Bitcoin Forum

I know this topic has been discussed in depth before, but I can't be bothered rehashing any old thread or read through some long threads to find an answer to my question. First of all, many of you will think that lost bitcoins don't matter, and I partially agree; the divisibility of bitcoin makes it nearly impossible to have a number of bitcoins in circulation which is too small. But on the other hand it does pose a real threat to the stability and feasibility of bitcoin in the very long term. I mean we will eventually reach a point where there's just a ridiculously small amount of BTC in circulation and I think it's better to avoid that scenario if possible, if only to help alleviate the concerns of people who think this is a real problem.

The solution is quite simple, if an address holding bitcoins remains inactive for maybe 50 or 100 years or maybe even more, then the bitcoin becomes minable again, or some how put back into circulation. If you don't want to lose your bitcoins then simply transfer them before this time period elapses, that seems completely fair to me. I'm aware that this idea has been suggested before, but I never read enough to be sure about how feasible this idea is and what problems may prevent it from happening. I don't see why anyone would have a problem with this system. It will ensure that all bitcoins eventually go back into circulation and that seems very healthy to me, rather than a constant decline in the number of bitcoins.

Keep in mind I know very little about the complex inner workings and technical details of bitcoin so keep your answers relatively simple.

It could be done, but there is no point to it. The principle of a fixed, decreasing inflation rate is paramount, from the viewpoint of existing coin holders.

Inflation (of the money supply) will decrease regardless, because new coins are created slower and slower until we reach the limit of 21 million. However, even if this idea was implemented, deflation (in terms of change in BTC value) will still happen because presumably the economic activity within the bitcoin economy will increase on average. Even now the value of BTC is going up because the growth of the economy out paces the creation of new BTC. That is really why bitcoin is deflationary, not because the money supply will get smaller and smaller. Either way I see no reason why it is "paramount" for the money supply to continuously decrease, that is absurd reasoning which could only come from someone who has a lot of BTC stashed away.

edit: made a few specifications to above text to make it clearer.

yes your exact proposal has been proposed at least a couple hundred times in the past.  Nothing novel or unique about it.   It will never happen.  There is no reason for it to happen and plenty of reason for it to not happen.


There is nothing which would prevent this from occuring even tomorrow other than the need for near unanimous consensus among bitcoin users.  You won't get that, it will never happen.  Most users don't support it but even if they did to avoid a hard fork and split of the block chain you would need nearly unamanimous support (i.e. 90%+ of users, 90%+ of merchants, 90% of service/wallet providers, 90%+ of developers, and 90%+ of miners).  The risk of a hard fork and split of the network at this point doesn't warrant any dubious gain from having coins put back into circulation.

TL/DR you are trying to solve a problem which doesn't exist and thus it will never be "solved".

There is clearly a reason for it to happen. It seems obvious to me that it's much healthier to have a money supply which remains stable, then to have a money supply which decreases into infinity; that's like the opposite absurdity of infinite inflation, both extremes are moronic in the long term. From a mathematical, practical, and economic perspective, the most desirable option is obvious. Now please enlighten me with the reasons why it shouldn't happen, other than you want your BTC to go up in value due to a decrease in the money supply.

This has already been discussed all the way. Basically, I would go for it if the lost coins were allocated proportionally to existing coin holders. But wait! - that is exactly the same as not doing it, existing coins would gail in exchange value. Maybe you would give the lost coins to somebody else, the world government? You could as well rename Bitcoin to Bernank.

If the coins were re-mined they would be going to people who use their computing power to mine the coins, exactly as they are distributed right now. And it is very different from not re-mining them, for the reasons I have stated thus far. I fail to see any reason why some of you would be so strongly against this idea, and your lowbrow sensationalist remark concerning Bernanke only indicates to me that you have a hidden agenda here.

Infinite deflation of the money supply is no more or less insane than infinite inflation of the money supply. If bitcoins answer and opposal to the current inflationary money system is to take on a form exactly the opposite to that system, instead of reaching a nice balance between the two extremes, then you guys clearly do not want to create a long term fair and stable currency to oppose the mainstream, but something which benefits a few of you in the opposite way that our current money system benefits a few.

One I don't accept that the money supply needs to be fixed exactly.  The loss rate over time will slow to a trickle and the money supply decreasing by 0.5% a year or (or even increasing by 0.5% a year) isn't a material problem.   For all practical purposes the supply is fixed and price is based on demand (which over the next 100 years or so changes in demand will dwarf any valuation changes due to slowly shrinking supply).  However lets pretend the money supply "should be fixed".


There are three major issues.

First.  Your solution won't make the money supply stable.  Valuation is based on the available money supply.  If anything your proposal will cause rapid fluctations in supply, and mining rates (to potentially cash in on a once in a lifetime windfall in mining profits).   Lets (pulling numbers out of my ass) that in the first 4 years roughly 2 million BTC were lost.   We would expect over time this rate of loss to decline as the obvious value of BTC becomes apparent as well as improved technology and best practices (deterministic wallets, auto backups, hardware wallets, etc).  So the "lost coins" are to a certain extent already price in.     Currently the price is based on effective supply  Nobody needs to know how many are lost the market effect of supply and demand will set the price based on effective money supply.   As the annualized loss rates continues to decline (in nominal BTC terms) the effect on overall valuations will be small.  The difference between an asset whose supply is truly and perfectly fixed vs shrinking at say 1% is immaterial.  The change is price will be driven mostly by changes in demand.   As an example say 10 years from now loss rate is <1% per year and demand is growing at 35% per year.   35% vs 36% does it really matter?  The price is for all intents and purposes determined by increased demand.


However whatever "expiration date" is used means that in roughly x years there will be a massive INCREASE in the effective supply when that window hits.   Say 2M coins were lost in the first 4 years.  That means in 50-54 years the coin supply (which has had slowing inflation for decades now) will supply see a minting explosion of 2M BTC (which could be worth billions of USD or more).   The fear and uncertainty on the true supply would have the exact opposite effect as intended.   As we approached the expiration date a lot of volatility would occur as people try to estimate how much new supply is going to crash into the market.   Another issue is the risk of overmining.   Mining will reach an equilibrium with transaction fees and in 50 or so years should be relatively stable however the expiration of these early 2M coins (which could be worth a small fortune) would cause a massive mining surge.  The network will built out massively as the ROI when including this once in a lifetime bonanza of confiscated coins would warrant expeditures than "normal" mining wouldn't.  What happens if the hashrate jumps 200x and then 99.5% shutoff after that free money window is gone?  Oops.  Network needs 400 weeks to reset and until that happens block times are ~1 day each?

Second.  It is unfair.  There is a social contract in Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is voluntary.  Nobody is forced to use it and the rules are well known.   However what you propose is an "Ex post facto" change.  It is material unfair.  People entered in Bitcoin because on certain proclaimed truths one of which being that (for better or worse) transactions are irreversible.  This is a form of reversibility.  You are proposing to change the social contract after the fact and that is ALWAYS unfair.  A system built from day one with this change (and other hard fork changes) would be different but to impose it upon people after the fact isn't just unfair it is immoral.

Third.  This is all academic.   It simply is NEVER EVER going to happen.  Just like the hundred or so last threads nothing is different.  Making this kind of hard fork is simply "defacto" no possible (although technically possible) due to the consensus rules built into Bitcoin.   Unless a change requiring a hard fork has overwhelming support the other "normal bitcoin" fork will live on.  So either one fork will die off or they would compete directly with each other causing chaos and uncertainty which devalues both forks.   "Can the real Bitcoin please stand up?"  

I think another major issue people have with it is how do you know that the "lost" coins are really lost.  I could make a paper wallet and give it to my grandfather (who knows nothing about computer security) and if he locked the paper away and just sent coins to that address in 50 years they would still be there and usable with that paper.  If they had to be moved every couple years then I wouldn't be expecting any bitcoins in my inheritance.  Something like the physical Casascius coins have a similar use case, they could be traded around as much as you want and (assuming the tamperproofing holds up) 50 years later the coins backing them will still be there in the blockchain unmoved (despite however many hands the physical coin may have gone through).

I raised this suggestion a while back and still believe it to be a good idea however didn't get much consensus:


Whole thread here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=112525.msg1218706#msg1218706

I doubt it will slow to a trickle, it will slow at a rate proportional to the amount still left in circulation. People are always going to make mistakes no matter how many safe guards are put in place.

The expiration time for any address would start when that address was last active, meaning the last time it had coins sent to or from it. Unless a huge amount of coins were lost at the exact same time (or rather, last active at the same time) I don't see how this concern is realistic.

It would not be unfair if the majority of us agree to change the rules, that's what makes bitcoin so great, we can change the protocol according to consensus if we think it needs to be changed. And I think my arguments here are more than valid. The only people who will consider such a change "unfair" are people who are hoping to gain from it.

This is the most realistic concern but I still hold that we need a stable money supply.

Then make the expiration time 100 years, or 150 years... what ever, as long as it can ensure a stable money supply. All one need do to re-validate the address and make it last another 100 or 150 years is send a small amount of coins to the address or remove some.

As the first inactive bitcoins start to be re-mined it may cause a little bit of shock and uncertainty, however that will quickly settle down and the system will become accustom to handling the reintroduction of inactive coins and begin to flow nicely as a stable currency system with a stable money supply. There will be no point when the "free money window" suddenly disappears, because once it opens it will stay open... since people will continue to lose coins up until the window opens, and beyond. Once it is open it will stay open indefinitely and miners will always be able to re-mine coins lost 50 or 100 years ago, or with what ever time limit we go with.

What grudge do you hold against inactive coin-holders?? You can achieve the same simply by putting a lower bound on the block reward. No need to use silly methods. Still not going to happen any time soon.

I could ask you what grudge you have against a stable money supply. I have no problem with people who might like to leave coins inactive for long periods of time, my problem is lost coins which create infinite deflation. I strongly feel that infinite deflation could be just as harmful as infinite inflation over the long term. I mean honestly, what is the problem with having to send or remove some BTC to an address which has been sitting idle for 50 or 100 years? Is it really that hard to show the network that the address is still active? All your arguments are clearly based on the point that you want to profit from lost coins, and I find it sad that you are all placing profit over the long term health and stability of the network.

To further illustrate the point I'm trying to make here, let me draw a comparison to gold, as people often like to compare bitcoin to gold in the way they function.

Gold can be lost, but not in the same way bitcoins are lost. When a person loses some gold, it doesn't just vanish into to thin air with virtually no chance of ever being recovered again, in the way bitcoins are lost. It will be some where waiting for someone to find it again at some point, even if they have to mine it out of the ground again. Would any of you really like a world where gold could vanish into thin air, and the supply of gold would slowly get smaller and smaller? Well of course some of you probably would judging by this thread so far.

But my point is that's not a healthy economic system, anymore than infinite inflation is a healthy economic system. Both are fundamentally flawed at a very basic level. Like gold, we need some system which will allow us to rediscover the lost bitcoins and bring them back into the system. The idea of a limited supply is great and fantastic, but it's not just a limited supply, it's an ever decreasing limited supply. It's easy to see that a stable money supply is by far the most superior currency structure, and bitcoin should be designed in the most superior way.

Here I am responding to some comments made on the other proposal thread concerning lost coins:

1. It is not theft if after 100 years or more a person fails to indicate that an address is still active. If they want to secure their ownership of the coins then they can take action to prove the coins are not lost.
2. The risk is much worth the long term advantage in my opinion. I don't see why this should be such a controversial decision if we are aiming to make bitcoin better and fairer.
3. That depends on how you see the problem. From my perspective it's a huge improvement to secure the long term viability of bitcoin.

There is none. I'm not against the slow inflow of coins through mining at all. Here, I've even told you how to achieve your goals without resorting to silly measures:
Yes, just make the minimum block reward equal to 1 BTC and the problem of infinite deflation is solved. My solution is superior to yours in these ways:
* It is much simpler, which means: easier to explain, easier to implement.
* It doesn't require long-term storage to be "refreshed", meaning less things to worry about.
* It creates a stable supply instead of allowing random market shocks. Imagine a million coins lost in 2009 hitting some lucky miner in 2109.
* It can not be subverted by a bot making 1-satoshi payments to all the addresses that are about to expire.

Wouldn't that just lead to infinite inflation in the case where we get less coins lost then coins created?

That's a good point. Then the system should be designed so that only withdrawals will prove an address is still active.

No. As the currency supply increases, the effective inflation rate decreases (because it's equal to M/S where M is the constant minting rate and S is the growing currency supply). The deflation rate will likely stay constant because people having more are going to lose more. This way the equilibrium will be achieved, when the deflation rate equals the inflation rate and they cancel each other out.

... which puts a huge burden onto the offline, or worse, m-of-n wallet keepers.

That is a just a bunch of guess work, and the simple fact is that your basic premise undermines the principles bitcoin was built on as a limited quantity digital commodity.

The only guess is that the coin loss rate somewhat grows with the money supply growing. I think that's a safe guess. You're not going to claim otherwise, are you?? Never mind that, it's wrong.

Right. Which is the reason why neither yours nor mine solution are going to be a part of Bitcoin.

ffs, stop double/triple posting to bump up your thread.

What I'm suggesting does not undermine the principle of limited quantity in any way. It only suggests a way to maintain a more stable money supply instead of one which deflates infinitely.

Your proposal undermines the principal that transactions are irreversible.  Reversibility is a slippery slope.  The optimal growth rate of a money supply would be the rate of economic expansion.  How far is it from "we must remine coins to avoid losing them" to "we must have a cartel of elite miners adjust the mining (and coin destruction rate) in order to maximize economic output.  We can call this the "federal mining reserve".

You seem to not realize that your proposal as dubious and impossible to implement as it is still wouldn't achieve a stable money supply.  As posted in the other thread. If the money supply shrank by 0.2% per year over 150 years the supply would be ~740K BTC in 2162.  If 200K BTC were lost in the first year (more than that have never been moved after being mined in the first year) you would be looking at a massive annual inflation being forced onto a system which has adapted to gradual deflation of the course of decades.   I can't think of anything which would cause MORE volatility and chaos.  Even after that first year it would be boom and bust cycles as coins weren't lost in a continual basis there were spikes and peaks.  So the money supply would not only NEVER be fixed (it would never reach 21M BTC not once ever) it also wouldn't even be STABLE.  Inflation would not only be high some years it would be chaotic and random.  33% one year, 8% the next, then 27%, then a period of 4-5 years with 1% inflation, then a giant spike up 40%.  Utterly crippling to any economy.  Worse it would be totally pointless.  If Bitcoin is still around in 150 years it means it MADE IT.  It doesn't need fixing.  Ironically after 150 years of success it would likely be the "fix" which killed it.

I would like to mention in this context something which does not get the attention it deserves.

It is plausible that the currently used version of ECDSA will be broken eventually. When weaknesses start to be found people will start moving their coins to more secure addresses. But the lost coins will remain where they are, and when it is finally broken, whoever does it will find himself with a huge treasure of coins. This isn't stable and is not how Bitcoin is supposed to work.

I think we need to consider agreeing that some time after the signature algorithm shows weaknesses, we will delete all old coins to which the keys were lost. It's either that or have them all suddenly move to one party.

For the record, I think discussion of that kind of thing is appropriate on the main development board. While technically it's a different cryptocurrency it's plausible that necessity would demand such a move and it's also plausible that the user-base would consider the economic principles as not changed enough to matter. After all, the assumption is the coins are lost, therefor ensuring they stay lost doesn't change anything for the majority of coins. Equally such a scenario is likely to have at least a few years of advanced warning as mathematics advances.

The beauty of Bitcoin is that it is voluntary. You can fork it and implement your idea, see how it goes. Like e.g. freicoin. Want taxable Bitcoin? You can just implement it. It won't apply to existing Bitcoin, but if your ideas are sound, others will choose your coin over Bitcoin. Being voluntary, no one can impose new rules after the fact that could damage existing money holders.

I love that.

bitfreak,

When I first started using Bitcoin I knew exactly what I was getting in for. I have also heard these tired arguments over, and over, and over again. I can tell you without a doubt that when I signed up to use Bitcoin, I signed up to use it in it's CURRENT state. What I mean is that Bitcoin, as it stands now, is in heavy favour of those that possess Bitcoins. What you are essentially saying by "feeing up" "lost" coins, is you want to swing it the other way BACK towards those that don't have Bitcoins yet, you want to ease some supposed deflationary spiral that will work against those that don't hold Bitcoins. What I know is this, right now, my Bitcoins are MINE, not the networks, not Satoshi's or the developer's, not some government's, not the UN's, MINE.

Now YOU come along, the white knight that you are, and want to "help recover lost coins" by making everyone that did the right thing, ring in their coins on a regular basis. I don't give a damn if it's 200 years, it's not the time factor, it's that fact that you have decided to strip us of a right bequeathed to us when we decided to use Bitcoin, and that is the IRREVOCABLE power to transfer possession of coins from one person to another. You want a constant financial census so that you know where all the money is, you want to know who still has control of what, and how much is being used, otherwise it gets stripped from the legitimate coin holders. I never signed up for your BS, and I can tell you right now, if this idea ever did get entertained, I'd sell up in a heartbeat and move to a chain that didn't treat coin holders like schoolchildren that had to sound off for attendance unless they wanted detention.

Considering that the vast majority that will ever be lost are already lost all this proposal does is make the supply increase wildly when these coins are eligible for 're-mining'. Whereas from here everything is smooth. Never gunna happen. The idea of even potentially taking away someone's multi-generational savings is disgusting anyway.

While coins (I.E. values of certain addresses) may be lost, no true value is lost to current bitcoin users. Since bitcoins are infinitely divisible, an entire economy could run off of 1 BTC. All the "value" in the bitcoin market would be stored in that 1 BTC and not the "lost" coins. Bringing back lost coins would redistribute the value in the bitcoin market away from the current users in an unfair way. Redistributing the coins proportionally to current users would be equivalent to doing nothing, as has been previously stated, because the total value in the bitcoin market would remain the same. It is like when the Fed prints USD, the total value of the USD market is the same, but some of that value is redistributed to the newly printed money (and taken away from everyone else.

I don't think we need to agree to that at all.  Who makes "you" (to mean not just you but anyone who feels they have the authority to control the wealth of others) to decide when wealth should be confiscated in order to protect others.  You are the bitcoin "elite" you need to protect others by confiscating their wealth?  You are talking about the role of a state.  The elite protecting the masses by confiscating wealth through force.  Bitcoin is dead if/when the "self proclaimed elites" out of fear decide they need to protect it by confiscating wealth.

That's all well and good, but if ECDSA is ever broken there will very much be an elite group confiscating wealth whether you like it or not. The question is how much wealth do we allow to be confiscated? Some of it, or all of it?

What would be elite about this group.  If ECDSA is broken wide open without warning Bitcoin is effectively dead anyways.  Massive amounts of wealth would be transfered before any such new address type could be created.  The probability of that happening is roughly zero.  What is more likely is that ECDSA is "compromised" meaning that one can attack it faster than brute force (although still needing massive, massive amounts of computing power).  One would essentially see "mining" of existing addresses a process which probably would take on the order of decades to "confiscate" all of it.

That is far better outcome than some cartel of "elites" forcing their will on the people in order to protect them.  I have enough government already.  I don't need another one to worry about INSIDE my currency.    If the consensus is stupid enough to allow such a rule to be passed they will allow other rules to be passed in the name of "security" and honestly it means the population is too dumb to keep Bitcoin secure.  Bitcoin is dead IMHO if it happens but I hope that will never happen.

You're right that ECDSA will not be broken overnight; theoretical weaknesses will be found first, and those weaknesses will turn into something more concrete in the span of a few years. But your idea that the weakness will just be an issue of "attacking faster than brute force" is dead wrong: the margins between insecure and secure are enormous, yet this actually means that successful breaks tend to go from "theoretically broken" to "totally broken" in one step. This is nothing like mining as we know it, because the rate at which that happens is totally uncontrolled. In addition, without a plausible plan to deal with a problem like that we will see the value of Bitcoin collapse as the ECDSA weaknesses get closer and closer to an actual break.

Like it or not in such a scenario killing off probably-lost coins is reasonable and the user-base has a real chance of agreeing to it. Or to be precise, the user-base will decide to adopt an alt-coin to replace Bitcoin that has those rules and and decide that the alt-coin has value and Bitcoin does not.

This has happened before: the value overflow bug was "fixed" by everyone deciding to adopt a new alt-coin overnight, that happened to be almost identical to Bitcoin but without that broken rule. That alt-coin was so popular, and reasonable, we call it Bitcoin.

I don't want to create a new fork of bitcoin, I have no intention to do so, nor the skills to do so. I want to make bitcoin more economically sound and stable over the very long term. Sure, the network could continue operating with only one BTC, but that is not healthy or sound in the long term. The fact this argument has been turned into some vendetta against a cartel of elite bitcoiners is absolutely ridiculous.

Please provide a single example.  It took roughly 15 years for MD5 to go from theoretical attack to "fully broken" and even today it requires a huge amount of computing power to cause a MD5 collision.  At each improvement of the attack it still required a huge amount of computing power but the speed improvement over brute force grew by magnitudes.  Almost like mining but in reverse ("difficulty" declined over time).   Note this doesn't mean MD5 should be used, there simply are better safer algorithms but the idea that it went from academic to "instahack" with negligible computing power is simply innacurate.

As another example SHA-1 was deemed "compromised" in 2005 however even today a collision attack takes 2^61 operations.  Although this is 524,288x faster than brute force (2^80 operations) it is still hardly useful in the real world.  2^61 in Bitcoin mining terms would be on the a difficulty on the magnitude of 536 million.*  Granted SHA-1 and SHA-256 are incompatible ciphers but it is useful to illustrate that even SHA-1 as compromised as it is for 8 years still requires a staggering amount of computing power to find a collision.  For example if Bitcoin were a SHA-1 hash of the public key and the entire network of Bitcoin miners repurposed their hardware to cracking addresses they could (combined) find a collision for roughly 1 address per day (that excludes the public private key generationt time so realisticly it might be more like 1 addresses every 2 days).   Granted under such a scenario it would be wise to split up coins into smaller addresses, and work towards a solution but the idea that it would result in millions upon millions of coins being compromised in a matter of seconds is just hyperbole.

Third example (and this is the big one).  DES (digital encryption standard) was a precursor to AES.  A theoretical vulnerability was discovered in 1991 however it was AFAIK never used in any attack because DES was simply brute forced.  By 1999 at a construction cost of roughly $250,000 the EEF built a dedicated DES cracker which could break any DES cipher in less than 56 hours (50% probability in .  While this the fastest from theoretical to useful attack and done at the lowest cost I would point out two things.  It still took years to develope and a $1M machine (circa 1998) would only be able to compromise a handful of addresses per week.  Also DES was known back at its inception (1975) to have a fatally short keylength (only 56 bits) this greatly amplifies the effect on any attack because there is so little headroom.  56 bit is is brute forceable even with no attack given enough money and time so any attack vector would almost immediately pay "dividends".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker
 

TL/DR:
Please name a single mainstream cryptographic algorithm (not some security through obscurity or proprietary solution created by an novice) which was broken wide open in a single step.

Oh here we go again with the profit argument. Yeah lets just ignore this idea of stabilizing the money supply just because you ELITE BITCOIN HOLDERS with a crap load of coins can make a profit from it. ::)

And your logic is completely flawed anyway, because people not holding coins are hardly going to give a shit about something which will happen 100 years from now. I do in fact hold bitcoins, and quite a few of them, so this move would not be in my best interest.

No one is saying they aren't yours. You can easily keep them if you take the effort every 100 years to show the network that those coins are still active. I mean what is so blasphemous about this if it can help stabilize the money supply. Oh the horror...

You don't understand bitcoin completely @bitfreak!, please revisit the official paper (http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) or the wiki (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page) a few times more before trying to "improve" the system. Thanks

Please explain why Bitcoin must continue indefinitely and never become a scarce commodity? Are you implying that there will never be another successful innovation in payments or money, or at the very least a BitCoin2100 with a fresh blockchain? Your insistence on the immortality of bitcoin is a fundamental logic error. At some point it will be as useless as US Confederate money, and possibly FAR more valuable as a museum piece at some point after that. I certainly don't expect 2012 USD paper bills to be traded at face value in 2265, assuming that USD means anything then. Assume that history will continue to march on and try your reasoning again.

There is also the point that you appear to be willfully missing. BitCoin was created with a fixed set of rules that a lot of folks are vested in, changing those requires a consensus, so your proposal is unlikely to ever get acceptance for "BitCoin." Some other crypto-currency might like the idea though, but if you are not interested in finding some developers to work with on that, how do you expect us to take your development proposals for mainline Bitcoin seriously?

You might as well give this one up, you are obviously going against consensus rather than establishing one.

You are proposing stealing from my pocket, or my childrens, or my grandchildrens, or...

It DOES NOT MATTER WHEN IT HAPPENS this is still theft, destabilization, and a very, very bad idea.

Please explain, as you have been asked multiple times, why a STABLE NUMBER OF COINS is required in any way at all. Your root premise is flawed as multiple people have pointed out.

It already is a scarce commodity because the supply is limited. I'm suggesting that we make it a stable scarce commodity, a bit like how gold doesn't just disappear into thin air, the supply on Earth remains consistently stable.

I am not missing that point, I am well aware of it and well aware that the chance of this change ever being implemented is extremely remote. But I am still going to discuss my reasoning and opinion for why it does need to be changed.

Name a single example of a broken public-key algorithm previously in wide use in the first place. Frankly we just don't know because we've yet to see a public-key algorithm broken in recent history.

FWIW MD5 collisions can be generated in 2^20 time right now, trivial. More importantly though look at Bitcoin difficulty, which is of course a partial pre-image: the security of the network is just a matter of a few "bits" of difficulty, yet even just a single paper in crptography is likely to remove at least a bit or two of security from an algorithm. It's easy to see why an algorithm can go from secure to insecure overnight if that last step happens at the wrong place, while at the same time having warning is likely.

Lets suppose for instance RIPEMD160 pre-image collisions went from 2^160 difficulty to 2^120: it'd be worrying, but still Bitcoin would be ok. Now another paper or six are published, and you're down to 2^70: rather worrying, but Bitcoin is still ok for now, if just barely. (the whole Bitcoin network has done about 2^66 SHA256's in total remember) One more paper though, another 10 bits, and suddenly stealing funds sent to address hashes is quite practical with just a few ten thousand in equipment, and each additional bit of security lost halves that difficulty.

There's a reason the difficulty target is a number, rather than just a number of bits.

Ok let me give you an analogy. You place some gold in a locked box and then 100 years later I find the box just sitting in some remote location covered in dust. I am going to take that box and bust it open and take the gold, because clearly some one has lost it and left it there. Now if it weren't lost, I wouldn't have the chance to find a 100 year old box covered in dust because someone would have come in, cleaned the dust off and relocated it to a more secure location, giving clear indications that the box is certainly not lost or abandoned. The fact is that anyone would have a very large chance to stop their coins from being re-mined, and if they fail to do so then the coins are fairly considered to be lost, because there are real lost coins out there which need to be found. If you happen to get caught up in that process it's you're own fault for not taking action to secure ownership of the coins within a reasonable time frame.

I have already explained throughout this thread why a stable money supply is more economically sound than infinite deflation. Infinite anything is absurd. Of course it's not necessarily an absolute necessity, but it is more economically sound and therefore superior and more desirable.

Meh.  2^56 operations would still be roughly the equivelent of difficulty 16 million.  The idea that is "quite practical" is kinda a weak argument.  You are talking building a network say 10% of the size of the bitcoin network would allow you to steal a couple dozen addresses per day.   Of course that assumes that security can be reduced to 2^56 operations.  I pointed out that even SHA-1 which has been known compromised since 2005 still requires > 2^61 operations. 

Will coins be stolen.  Sure in time but it won't be these "insta-hack" nonsense you espouse.   The period of time between improved attacks is usually measured in years.  So when security is reduced to 2^56 you will see the largest dormant addresses "remined" and then it really won't be worth it.  Maybe in 4-5 years someone will improve the attack further and the medium sized addresses will be compromised.   While this brings coins into the network it will hardly be this "instantly every RIPEMD-160 address is owned by a single person in the span of a few seconds.

It will take time and honestly won't be much different than mining now.  There will be risk involved.  Do I bought a $10K RIPEMD-160 cracker out of FPGAs?  What if others get the best addresses first?  What if BFL releases a RIPEMD-160 ASIC before I pay off my "rig".   I would also point out that it would be decentralized.   It would be the FIAT command from on high deeming RIPEMD-160 addresses unfit for use and therefore nulled.  I would never, ever, ever support it.  I would spend the last of my coins fighting it and if it still did happen I would have no reason to use Bitcoin.    Bitcoin where wealth can be confiscated at will because the elites deem it necessary?  I will go back to Gold.    Many Goldbugs BTW fear this very idea that Bitcoin isn't truly Tangible.   If it can be confiscated by decree then they are right.

This argument falls on it's face. With BitCoins you CANNOT "clearly" know that they have been "lost." There is no dusty box or other indication besides the last time the address was used. If I have placed some gold in a safe I expect it to stay there. If my great-great grandchildren re-discover and open by old safe with paper bitcoins in it, you want the gold to already be gone.


No, you have not explained, you have claimed this repeatedly (and without attribution) but you have not justified these statements in any significant way. No mentions of the possible consequences or scenarios that you are testing against. You are just saying it over and over again.

Since you are arguing that something which already exists should be changed, and everyone else is arguing for it to stay the same, you have the burden of proof. I'm offering you a way to convince some folks rather than just saying "should be" over and over again.

There have been a large number of substantial objections raised to your idea including practicality, social contracts, existing code, design intentions, market forces, future impacts, and most importantly the immutability of transactions themselves. You are questioning the very foundations of bitcoin by proposing that transactions can EVER be undone, your burden of proof is enormous.

You don't want to create an alt coin? Live with the one you got cos you ain't changing the existing one. Or don't use Bitcoin. It bears repeating: unlike government money (which has the properties you seem to want), nobody is forcing you to use Bitcoin. You already have what you want available to use today. Use dollars and stop trying to bring its fucked-up disadvantages to Bitcoin.

At any rate, you ain't fooling anyone. This whole 'making Bitcoin more healthy' and 'stable money supply' is statist code speak for imposing your opinion on stealing from existing wealth owners. Perhaps that explains why you annoyingly keep repeating the same nonsensical and absurd conclusions of 'stealing old money is good' like a broken record without actually ever substantiating them.

Stealing a couple dozen addresses a day can give you serious amounts of money. There are addresses that have historically had amounts in the low millions assigned to them, and I'm sure the unspent-tx-out set has plenty of addresses with at least tens of thousands attached to them.


That's all well and good, but when the difference to that stealing happening over a matter of years, or a matter of days or weeks is one paper, it'll cause the value of Bitcoin to tank all the same. Mining as we know it is carefully controlled and highly predicable, "mining" by attacks on cryptography isn't.

Also, if a RIPEMD160 attack does happen, we have just two backup options: move to SHA256 for address hashes, or move to pure public keys, both of which are backwards compatible changes. If an ECDSA break happens we have no choice but to move to a new PK algorithm. Doing that is a hard-fork change if you want to be able to spend your coins, and thus this discussion will come up. Given how many people consider protection against inflation as one of the core principles of Bitcoin protection against the risk of inflation by releasing old lost coins will be discussed. You're hung up on the idea of it being confiscated by "decree", but plenty more are just going to worry about their wealth being confiscated however it happens.

Of course all this depends on how many coins are lost; maybe it won't be an issue. Note that one way this all could be handled is to have the new rules in this hard-fork scenario only allow old coins to be spent on a schedule, with limits on the volume of such spending. You could say that after block n only transactions from weak to strong are allowed, and only xBTC of those transactions per block. (with the obvious tx fee competition happening) Or the rules could state that making the coins undependable only happens if a certain percentage of coins in circulation remain under weak keys beyond some date, thus limiting the possible inflation. We may find in such a scenario that that percentage is low enough that people aren't worried about the inflationary wealth confiscation. Of course coming to consensus in any case will be hard. Even just moving to a new PK algorithm will be bad enough.

I really, really, really want to see the look on those Goldbugs faces when someone mines the first meteorite, or someone makes a breakthrough in gold nucleosynthesis... In the latter I suspect they'll start arguing that gold isn't gold unless it's totally free of trace radioactive contamination.

Of course you can never truly know if they are lost, however if people are given a truly fair window of time to show the network that they aren't lost I fail to see the problem. You could tell your grandchildren to make sure they they enforce their right to the coins before that window expires. And if they also want to put coins in storage for a long period of time and hand them down, they can do the same thing. It's not rocket science, nor some tedious task which needs to be repeated every year. We are talking extremely long periods of time here.

Translation from statist codespeak to English:

I want to impose on Bitcoin a policy of "Prove to me that you own what is yours, or else I'll pretend it's not yours, steal it from you, and call that 'fair'."

The whole point of this is, of course, to impose Keynesian policy by discouraging long-term saving.

This is why I just love Bitcoin-the-existing-blockchain: it makes it impossible for misinformed and propagandized fools to impose their terrible cached ideas on everyone else.

Adding to ignore list... done.

...and you ignored all the rest of my points and replied flippantly to this one.

Ignored.

But, but, but TRULY!  TRULY!  TRULY!  OUTRAGEOUS!

Haha :-) 

He's clearly not engaged in a conversation with anyone here -- the very second anyone questions his terrible ideas, he immediately regresses to unsubstantiated suppositions, opinions and theories, making his participation here useless, bad and boring.  I added him to my ignore list too.

I think of it more as a community consensus to make sure Bitcoin works the way it was designed to - that lost coins remain lost. I think when the time comes we'll figure out what is a fair solution.

That said I understand the issues with this deletion, and hence I will not press this further at this point.

I am positive of one thing: if at some point any "self-appointed elite" with commit access manages to sneak in the source code a proviso to steal existing coins -- regardless of the form of this proviso -- I will immediately fork the code, revert the change, and start running nodes to keep the original non-organized-theft code alive.  Then we'll see if people choose to stay with a currency paradigm that unilaterally decided to steal from them, or continue using the original paradigm.

It would work, but it's unnecessary.  It's extremely improbable that the crypto algo currently in use for creating address keypairs will remain secure for that entire time period.  Bitcoin includes an upgrade path to a more secure algo, without exposing any security issues in the meantime, should it start to look like the algo is at risk.  The leading 1 at the beginning of current bitcoin addresses is what denotes the version of bitcoin address.  Bitcoin doesn't presently recognize any other, but it eventually shall.  At some point, it's going to become apparent that the current algo is at risk of breakdown, for whatever reason, and the community is going to transition to another algo.  Any unclaimed transactions that have not been moved to addresses using this new algo will ultimately become salvage to whomever can brute force a collision first.  Thus, lost bitcoins are not really lost permanently, just not likely to be recovered within the lifetime of anyone here.

EDIT: Actually, Bitcoin does recognize a special address version for the "testnet", but those are not usable addresses in the live bitcoin network.

In the real world if you leave something untouched for over 100 years and then fail to prove it's yours when some one else tries to take it, they have every right to take it. What reason do they have to actually believe it's not lost if you can't prove it's not lost? Of course you might say "it's sitting in my house", but unfortunately there is no such easy way to prove that bitcoin is sitting in an address which proves you own it. But there are still easy ways to prove you own it... but that's not the problem here, the problem here is that you simply don't want to have the network discern any difference between lost coins and active coins, because you only want to make a profit from infinite deflation, regardless of the economic holes in such a system.

I could argue infinite inflation really isn't bad... you know it just benefits a few people, but in reality the market will always adjust even if we have a quadrillion trillion trillion dollars in circulation. No problem folks, that's entirely economically healthy and I see no reason why we should try to avoid that if the system can still work with that much money in circulation.  ::)

But I don't think you will even be able to read this since you've ignored me and don't see anything you don't want to see. Well done.

Why sulk, just jump in. You can be an early adopter.

I already have jumped in and I already do own a fair amount of BTC. That's not the point here, I'm not trying to profit from infinite deflation, my motive is to create a more economically sound currency which will be more stable over the very long term. My main motivation is not greed or irrational fear of having my coins stolen 100 years from now.

You cannot hope to do this, for that is what Bitcoin already is.  Bitcoin's current exchange instability has zero to do with it's deflationary nature, because that won't occur until about 2130.  Bitcoin is still hugely inflationary, and will be more inflationary than the US $ and the Euro for another four years or more; unless something dramatic happens to one of those other currencies.  Bitcoin's current instability is most related to the very tiny size of the market for which it serves.  Even in 2130, Bitcoin will not be particularly deflationary.  The monetary base will simply be very stable, which is not the same as deflationary.  Those who assume that Bitcoin will prove to be deflationary because of lost addresses taking bitcoins out of circulation are still assuming that to be so.  Bitcoin is based upon Austrian Economic Theory, and there is no more 'sound' basis for a currency.  If you want to start a perpetually inflating version, go right ahead, but it's already been done several times, and every time it has faded away in mere months.  Bitcoin was designed to mimic gold, and it does this very well.

Clearly you haven't understood much of what I've said in this thread. I'm not talking about anything related to infinite inflation. Let me repost some things I've said in this thread and the other thread about a design contract so that you can see what I'm describing is CLOSER to gold and MORE aligned with the Austrian mind set.


This is a sarcastic remark which helps illustrate my point further:

And this was my first analogy using gold:

You've got a lot more stamina then I had on this subject when I proposed the identical idea several months ago.

People here don't want to hear it.

Regardless of their reasons (rational or irrational) I was merely looking at it from a code elegance standpoint. So many subsets of Bitcoin self-regulate  and work beautifully without developer intervention - with the exception of lost coins. I too think it would be better if the system were completely self-regulating but there are some technical problems that shoot some holes in the proposition (like sending coins to an address to mark it active could be abused by people sending a few satoshis to all old adresses and preventing them from expiring)

After receiving several nasty replies similar to those I've read in this thread, I dropped the subject.

lol, that's good to know. I must have thick skin. ;D

Yes I agree, the self-regulation that coin re-mining would result in is also another great advantage. But mostly I think it's an economic principle which needs to be addressed. As I mentioned on the last page, a system where lost coins can be reintroduced into the system is in fact closer to gold and more aligned with the Austrian mind set.

Well as I already mentioned a few pages ago, this problem could easily be remedied by having it so that removing some coins from an address would be the only way to prevent it from expiring and prove active ownership.

bitfreak,

You replied that an economy running on 1 BTC is not "healthy or sound in the long term." Why? How is that any different from an economy running on 21 million BTC?

Well, I took your sarcasm as an argument, and you ignored my prior point that re-introduction of lost coin sets was unnecessary.  As with gold lost to the sea, future advancements in crypto and hardware will once again make those lost coin sets accessible as salvage.  Bitcoin already has the code set up so that crypto algos are modular, and new ones can be introduced without harming the function of the running system.  This is expected, and was expected by Satoshi.  No cryptologist expects any algo to remain secure indefinately.

There's a difference between making sure coins are recoverable, and hoping they will be recoverable due to weakening protection. That does not ensure that lost coins will be the main target and it does not ensure that all lost coins will in fact be recovered. They are completely different things.

Requiring the removal of coins to "refresh" a wallet makes the use of paper and offline wallets far more annoying though. It's easy to send 0.1 BTC to a cold storage wallet to keep it fresh vs bringing the privkeys online to spend, so I do agree with some of the others' sentiment on this issue.

Maybe a viable solution would be that to "refresh" an address, you would need to send funds to it from the address that originally registered the offline address in the blockchain. This is still far from ideal though.

The problem I've always had with this proposal is that it doesn't specifically target "lost" coins. It targets unmoved coins. Period.

Why should I (or my heirs) have to choose between moving coins or forfeiting them? Is this really the only way to combat this? It seems very inelegant to me.

Therin lies the problem. How do you detect the difference between unmoved and lost coins?

There is no need to be certain, either.  Lost coins do not pose a threat, even if they are never recovered.  However, introducing a method that permits the re-introduction of lost coins does potentially introduce a flaw; that may or may not be exploited to counterfit or steal bitcoins via the blockchain itself.  The very possibility that this could happen is reason enough to not pursue this path, since the problem that you are trying to fix certainly won't be a problem within the next 100 years, and may not be a problem at all.  Bitcoin is not broken.  It's an elegant and highly interconnected system.  No one is going to consider tampering with it because you and a few others see the potential for a systemic problem decades in the future.  You are not the first to bring this up.  Hell, even I brought up demurage some years ago, but there is no way to fix these minor issues without possibly introducing much bigger problems.  Even if lost coins are never recovered, an unlikley scenario in the long term, the market will adjust.  It's simply not a critical issue.

You can't.  And in a future wherein Bitcoin is hugely successful, and forms the 'backing' for more local currencies or other cryptocurrencies, it can be expected that there will be entire sets of bitcoins that don't move for decades or longer in exactly the same way that the gold in major reserve vaults have changed ownership without changing their physical location for decades.

It's not quite as elegant as people might like it to be, but it's the only realistic and workable solution I can see to ensure lost coins are eventually recovered which has a remote chance of ever being adopted.

It doesn't have a remote chance of ever being adopted, either.

Have you noticed, guys, how the assertion "Lost coins will cause an unhealthy economy" just keeps being repeated like a mantra, but absolutely no rational justification has been proposed to substantiate it by the idiots repeating that mantra?

Surely you have.

Have you detected how no answer is provided to the question "So how do you detect the difference between lost coins and parked coins?"  The statist doesn't answer -- he merely says "just steal what isn't yours, but don't worry, we'll make this theft 'fair'."

Their next "argument" will be as follows: the people who want to bake organized theft into Bitcoin (to steal people's coins, obviously) will accuse of "greed" people holding Bitcoins who don't want the protocol to change.

I have presented plenty of rational justification for why infinite deflation is not healthy, you obviously just refuse to see it or comprehend it. Just like the inflation freaks refuse to acknowledge the problems with infinite inflation, you refuse to acknowledge the problems with infinite deflation. You are obviously taking this much too personally and letting your emotions drive your responses instead of actually considering what it being said here in a rational way you just go on about how we're trying to steal your coins.

I have answered extensively that the solution is to give an indication that the address is still active. This is one method to detect if the coins are lost, admittedly not a fool proof method, because some people may forget to reactivate their addresses every hundred years or something, but it clearly is the most fair solution anyone could offer and it in no way equates to stealing your coins, such an argument is sensationalist at best.

Personally, its inelegance is what dissuades me from considering it a "realistic and workable solution."

It's as if my doctor said, "The only way to be certain you won't break your arm is to amputate it."

Okay, So say i have a 1000BTC gold bar that has a hidden privkey - why do i have to destroy it in order to save those coins? .... they are on that privkey to be safe in the first place, why does it matter that my gold bar and Bitcoin privkey have been stored in a safe for generations? how is it okay to 'reclaim' my coins?

So again, The answer to this overasked question is, IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN WITH BITCOIN! Go make your own altcoin that has coin stealing included, If it really is better then people will use it

It's obviously not ok to reclaim your coins, and all you have to do to prevent that is to prove the address is still active. Problem solved, your coins remain yours and the wont get re-mined for at least another 100 or more years. It's as simple as that. It's a small price to pay to secure a long term stable money supply which doesn't have the property of infinite deflation imo.

But I'm getting very tired of debating this topic as clearly you folks don't give a damn about the long term stability of the money supply, and you're no better than the folks who can't understand the damage caused by infinite inflation, you think infinite deflation is some how more reasonable. No, no it isn't. True Austrian economics is based on a finite stable money supply, not a dwindling one.

People have tried to reason with you, and people have listened to you, and people have asked you to substantiate what you have to say.  And all you keep doing is repeating the same irrational scaremongering, never engaging people rationally, never substantiating your propositions.

I am tired of your shit.

The bottom line is: if you're so sure that Bitcoin will be a catastrophe "because infinite deflation", don't fucking use it.

And really, you need to let go of your self-importance.  We don't need to change Bitcoin just to assuage your fears.  We do not exist solely to serve you.  Bitcoin wasn't invented for you.  Bitcoin shouldn't change to be what you want it to be.

Bitcoin is the way it is.  Period.  You can either choose to partake in it as it is (in which case, good for you), found your own community (doing all the necessary work), or don't participate at all (in which case nobody will punish you).  There's three perfectly fucking good choices right there for you.  I'll tell you what's not an okay choice: it's not okay to pester, fearmonger, or terrorize us with lies, just so you can get your Ideal Bitcoin imposed on the rest of us.

You need to understand that.

And if you're not going to understand that, you are not a reasonable man.  If that's the case, GTFO already dude, nobody wants to hear your shit anymore.

I can't prove the address is active, I'm dead and the private key is sealed in a gold bar in a safe (perhaps in a bank), Sure whoever I left it to could break it open, but why should they have to? They are the owner of the gold bar now, why does its usefulness as a way to store bitcoins offline have to be made useless?

After really thinking about this some more, and reading through that other thread about a bitcoin design contract, I've reached a conclusion on this. It seems to me that due to the ever-weakening cryptographic protection, there will eventually come a point where people are going to have to transfer their coins over into another address unless they want them to be stolen. This will also mean that all lost coins will eventually get stolen or recovered in some way. This will probably ensure that eventually lost coins will go back into circulation. Although it's not as absolute or repetitive as what I would like, it is probably going to happen at least once. Now this is where coin deletion comes in, some people are saying we should just delete those old coins to make them undependable if they aren't transferred to a new address within a certain time; this really illustrates just how fanatical these people are about infinite deflation.

However I can see the problem with letting all those coins come back into circulation so quickly, it will happen MUCH quicker than the system I propose here, which would have them re-mined at a rate close to the rate they are lost. The market would be flooded with lost bitcoins relatively quickly in a situation where the cryptography weakens to a point where coins become stealable, unless it only weakens to a point where it's still quite hard to steal them and they get reclaimed very slowly, but it's still likely to be much quicker than the system I propose here. However, simply deleting those coins to avert such a problem is absolutely absurd, and that would be much closer to the premise of actually stealing coins from people, since presumably they will have very little time to act before the coins are deleted.

Someone in that other threads puts it very nicely:

You are clearly the one here trying to present your opinion as absolute facts with no flexibility. I'm not demanding that we change bitcoin, I'm presenting my opinion and my rationalization, with the clear understanding that what I am proposing is extremely unlikely to happen; I have stated that multiple times now. You are the one taking it very personally and getting emotionally charged, as if I were attacking you directly. Calm down and stop acting like I'm not allowed to voice my opinions or concerns. I'm not interested if you think I need to shut up or stop using bitcoin, I will do exactly as I please regardless of your bickering and ridiculous demands.

Also can everyone please read what I said at the bottom of the last page to understand my current position on lost coins.

Look and listen, you little shit.  I bought a lot of Bitcoin precisely with the purpose of investing and saving it for a very, very long time.  Your stupid-ass proposal is exactly about robbing me and other people like me, about depriving us of what we worked very fucking hard for, most likely when we will need it the most, about imposing extra uncertainties on top of the long bet we've already signed up for.

How am I supposed to react to that, huh?  Should I write a whitepaper and publish it in a scientific journal?  Should I smile and fart unicorns?

No, turdhead, I'm going to get very pissed.  Justifiedly so.  How should I not get emotionally charged?  Do you seriously think we're playing with marbles here?

Of course I'm taking it personally, you idiot; it's my money you're proposing to endanger.

If I told you that I want to organize people to rob you, to deprive you of your savings, how angry would you be?  I bet you'd be really fucking angry.  If I, to that, added insult to injury by acting "puzzled", failed to respond to good reasons why you shouldn't be robbed, and told you "well I don't know why you get so angry", you'd get even angrier.

Life lesson 1: If you don't want people to get angry at you, don't fuck with other people's money.

He did the same thing on Wikipedia when SudoGhost wouldn't change the wording regarding bitcoin and ponzi schemes.
When he didn't get his way it degraded into personal insults and shitstorm on the talk page.

I tell you what though, this thread has sparked some actual thought from other members so it's not entirely wasted effort I suppose.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1181169/133737022.png

That's more than enough, Rudd-O.

Hahaha, I don't think that picture represents at all what I do, but I gotta admit, it's a pretty hilarious picture and I'm saving it to my GIFs/JPEGs folder.

lol ironically I just finished eating a sandwich before making this reply. The only reason you feel it's such a threat is because you are equating it with theft, but that's a very large stretch to make and has no real basis in reality. Your coins will in no way be endangered because what I'm proposing offers a very large window of time to ensure you don't lose your coins. So there is simply no reason to get so upset about it. Especially when it's so unlikely to happen because of people on your side of the fence. Just because I propose it, doesn't mean it's going to happen. There's simply no reason to get your panties in a such a bunch at the mere proposition. I'm allowed to propose any idea I want, and I expect to have a civil response and discussion about it, not be attacked as if my idea was on the verge of happening.

But it is theft, again

I can't prove the address is active, I'm dead and the private key is sealed in a gold bar in a safe (perhaps in a bank), Sure whoever I left it to could break it open, but why should they have to? They are the owner of the gold bar now, why does its usefulness as a way to store bitcoins offline have to be made useless?

They should have to so that they can prove the active state of the coins and show that they aren't lost, in order to establish a system capable of recycling old coins. That is the price to pay, the trade off for achieving such a system. Yes they "have to" do something that might inconvenience them in a slight way, but it's something which only needs to be done very infrequently, making it almost irrelevant. It does not effect ones ability to store coins offline, it just makes it that tiny bit harder for people who want to store coins in the same address for more than 100 years.

Another scenario: consider the people who consciously destroyed their bitcoins as a charity act: to make a gift to the other bitcoin users. Do you think they will be happy to know that their gift will go to waste (burned by the miners) instead of rewarding the bitcoin holders with the increased value of their coins?

I know these people are not too important, but this whole thread is anyway.

That's a valid point, but I would argue that their "donation" did in fact have an effect for the duration before it was re-mined. It wont have an everlasting effect, but it will be a very long time before that effect is reversed.

Sigh.

The futility of this exchange is simple to summarize:

People who are okay with theft will never be persuaded by reasons why theft is a bad idea.  Reason factors not in their decision.  Otherwise they would have deduced, like most everyone else before them, that what they want is bad.

"Everybody knows that theft is bad".  It would be to the detriment of the thief's interests if his intentions were unmasked.  So a clever thief will pretend what they want is not theft; they'll give you all sorts of made-up lifeboat scenarios to rationalize the theft; they'll even promise that they will spend the loot in a noble cause.  (I believe we've seen pretty much all of the above in this thread.)

In sum: the clever thief will abuse reason (spin a story), not because he himself believes in reason, but because he knows that he can misuse reason to manipulate well-intentioned and reasonable people willing to give him the time of day.

But admit that what they want is theft?  No, of course not.  NE VAR.

The greatest evils ever perpetrated, all of them, without exception, were sold to victims as virtues and solutions.

Such a situation would really only be up for a serious vote if there was an actual way to prove unmoving coins from lost coins.

If there was magically somehow a way to prove that coins were lost, should they be re-introduced into circulation, or is that still "theft" to you?

Yeah, and everybody, except people like you, know what theft is. It's not leaving something untouched for over 100 years and then crying about it when it's taken, when you have countless decades to stop it from being taken.

So to you, destruction of my property (the gold bar) or theft (the reclaimed coins) are the only two options? I don't like it and I never will...

I never proposed "destruction" of anything as an answer, that's the opposite of what I want. This has nothing to do with taking things from you and reallocating them or destroying them simply because you failed to use them. It's an effort to recycle truly lost coins to ensure a stable money supply. Destroying coins would do the absolute opposite of that.

In that other thread about the design contract, it was suggested that when the cryptography protecting coins is weakened to such a state where it needs to be updated, old coins which aren't transferred into the new system within a specified time frame should be destroyed to avoid sudden inflation. I do not agree with that idea at all for two reasons:

1) the time frame for transferring the coins in that case will be very small, and as such will be more akin to theft for those who fail to do so.
2) it will create a truly irreversible decline in the money supply, where as I'm attempting to ensure we have a limited yet stable supply.

I don't think reintroducing lost (truly lost) coins is theft, but I'd wager that anyone who invented the math to do such a feat, can surely figure out a way to reverse the accident that caused them to be lost, giving them back to the person who lost them.  If at all possible, I think that would be the just solution.

Other than that, I'm quite fine with the donation in value that lost coins provide.

My private key is inside a gold bar, in order to do anything with the coins I would need to destroy the gold bar, else you think its okay to steal, sure, i'd still have some gold, but it is now useless as a way to store bitcoins forever

"It's not theft if you didn't do some as-of-today unnecessary ritual that I want to impose on you".

See?  I told you guys.  Reasons matter not -- the thief will invent lifeboat scenarios and false reasons to pretend that his theft isn't theft.

I love Bitcoin because it allows me to protect myself from precisely these types of insidious thieves, who love to invent exceptions to the very simple rule "don't steal".

That would be cutting open the gold bar, not destroying it. And if you did put it in something which had all its value destroyed when opened, it would eventually have to be opened anyway unless you plan to leave the coins sitting there forever, so it's a stupid idea either way and would be your own fault for implementing such a ridiculous idea.

Forever or until I WANT to spend them, why is being able to safely store value for any amount of time a problem for you?
I know no one else has accessed my coins because my gold bar is in tact, I can expect them to be safe because we will never have theft built in.

It's only unnecessary today because we don't have a system which requires it to be done. It would become necessary if we wanted to implement a system capable of recycling lost coins. The "ritual" would have a clear purpose and meaning in that case, making it useful and necessary. And it's not theft if you are given every possible chance to avoid something being taken but still allow it to be taken. Your entire argument basically boils down to "I don't want to have to do this one little thing every hundred years or so". I mean please.

You could store the key in many other things which don't immediately lose a great deal of value when opened, but still provide the same amount of indication that it has been opened. I fail to see your point.

That it is mine and I should not have to open it because a very small minority don't like that they can't steal, regardless of what it is made from

So basically your argument also boils down to the fact you don't want to do this simple thing every 100 years or so... but you take it further and say "oh it's harder for me because I make my private keys hard to access and it costs me a lot of money when I access them. Although I could make it so I don't lose a lot of money when I access them but I don't roll that way.". Saying this shouldn't be implemented because it would ruin your obscure plan is simply absurd. The benefits of it outweigh your freedom to implement your obscure plan.

Its not about it being hard, its about it being a ridiculous request

Exactly.  Guy here is telling you "why is it so hard for you to bend over so I can steal from you?"  Hahaha!  What a guy, eh?

Thieves use reason to manipulate others, but they don't accept reason themselves.  Sorta like a counterfeiter passing fake bills while being careful to get real ones, except in reverse.

--------------------------------------------------

In other news: I stopped being angry when I finally understood that what bitthief! wants is theft.  A couple of hours before it hadn't dawned on me, so I was (understandably) very pissed at him for not comprehending that what he proposes is theft.  I was like "how could you not fucking understand that stealing people's savings is stealing?".

But now that I figured out he doesn't want to understand, my anger's gone, completely replaced by the satisfaction of knowing that Bitcoin has protected me from people like him, who would seek to use subterfuge to steal from me.

Phew!

Prove it.

There's absolutely nothing stopping you from inventing your own cryptocurrency with all the wonderful improvements you can possibly imagine and watching the existing Bitcoin users flock to your superior system. You are also perfectly free not to use Bitcoin if you're worried about the way it works.

I said that much to him, first calmly then angrily.  He didn't ever listen or respond to that.

That's when I understood that he actually wants theft.  That's when it finally made sense for me that he was giving all these nonsensical "reasons" to implement his plan.

Yes... my plan here is to implement this change, so that 100 years from now, I can re-mine your inactive coins when you fail to claim them, never mind the fact that mining isn't exactly the same as getting free coins, or that I'll probably be dead by then. Would you listen to yourself, you're the one trying to manipulate others here with your delusional logic.

Expect continual attempts to do this as Bitcoin gets closer to becoming mainstream.

You don't think the parasites that currently infect the legacy financial system are just going to get go real jobs when the current system is no longer able to feed them, do you?

Just today, I've read four threads about this, two here and two in Reddit.  All of them littered with the same irrational propositions.  It's like all of these idiots' brains malfunction, but malfunction in a very specific, pro-theft way.  What a coincidence!


I absolutely expect them to take to the streets once they figure out that the end of their gravy train is nigh.

Part of "taking it to the streets" is useful idiots doing the Lord's propaganda work of sabotaging that which (they perceive) is costing them the gravy.  This will most def include Bitcoin.

Think about it -- how much do these parasites get from other people's inheritances?  Bitcoin's gonna do away with that gravy train.  Isn't that precisely the point of making long-term Bitcoin savings stealable?

lol you guys really are living in your own little fantasy world aren't you. "Those there mainstream folks are coming to steals our coins yall! Rabble rabble rabble rabble!!!"

You are the one unable to see the reality that fatal changes like what you are asking for will NEVER be a part of bitcoin.

Oh, bitfilch's switched to condescension and derision!  That means he's finally out of lies!  Yippeee!

Yeah, he lives in a fantasy world where he thinks that we'll all bend over and take his theft in the ass.

I do have to love one thing about the whole ordeal in this thread (which I suspect will be ending very soon):

I love that he has to beg.

See, if this was fiat money we were talking about, and he proposed stealing from us via, say, stealing from deposit boxes (which has happened and still does happen today), and he, say, did business under the name "United States", we'd be fucked.  We'd just be robbed and there would be absolutely nothing we could do, just like they do in fact steal from people's deposit boxes today, and make you sue them to get your shit back.

But here, with Bitcoin, he has zero power.  So he has to beg, and he has to lie, and he has to manipulate, and he has to play stupid.  All these demeaning actions, right, that reveal him for what he really is.

I love that shit, because I know that, for all the hot air he might expel, it's inconsequential.  He can't steal my shit.    I quite enjoy when I get to see thieves on the other side of the fence, powerless to get at me.  I like to wave at them, and say "Haha!  Fuck you, you can't steal from me!".

lol the only lies I see here are from you trying to suggest I'm planning this all to steal your coins 100 years from now. Get a grip man, we can all see that is totally false no matter how you try to spin it. I'm suggesting this because I believe it has economic validity, and is more aligned with the Austrian line of thought which Bitcoin was built upon. You witched to condescension and derision in this thread long before I did, so what does that say about you Mr. Super Righteous bitcoiner.

Actually the majority here recognise coin "reclaiming" as theft, they are not your coins to decide the fate of.

I just thought of something.

Bitcoin is really only the first step in protecting oneself from theft.  We can already see how this is too disturbing for statists not to react, sabotage or otherwise defame.  "You need a state to have money" has been refuted by reality.

But there will come a day when someone invents a personal protection shield that prevents you from getting shot, stabbed, beaten or caged.  It's really just a matter of time.

And then, you'll be able to protect yourself, not only from common criminals, but from organized criminals, including those who allegedly exist only to "protect" you.  They won't be able to attack you to get your obedience and your money.  "You need a state for protection" will have been refuted by reality too.

Can you imagine that, for just a second?

I can already envision the headlines in the mainstream media: "Terrorists use unauthorized protection devices", "Only The Government should be allowed to own protection devices", "Evil people evade good taxes with evil protection devices".  And the consequential demonization of anyone who buys, makes or sells one of these...

...proving beyond all doubt that government was never about protecting people.  It was about farming them.  Except it won't matter anymore, because these organized criminals won't be able to do a thing about it.

That'll be the day when statists will literally lose their shit.

inb4 personal shields needing to be proven that they aren't 'lost' by turning themselves off randomly, allowing them to be 'reclaimed'

Yes you may propose the concept of coin recycling as theft, but Rudd-O is now directly accusing me of trying to steal his bitcoins.

1) I wont be stealing anything because I will be dead by the time it happens
2) this system doesn't allow anyone to specifically target any coins to steal
3) the coins will need to be re-mined and not just easy to take at will
4) I argue it's not theft if you are given every chance to secure ownership

Even better, they should ideally turn themselves off by remote control when a "government official" flips a switch.

Don't you see that, if we don't embed this capability in the protection shields, you won't be able to be made to voluntarily contribute your fair share?  Won't you think of the poor children!!?!?

It's not profit, it's financial principals. You just want a system that redistributes value, so that it benefits the economy, regardless of where the value comes from you think the system needs intervention in order to remain stable. Just like existing systems use credit to encourage economic growth, stealing the value from those that already use the currency. You're wanting to implement EXACTLY the same type of value redistribution system that exists in the financial world into the Bitcoin world. I am in the process of walking away from the old ways of managing money and here you are trying to create a revolving door so we all walk straight back into the good'ol days of moving value from those that hold coins to those that could help "stimulate the economy".

Don't like it? implement you're own, oh yeah that's right, you can't because you're here, using Bitcoin, with us. So much for your stance on how finance SHOULD be done in you're opinion, you're a hypocrite and incapable of even following through on your opinions. What's more you believe more strongly in sabotaging what Bitcoin is to further your own deluded notions of how free money works, rather than having the courage to step ahead of the pack, and pioneer a better monetary system in your own space and time.

Hey, bitthief!

Here's the door: http://www.freicoin.org/freicoin-s-superiority-to-bitcoin-t35.html

Don't let it hit your wallet on your way out!  :-)

[tinfoilhat]I wonder... [/tinfoilhat]

I only changed 2 words.

It's like they wrote this as a perfect boilerplate, a fillable form that can be used to excuse practically any form of violence, transgression, suppression, aggression against any people who threatens their power.  This is the perfect example of generic doublespeak.

Wow.

Thank you for at least trying to present an economic analysis and not insults. However what you said here is completely illogical.

Lets try another comparison with gold.

Some times gold is lost. Some times gold is found. Apart from the gold being mined, the supply remains relatively stable, gold doesn't appear from thin air and it doesn't disappear into thin air. So far this is exactly like bitcoin, but it's missing one thing; the ability to find lost money.

The ability to bring lost bitcoins back into the system does not equate to anything you just described above. Now please examine what you just said once again.

It has nothing to do with value redistribution, and everything to do with recovering lost coins in order to maintain a stable money supply, which is aligned with the Austrian theory more than a system which can allow coins to disappear into thin air.

The only time it would be anything like you describe, is if we didn't give any chance for people to prove ownership of coins, and just redistributed them willy nilly regardless of if they seemed lost or not.

This is what it looks like, when you demand that people prove that they own what is theirs:

http://cherylkicksass.blogspot.com/2011/04/why-safe-deposit-boxes-arent-safe-in.html

(Note how the above is exactly what bitthief wants.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/06/family-loses-lawsuit-gold-coins-belongs-to-uncle-sam_n_1862151.html

"Oops, sorry, those are ours.  You bought them, but they're ours because we say so.  Fuck you.  Haha."

As long as you continue to present sensationalist out of proportion arguments I am not going to respond to you.

When you begin making rational and sensible arguments which have some grounding in reality I will pay attention.

You're not convincing anyone.

I didn't read the entire thread since you're original reply, but it seems most of the people have done the talking for me. Because of that I'll keep it brief. Gold is a bad example since governments have tried to do EXACTLY what you are proposing to do to Bitcoin, seize wealth from those that have it sitting doing nothing so it can stimulate economic growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 .

It has everything to do with value distribution. You believe Bitcoin is headed for infinite deflation because no new coins will enter the system at some point. Minting new coins will only be given to miners so essentially new players are incentivised to enter the system down the track to get more free money, to the detriment of the people that already hold and use Bitcoins. You're doomsday prediction will not materialise, we have immense precision, something that can't be fundamentally done with gold in any case. Even with that said, the fact of the matter is, new money WILL enter the system in the form of those that have been longtime holders of coins. Their diligence in keeping those coins safe and their redistribution into the community will be rewarded in the form of a likely generous increase in value.

Your approach is, like I said previously, a deluded, ill-though-out solution to a non-existent problem.

My advice to you is this, stop drywashing your hands over a "problem" of hyperinflated importance in your own mind, crack open a cold beer/soda/poison of choice and revel in the fact that Bitcoin will be just fine.

I'm not convinced that Austrian theory demands the ability to recover lost currency, nor have I seen/heard anything that convinces me that it is a problem for the currency supply to shrink over time.

If it is a FACT that a shrinking money supply will eventually be a problem, then this WILL destroy bitcoin eventually.  However bitcoin is founded on and maintained under the presumption that a shrinking money supply is not a problem so long as the supply can be adequately divided into smaller pieces.  This is the great experiment.  Anyone who does not want to participate in this experiment will switch to an alternate currency that either has mechanisms in place to maintain a consistent money supply, or to increase the money supply over time.

To change this fact about bitcoin is to change what bitcoin is and represents.  Personally, until I see a convincing argument otherwise, I continue to believe that a shrinking money supply is not a problem with a sufficiently divisible currency and am looking forward to see how the experiment plays out.

Seeing as this is the premise that bitcoin is built on, you'll find that many bitcoin users will feel quite strongly that you not change things in the middle of their experiment.

There is no need for it.  Tx fees will cover for mining, or BTC could be used as Satoshi and there you Go !

That is no where near "exactly" what I am proposing. That's forceful extraction of wealth against ones will. My system has a very simple way to avoid one having their coins taken, and the coins are re-mined through complex calculations like they are now, not just redistributed. In reality one can easily leave coins sitting unused for as long as they want, assuming they continue to re-activate the coins each time it's necessary. So once again your analysis is entirely flawed.

This thread should have ended before it started, and even in the worst case scenario, should have ended when freicoin was mentioned... And yet you still won't take "LEAVE MY MONEY ALONE" as an answer...

I never said it would certainly destroy bitcoin, I said it's not economically healthy, any more than infinite inflation is economically healthy. Sure, you could theoretically have infinite inflation, the Government certainly seems to think so, and the value of the currency will simply continue to adjust according to the amount in circulation. But there are still problems with any system which inflates infinitely or deflates infinitely, especially over the very long term. My basic argument is based on the premise that a stable money supply is superior to anything which inflates or deflates infinitely. I'm not saying it's needed to avert some coming doomsday, but it is superior.

Honestly if you don't want to hear this then don't read this thread or participate in it. No one is forcing you to. I see no reason why we should stop this discussion just because you want us to stop. It'll be over when it's over, and no sooner.

It is in my interest to argue against an idea that could make my bitcoins worthless

This is clearly what you are stating.  I just haven't heard anything that convinces me it is true.

I'm saying that a deflating currency is economically healthy.  My basic argument is based on the premise that a deflating money supply is superior.

Arguing against something is different to demanding we stop talking about it. And maintaining a stable money supply does not equate to making your bitcoins worthless.

So let me ask you this. Would you prefer if gold could just vanish into thin air? Price deflation is going to happen whether or not the money supply decreases. As I stated on the other thread, lost coins are going to play a very small role in price deflation compared to growth of the bitcoin economy. This is why the price of gold and silver increases regardless of the fact that gold and silver don't vanish into thin air, and why Austrian economists prefer them over currencies which can be infinitely inflated; because these limited resources are great at holding value and even increasing in value despite the fact that the supply isn't actually getting smaller.

Here's one reason I can think of why infinite deflation is not healthy, and I'm sure there are many more potential problems. Consider an example where at some point far in the future enough coins have been lost that we only have 100 left in active use. Now imagine a day where someone digs up an old private key out of a dusty old box in the attic of their new house, and that key gives them access to an address which holds 100 bitcoins, or even more. Imagine what that would do to the economy if that person now owned more wealth than the entire economy combined. This is just one simple reason why it's inherently unhealthy.

Yes, and while it is extremely unlikely, it is possible. I suspect many bitcoin users would agree that they would prefer that, otherwise why choose to use a currency that was designed to do exactly that?


And how do Austrian economists feel about currencies that can be infinitely deflated?

I don't see anything inherently unhealthy about this scenario.  Note that you are contradicting yourself a bit here.  Either the 100 BTC associated with that dusty address were not "lost", since they were recoverable in which case they should have been considered part of the currency supply, or they were lost and then were "re-mined" by the person who dusted off the private keys, which is an ability you are saying is "superior".

Imagine a scenario where gold has been lost into the deepest part of the ocean over time until there is only 100 kilograms of gold left in active use in the world.  Now imagine someone opens an old dusty trunk in the attic and finds 100 kg of gold.  Same thing.

At this point do you really think that the contradictions, appeals to authority, and other assorted logical fallacies are unintentional?

Sorry for my delayed response. This is really just too easy... let us continue.

Uh huh... nothing at all unhealthy about it. ::)

There are several faulty lines of logic used here. First of all the bitcoins were lost for a long time, but they were found again when the person found the private key in a dusty box. This is not really how bitcoins are lost, they are lost when private keys are destroyed and not recoverable. However, in this case, the private key was written down physically so it was possible to find it again. At this fictional point in the future, it will have been a very long time since the market saw any single account holding such a large amount of bitcoins. As far as the market is concerned, there is essentially only 100 bitcoins in active circulation. Also keep in mind that I am describing bitcoin as it is now, where coins cannot be re-mined, to illustrate why infinite deflation is unhealthy. Reintroducing an amount of coins which appears to be equal to the entire amount left in circulation after hundreds or thousands of years of deflation in the money supply, is going to cause some large upsets. Now in the case where it's possible to re-mine coins, if that person found the key sitting in an old dusty box, and it had remained untouched for over 100 years, the coins would already be gone. In fact if he found those coins 99 years after they were first active, he could use them; but in such a scenario the re-mining process has ensured a stable money supply, meaning his newly acquired 100 bitcoins will have no dramatic effect on the market because there are still nearly all bitcoins in circulation.


Once again this is not the "same thing". When bitcoins are lost they become inaccessible. Gold at the bottom of the ocean is still accessible to those who have the motive. We drill oil from some insanely deep places. And if we lose a majority of our gold in the ocean, there's going to be an extremely big motive for people to go get it. Furthermore, and more importantly, it's very unlikely that we will ever lose a considerable amount of gold in a place which makes it virtually impossible to recover. Bitcoin is entirely different. It's extremely easy to lose with one wrong move, and any single time that any amount of BTC is lost, it goes into a state where it's virtually impossible to recover. Nearly every time we lose gold it's going to be in a state where it's fairly easy to recover. So there are clearly some huge flaws in this analogy, just like all your other analogies.

If you actually knew anything about me you would be in hysterics right now. "Appeals to authority"... lol

Excellent point.  Thanks for the reminder.  I suppose it's jsut about time to activate the billy goat button.

I believe my work here is complete :-)

Ahah... brilliant response. Your childish last resort only helps to confirm that you have no rational counter-argument.

lol just when I thought your job here was complete. That truly is a masterpiece which exemplifies and reflects the great intellect behind it's delicate and painstaking creation. A nugget of gold more brilliant than any of the other nuggets you have so kindly contributed to this thread so far.

Thank you.  It's always nice to be commended by a thoroughly discredited wannabe thief.  :-)

How the hell did you make it this long without your ignore button flashing red?

Hmmmm... lets see.

bitfreak.info (http://www.bitfreak.info)
Bitcoin SCI: process transactions yourself! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56801)
BitShop - digital bitcoin shop script (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128635)
Deja Vu - Bot Scripting IDE (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=121648)

Indeed, I am clearly set out to destroy bitcoin, perpetuate the status quo, and steal all your coins!

MWAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

::)

FREICOIN WILL NOT STEAL YOUR "LOST" BITCOINS

FIRSTLY Freicoin is not released, it will be released on 21-DEC-2012. Please click this link for real information on the coin. (http://freico.in/)

Guys. Please do not believe Rudd-O's troll attempt to youtube RawDog the unreleased Freicoin software.

I cannot any longer ignore Rudd-O's attempts to tie Freicoin to stealing your lost Bitcoins.  He is even posting Reddits on this topic. (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/15148t/do_you_have_an_irrational_fear_of_lost_coins/)

Lost coins was not even a design consideration of Freicoin.

well, not exactly lost coin retrieval, but the slight fee would slowly reintroduce lost coins to circulation, or do i misunderstand how it works?

listening!

With the slight fee half of the lost coins will be reintroduced in 15 years. It will take another 15 years to get to 3/4 reintroduction. Reintroduction behaves asymptotically like the Bitcoin supply curve, how it will never be quite 21 million but its always approaching it.

The lost coins will never be fully reintroduced. We don't see lost coins as a problem and Freicoin was not created to fix this problem. Please see the site for information about what Freicoin is trying to do. http://freico.in/

OK, I gotta intervene.  You got me all wrong.

First, let me say this: Freicoin looks like an interesting experiment.  It appears that Freicoin proponents have a comprehensive economic theory, which appears wrong to me, but I could be wrong myself.

So, test it!

The economic theories behind Freicoin should be put to the test -- Freicoin should be released.  Then, we shall see how it fares among the people that choose to use Freicoin (just like we're seeing people choose Litecoin today).

Once you guys have a sizable base of users, it'll be very easy to test whether the testable part of the theory behind Freicoin stands (including claims like "non-zero basic interest is the cause of the boom-bust cycle").

But the very first thing, the absolute first thing that needs to happen, is this: Freicoin is going to need users, and these users need to voluntarily choose to use Freicoin over other currencies.

Until that happens, there's not even a glimmer of hope that the economic theories behind Freicoin can be tested (with the implications that such a reality carries).  The key behind this observation: testing Freicoin in a scenario where people are threatened with punishment if they choose another digital coin, would instantly invalidate all tests of Freicoin, because the experiment would have been contaminated by said aggression-based intervention.  If you were an experimenter, and you threatened people to make a choice in the experiment, then your observations in the experiment are only applicable when people are subject to threats.

It should be obvious that, if no one chooses to use Freicoin, it's clear that the people who could have chosen of their own free will to use Freicoin, have declared through their actions that Freicoin is not good enough for them, and that they prefer other alternatives (like Litecoin, Solidcoin or Bitcoin).  In this case, whatever the Freicoin theories say is entirely irrelevant, as irrelevant as theories about unicorns.

So, let's see how Freicoin does.  Let's see if people willingly choose "freedom from usury" while paying the associated price. My most sincere wishes for success.

I, for one, would LOVE to hear it.

http://freico.in/about/  ;)

It seems you are late with freicoin.

The Treasury already has assets on sale with negative interest. Will they also spark an economic miracle?

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8b76525a-486b-11e2-a1c0-00144feab49a.html#axzz2FWwaEWlj

You must read zerohedge, or a similar gloom and doom blog? That doesn't really mean what you think it means. I participated in this bond auction, but I was buying 30 year bonds. The interest rate was 2.75%, not negative. God bless America. Thanks.

It is in real terms.  The average annual inflation over prior 30 years was 3.07%.  2.75% - 3.07% =  -0.32% real return.

You don't think the next 30 is going to be less inflation do you?  I mean at this point the best we can hope for would be "only" ~3% inflation.   If we get a period like from 1973 to 1981 in there well ouch. 

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/

Good luck.

I hate to be the one to say it, but that freicoin manifesto is a cesspit of keynesian gibberish and populist nonsense.  Calling it a "comprehensive economic theory" is to go zero for three.

Technically, not keynesian.  I'd say it's arguablely a variety of a monetarist theory, although not of the dominate set.

Keynes had more to say than just "print more".  I see a lot of his other blather in there.

Since this Freicoin thing apparently doesn't deal with lost coins I don't see how it's relevant to this discussion any more. I personally think Bitcoin is almost perfect as a currency how it is, except for that one little thing; lost coins. As I have stated multiple times, I don't think it's something which will absolutely lead to the downfall of Bitcoin, but as I have clearly explained there are aspects of infinite deflation which can lead to an unhealthy Bitcoin economy. Just as there are aspects of infinite inflation which can lead to an unhealthy economy, they are both fundamentally flawed.

I'm not talking about making Bitcoin an inflationary currency, if lost coins are eventually recovered we will still see price deflation because of economic growth, just as we do now even though new coins are being mined. In terms of the money supply, bitcoin should be neither deflationary nor inflationary. It should strive to maintain a stable money supply where the value of each unit is solely driven by natural market forces, and not driven by changes in the size of the money supply. Now you can disagree with me on this, but I have yet to hear any truly solid counter-argument.

I think the economics of a system which has a stable money supply is clearly superior to any money system which has an infinitely increasing or infinitely decreasing money supply. And until I hear a truly solid argument for why my economic theories are wrong in this respect, I will always argue that Bitcoin needs to be transformed into the most superior state which is built for long term robustness and economic stability. The solution to the absurdity of infinite inflation of the money supply is not infinite deflation of the money supply, in reality both fail to understand the basic premise of a stable money supply.

Well, its a comprehensive economy theory. You may just happen to disagree with it. :)  As an aside the Freicoin network now has around 5GH/s hashing power. I couldn't be happier with how people from all over the globe have pitched in to help this fledgling cryptocurrency take off.

I agree that Freicoin is WAY different, and not really relevant.

Please provide at lease SOME detail on what your basis is for stating that a stable number of coins is required. I'm still waiting for anything better than a blanket assertion.

At this point I am completely unconvinced that losing some or even most BitCoins is a bad thing, as long as everyone understands that they are lost forever (or until the theoretical possibility of cracking keys allows limited reclamation.)

Help me understand your basis for this belief and I will either understand your point and agree, or point out where our reasoning differs. It is possible that one of us is making a significant logic error, but refusing to talk about your reasoning is not going to help anybody.

See Scrybe's post just before this one.

That document does not describe any theory, does not appear to be about economics so much as jealousy, and can hardly be thought of as comprehensive.  Zero for three.

Well a few pages back we already began discussing some unhealthy scenarios which can develop from an infinitely deflationary currency. Some of this discussion has been quoted below. If you can follow up where the argument stopped and provide some solid counter-points I will consider them seriously. But you also bring up another good point about cracking keys; eventually most coins will come back into circulation when keys become easy enough to crack, and it's possible a situation like this could flood the market with lost coins which have been out of circulation for a long time. This idea to re-mine lost coins could help to offset any situation like that because it will help stabilise the money supply and not allow it to dwindle down to a dangerous or risky point were a sudden inflow of coins could cause great harm to the economy.

Well lots of flaws there.

1) Your system would only "expire" coins after 100 years so a huge number of coins found which were previously "lost" for 99 years would have the same shock/impact on the system.

2) Your system would result in chaotic amounts of supply.  Coins are "lost" at a regular pace and thus they won't expire at a regular pace.  The supply will jump chaoticly 100 years after periods when a spike of lost coins occured.

3) You system wouldn't have any effect until 100 years.  If deflation is truly an issue it is very likely Bitcoin will fail or be replaced decades prior to the system ever retiring the first coin.  If the system does last a century it likely doesn't need any change.  The economy has adapted to the concept of a slowly and regularly deflating currency.  The worst possible thing would be sudden and rampant inflation (which could be well over 50% on an annualized basis).

4) Your belief that Bitoins being lost =/= Gold being lost is flawed because you think a crypto algorithm will never be compromised.  The history of crypto-analysis has shown that to be incorrect.  In time RIPEMD-160 and/or ECDSA will be compromised and thus coins can be "remined" by treasure hunter.  This is very similar to gold from shipwrecks being recovered due to the improvement of technology over time. 

BTW you still haven't proven that there is a problem with inflaiton or deflation.  The issue with inflation isn't INFLATION ITSELF.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with inflaiton if it is fair.  Hypothetically tomorrow imagine all your USD double.  All the cash in your pocket, all the money in your bank, the value of any bonds or CDs, etc.  Also your wages double and all prices double.  Has anything changed?  Nope.  The issue with Fractional Reserve Banking is that INFLATION OCCURS UNEQUALLY.   There is a lag from the creation of new money to the change in prices.  Those close to the top of the pyramid (central banks, banks, major corporations, the ultra wealthy) can PROFIT from inflation.   Since money isn't wealth, money is an accounting system if someone is profiting then someone is suffering a loss.  Fractional Reserve Banking and the unequal inflation that comes with it is a mechanism for transfering the wealth not from the 99% but more like the 99.99% to the 0.01%.

These two points are basically addressing the same point. To answer the first point specifically, there wouldn't really be a "spike" because the coins would be re-mined at the same rate they were lost. So maybe if we had a spike of coins lost within the same week or something, it might cause a little market turbulence. However, the idea is to make the time period for coin expiry short enough to make sure the money supply hasn't experienced too much deflation via lost coins, but also long enough to ensure people aren't terribly inconvenienced or feel threatened by it. If you were to graph the change in the money supply under this system, it would show some sort of waveform. However, this wave form will eventually flatten out, because as I mentioned a few pages ago, once the re-mining process begins it will continue without stopping, so that on any day after re-mining starts, the system is re-mining any coins lost 100 days before that time.

I'm thinking in the very long term here. The amount of deflation incurred via lost coins in the next 100 years is certainly not going to pose any hazard to the bitcoin economy imo, but that's not the point. The point is building a system capable of dealing with and removing that threat of having a high enough degree of inflation that bringing in a large amount of coins via recovery of large amounts of extremely old coins or some other method, such as crackers finding ways to crack private keys. 100 years simply isn't enough to time to measure the problem, and if bitcoin lasts the next 100 years nicely, it does not mean that infinite deflation wont eventually lead to problems.

Yes I agree, I do believe that these algorithms will eventually be easily cracked, I've noted that several times. And that is a fair analogy to gold, but I still must note one important thing; the time it takes for those algorithms to be compromised, and the time it takes for their successors to be compromised, is highly random and very unpredictable, and could be more than 100 years. Furthermore, the recovery of the lost coins in that way wont be regulated by the normal mining process and may flood the market in very small periods of time. In reality we are highly unlikely to recover any substantial amount of gold from the deep ocean within a small period of time. This is why the main advantage of my system is to help offset the potential harm which can be caused by a sudden influx of inactive coins, by keeping the money supply at a relatively stable and high level.

That's something I have also noted. The Governments of the world could technically keep causing inflation forever, and businesses could just keep raising prices and paying us more and so on. I'm not sure how they could create a "fair" amount of inflation, but as you noted it does generally cause an effect which can benefit certain people unfairly compared to others. Perpetual deflation can unfairly benefit people who have lots of bitcoins, which is something I don't particularly mind because presumably they have risked a lot on bitcoin. However what I do mind is when people can unfairly find high amounts of coins when a high amount of the money supply has already been lost (think very long term). Inflation can cause similar problems when money keeps being injected into circulation to maintain liquidity and help service debts, but keeps being sucked up by the most powerful corporations on Earth and filtered up to their top share holders. I would be willing to bet that some of these people now hold enough money to cripple the economy of multiple nations.

Cracking Keys is an exception case that needs to have a minimal planning performed now, but will have unique needs depending on when and how it is broken. Your proposal to re-mine lost coins will not prevent anyone from cracking this encryption, nor will it protect any coins. The only effect your policy would have is forcing some users who didn't have their coins stolen in the first 100 years of bitcoin to move them to a new cipher or lose them. If the break in encryption comes before your re-mining mechanism kicks in then there is no effect at all. Re-mining does not improve the cracked encryption scenario practically, agreed?


You keep referencing "infinite" which means "going on forever" the very use of that word implies that there is no end or curve, but it just goes and goes "TO INFINITY!" Given a realistic situation as bitcoins get lost more and more rational people will place a higher and higher value on the remaining coins. Since they are worth more, extra care will be take to ensure that they are NOT lost, and you will end up with a long tail of deflation that reaches the FAR FAR future long before the number of BitCoins can realistically reach a point that it is unusable. Even if 1 million years from now there is only 1 Satoshi left that is an acceptable end for me, since that 1 satoshi will be worth a fortune in bitcoin 7.0 or something. Even if we lose 1% of all BTC every year, we will have a functional economy for generations before we need to add precision. Your infinity problem is so much farther than 100 (or likely even 1000) years away. We will not see bitcoin erode into something unusable within your lifetime by your own admission, right?


This is simply economic uncertainty, and should be part of the investor equation. Anyone investing in BitCoins when there are only 100 left should know that there USED to be 21 million, and that there is a chance that some will come back online. This is a risk to investing in bitcoin that is infinitesimal right now, but will grow over time as coins are lost, why would future investors not be aware of it? The problem is that the chance of "crashing" the bitcoin economy with found coins will require either a LOT of coins, or a LOT of lost coins, but again, this is a risk, not a certainty. Risk of devaluation due to an event like this is real, but unlikely. Are you proposing that we have to build a perfect system that does not require diversification of investments?

I don't see anything here that says that deflation over a long time is bad, or that we need to weaken bitcoin to prevent risk in the future.

I never said anything which would imply that my proposal to re-mine coins would prevent anyone from cracking the encryption. I said it would help offset the problems caused when we do need to change over to a new encryption scheme, and the lost coins which aren't safely secured in a new address are recovered. If this were to happen when the money supply is very low, all those recovered coins will upset the market in a drastic way. But it will also happen in other scenarios, such as if someone finds a large stash of lost bitcoins after the money supply is already very low. By maintaining a near-max and stable money supply none of these problems can manifest into reality, thus proving the superior nature of a stable money supply.

It doesn't matter how good we become at making sure coins don't get lost, because they will always continue to get lost, so it is infinite no matter how you look at it. And the problem I'm putting forward has nothing to do with the money supply reaching a level which is too small to use, it's the potential problems which can arise when the money supply has become that small; such as sudden and unexpected recovery of long lost coins, which can unfairly put certain individuals in a very powerful positions. And the fact that the level of deflation in my life time wont pose any problem does not negate the fact eventually we will see problems, whether it's in my life time or 10 generations from now. The point is we need a secure and robust currency capable of lasting countless generations.

It doesn't matter if future investors are or are not aware of it, the risk should preferably not be there in the first place if it's possible to avoid that risk, which it is by maintaining a stable money supply. The unhealthy economic hazards generated by infinite inflation and infinite deflation are both unnecessary hazards which can be removed from the equation by implementing the most reliable economic system; a limited stable money supply with high divisibility. I strongly believe that the only things which should apply a force on the market price of any currency should be natural market forces such as supply and demand, and not a change in the size of the money supply, whether by increasing the money supply or decreasing it. Price deflation will happen naturally under a stable system, you don't need to have a declining money supply.

I snipped your points down for brevity, and to get verify my understanding. Please correct me if I missed your intent on them.

I see one risk scenario presented repeatedly, the re-introduction of "lost" bitcoins causing destabilization. Are there other scenarios that your proposal would help outside of this?

In fact by re-introducing large numbers of coins lost (to hackings or other events already past, and more in the future) you are causing the very event that you are talking about preventing.

4 more questions:

Please explain how your mechanism, that will certainly cause destabilization by re-introducing large amounts of lost coins once every 5 generations, is superior to the current solution that only has the potential to cause a similar destabilization in a rare event (that should have plenty of warning.)

Irreversibility of transactions is a key component of BitCoin, is this threat larger than those posed by reversible transactions needed for reclamation?

Why do you assume that you are smarter and better able to plan for their future than your actual great-great-great-grandchildren?

How does your economic theory behind this proposal handle multiple existing and many potential new currencies with different inflationary, deflationary, noninflationary, demurrage, pure-debt, and others? Are you considering a marketplace or basket approach, or treating BitCoin as an exclusive currency?

The basic idea is that it will fix any problems that are associated with infinite deflation. I have described how some of those problems may occur, but there are probably other benefits that come with a stable money supply which we haven't explored yet.

As I already explained, the only disturbance will be when the re-mining process starts, because after it starts it would continue every day re-mining coins lost 100 days before that day, it would not be a reoccurring problem. The reason for making it 100 years is because if the re-mining process begins in 100 years it wont cause much of a disturbance, and it's long enough to make people feel safe with the re-activation process. As I vaguely explained, if this process where graphed one would expect to see an oscillating waveform pattern which evens out rather quickly. And the advantage of this is that we can maintain a high percentage of active coins and a stable money supply, so in the future (much more than 100 years) there is no risk of sudden lost coin influxes.

Once again, nothing will reoccur every 100 years, nor will a problem even occur once, since if the re-mining process does begin in 100 years, we will still be mining new bitcoins and the amount of coins lost will not be anything to worry about; bringing back those lost coins in 100 years at the same rate they were lost would not cause any real disturbances. From that point the network would adjust to the new system and it will be smooth sailing from that point on... so put another way, the size of the money supply should be expected to fluctuate around a level equal to the maximum size of the money supply minus the average number of coins lost within 100 years.

It's not exactly the same as making transactions irreversible, because first of all the coins are actually re-mined and distributed to miners who input energy to recover them. This is the main advantage that my system has compared to simply letting lost coins be recovered when cryptographic algorithms become compromised; it's impossible to regulate at what speed and difficulty those coins can be recovered. And by maintaining a high percentage of active coins we offset the potential damage which can be caused when lost coins are recovered by hackers, as I've explained multiple times. And second of all, it's extremely easy to stop the re-mining of any coins and you have 100 years before there's any chance of anything being reversed.

a few hundred years ago many wooden boats with their chests of gold sunk to the bottom of the sea, too deep to ever get to the gold ever again.

more recently gold is being used to make objects and those objects end up in land-fills never to enter circulation again..

trying to get to that gold is not called helping the economy. its called treasure hunting and trying to get rich off of other peoples forgetfulness..

i DO NOT condone any activity where someone can sweep my address if i left the funds in there for a few decades. its mine.



(replace the word gold with btc in this next statement)
if you want gold then buy some at a shop/ goldsmiths. DONT try imposing a law that if gold is not recirculated within 20 years, then it can be taken off of you.

99% of us here agree with you, even Gavin said that doing anything about reclamation of lost coins is "Bottom line: ain't gonna happen" https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=79576.msg882591#msg882591 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=79576.msg882591#msg882591)

It's also been rehashed in at least 10 other threads in the last 2 years. I'd urge you not to get dragged into bitfreak's craving for lecturing. He has been condescending, patronising, dismissive and is completely self-absorbed in his "lost coins". He is what I like to call a believer. He believes so completely in his own opinions, all that is left for him to do is to get others round to his way of thinking. I have already made my case, and he has conveniently ignored my points if he couldn't easily argue around them, spoke patronizingly and insultingly to nearly everyone here, even longtime forum members, and lastly, continually fails to take a hint, as if the open hostility shown towards him were somehow reassurance he is on the right track.

Hit the ignore button like I did and mosey on to the next thread dude. ;)

We have already gone over these analogies to gold, and while they are partially true, they are still full of holes because 1) it's extremely easy to lose bitcoins in the "deep dark ocean" with one wrong move and 2) unlike gold all bitcoins lost go straight to the bottom of the sea and 3) we can eventually recover such gold in a slow and difficult recovery/re-mining effort. As it stands right now we will only ever recover lost coins by waiting until certain protection mechanisms weaken to a point where it forces bitcoin to move over to new encryption algorithms, and such a situation may lead to a sudden and unregulated influx of long lost coins. As I have already explained in great detail, a re-mining process can offset this risk by regulating the recovery process and making sure that we never have too many lost coins ready to be recovered and disturb the market.

Like many other similar statements made in this thread, that statement does not match the reality of the situation. Firstly, I don't "want bitcoins" by re-mining from others, I will be dead by the time the re-mining process even starts and I would still need to input energy to re-mining the coins just like any other miner. Second of the all the system is not designed to make sure coins are circulating, if you want to keep your coins all it takes it one simple action to indicate that your coins are still active by sending a tiny amount from the old address to any of your other addresses. To use our gold analogy, this would be like shifting a small amount of gold from one of your safes into another one of your safes, you haven't recirculated any coins to anyone else in the process and your coins remain yours for another 100 years.

Just when I thought this debate was reaching a calm and rational level of discussion you have to start slinging around turds to make a point. The "the open hostility shown towards me" only reassures me of the fact that some people here are extremely emotional individuals. Perhaps you should take a look in the mirror and realise the condescending and dismissive attitude is extremely prevalent in your own approach. Furthermore, you are the one who stopped our discussion mid-way when I provided a counter-point which you presumably could not counter yourself.

Now lets get back on track please. Keep me ignored and stop reading this thread if it upsets you. Otherwise present your opinion in a calm and rational way if you want me to listen.