his Bitcoin client.  He assumed that his wallet was somehow web based and lost 3 BTC.  When I explained how everything works, he didn't show too much concern over the $30-ish and just started over.

I, however, was more upset, mostly with myself.  I spent several hours recovering his lost wallet and trying to get at the coins, but it was corrupt and I finally had to give up.  It wasn't the loss of the current value that bothered me, but what 3 BTC might be worth someday and how annoyed I'll be at the situation if that happens.

tl;dr: Losing bitcoins sucks because they might be worth a LOT more someday, amplifying one's regret over having lost them.

I totally agree with you! I went on satoshi dice and lost about 6 bitcoins betting and it still burns me up thinking about it and that happened like 4 months ago. I will never bet my hard earned bitcoins again! I totally plan on using them as a form of retirement one day in the future because I believe they are destined to be worth a considerable amount one day.

As an alternative to (or perhaps adjunct to) revaluation as described above could the community decide we should reinstate mining for some specified number of coins?  Ignoring whether or not it's a good idea, is it technically possible to modify the block chain to do this?  I'm talking a long time from now, like 3 or 4 human generations after the 21 million coins have been mined.

Bitcoin is simply a set of rules agreed to by consensus you can change anything.  You could make the blockreward 500,000 BTC per block tomorrow.  You could make the block reward 500,000 BTC per block retroactive back to the very first block.  Both changes would require at most a couple dozen lines of code and maybe a weekend worth of coding (including testing).

However anytime the protocol changes unless 100% of users (not 100% of just miners, but 100% of all nodes installed, all exchanges, all merchants, all bitcoin owners, all client developers, etc) there will be a fork in the network.

Some % of the network will continue to use the old code and some % will use the newer incompatible code.  Unless a change has nearly unanimous support or rejection a split like that could be very damaging as both forks could continue to exist independently however they would be incompatible.  Imagine two protocols both calling themselves Bitcoin, both very similar but completely incompatible.  Imagine you are on fork A but your friend is on fork B.  He sends you some coins but those coins aren't seen as valid on fork A so you never "get them" (at least not of fork A) but from his point of view he did send them (just to the same address on fork B).  Now imagine neither side is willing to drop the name Bitcoin ("we are the real Bitcoin").  Some merchants accept Bitcoin-A, some accept Bitcoin-B.  Some sloppily don't indicate the compatible fork so merchant-A gets paid orders paid with Bitcoin-B Bitcoins that the merchant can't see but the customer can't get back.

Of course such a scenario is unlikely to happen because the results are known to be chaotic.  Any such change will get minimal support and die a quite death.   The fixed supply is part of the social contract.  Bitcoin users join Bitcoin voluntarily and do so based on the information that is known (including the fixed supply).  Changing that decades later would be a huge blow the confidence in the network.   I would go so far as to say it is immoral, it changing the contract after the fact and STEALING (yes STEALING) from existing users.  So can it be changed?  Sure.  Is it likely to ever be changed (a year from now, a decade, a century)?  No.   Of course if you feel it is so important to have coins never stop minting then simply make a fork of Bitcoin call it "Inflat-a-coin" or something like that and if it is popular enough someday it will displace Bitcoin.

TL/DR version:
If you can change the minting rate once you can change it again, and again, and again, and again. Anytime inflation is changed there are winners and losers.  So if people accept such changes and you can benefit from a change in inflation you should keep changing it over and over and over.   The confiscation of wealth via inflation is probably the most powerful concept in the enslavement of modern man.   I would hope that most people would have no faith in such a system where the rules can be changed to the benefit of some at the expense of others and reject it outright. 

The implications are discussed ad nauseum in this forum.  This is what people often simply call "deflation", more accurately one might call it deflation of the money supply. 

Some people read more into it but imho the implications are just that a single unit of currency will become more valuable with time (provided you can hold onto those keys ;)

Most people who have lost data once do them.  Those who don't, well, haha, sucks to be them, but I'm not them, so I really don't give a shit.  In fact, I find it economically beneficial that there are idiots out there who don't do backups, because that means their lost coins give my own non-lost coins much more value.

Offsite backups

And in the case of BTC, the private key or even the whole wallet is so small, there's really no excuse not to. Heck, there should be cloud integration in the client (not that I'm a huge fan of "the cloud")

Spend the 30 bucks and buy three bitcoins. How much time did you spend trying to get them back?

How badly was the file corrupted in any case? You know you only have to get the private key out, right?

I think he's talking about re-mining "lost" coins. The thing is, how do you know what's lost and how do you know what's been put away for a rainy day? You could be quite literally stealing* if you did that.




(*Arguments that bitcoins cannot be stolen notwithstanding).

That's completely irrational of course. Today's price is all that should matter to you,  if  really bothering you just buy 3 from someone or some exchange.

The implications is that bitcoins will be more valuable and the decimal will be moved over.

Yup, if you HONESTLY feel they will be worth a lot more... buy a few dozen coins or whatever is reasonably affordable based on ones income.

True story.  ;D

I think losing bitcoins won't never be a problem for bitcoin. 21 Million coins with millions of users requires a few broken hard drives.  :P