Bitcoin Forum

What exactly is the "core design", though? Can apparently-lost coins expire at some point? Can they be "recycled". Can the subsidy algorithm change as long as there are always fewer than 21 million bitcoins? If precision is increased, should this also increase the BTC limit slightly to be consistent with the current right-shift-based subsidy code? Etc.

To make this stuff clear, I think that an explicit "Bitcoin contract" should be written and included in all Bitcoin clients which says exactly what properties are guaranteed by the Bitcoin network. For example, there should certainly be no more than 21 million bitcoins in existence at any one time. If anyone tries to change these guaranteed properties (via a BIP, for example), it will be easy to point to the Bitcoin contract and say that any network with the proposed changes would not be Bitcoin.

One example of where this would be especially useful: It is likely that at some point ECDSA will be weakened and everyone will need to send their BTC to different addresses that use different signing algorithms. However, lost coins will not be moved, and when ECDSA is finally broken, these lost coins will be spent by random people. This will increase supply a lot, perhaps more than should be allowed. Perhaps old coins should be "expired" before this can happen. But does expiring coins violate the Bitcoin core design? A contract should exist to solve conflicts of this kind.

The core design is anything that doesn't involve a hard-fork. So...

No, no, no, and yes if it ever happens.

If it'll shut up the people who keep complaining about lost coins, I'm all for it.

It won't increase the supply any more than the original limit, and in any case, most proposals for "expiring" old coins involve sending them to miners, ie, randomly distributing them according to computer power, which is exactly what will happen if ECDSA is ever broken. Remember, a lot of people will still be (unwisely) using old versions of Bitcoin long after ECDSA is broken (and it won't go from "completely safe" to "any key can be cracked in less than day" overnight, either), and it wouldn't be fair to effectively say to them "Hackers might steal your coins in the future, so we've arbitrarily decided to save them the trouble and steal them now."

Personally I'd like to see them simply destroyed.  If coins go up in value a large amount then someone's old 10KBTC wallet they abandoned when it was enough to buy a pizza will suddenly come on the market, along with hundreds of others, whenever the first expiration date comes up.  It might also create weird distortions in hashrate.  Overall it's bad from a market perspective.

Simply destroying them will reestablish the number of coins that are still in circulation; overall I consider that a good thing.

It'll have to wait for an alt coin though since it's unlikely to happen in BTC.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and have recently commented about it here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131101.msg1404575#msg1404575), completely oblivious to this post of yours. Talk about coincidence.

In this context it should be clarified what a "bitcoin" is. A "split" where all bitcoin balances are multiplied by 1000 (so there are now 21B coins; technically, it just means the word "bitcoin" is now used to denote 100,000 satoshis) is not against the core design and can be considered (not saying it's a good idea).

No, some hard forks are not against the core design and will be necessary eventually. e.g., fixing the difficulty adjustment off-by-one bug, or a new hash function (and/or protocol for including different hash functions) when SHA256 is sufficiently weakened.

Increasing precision or adjusting the subsidy rules at all are certainly hard-fork changes...


Redistributing lost coins in any way doesn't affect the overall money supply, but it would greatly increase the supply in circulation. The fact that lost coins are lost forever is maybe something that should be a guarantee of the system (where possible). If lost coins can eventually be spent through either weak crypto or intentional changes, this should at least be explicitly stated so that people don't rely on lost coins being lost when making long-term predictions.


Wow, that is a strange coincidence!


Agreed.

The contract is the code. If people vote to include a major change, then they can vote to change a contract.

Let bitcoin evolve. If a meatspace authority steps in and demands a change, let them, and we will fork. Be water, my friend.

While this is true and a change of this contract with consent of a part of the network can't be stopped just like a part of the network can't be stopped from not changing it, it's still computer code that not everyone can read.

How I understand theymos' suggestion is to translate the contract contained in the code into a more simple, human language that anyone can understand and I fully support it.

If it were up to me, this could be displayed under Help -> About, and the same contract could also be displayed on bitcoin.org and in any other clients the code of represents the same contract.

you guys feeling loopy?  recycle expiring coins?  so no one is allowed to hoard then since dormant coins are being recycled?  everyone gets a bitcoin for christmas or something?

Not sure who you are talking to, but theymos and I suggested the opposite, deleting expiring coins; and only when the alternative is that they will be commandeered by whoever breaks the signature algorithm.

I don't think they should.  "Expired" coins in any form violate the understanding of irreversible transactions.   It is a major selling point to say Bitcoin is irreversible.   Once you start clouding that up it becomes Bitcoins is "pretty much" irreversible (which means it is kinda like ACH in that most people think it is irreversible but in reality it can be reversed to your destriment.

Proactively stealing wealth because it is in an "insecure" address is still stealing.  If ECDSA is weakened history would indicate there will be significant time to transistion coins to new address types which are more secure.   Most people will transistion their coins.  Some won't due to negligence and some won't because the coins are truly loss.  Eventually those coins will be "stolen" much like "lost" Gold from a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean is recovered.

The protocol should never try to "protect people" by confiscating their wealth.  That would be a deathblow for Bitcoin.  The state already does a pretty good job of protection via confiscation I don't think Bitcoin can really compete in that arena.

Then Bitcoin is reversible if/when the elites decide a person isn't being secure enough.  Hardly p2p, hardly commerce without a trusted third party.  They day that happens is the day I am done with Bitcoin.  The social contract (written or otherwise) has been broken.  It would be like governments (still on gold standard) outlawing the recovery of gold from shipwrecks and then pretending the price of Gold is set by market prices. 

"Comandeering their signature" and mining them are exactly equally legitimate ways of obtaining BTC. Also, I don't understand why are you still polluting Bitcoin with your dimwitted presence. Don't you have some banal crap to repackage into a pdf or some nonsense "vanity" threads to make or somesuch?


Amusingly, recovery of gold from shipwrecks is forbidden in the sense that it must be given up to the Admiralty.

As to the OP: fundamentally bad idea, as it simply adds a weakness to be exploited / attack vector for no benefit. It is in fact borne of the same root as the TSA etc. Fortunately it is also impracticable, in the sense that nobody has the authority to do this (specifically, the current dev team certainly does not, if that's who you were thinking of).

Here are some examples of things are not possible without a hard fork:

• Increasing the block size limit
• Increasing the precision
• Having a non-zero subsidy after block 6930000
• Allowing miners to collect coins that are over a certain age

Here are some things that are possible without a hard fork (but with miner consensus):

• Require a 10% fee on every transaction
• Introduce a new scripting language or cryptographic primitive
• Limit the subsidy (including fees) to 1 BTC, forever.

Judge for yourself.

It wouldn't be reversible. The money just becomes unspendable. I don't advocate recycling the lost coins.

If 500 tons of gold were lost at the bottom of the ocean for many years and the loss of this gold therefore gets factored into the gold price, I think that gold would be a better currency if the lost gold is never found because the price would then be more stable. No one is hurt if the gold isn't found because it's already lost. Preventing obviously-lost money from being found isn't possible with gold, but it is possible (backward-compatible, even) with Bitcoin.


Your view on what the "social contract" guarantees is different than the views of me, gmaxwell, and Meni. This conflict of opinions is exactly why an explicit contract is needed: to resolve conflicts of this sort and to inform Bitcoin users about exactly which guarantees "the Bitcoin network" will always provide.


This is part of it, though I also want to specify which major changes are "allowed" to the core Bitcoin design in the future. Obviously this contract can't be enforced by the network, but it would be useful to write it down to make sure that all developers and users are on the same page.

It's not to protect the owners. It's to prevent the economy from being shaken when someone breaks ECDSA and wins all the lost coins.

Oh, I'm nowhere near finished. My next pdf will be about ad hominem attacks and the probability of protecting against them with the use of the ignore button.

I don't understand why this keeps coming up, the issue of destroying or recycling old coins that is. But if it even seems like this is going to happen. I will stop using Bitcoin. And I suspect that I am not the only one in this category.

I have bitcoins stored in such a way that their private key has never been on a harddrive and they are stored in a way that was designed to be passed down from one generation to another. Destroying coins is destroying these.

I have a sort of "retirement" cold storage key (also, not ever having been on a harddrive, but stored in another way). Destroying coins on a timescale of anything less than a lifetime makes it more difficult and less secure to handle these coins.

Please don't destroy old coins. Please don't recycle old coins.

Please stop bringing up the topic.

+1

People wanna steal old money?

Keynesians in my Bitcoin? YOUDONTSAY_NICCAGE.JPG!

Statists gonna state, I guess.

As I said in the other thread: the beauty of Bitcoin is that no one is forced to use it. If you want to invent a Bitcoin competitor where people can steal other people's money under the pretense that it is about 'recovering lost coins' or 'improving the economy', you can. See how well it does against real Bitcoin. But changing the existing Bitcoin to suit your political opinions? Ha, good luck.

+1

lol so now we have people in this thread suggesting the old coins should just be destroyed. Yeah that's certainly a more sound and rational alternative to having them re-mined. Wouldn't want to cause any unnecessary volatility in a few decades now would we.  ::)

Your comment above I think really illustrates the main problem with recycling or destroying old coins, people are scared of losing coins held in long term cold storage. However, in my other thread, which is presumably the reason this for this threads manifestation, I suggested a very easy way to circumvent that problem.

One must simply show the network that the address in question is still active within a reasonable time frame, 100 or 150 years, or what ever. This is most certainly not unreasonable in my opinion. If you leave something sitting untouched and abandoned for over 100 years someone is going to find it and take it thinking it's lost.

Same here. Bitcoin should not "reign supreme". An alt currency can "fix" this. Satoshi didn't comment on what to do with old coin because he didn't intend for there to be anything done with old coin.

If ECDSA is compromised, it's going to take effort for these old lost wallets (even those with 10k+ of BTC) to get compromised anyway, and we're probably going to know about it because one of them will be compromised before the first paper explaining the details is published, anyway. It will likely be a qualified researcher who then uses the money as a grant for more research.

Also, a weakness in ECDSA might only mean certain key combinations are weak, and the treasure hunting might still be very expensive and provide alternatives to mining. We don't really know, nor can we predict how it might unravel.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: I don't like this idea because it allows for "human error". Specifically the kind of error where a human makes any sort of decision at all. Let the code be. I don't want a developer, God, or government making these kinds of decisions, so we shouldn't touch it.

No the price would not be more stable. It would shift in one direction constantly for as long as we used it. But we don't live in some irrational world where lost gold can never be found again, so the opposite thing also applies; when gold is found the market adjusts and factors that into the gold price. In a world where all the gold has been mined, we would only have some gold being lost and some gold being found. Overall, this would result in the value of gold remaining at a stable pace, and not shifting infinitely in any one direction. The main factor applying a change to the value of gold will be natural market forces such as supply and demand in accordance with natural economic growth. It doesn't take a genius to see that this economic model is by far superior to a model which shifts infinitely in one direction, whether that direction is inflation or deflation. Both options taken to infinite extremes are not economically sound.

I'm a certified genius, and I see no problem with gold going up in price forever.  I've seen absolutely zero evidence to believe that "a commodity going up forever" is bad, which makes this belief a faith-based irrationality.

Fact is, as long as businesses can predict the rate of change in value of any commodity and plan accordingly, there's nothing wrong with a commodity going up or down.

Here's how I know that implementing "theft of long-term storage coins" is a bad idea: someone already implemented this very concept -- called demurrage, purported to be "fair" -- in an altcoin called Freicoin; that shit tanked and went nowhere.  That was 100% predictable -- lots of people want other people's money to be stolen, but nobody wants their own money to be stolen.

It's really simple to know whether something is a bad idea or not: just observe people's choices (when they are not being forced to do a particular thing), and you'll know what's "better".  People choose Bitcoin over dollars because people judge Bitcoin to be better than dollars.  People choose Bitcoin over Freicoin because people judge Freicoin to be worse.

You're grasping at straws. Demurrage has absolutely no similarity to what we've discussed - which is a technical solution aspiring (with debatable prospect of success) to make Bitcoin closer to its idealized design in the face of the harsh practical realities.


Is discussion of particular items that could go into the design contract on-topic for this thread? Or is it meant to be more meta?

Are you guys high!!???  Don't fucking recycle or make unspendable old coins!  ONE OF THE MAIN FEATURES OF BITCOIN IS A STORE OF VALUE!!!

If and when ecdsa is cracked, everybody will hear about it.  And even if they don't-- making coins unspendable is WORSE than having them be stolen.  If they are unspendable, the legitimate account holder can never spend them.  If they are steal-able by cracked ecdsa, they may get stolen, but the account holder MAY ALSO SPEND THEM HIMSELF.  So in one scenario, the legit holder can NEVER spend them, and in the other, he MIGHT be able to.  MIGHT is clearly preferable to NEVER unless everybody universally agrees that spiting a thief is worth a lot of money.

Stop trying to make giant protocol changes!!  Leave britany bitcoin alone!!!!!!!!!!!

Even if these ideas were incredibly similar, his argument is still entirely invalid because most alt coins fail regardless of their apparent advantages. Not to mention, we are talking about the recycling or deletion of coins which will happen a long time from now, so anything which implements that idea wont even be able to test how well it works until that time is reached when it comes into effect.

The only reason they want to delete them is because they don't want truly lost coins to come back into circulation, which reveals the real motive for why some people here don't want coin recycling to happen, but would be fine with coin deletion, even when that's clearly the worste option. It has nothing to do with the potential to "steal" coins, but because they want infinite deflation and the benefits it offers coin hoarders.

edit: clarified above statement, wasn't thinking clearly when I first wrote it.

Forever is a long time to keep a promise. Even if you tattoo "21M BTC / 10 minutes" on your forehead. The "Social Contract" is the right metaphor to bring up here, because the truth is that there's nothing cryptographic, mathematical, or algorithmic that keeps the rules from changing. Even constitutions can be amended. So, the future of Bitcoin will be determined by much fuzzier social things than the rhetoric (like "in cryptography we trust") suggests. It's worth talking about these processes and our values/priorities now, rather than sweeping these concerns under the rug.

If Bitcoin continues to survive, then at least one of the following statements must be true:

1. Bitcoin will never face a crisis where a (timely) hard fork is required to prevent disaster/collapse.
2. If a hard fork is required, then the best choice for the new rule set will be unambiguous or the community will quickly reach consensus.
3. Eventually there will be a substantial split between two forks within the community.

My biggest concern is that it will eventually become apparent/obvious to a large portion of the community that a major technical change will be necessary for future prosperity (for example, UTXO commitment, altered between-blocks interval, modified proof-of-work puzzle, UTXO rental fees or demurrage, more powerful script-tx binding) but that it will meet resistance from another large portion of the community. Then we'll have a dilemma, and we'll be much better off if we prepare ahead of time.

I don't want infinite deflation. I'd be a happy man indeed in nobody lost coins. But lost coins should remain lost.

You're trying to make it sound like a bad thing. People who have invested their time and money on Bitcoin have every right to want it to live up to what it promised, and prevent devaluation of their bitcoins or the shock to the economy that would be caused by a sudden resurfacing of lost coins.

That said: The solution proposed to this problem has potential issues (as some have pointed out), which is why we might have no choice but to allow crackers to steal the lost coins.

Please don't tell us the details on how you store your lifetime savings.


Please tell us more about that!

I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing, but it is a bad thing when people are using that potential profit as an excuse to circumvent changes which could help create a more sound currency. Furthermore, the limited nature of bitcoin already makes it inherently deflationary (in terms of price change), since demand tends to increase over the long term and leads to economic growth. We don't need to have lost coins to have deflation in the value of bitcoin. The value will tend to go up regardless, in fact lost coins will probably play a very small role in the price deflation compared to economic growth.

Then why does this problem need solving, anyway?

Because infinite inflation and infinite deflation are both fundamentally flawed.

Demurrage is exactly what is being proposed by baking the theft of "old Bitcoins" here.  The distinction is not one of category, but one of parameters -- the demurrage being proposed would be after a few decades, rather than only a few months or whatnot.

If the code contract in the Satoshi client changed to include demurrage, I stand by my promise to keep the original source code running so demurrage will not happen.  That will ensure Satoshi Bitcoin users will not lose value or coins at the hands of people peddling organized theft as a "virtuous solution"  to a non-problem.

Going back to the original idea before retarded people derailed it with a proposal to steal "abandoned" coins.

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

I think it would be a great idea to add this "contract" to the Help menu of the client, and to a text file in the source code.  The contract should explain in plain terms how the network works, what's the limit on the generation of coins, what happens to lost coins (they remain lost), what the fees are and in which circumstances they are required, et cetera.  The goal of clarity for such a document should be that anyone understands the implications of Bitcoin's technical decisions before committing to using Bitcoin.  That is, to generate mutually informed and voluntary consent.  ALMOST like a contract (but not quite, in any legally binding sense, of course).

If possible, this document should be formatted using Markdown or (failing that) HTML.

It's not "after a few decades". It's when the signature algorithm becomes so weak that your coins will be taken anyway by crackers if you don't move them. Again - the new version will cause you to lose your coins in exactly the same situation where you will lose them in the current version too.

The proposal was in the OP. It was more of an example than a proposal, but still.

This is almost universally agreed to be mutable.

Bitcoin can't make such a guarantee. It can try, though.

So you agree with the proposal to keep lost coins lost by deleting them when the algorithm is weakened?

I like this idea.


If you mean weakened by quantum computing, then only those lost coins whose public keys have already been published will be spendable. The addresses hashes are not vulnerable to quantum computing, AFAIK.
Or do you have any reason to believe anything else other than quantum computing risks "weakening" ECDSA (and RIPEMD-160, and SHA256...)?


I don't like this idea.

Example follows.

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

Number of coins.
The number of coins generated by Bitcoin participants will be a maximum of 21 million.  This number will increase slowly over the space of a few decades.  The increase will slow down as Bitcoiners get closer to 21 million generated coins, and then stop.

Decimal places.
Each Bitcoin can be divided into 100 million units.  This means there will be a maximum of 2.1 quadrillion (in U.S. numbering style) units of currency.  In the future, this may be amended to increase the number of units -- but the number of Bitcoins you have will not change by such an increase.

No double spends.
There is a (tiny) risk that bitcoins given to you won't be given to someone else at the same time, causing you to lose the bitcoins given to you.  Bitcoin prevents this by having multiple participants verify ("confirm") all transactions, and showing confirmations to you.  The more confirmations, the less likely it is that this will ever happen; with six confirmations, there is a XX.XXXXXX% guarantee that the transaction is irreversible.  The more bitcoins you are receiving from someone, the more prudent you must be in waiting for six confirmations.

Do not lose your coins.
Sending coins to invalid or abandoned addresses will cause these coins to be lost forever, reducing the amount of Bitcoins in circulation by that amount.  Since this usually causes a very slight appreciation of everyone else's Bitcoins, think of this phenomenon as a donation to the general well-being of every Bitcoiner out there.

Keep your Bitcoins secure.
If someone manages to swipe your Bitcoin wallet (and, if it has been password-protected, your password), Bitcoin provides no mechanism for you to block them from spending your Bitcoins.  So keep these valuables as safe as possible (or safer) as you would keep cash or any other valuables.

Eventually, your Bitcoin wallet will require an upgrade.
Computers become faster all the time.  The complicated security puzzles that Bitcoin uses to secure your coins become easier and easier to solve as time passes by.  Given this physical reality, after a few decades, the Bitcoin network will have to change to a newer, more complicated security algorithm, securing the existing Bitcoins with the new algorithm in the process.  You will, in all likelihood, have ample time to secure your Bitcoins by transferring them to a new wallet.  However, should you not do that during the transition, Bitcoin will not be able to keep your coins protected from theft.  So you will have to perform this operation at least once.

What about the whitepaper? www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Sure, the whitepaper could conceivably be linked in the contract.

The thing is, through the magic of technology, we can keep track of who is the rightful owner of that something sitting untouched for over 100 years. It wouldn't seem to be lost. It would belong to the person in control of the associated private key. If someone loses their private key, that is their problem. It doesn't harm anyone else. I'm sure that the size of the blockchain files can be handled in much better ways than destruction of property or theft.

I think you are applying 'old world' methods of thought to the 'new world', so to speak.

1. The conditions needed to spend an unspent output shall not be changed after it is created.

2. The fraction of the total generated coins an unspent output represents shall be predictable for any point in the future.

Promise 1 would exclude demurrage but would allow new transaction types to be introduced. Changes to the mining reward would break promise 2 but increasing the number of decimal places would not.

This is fundamentally great insight.  Bitcoin, unlike other digital technologies, shares elements both from "old world" thinking and from "new world" thinking.  it does so -- some would say unfortunately -- because it ultimately must.

A store of value is fundamentally useless if it can be replicated infinitely, like everything else in the "new world".  And all stores of value "guarded" by "old world" methods (giving the keys of the empire to a bunch of sociopaths) have failed or are in the process of failing, victims of sociopathic greed and sabotage.

So what is one to do faced this constraint imposed by reality?

One invents -- or discovers, some would say -- the math necessary to bring the "old world" restriction of scarcity into the "new world" of infinite replication.  One invents Bitcoin.

Now, the way of producing scarcity that makes Bitcoin Bitcoin has the disadvantage that lost coins are truly lost.  They can't be recovered.  We don't know of and we don't have an algorithmic mechanism to produce a Bitcoin that doesn't have this alleged "defect" yet shares all the good properties of Bitcoin (including decentralized operation, scarcity, and long-term resistance to theft).

Now, as you can see in this and other threads, the one and only proposal to address this "defect" consists of deliberately weakening the long-term resistance to theft property of Bitcoin.  Since this "defect" is not really an issue (lost coins just add value to the economy in general), and theft is an issue, Bitcoin chose to prohibit theft of long-term stored value.

This choice is no accident.  This is deliberate in Bitcoin's design.  Satoshi could have written demurrage of long-term savings in the code -- it is just a computer program, it's not very difficult to implement, and the Freicoin team doing that right now -- but he didn't.

Now why do you think that is?  Do you think it's because Satoshi is supremely dumb and couldn't figure out how to make that happen?  Or is it more likely that allowing people to steal "stale coins" is just a terrible idea?

Whoever wants to have a Bitcoin that deliberately chooses to allow people to filch from others' savings, will certainly have something Bitcoinish, but it won't be Bitcoin because it doesn't share Bitcoin's properties.  They can try, but the slogan "Filchcoin: a revolutionary digital store of value that allows people to steal your coins if you keep them for too long" somehow, I suspect, won't exactly make the greatest catchphrase.

Until someone invents the math that will allow for a Bitcoin that doesn't allow for theft of long-term savings and allows retrieval of lost coins, you're going to have to live with what we have.  If you're so worried about losing coins, do yourself a favor and lose some.  Be charitable with the rest of us.  And take up math.  Maybe you'll learn enough to invent the math necessary to recover lost coins without stealing people's savings.

+1

If someone loses their private keys, that just makes the rest of the coins more scarce and valuable, that's one of the perks of Bitcoin!

We have enough units to denominate and function no matter how many are lost. 

It would be so hard to get people on-board with Bitcoin if they expired.  Hey here's a Bitcoin, be sure to spend it before it expires!  I don't see any benefit of coin recycling at all.  It's a ridiculous subject, but I suppose that is what forums are for, voicing opinions and shooting ideas back and forth.

I was sitting there trying to figure out why on earth would theymos propose such a thing.  And then it hit me.  I read the OP.  He was pointing towards putting a contract in the 'satoshi client' that would show people, like, the rules of Bitcoin, and a contract set in stone.  I think it's a great idea.  right now the client basically tells you that this is experimental software, have fun!  We should have a document in the window there, I don't think a blob of text is going to take up much disk space (considering the ballooning blockchain size) and it will give newbies something to read. 

Right now the two options under 'help' are 'about Bitcoin-QT' and 'about QT' which don't provide a lot of information.  Now, we can't really have a whole wiki in there, but a contract stating the cold hard facts about the network and what will never change, I think that should be in there.  The contract wouldn't really be enforceable though, since who would enforce it?  There isn't even really a need for a contract, but if it was a contact to prevent other parties (like the bitcoin foundation) from submitting any huge changes to the protocol and messing the whole network up, that would be great as well. 

Some sort of blob of text protecting us is never a bad thing. 

Yeah, it wouldn't be an actual contract -- just a responsible disclosure that the developers are providing because they're nice and they don't want anyone to lose money just because they didn't know or couldn't deduce a particular detail about Bitcoin.

I agree and nominate Atlas to be the author of this contract.

Who would be the parties of the contract, for starters?

Your beloved feature "store of value" would be destroyed.. not by "Meni and Theymos", but by ECDSA weakness. Are you guys even reading the OP and what Meni suggested? We're talking about a case where ECDSA is becoming more and more "crackable". Store of value my ass. That's no store of value when the first math genius with a big calculator that cares enough can grab any old coin and I'm pretty sure all the people here that say: "the contract can't be changed, that would totally destroy trust in bitcoin" would think quite the opposite: "The contract has to be changed, otherwise trust in bitcoin is lost". I'm thinking you guys are reading "destroy old coins" and having a knew-jerk reaction because you've been involved in related discussions that do not involve the assumption of weakening ECDSA.

It might be too early to talk about this now and if I can believe the cryptonerds, we will have plenty of time to talk about it when the process starts.

From the point of view of a brainwallet for my grandchildren, well: it doesn't make much difference then, does it: the money would be gone by the time they find my will containing the worthless passphrase so  I would definitely move the coins to a new secure address anyhow. The risk of fucking that up is much smaller than the risk of the old address getting "cracked".

While I'm not sure I'll be alive at the time, somehow I'm really looking forward to ECDSA becoming weaker: we would gain some knowledge about how many coins are really lost. Maybe we'll have a second gold rush (will butterfly labs accounce an ECDSA cracker?)

I read the whole "ECDSA will be breakable" (which is debatable, but moot) and all I hear is this logic:

"Oh, the lock on your door might be pickable sometime in the future.  Might as well build a backdoor in your house now, so others can just steal your shit then."

That's how absurd this whole argument is.  It's not even an argument, since the conclusion does not follow from the premise, which is purely speculation that isn't even supported or proven to begin with.  The arguably best expert in cryptography in the world says 256b ECDSA is most likely simply unbreakable: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131175.msg1405345#msg1405345

It would be risible if people proposing it weren't serious about it.

Yeah that is a problem that I don't think can be solved. Theymos, you know, while I support spelling out the rules Bitcoin adheres to so ordinary people can understand it maybe a statement displayed in the gui and being called a contract isn't such a good idea after all. How about instead we ask the devs to insert a sort of a personal voucher that the code they wrote conforms to these rules. This way no one is really bound by them, there's no one who can think anyone is bound by them and devs risk their reputation if they insert a different kind of code than what their plain spoken english voucher said it is.

I'm not sure this is the case. There is an theoretical enforcement mechanism in the form of the Jim Bell protocol. What would happen if a consensus developed that it could be employed in any case where someone distributes a contract-breaking change to the currency and calls the result "Bitcoin"?

I'm not an expert in game theory but it seems likely that merely talking about the possibility would at the very least change the way public figures involved in Bitcoin development think about their personal security. Being a publicly known figure has the advantage of allowing them to leverage their personal reputation, but at the same time makes them potential targets for bribery and coercion. I wonder if it would be better or worse in the long term if more Bitcoin development was done in the darknet.

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.

I'm feeling grumpy this morning, so my reaction is "good luck with that."

FTFY the network is us

I assume that those arguing for "recycling" of bitcoins after a certain period of time are the miners. The miners will collect extra revenue if they can recycle bitcoins, but this is at the expense of the rest of the economy. Lets say that 100 years goes by, and BTC is still operational. An address containing 10 000 BTC has not been active since 2009, and now everyone agrees that those funds are "expired".
In 100 years there is a very high chance that mining is a very small niche of the bitcoin economy, since they have to continually increase productivity, like everyone else in a free market. So perhaps the transaction costs are down to 0.001%, as opposed to todays 1% (http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction).

What will happen at this point is a close approximation to what's happening today with QE. Today the bankers gain massively by being first in the queue for the fresh money. We see this with the banks receiving billions and billions in fresh funds from the FED. The losers are the savers of currency, and the people who are last to get their hands on the new currency. By the time that the last person gets their hands on the newly minted currency, the prices has adjusted already for the extra currency in circulation.
So we should expect miners and people who can get their hands on newly minted “expired” bitcoins (like vendors to miners, like BFL) to like such an idea, while savers of bitcoins and non-miners will be opposed to this idea.
If we look at how much the miners stand to gain from such a future event in the Bitcoin economy, we should not be surprised that there will be some people who thinks this is a fabulous idea. Imagine that the miners are a tiny 0.001% of the Bitcoin economy, and all of a sudden they can strike it rich by being in the right place at the right time. 10 000 BTC in one big chunk.

I’m a miner, but even if the coins really are lost, this seems unethical to me. Lost coins are lost. Infinite deflation already happens in ALL computer/technology products, and I don’t see anything wrong with it. I love it when prices are falling, then I can afford more. It’s that simple.

Why is it a bad thing? You don’t have any argument to support your hypothesis. Why is it horrible that technology gets cheaper? Why is it negative that information becomes cheaper and more available? This is deflation in practice, and I have a hard time understanding why you think this is such a bad thing.

Actually, the way the discussion has been going, there is one discussion related to ECDSA being broken, and one which is not.

EDIT: Conflation abound.