Bitcoin Forum

With recent events of theft, hacking, combined with the never-ending deflation/inflation debate,  it's very tempting to modify the code solving these issues.

For example:

1. If a large sum of coins is stolen or lost due to malicious attack, the client code can be modified to blacklist these coins (and their subsequent forms), or it can even go further issuing specially generated coins to compensate the victims.

2. Why there can't be a time limit of inactivity, if a coin hasn't been touched in the past 10 or 20 years, can the program just mark it as "lost" in the blockchain and issue a replacement?

3. If a majority of bitcoin users have reached a consensus that the deflationary aspect is bad to the currency, development team will likely be under pressure to modify the coin generation algorithm, e.g. lifting the 21M cap.

I can see a day development team will split on these issues, there will be struggle between "reformist" and "fundamentalist"; how far bitcoin is allowed to evolve and still can be called "bitcoin"? If bitcoin survives in the next few years, this will be the most serious issue determining its long term survival.

I am surprised Satoshi didn't attempt to create something like "Ten Commandments of Bitcoin" or "Three Laws of Robotics" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics)

Or maybe it does exist somewhere and I am just ignorant?

Which is why I suspect there will probably be a bitcoin2 one day with a migration path to transfer bitcoin1's into it.  Bitcoin is really in beta still.  It's a very neat design with a number of checks and balances built into it but it's really only starting to be tested properly in the last couple of months.  Both the code and rules of the system need to withstand a lot of external factors that it won't face until the economy gets bigger and many which may never be predicted before they happen.  This will inevitably highlight weaknesses in the design that can be rectified by tweaking it.  You can't realistically keep tweaking the current bitcoin, it will undermine confidence if the rules keep changing.  So the best solution is to eventually come up with a bitcoin2 standard and migrate.  Leave the existing bitcoin in place and people can migrate as they see fit.  Market forces will determine whether btc 1 or 2 will prevail and then the loser will die out completely.  As it becomes clear that bitcoin2 is going to become the standard bitcoin1 value will start to drop and motivate people to migrate.

1 - Can be easily abused to cripple people that got paid honestly

2 - What happens if someone digs up their private keys 20 years from now and tries to spend their savings? I don't think the system should be coded to automaticly steal from people.

3 - It's open source, anyone is free to release clients that will allow for a bigger total number; if people using that variation outnumber people using clients that respect the original design the system will automaticly consider the new rules as the official rules.

Others may disagree but I think this is a fantastic idea.  Of course it's too late now for bitcoin to include such a feature but I see it working with a simple rule like this:

For transactions over 20 years old, any input referencing that transaction is considered to have successfully claimed the value of the output no matter what the script returns.

In this way, once a transaction is 20 years old, it's anyone's to claim.

If you're nearing the 20 year mark (say at year 15 if you're really paranoid or something), you just re-send the money to a different bitcoin address and you're covered for another 20 years.

No bitcoin would ever be lost; someone would always claim it.  That someone being a miner since they'd obviously put a transaction taking the bitcoin into the next block they are trying to solve as soon as it is valid to do so.

I think it's a great idea and it leads to 0% inflation and 0% deflation in a system like bitcoin since no money is ever lost.

It's a terrible idea. :P  Attempting to introduce this into the current protocol (or a newer one) isn't a practical idea.  Mostly because you're attempting to solve a "problem" that shouldn't be solved at the protocol level.  Think layers of an onion.  In this case, we have a solid core.  This is a type of "problem" that can be solved by increasing the precision of the bitcoin divisions.

The reason I put the word problem in quotes is because, as far as I understand, the number of units of coins are theoretically scalable to an indefinite number.  The fear is that we'll run out of coins.  All we need is one coin.

To me, this really nails it on the head.  Any of the time-out proposals would introduce a footnote into the system.  Your savings will be GONE if you forget this little long-term clause.  Exceptions like this don't belong in the core protocol.

I don't believe this is correct. The problem isn't solved by increasing bitcoin divisions. That isn't what the problem is about. The problem is that the ratio of saved coins to lost coins becomes less knowable over time, while at the same time, the ratio of coins known to be in circulation to the coins that are currently not in circulation (lost or saved) becomes smaller and smaller, which leads to a system that becomes, at the extreme, so uncertain that it is unusable.

See the thread on wallet heartbeats.

I think OP should have to move his coins every 20 minutes or I get them.

Btw, what if someone gets rich, and then lives the rest of their lifes spending a small fraction of their fortunes per month; i would be seriously pissed if after 20 years suddenly my fortune got claimed back to the ether leaving me pennyless...

And why would that happen? If you are capable of being pissed about the loss, then you're aware of your holdings, and thus clearly in a position to lift your finger every 19 years or so.

It's as practical as any other idea; perhaps even more so, because we'd have 20 years for all bitcoin peers to update themselves to this agreed protocol change before it would even take effect, plenty of time for conformance testing, planning, etc.


Yeah now that I think about it more, perhaps there is no value in guaranteeing that no bitcoins are ever lost.  Because practically speaking, there is no difference between a bitcoin that cannot be spent because it's lost, and a bitcoin that will not be spent because the owner wants to hoard it.  Still I wonder if perfect knowledge of exactly how many bitcoins are circulat-able is valuable in any way; if it is, then my proposal has merit.


They already lost their money if they waited 20 years.  I mean come on, it's not that hard to 'refresh' your bitcoins at least once every 20 years.  If you can't do it for some reason, then you've lost your money, sorry.  I would bet that orders of magnitude more people are going to lose their money because they lose their private key somewhere along the way than would ever lose their money due to this 20 year rule, and this kind of loss is already built into the bitcoin system.  But you're willing to accept that I guess because, even though it's many orders of magnitude worse than the 20 year rule, it's already built into the bitcoin system so I guess it's not a problem to you?


If it were a built-in rule then it would be very clear to everyone and I doubt that anyone would be caught out in the cold by it.  Seriously.  Someone else pointed out that many banks have a policy already that if you don't use your account in 7 years, the bank reclaims the money.  Or something like that.  People can handle rules like this.

It's not that I'm saying it's super important to get it into the bitcoin protocol; I just think it's an interesting idea and there's something satisfying about a system that can guarantee 0% inflation and 0% deflation.

See this post: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20866.msg262100#msg262100

There is a difference, and it becomes more pronounced over time.

Just to be more precise here: while there would be 0% inflation and deflation over long time spans, this doesn't mean that there wouldn't still be uncertainty about the bitcoin supply.  Some coins would still be lost and although they would be claimed no more than 20 years later, there would always be some unspendable coins out there, and this amount would fluctuate.

No.  This would introduce an obvious abuse vector.  He who could influence the blacklisting of coins, or their unlisting, to his own advantage would eventually do so.  Don't bother trying to claim that you are above corruption.  No one is.  Everyone who runs for congress for the first time does so because he believes this fallacy.


Again, abuse vector.  How is the time limit decided?  Can this mechanism be spoofed?  I suppose one could use the block number, but why bother?  The future expected deflation due to lost coins is bound to be so slow as to be unimportant.


Absolutely not.  Get out.  And go start your own currency.

Not a smart one.
Say an average joe gets talked into investing into BTC. Encrypts it on a drive and puts it in a lock box, Saving it for 20 years to retire, buy a new car or house, or even their childs college/car.(Considering they believe the price of BTC's will raise to a certain amount at this point in there life.) They go back after all this time pop it in a computer(Of the future, ooooo ahhhh! lol) And boom, Bitcoin says there data is to old. They depended on that as a back up plan and now it's absolutely worthless. Whose to take from all of us today, and throw it out in 20 years?
JS.

Do you know what happens to bank accounts after seven years of inactivity?

Free toaster?

The 20 year rule would be common knowledge.  With commonly disseminated knowledge about the rule and an easy way to avoid the 20 year rule, I don't see any problem with expecting people to use the system properly.

Do you also think it's a problem that if you delete your private key file, you lose all of your bitcoins?  What about the average joe that saves for 20 years and then accidentally deletes or loses their private key?  Does the fact that this can happen mean that bitcoin itself should not exist, just like your assertion that the fact that a 20 year rule should not exist for the same reason (i.e. someone know knows, or should know the rules, still makes a mistake and loses their money)?

You missed the point completely.  Was that on purpose?

The point was not to say that bitcoin should be like a banking system.  It was to show that the kinds of problems that people are proposing with this system ("but people who ignore common knowledge can get screwed!") are already accepted by people in entrenched systems.  If such rules are not already too onerous for people to deal with, why would they be too onerous when implemented in bitcoin?

No, it doesn't belong in the bare-bones protocol.

At the kernel level of an OS there is no "undelete."

+1

Guys, the intention of my original post wasn't arguing for or against any of those plausible improvements, they are merely examples. What I was asking was: shouldn't there be constitution-like laws that define the essential characteristics of the "bitcoin" concept?

We all know what requirement creep can do to a project, for bitcoin, little upgrades and improvements over the time can chip away the very foundation on which bitcoin exist today.

Without these explicitly written rules (i.e. red lines), bitcoin is at the mercy of whoever gains dominant influence to the project, it can morph into something very different during a relatively short period of time. Development lead and members will come and go,the threshold of making important changes needs to be raised. Just throw some random thoughts out there:

Rule #1: No change to the coin generation algorithm shall be allowed
Rule #2: All coins are created equal, system shall not discriminate against any coins, old or new, stolen or legit.
...
Rule #10: Any proposed amendment to these rules must have unanimous approval from the core development team and accepted by 2/3 majority of the users.

This will instill stability to the concept of bitcoin, adopters will have better idea what they are buying into.

Rule number zero: You can change the protocol. Any time you want. It's a peer to peer system.

The issue just is: If not enough users pull your change into their version, you just damage yourself by improving your protocol and losing acceptance.

Rule numer minus one: At every moment, you can roll your own bitcoin. It's an open source system.

There are numerous regional alternative and parallel currencies, cupons, voucher systems. Their value depend on the acceptance and on the stamina of their originators to make 7 billion people accept them.

There is really only one "Law of Bitcoin":

In the long run, anything that is wanted by more than 50% of the connected hashing power, happens.

That's not really true. The clients have to approve of the blocks which the miners produce. If the miners start creating "bad" blocks or if the client is altered to reject certain blocks then it just looks to the client as if that portion of the hashing power has disappeared.

If there were any real difference in interests there would be an uneasy truce between miners and clients.
Miners need the clients to give their transactions value.
Clients need the miners to give their transactions security.

I think the clients have the upper hand though as in the past Bitcoin operated without dedicated miners and could do so in future (with appropriate client software changes) if the miners held the network to ransom.

ByteCoin

the first one looks legit, blacklist of coins. but... YOU CANT ISSUE NEW BITCOINS.
at some point governments will force a blacklist upon merchants, bitcoin-banks and exchanges.

im not a fan of it, but i see it can be done. and i think will be done. sadly :'(

There should be no change in the protocol it is working, and people investing in the bitcoin economy what something stable.
Bitcoins should never expire, that way they can be used for retirement, savings, and emergencies.
The 21 million dollar limit is more than enough, with a total of 8 digits for decimals, and 8 digits to the right of the decimal point, it creates a total of 16 digits, in other words you can represent 2.1 thousand trillion  bitcoins, the world population is 7 billion, if we divide we get 300000 bitcoins per person, most of us are not even close of having that type of money, and average the current amount of money per person is the world is a lot smaller than that.
Do not ever compare Bitcoins to Banks policy, Banks are corrupt inflate money, charge huge fees, buy politicians, etc, Bitcoins represent a very honest system created by very clear rules, we want to keep rules simple so everyone understands them and that way they are clear and precise, Banks are like courts, the reason you need a lawyer when in trouble, is because laws are very complex, unclear, they contradict each other, and even though the law says not knowing the law is not an excuse, I am sure no one in this planet knows all the laws that exist, not even a tiny percentage of the ones that exist.

Someday far away we will have a p2p legal system, and that will be great, clear and precise like math.

Bitcoin is a very clean design, it is lean and mean and it should stay that way, if a lot of bogus stuff is added on the protocol, you risk having security issues, in the computer world it is well known that secure programs are usually small  with few features, complex programs with millions of lines of code and many features, very often have security holes, the reason for that is human nature is a program is small it is easy for someone to go though the code and detect a flaw, if it is a huge program it will require many persons going though the code, but the persons going though the code will most likely go over the code that they consider important.

Simplicity for security is critical in a program that represents a currency.

I have a lot more trust in Bitcoins than I do with any bank, banks change their policy all the time, it is nice that Bitcoins is very stable in this regards.

We should always compare the Bitcoin with good things, paypal is terrible we should never compare bitcoin with paypal, banks are bad.

I find it very suspicious that all BTC addresses currently start with a 1. That makes me think that there will be a "2".

no it just likely that is the address format. like a "1" for ECDSA, and "2" for RSA, 3 for new unknown scheme.  using RSA instead of ECDSA, will not break bitcoin, or fork the chain. just giving people more flexibly

I also think that they should expire after a certain time, but they shouldn't be recreated. At some point in the future we could end up in a situation where only 0.1% of the BTC economy has actually been circulated in the past 10 years, and nobody knows whether the remaining 99.9% is hoarded or lost forever.

This will cause instability and I would certainly move my BTC to BTC2 or whatever new system doesn't have this problem. It's inevitable that this will cause problems in the future, we should recognise this rather than childishly bury our heads in the sand.

I have a nice little gold bullion in my hand.

I have no certainty of how much more there is in the world, simply a gross estimate.

Of this number, I don't know how much have been lost. I don't know how much is hoarded.

Is this an argument against gold?

No.

Awful idea.  If I've been jailed for 10+ years after my magnificent heist went wrong by some malevolent regime who doesn't like my politics,
I'd like my loot savings to be safely hidden in the form of an encrypted bitcoin wallet.

Edit:  Sorry I mucked up the quotes.  ;)

^_^ This.