Bitcoin Forum

So there are only 21 million btc's that will ever be mined, and the last coin is projected to be mined sometime around the year 2140.  Awesome, no government printing money at their whim.

However.... People are bound to pass away.  When people with btc die, lets say for optimisms sake that most will have someone that can access their wallets ringer to the bitcoins.  But, the problem is that not every person will.  So these coins are inaccessable by anyone, ever.  

This becomes an issue not right away, but it is an issue.  

Some say modifying the protocol to add more btc, but that defeats the purpose of having a limit in place.

Some say set something up to where if a wallet goes unused after a certain time, to raid it and reintroduce those coins.  That's not good...if I get coins in a Wallet and wait 50 years to touch them, and someone takes them thinking they were lost, that's not good.

Ideas?

Yeah, just don't consider it a problem. It is not your money, so it is not your problem. :-\

Ummm for each BTC lost the BTC value goes up! I'm all for people dying who have BTC!  ;D

Simply stated, it is not a problem. Nothing needs to be done.

Pollution is not my problem then either, since it won't affect me directly in this lifetime.  I think this is a statement that is not thought through at all. 

If one day the lost bitcoins is causing a lack of liquidity, more zeros can be added after the dot 0.000000000000000000000002 BTC

Problem solved

That's good for today.  But if this is something that will last, and not a novelty, then this needs to be fixed at some point.  We are like the pioneers of bitcoin. Our baby will be dying out and what happens when there is only 1 million left, and btc has been mass adopted?  Sure, its divisible into many decimal places. But eventually they are all gone. Probably very slowly, but they still will be gone.

This is a good idea I think. Simple but effective.  Any other ideas?

People mistakenly believe that all the bitcoins will eventually disappear, but the truth is that they can only disappear completely if bitcoins are are no longer used or there is an organized burn of all existing bitcoins. Thus there is no problem.

There is going to be a never ending loss of coins. Regardless of if they are used are not, coins get lost.  Just as money gets lost.

Its honestly not a problem, and you aren't the first to bring it up. The choice of 21 million coins in total is completely arbitrary, because they can be divided indefinitely. So even 1/21 000 000 of a coin would be enough for the whole world economy to function - we'd just have to add more decimal places.

+1

because there also could be just 10 bitcoins for 1.2 billion of dollars. then 1 bitcoin would cost 0,12 billion dollar. these are just numbers.

Yes, that's the beauty of divisibility

I now pronounce the great lost byc problem as solved, thanks!

The solution to this issue is to increase currency divisibility. This will permit the continuation of mining well past 2140 where the reward per block would diminish with time to an ever smaller fraction of a satoshi. The 21000000 BTC limit is still respected. The economic impact of this would be below the addition of 1 satoshi to the total Bitcoin money supply because of the change in the rounding.

Actually the last whole coin per block will be mined well before 2140. What is estimated is that before 2140 the last whole satoshi per block will be mined.

There is a problem here, but not what the OP was saying.

As more coins stop being used we become more unsure of the total market cap of bitcoin because we don't know if those coins are actually lost or simply not being spent.

What if there is a 1 trillion dollar bitcoin economy but 20 of the 21 million coins are considered "lost" because they haven't participated in a transaction in hundreds of years.

But actually 4 million of those coins are simply sitting in a misers wallet.

One day he decides to spend them.

Now suddenly the number of bitcions increases by 5, causing everyones bitcoins value to plummet by 80%. This would be a huge disaster.


So as you see, as more bitcoins become "lost" the value of a bitcoin becomes more uncertain.

It is unlikely that a "miser" is going to decide one day that he is going to spend $800 billion. Even if he does, the value of a bitcoin won't plummet. The U.S. money supply has more than tripled in just a few years and the value of the dollar hasn't plummeted (yet).

You are correct and great observation, this will be a very serious issue as time goes by. If millions of coins enter the market at once it will cause the value to plummet. It is important to know the number of coins that are in the system. Maybe the Devs can come up with something.

simple solution.

print your private key, store it in your will with instructions on how to redeem it in today's technology.

And here I thought this thread would lead to the argument that fewer coins would cause the exchange rate of the remaining ones to rise, and as a result the deflations.

This doesn't really hold water. By the same logic, none of us should give a fuck about bitcoin, we should all happily accept government backed money, because after all whenever the central bank prints a few more kajillion USD or EUR or GBP, it's 'not our money'. The truth is of course that other people's money affects your money, as we bitcoiners keep trying to explain to everyone who prefers their state's toilet-paper version of money.

mgio hit the nail on the head here:


This is the real problem. As time goes on we simply become less certain how much money actually exists. This runs counter to the whole purpose of the btc allocation mechanism, which was to make everyone clear as to exactly how many btc there are at any given time. It's not quite the same scenario as a central bank firing up the printing presses but it's quite similar.


I think this is actually thinking along the right lines (and I know I'm very much in a minority here, and I have seen a poster whose opinions I almost always respect and consider carefully, start screaming 'THIEF!!!' at anyone who proposes this). This WOULD be a workable strategy, though it can't be implemented quite the way the OP says. It simply isn't possible (okay, 'computationally tractable') to find the private key of a lost wallet, so the wallet cannot be raided. That's not a matter of changing the protocol, it's a matter of fundamental mathematics.

A different implementation might work something like this: if a UTXO remains U for, say, 50 years, the revised protocol considers it unspendable. The revised protocol then looks to see how many BTC were in the UTXO, and distributes a precisely equal amount of new BTC in the next few coinbase transactions in the next few blocks. This need not cause a problem to people who have stashed BTC away somewhere, as every bitcoin client developer would have big flashing neon signs on their download sites explaining the situation to newbs and reminding them to shuffle their coins around at least once every 50 years. Hell, they could even make the clients check for this and do it automatically.

I can also think of a way we can all reach a consensus on this issue in a timely fashion. Let's say every bitcoin client includes an optional hack in their code, a command line switch or something, making their client behave in the revised way. So you can choose whether you want your client to behave as PureOldSchoolCoin or OMGThief!!!Coin. Also (I'm assuming this is possible, knowledge a bit sketchy here) when the client broadcasts a valid transaction and/or the miner broadcasts a valid block, it sets the value of some bit somewhere (we have spare bits in transactions and blocks, don't we?) to explain which version it's going by. Other validators can then accept or reject according to their economic philosophy as expressed by command line option.

Here's why I don't think there'd be a massive fork, human sacrifices, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria: if we implement this optional switch NOW, it doesn't make any difference to the actual blockchain for another 45 years. It basically will only act as a barometer of public sentiment, and an adaptable one at that. 45 years from now, anyone who is starting to worry about whether they're going to be in the losing fork, just needs to look at the votes. I assume of course that 45 years from now, the votes WOULD have come down on one side a lot more than the other.

My 2 sats, anyway.

This. Simplest solution seems to be a minimum reward.

I wouldn't worry about it. In a hundred years once a vulnerability is found in the private/public key people will move their coins to a more secure address and the only vulnerable coins will be those lost coins. People will then mine the vulnerable addresses.

I am certain that in a hundred years if bitcoin is still around people will have stolen every lost coin.

It is not problem even if majority of coins get lost (or unused), but feel free to share your story how you lost your BTC

Nope, it's not. Never will be, either.

Even if everbody would lose ALL their bitcoins right now, it's still not a problem. See, mining never stops. Even after 2140, mining will still continue as always, it's just that the mining reward becomes lower and lower in an exponential fashion. But never zero. So, new (fractions of) bitcoins will always be newly generated.

No matter how many coins are lost (even ALL coins in existence today or any point in the future), there always will be new (possibly fractional) coins added. Even if there's just one trillionth BTC worldwide, it's enough. Because it's all digital, it's all divisible, and we can use it in the exact same way. So we can call one billionth of the total world supply of Bitcoins (no matter if that's 21M or one billionth of a BTC) a "picocoin" or whatever, and trade with billions of those.

Conclusion: no problem whatsoever.

I lost just because of I lost password of blockchain an lost all my btc and now some lost in inputs also after losing of pin code

Bitcoins are divisible into 8 digits and i think it can be modified to be divisible even further.

I'm pretty sure this isn't correct, at least as the protocol is designed at the moment. The block reward is designed to keep halving until we run out of bits to continue halving accurately. Then the reward will keep being truncated downwards. The block reward at the last halving will be 1 satoshi, and after that it WILL be exactly zero. Mining will of course continue, being subsidised by transaction fees. And as has been pointed out earlier, it's the unlimited divisibility of EXISTING coins, not particularly newly created ones, that means that there won't ever be a supply problem unless ABSOLUTELY all bitcoins were to be lost. And that wouldn't happen because, for instance, long before the remaining supply was one satoshi, the decimal places would have been extended, and billions of people would own various billionths of that satoshi. There'd never be a situation in which the entire remaining unlost supply of bitcoins was concentrated in a single owner, who'd then decide to eat their wallet.

Thanks for all the good responses, after we got past the first few trollish posts, this became a good topic.  :)

^^ Incorrect. ^^

---

^^ Correct. ^^

By "trollish", I assume you mean posts that say that there is no problem, but other than the posts claiming that lost coins create uncertainty, nobody has yet even stated what the problem is.

Now, regarding the uncertainty argument. I'm not convinced that the uncertainty is really a problem. Knowing the size of the money supply is important to those who manage the money supply, but nobody manages the bitcoin money supply, so the importance of knowing its true value is low.

The scenario where someone discovers/recovers the key to a huge number of bitcoins is possible, but it is extremely remote. It is interesting to note that the plundering of the gold in the Americas by Spain had major economic effects on Europe. The effect would be similar in this scenario.

Also, I want to to clarify that the uncertainty is not caused by lost coins. It is caused by the inability to determine which coins are lost. A fixed block reward does not remove or lessen this uncertainty.

Since it cannot be determined which coins are actually lost, the only way to eliminate the uncertainty of lost coins is to declare that certain coins are lost (whether they are or not), and then make them permanently and explicitly unspendable. The problem becomes one of how to decide which coins should be declared lost.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Days_Destroyed

Specifically, cumulative %of bdd.

OP account is, in my opinion, very likely to be a disposable, one-shot trade/loan scammer one.
I'd ignore it, even though that was a sensitive attempt to kiss this old, stinky troll back to life.

Yes, but the vanity of "1 bitcoin" will be lost. Then it would be "Hey, this will cost you 500 billionths of a bitcoin!"

Nah, it's unlikely that things would be priced in "billionths of a bitcoin".  It is far more likely that people will eventually move to various nicknames for small quantities.

As an example, "500 billionths of a bitcoin" is far more likely to be either:

"Hey, this will cost you 500 nanobitcoins" (or 500 nans, or 500 nanobits, or 500 nannies, or 500 nanoes, or whatever nickname becomes common)

or

"Hey, this will cost you 50 Satoshis" (or 50 sats)

Since 500 billionths of a bitcoin is equivalent to 0.00000050

Wow. That was hard to read.

A solution to this would be creating an expiration on Bitcoins. Say after 10 years if there is no activity in a wallet the bitcoins get returned to the bitcoin community to be mined again.  No flames - since I know this idea would be repugnant to some people and may not even be technically possible - just an idea I'm throwing out there.  The fact is this wont be an issue in the near future.

That will not work.  What if I buy now and want to hold until 2030, when I think BTC will be worth 2k each?  You cannot just up and steal my coins....

I think most people would consider that change a problem not a solution.

As the amount of coins become smaller, the value with increase so no problem there!

Was about to say that.

Every lost bitcoin just makes the BitCoinsAvailable/NumberOfUsers ratio better for bitcoin value! if all the bitcoins were mined and there are exactly 21 million users in the market and 21 million bitcoins available, the ratio is 1:1. If 1 million of these bitcoins go missing for some random reason, but we still have 21 million users, the ratio is 20:21.
20/21 = .95 bitcoin
.95 is better than 1 because it's reverse inflation. That's said because .95 will then buy what used to cost 1 bitcoin. Thus the bitcoin has gained value.

Yep haha this is not a "problem" nor is it a "great" problem.

But, the people who want to think it is will never be disueded. These annoying threads will always pop up. And the same people will always chime in.

in 2140 you wont be here anymore. So why worry?

Christ, I don't know why I bothered.
 
From now on, when I disagree with someone I'm just going to say NUH-UH!  >:( and stamp my feet. It seems to be the MO around here and it's so much less work than typing out a long, considered post detailing why we should think about this issue, how to go about solving it, and how to allay people's fears that people will 'up and steal their coins'.

TLDR: would it kill you to just move your coins around once every fifty bloody years?

It has already been discussed and it is NOT a problem.


Even with 1 remaining bitcoin, you can still use 0.000000000000000000000001 btc for buying and selling stuff, and you can divide it even more.

So you did not read my post #21 then? The one where I agreed with an earlier poster who explained that yes, it is indeed not a problem having known lost coins, but it IS quite a problem to have large numbers of coins whose status is unknown? Where I explained why this was? And what we might do about it?

TLDR: I agree entirely with you. And you did not read my post. Which isn't about what you say it's about.

I am a little confused about the adding another 0 idea.  If even one extra decimal place is added, that increases the number of units by a factor of 10.  Doesn't that mean that bitcoin is in fact inflationary in the long long term.  In the real world countries can print new money as needed, and the inflation rate is supposed to be kept in close check.  those countries generally aren't increasing the money supply but a factor of 10 all at once, except some small 3rd world examples.

Isn't adding a zero an inflation supporting move? A massive step.


 

It's not really the same as inflation of fiat money since everyones money supply increases by the same factor if an extra decimal place is added. In the case of fiat-money inflation, the number I see when I check my savings account doesn't increase after new money has been printed. So the total money supply increased, while my amount of money stayed constant, which means I now own a smaller piece of the pie. Adding a zero to Bitcoin is just a notational thing. You can compare it to expressing fiat-prices in cents instead of dollars/euros/pounds/whatever.

What truely matters is the fraction of the total money supply that you possess, not the numerical value that goes with it.

This thread pops up every fortnight

THIIIIIIIIIIIIS. I'm quoting it again to improve the signal to noise ratio of this thread.

Ok cool, I get it.  I'm no economics major and hadn't seen any of "the other" threads on this topic, and it never hurts to ask.
Peace

No.  What you are missing is that, for the time until your hypothetical time X, this will have been the situation - i.e. the uncertainty of knowing how many coins there are.

As long as everyone has the same information, there is not a problem.  If you ignore the available information (and are therefore "surprised") in formulating your decisions, that is your problem because of your lack of research, and a cost to be borne by you alone and not foisted onto others.

Free markets are a wonderful thing, and remarkably stable if there is no "authority" pretending to protect people from themselves.

I agree. It should also be bloody obvious that, in the situation we are discussing, everybody does NOT have the same information. Specifically, whoever originally had the private keys to old coins knows something that everybody else does not, namely, whether those coins still exist or not. Recycling 'expired' coins *puts* everybody's information on the same level, which is why you ought to approve of it.

Damned if I can see how any of the rest of your post responds meaningfully to anything anyone has written here. It's like one of The Onion's 'Ask Someone who is...' parodies. "Ask someone who just picked up a copy of Milton Friedman's Collected Works in the library", perhaps.

any type of "recycling" undermines the concepts of both Saving, and Investing. Bitcoin ceases to be a means to retain value. My Bitcoins are MINE and if i choose to take them out of circulation that is no one elses business.

You haven't touched your bank account in 20 years, We are going to take your money give it to the people maintaining the banking system.

Actually, in the U.S. it is 3 - 5 years (depending on the state), but the money goes to the state.



edit: added link

Wow
Really?

I'd be furious if my bank did that.

The reason why I'm perfectly happy to contemplate a Bitcoin with that feature is precisely *because* of all the ways Bitcoin is already different from money that the banks have control over. In my proposal, ALL you have to do to keep hold of your precioussss coins is MOVE them once every fucking fifty years. There's 'respecting property rights', and then there's 'being willfully obtuse', and I feel too many bitcoin enthusiasts mistake the one for the other.

Here's another crucially important way in which my proposal differs from your hypothetical Evil Bank Manager, an aspect I didn't *think* I'd have to emphasise, but *every* *single* *person* who goes OMGTHIEF!!1! willfully ignores:

In my scenario, the recycling aspect is NOT sprung upon the poor unsuspecting saver at the last minute. It is SHOUTED FROM THE ROOFTOPS continually from the very first moment the saver hears about bitcoin. Regular popups come up in all bitcoin wallets saying "Don't forget to move your coins in [xx] years! Would you like to auto-enable this feature? Really? Are you suuuuuuuure?".

Now I'm quite sure that *some* people would throw vast wealth away just to make some foggy, poorly thought out statement about how they're the brave producers being ground down by the mean grabby bankers. But that's because some people are just idiots. Some people genuinely deserve to have their money confiscated. People who can't understand extremely simple instructions, for example.

Oh this bit also needs comment:


No argument from me there.


But this is incredibly myopic. To see why, let's get back to one of the key reasons we're all on this forum in the first place.
What is it that central bankers can do with money, that no one can do with bitcoin, that's why we all hold fiat money in contempt? It's changing the money supply at their whim. Well you can't have it both ways. If you want a currency that no one can print out as much as they like whenever they feel like it, then no one should be able to destroy it whenever they feel like it either. I presume you would NOT accept an argument from, oh Bernanke or whoever it is, that whenever he prints another billion dollars, those are HIS and if he chooses to put them into circulation that is no one elses business?

The protocol was designed so that we should all know exactly how much BTC exists at any moment, and we should also know how that supply is going to change well into the future. So that we can make wise decisions about what to do with our piece of the pie. It seems to me an unfortunate oversight that as things stand now we only have an upper bound on the money supply. All I'm proposing is a simple fix. It doesn't confiscate money from anyone unless they really really REALLY WANT their money to be confiscated. What it does do is improve the quality of information. Free markets are only 'free' to the extent of the information the participants have, as was alluded to in an earlier post.