Bitcoin Forum

I am not sure whether it is already discussed.

Is it ok to set a max coinage (5 - 10 years), so coins that are were not spent for specific can be invalidated.

and, to distribute these coins through mining rewards (throughout for next few years).

So that, no coins were ever lost. :)

AGAIN??
Come on guys, stop stealing money from people keeping it in their vault!
Yes it has been discussed a thousand times, a least once every two months, did you search?

Bitcoin as it is does not need such a rule - I'm pretty sure that the loss of coins can be handled well already.

But if you design an alt coin (do we have enough already?) you might add this as one of its rules.
I don't know whether it would really have a positive effect - it would make those "lost" coins available again, but there might be some folks who put coins in a cold storage wallet as savings, and they might not be happy to find that their coins have been given to someone else.
Of course, people adopting such a coin would know that they need to touch (move) their coins once in a while to keep them, so it might not be a big problem after all.

Onkel Paul

Seriously, I search "redistribute old coins", already two results
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=20799.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=171411.0

Try with google...

Yes, it's been discussed before. Besides jackjack's results I also found:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=48851.10
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=82847.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175688.0

In short, most people, including myself, think that there is no such problem. If coins are lost, then the total amount in circulation may be significantly lower than 21 million but there will still be quadrillions of satoshis in circulation.

There will never be the consensus to allow such a fundamental change.

thanks, I will check those threads.

"max coin age", no results. :(

Maybe there should be an optional opcode that allows an output to be claimed by a miner on or after block n.

That way anybody who is worried about this can store their own funds in such an address without forcing it on everbody else.

Who would do that? For what purpose?

How do so many people come up with this ridiculous notion independently from each other?  :D

@OP don't mind them and me. It's just that this must be the most asked question on the forums and there have been heated debates when people really couldn't be convinced it would be ridiculous to implement this so some people are fed up with it :)

Probably no one.The only reason for such a feature to exist is so that anyone who brings it up could be encouraged to use it themselves instead of arguing about it.

The thing is I don't get why some people need to add the "forget about your coins if you hoard them" "feature"
WHY?
Because lost coins are a bad thing? How is it bad? It even makes the remaining ones more valuable


I'm sure if such a possiblity is introduced they would be whining about why it is not obligatory

It's called the "I missed the early adopter train" syndrome.

Which is BS, as everybody with brains know.

Just buy and be grateful you were able to know about BTC so early ;)

So those people would want to kill the assets of early-early-adopters?
Possible
Highly possible indeed

How would you feel if you wanted to buy something and the store refused to take your money because it was old and wrinkley? Or, the money police took it away from you and gave its value in new money to someone else?

Absolutely
Same for the gold you're keeping somewhere hidden
Same for your jewelry you never wear

"Dear, it's finally time to retire and spend some of those bitcoins on that Casascius gold bar you bought back in 2012."

"You're right, honey! Let me just import them into our active wallet... Oh no!"

"What's wrong?"

"The coins expired!"

"When?"

"Yesterday."

How about setting a MIN coin usage ?!

We could set a minimum coin usage, ie you can't use any of your bitcoins if you don't move at least 1000BTC
That's an improvement as it avoids de facto the blockchain dust

Perhaps the OP would do it and the others in the other threads.  Yeah right - most would not do that, but would advocate it for everyone else since they know best.

I've never quite understood the natural objection to lost coins that some people seem to have.  Many other perceived problems with Bitcoin are explained but this one is usually taken as axiomatic.

Is it the lost granularity that concerns people?  Is it a fear that people will hoard bitcoins? (Economic flamewar aside, I don't see why hoarders would be less likely to lose coins than everyone else).

Perhaps it's just because existing currencies are not so fragile.  I don't see a gold forum parallel to bitcointalk.org with topics like "Help!  I accidentally launched 3.8 tonnes of gold into deep space."

Oops!  :D

The problem as I understand it is that there is a finite number of Bitcoins that will be mined, 21 Million. After that any coins that are hoarded and forgot about or destroyed by damaged media, are out of circulation, forever. This will lead to the number of BTC shinking over time.

It happens all the time with paper money and coins. They are destroyed, but the government replenishes the supply by printing more. What will happen to the value of Bitcoins once their is no printing more and the supply of them is diminishing?

This is correct but it's not really a "problem."

I suppose it depends on the rate of Bitcoins being destroyed. I can't imagine a shrinking number of coins in cirulation won't have any effect at all on their value.

You could make that money that isn't transferred every year is lost.
AND THEN IF YOU ARE A HOARDER YOU JUST MOVE YOUR MONEY BETWEEN YOUR 2 WALLETS ONCE A YEAR.
and if they money is not moved, then it's probably lost or forgotten.
what's bad there?

also will help with statistical data, otherwise you'll never know if someone holds a million btc ace in his sleeve or something.

also will probably help with blockchain size

Read the links in the first page
Think what you want, it will never happen

Yeah, it's sure that moving coins that are supposed not to move, thus creating useless transactions, will definitely help the blockchain size

Man. Just think before you type. There are 100,000,000 Satoshis for each Bitcoin. Do the math instead of babbling. And please, after you have done the math, be so kind to let me know what rate of coin destruction we need to have for this being a problem in, let's say, 2200.

Stealing peoples' bitcoin retirement funds... great.


We could make that your car is sold and money redistributed to your neighbours if you don't drive it at least once a month because it can corrode if you leave it for too long.

Go Freidcoin then for teh demurrage

I rarely use the word "moron," but this ridiculous argument about lost coins is one of my pet peeves.  You guys arguing that we should somehow reclaim piles of coins are taking a wonderfully elegant and intuitive system and trying to turn it into an awkward game of coin twister or gotcha by making people move coins around pointlessly.

There is a very efficient and, above all, fair way to deal with lost coins - do nothing.  If the coins are truly lost, the value of those lost coins is distributed throughout all remaining bitcoins by increasing their scarcity.

There is $1.15 trillion US dollars in circulation right now - that's $1,150,000,000,000.00, including cents.  That means that Bitcoin could replace all the US dollars (and cents) in circulation at the same granularity with only 1.15 million BTC, or 10% of what's currently in circulation, or roughly 5% of all BTC that will be mined.  If somehow 95% of bitcoins get lost AND it becomes as pervasive as the US dollar, then you have the right to resurrect this dead horse and beat it.

Would you ridcule someone who is OCD for putting thing in order or wanting everything a certain way? the people who want to recover lost coins are similar, it grates on them that there are, what they consider, wasted coins. Wasted coins represent wasted work to them. They want all their Ducks in  a row and all the coins in use.

We just need to explain to them that this isn't what everyone else wants and that the system is fine as is and then move on. They won't see, or agree with what the majority of us says, but they will just be whistling in the wind.

I disagree. IMO, those who wish to force a method of reclaiming "lost" coins into the protocol are more likely practitioners of the xkcd method of extrapolating (http://xkcd.com/605/).

This has been posted far too many times now. So let me ask you, if you owned 100BTC and couldn't access you're wallet for some reason (lost passphrase etc). Then one day you remember or find the pass phrase. But, when you go to take out you're BTC, it's GONE.

How would you feel?

And by going to tenths, hundredths or thousandths (etc) of a satoshi, further granularity is possible if needed.

No. Satoshi is the minimum granularity (with the current blockchain format).
For further division, you'd either have to change the format and a majority of clients (basically, it would suffice if the 5 biggest mining pools made the change) or keep smaller amounts off-balance (i.e. outside the blockchain). That would mean additional bookkeeping, perhaps a system such as ripple could be used for this, but in general, it should be avoided. One of the elegant aspects of Bitcoin is that you can keep control over your funds yourself. Of course, with online wallets people already give up a bit of this essential ownership, maybe they would be ok with keeping sub-Satoshi balances in an external system as well and just hold their big savings within bitcoin.

Onkel Paul

True but I'm not sure we need more granularity than the one provided by 2.1e15 units