Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

Here is a way of restoring lost bitcoins.

By design, it is impossible to tell idle bitcoins from lost ones. However, with time, there will be an increasing number of lost bitcoins, which will further increase Bitcoin's inherent deflation unnecessarily. How to avoid that? The solution is to define an expiration period for bitcoins, after which any public key that does not reappear in the block chain will expire. Then the Bitcoin client must have functionality to resend those bitcoins to their current wallet (or to any other wallet) before they expire (the client could periodically verify and warn the user, asking what to do). The expiration interval could be a very comfortable one, say, 10 years. After their expiration, the network nodes can mine those expired bitcoins again, so mining remains residually alive.

Please comment on that one.

NO

NO

Deflation is better than the current exploding money-systems ;-)

If the people would hold their bitcoins because of a deflation then the economy will suffer and the trust in the bitcoins will go down.

But the idea with expiring money is not bad and will force the cycle of money.
Money should be go through a lot of hand and make a lot of benefit.
Money which will stored for longer time is one of the main reason that the world have exploding debt.

I think the way to restore lost coins has been build into bitcoin system. If you were lucky enough, bitcoin client would generate you an address witch has been used before, and probably contains lost coins.

also if you are lucky enough, you can jump out of the window and not hitting the earth.
the recover lost addresses, is just unlikely. even if every atom in the universe, could generate 10mio addresse per second. and had done that since the beginning of the universe, they would with 99,9999% certainty not have found two equal addresses.

No? Why?

Since there is no way of telling idle bitcoins from lost ones, the only way I see to tell them apart is forcing the idle ones to "show up" before some "deadline," and if they don't, then expire them. If not, then please let me (and the others) know why not.

I think at least part of the reason is that it would force people to spend their bitcoins at some point, and thus at least partially identify themselves.

This is a fallacious argument: The lack of anonymity of Bitcoin is a consequence of not taking the required measures to make it anonymous, rather than a consequence of spending it.

Someone goes into a coma for too long, they wake up to their bitcoins gone.  Thats just one example, but enough for me.

I mined the coins, it's my godamm'd right to never spend them! The unborn grandkids that will inherit them will think it's novel that I mined them on a video card that didn't even have a laser 7 holo output or quark computing.

If bitcoin is to become our everyday money, then we will access our wallets at least once each, say, ten years, don't you think? For how many days can you afford not touching your wallet (I mean the one with dollars)? If bitcoin is to be our actual money, then that's the time interval you will be able to stay away from your bitcoin wallet. And every time you do, it will check your bitcoins expiration status and warn you, asking what to do.

That leaves the situation in which you keep a separate wallet full of bitcoins that you never touch. Yet even in this case I would restore it at least once each five years or so just to ensure it still works, wouldn't you?

That's the way one would think about toy money, but if bitcoin will ever become our everyday money, then we would have to take it much more seriously.

Really cute feature but why would we want forced communication (resend those bitcoins to their current wallet) in an anonymous currency?

Unintended consequences anyone?

When I used to write code years ago, I had a motto. Make things simple, straightforward and let them behave the same always. The reason is that flexibiliy = Complexity Squared. And complexity leads to buggy systems.

Besides all the other reasons not to do this is you are building in a massive amount of complexity dealing with all this "Sending bitcoins to their current wallet" stuff.

My thoughts.

The bitcoin client already sends bitcoins back to your wallet in various situations: it is already quite complicated. The aim is precisely to guarantee anonymity. In the expiration scenario, it would do the same to guarantee not anonymity, but the fixed supply of bitcoins.

Yes, but there are 'wallet' situations and 'savings' situations.  Bitcoins in 'savings' could be in a safe, or a vault (on a USB drive or via a paper key).  And you still haven't addressed the medical emergencies which could potentially cause your 'savings' to expire, just so some other miners out there could get a few more coins.  No thanks.

I understand your worries perfectly. But let me try addressing them. Regarding 'wallet' situations, case closed: there is no problem with an expiration period, provided bitcoin becomes our everyday money (which I hope it will). Now regarding 'savings' situations. In ten years (from now), we will certainly have (if we do not already have) technology for building bitcoin wallet gadgets capable of activating themselves and connecting to the network before their contained bitcoins expire, which solves all your worries, in addition to finally telling you where the heck are those savings you no longer remember where you hided. And don't tell me this sounds like science fiction: remember we are talking about bitcoin, which ten years ago would sound much more so.

However, I would like to stress that even without such gadgets most people simply won't let ten years pass without accessing their 'savings' wallet (even from the hospital), at least if it contains serious money.

A device which connects to a network automatically is just asking to be hacked.  Thats why the 'savings' are offline in cold storage.  And still does nothing to address medical situations that occur now (ie coma).

Well, if this expiration period is implemented now, then it will just occur ten years from now, so we will not have to worry about it for a long time.

And although those gadgets are possible, if you have a wallet with a serious amount of society's current money, you will much more probably have it invested in some way, rather than just stored in a pen drive hidden somewhere. The problem is that we are still thinking of bitcoin as not being serious money.

As for the device being hacked, bitcoin's protection is in its cryptography, and not in the gadget itself.

I'm not aware of any 'serious money' that just disappears after Xyrs of inactivity, only to be redistributed to others

I agree that it's somewhat of a problem discerning which bitcoins are 'lost' vs which ones are 'stored'.  But that's up to the market. 

Money just disappearing is quite common: just put U$ 10,000.00 under your pillow and let ten years pass to see a good deal of money disappear.

Regarding the problem of discerning which bitcoins are 'lost' vs which ones are 'stored', it's more then a bit of a problem: it is impossible, which leads to the money supply being continuously eroded, hence to a higher level of deflation than is necessary. The idea is to preserve the monetary system, making it more resilient.

The fiat in my mattress may devalue, but it doesn't disappear.

I don't like expiration idea because:

• Bitbills, coins, savings nuggets and whatnot. Those can be in circulation for god knows how long. (e.g. I shouldn't need to keep track of the expiration dates of my coins stored in a physical safe I don't have direct physical access to.)
• Bitcoin is not similar to bank notes accounts, it is supposed to be analogous to gold.
• Lost coins isn't a bad enough threat.
• Bitcoin will eventually move to a different algorithm and decades old addresses will one day be easily crackable. Natural expiration. ;)
• Coma patient argument is convincing.

Hello, wake up. Read what i bolded. We DO NOT WANT to lose bitcoins. THERE IS NO NEED to tell "lost bitcoins" from idle ones. There is NO NEED to make them show up. NO NEED to set a deadline and let them EXPIRE!

Seriously, do GOLD expire? NO! Why my BITCOIN should expire? Cause a noob so decided in the noob forum? Nah.

The difference between worthless money and nonexistent money would not bother me that much: what matters is that neither one allows me to buy anything.

Here is why lost bitcoins can be a problem: they will not be a problem as the loss of large 'savings' wallets. They will rather become a problem when Bitcoin is used by billions of people, each losing an "irrelevant" amount of bitcoins: these billions of "irrelevant" losses can have a big impact on the money supply. As for the 'savings' wallet, it will either be accessing some investment system, or stored in some periodically self-connected gadget or even in a long-term storage device that we will check periodically since it has an important amount of money that we cannot aford to lose.

Bitcoins are divisible into 8 decimal places.  Even if 1m bitcoins are 'lost', the money supply won't be affected, as there are many many 'units' of bitcoins available.

Let's do the math. There are 2,100,000,000,000,000 bitcoin units approximately. Let's assume there are 5 billion people using bitcoins and each one loses 1 bitcoin every year. Then, in ten years, the money supply will drop to 2,099,950,000,000,000, which is a significant economic impact.

AFAIK, one can only 'lose bitcoins' by losing the private key of your wallet.  I somehow doubt that 5b people are going to lose their wallet once a year, and have 0 backups.

That's not quite true: I can lose one bitcoin by restoring a slightly older backup than I thought. Or by trusting an online wallet that gets hacked (then I could lose much more bitcoins). Or by having many wallets and lose one of them (quite probable if I try to maintain lots of wallets and are slightly disorganized). The scenarios are endless.

I would prefer to believe that this is not really a problem, since Bitcoin is so beautifully designed.

Hacked wallets aren't 'lost', they're 'stolen'.  Big difference.

Plus, your backup wallet gives you access to the blockchain where your coins are 'held'.  AFAIK, if you create a backup, recieve 20m coins, destroy the current wallet and restore the backup, you still have access to your 20m coins because the coins aren't in the wallet, they're in the blockchain.

If I backup my wallet before generating a new private key, then receive a new amount of bitcoins under that new private key and restore my backup, then I have lost the new amount, since my backup didn't contain my new private key.

As for online wallets, I agree that we are not sure that, say, MyBitcoin didn't stole that wallet, but this does not make us sure they did.

Likewise, we are not sure that bitcoin losses will have no impact whatsoever on the money supply, so we'd better counteract it, especially because bitcoin is already deflationary by design.

What about nothing happens? The impact is on who lost the wallet, but that's their problem. Same when a ship full of gold sink. Other bitcoins will slightly increase in value. That's all.
And definitely do NOT justify deleting bitcoins cause...uhm... cause you want it.

And bitcoin are divisible as much as you wish. This 8 decimal thing is just a thing of the client, you can change it to how many decimal you want.

Great! I didn't go that far into Bitcoin's implementation, but if you assure me that we can easily change its decimal precision, then I will drop all my concerns and stop bothering you. Do you?

You can have infinite decimals if you want.

Or change name, for example use 1 bitcent instead of 0.01 bitcoins. As you wish, just easy changes in the client

WRONG!

After all, is it possible to change the number of decimal places just changing the client or not? If it is, then the loss of bitcoins indeed represents no problem...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=8657.0

they are wrong, the 8 decimal point, is a hard limit. of cource we could get hackie, and make a new transaction structure.
and all (new) clients would have to support both formats for a long long time, for backwards.

but currently its a hard limit, because the coin base tx are of are 5000000000 satoshi/units(is the "0"'s right?).

Anyways, it seems to me that increasing precision, if possible, is a better approach than creating an expiration period, so I am definitely dropping that one. I did a little research and there was an incident regarding the CTxOut member structure, which created a value of 92233720368.54275808 bitcoins by sum overflow (see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Incidents#Value_overflow (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Incidents#Value_overflow)). It is obvious to me that the block format would have to change to accommodate more than 8 decimal places, but the fact that the network remained operating with this absurd value indicates that it would not be that difficult for it to accommodate two different formats. Is that impression correct?

not the block format the tx format. and no two formats are just wrong, but it may be necessary in the FAR FAR future. and its only passibol after a long long time with the two formats running in parallel

I think mirelo's argumentis absolutely right - bitcoins will be lost; people die and don't pass on their wallets, move on to other monetary systems, etc. If I walk away now, .018ish bitcoins will be lost from the system forever. Laugh now, but if 20 years from now that is the equivalent of $100000, not so funny.

A lot of people on these forums like to dismiss arguments like these because they are "so far in the future that it will never impact us" rather than evaluating them for the long-term viability of Bitcoin. It's somewhat disappointing, especially when at some point in the future, it will become a real problem. Having a billion people trying to trade in Bitcoin at 8 decimal places .000000010 won't work.

It's very easy, just take .00000001 and start calling it 1. The client already support different visualization, go in options and you will find the option to have the client show your amount in BTC or mbTC or uBTC. Problem already solved  :D

Of course it will work.  Bitcoin has 1E14 discrete units called a satoshi worth 1E-8 BTC each.  Say hypothetically decades from now Bitcoin has a value such that 1 satoshi (1E-8) is worth > $0.10 (2012 dollars) and it starts to disrupt commerce (can't trade in values less than $0.10 equivelent).  We can add more digits by modifying the protocol.  We can make the smallest unit in Bitcoin 1E-12 or 1E-16 and gain a million fold increase in the number of discrete units.

If you are saying it wouldn't work because trading in 0.0000001 BTC increments is confusing well that is just silly.  If Bitcoin apreciated to the point that most commerce was done in small units people would use mBTC or uBTC or simply satoshis in daily vocabulary.

Dude I lost 130 mBTC (maybe informally called millibits) on that game last night.
...
So you ordered a #1 combo with large fries that will be 138 satoshis.
...

There is no possible scenario where confiscation of wealth is either necessary or desired.  Even if every single Bitcoin except 1 satoshi was lost the network would continue by adding more digits.  

Create a fork.

expiration is not a feasible option.

The short answer is that expiration is meaningless when you can just create transactions a priori which move any bitcoins within your wallet indefinitely. Then the only thing you need is to have some kind of service which sends these transactions within the right time window. Of course there might be compatibility issues, where an "old" transaction may become invalid at some time in the future and I may also have missed some aspect of the transaction design which creates a burden for creating automized transactions, but that's not the point, which is: any strategy to enforce expiration usually can be circumvented somehow.

Thus to pass back the question to you: How do you uniquely identify a "lost" address?

Guys, it's a 2011 thread

I bet you there are at least 10 threads saying the same and started on 2012 ;)
Fast forward to 2020 and you'll still see someone trying to find a solution for lost coins.
And yes, the coin expiration always makes it to those threads. lol

Yup, i remember seeing some of them

Somewhat offtopic: I don't think we're going there. Bitcoin may be one of those kind of inventions where the underlying concept is revolutionary, but the first actual implementation has disadvantages over newer ones. Let's assume we have 2022 now, Bitcoin price has risen by two to three orders of magnitude and there's a Newcoin with stable hashrate in existance. I'd probably prefer the Newcoin because at the point of time where 5% has been mined it's going to have a fairer distribution of wealth. There are no early adopters that were able to buy/mine substantial percentages of coins almost for free. Also, there will be less volatility because no one can drop huge early adopter holdings into the market.

Besides more objective concerns the Bitcoin legacy may have a psychological impact: Once a Newcoin has "arrived" - will people buy a Bitcent for 1000$ if they know that quite a few people own quite a few Bitcents they bought for a Dollar or less? I don't see Altcoins becoming worthwhile in the next few years, but as Bitcoin becomes more widely adopted and the price rises, as the concept of cryptocurrency becomes general knowledge, people will be more and more concerned about the infancy period of Bitcoin and eventually create a successor. My guess is it will happen within 5-10 years from now. This doesn't mean Bitcoin will become worthless, it won't. But it will neither fulfill the prophecies of becoming the one major worldwide cryptocurrency. All it takes is the well-coordinated and widely supported creation of Newcoin once the time is ripe.

(EDIT: Clarification on my implication of Bitcoin wealth distribution being "unfair": I do not think it's unfair at all. Early adopters played a vital role in establishing Bitcoin. They will be rewarded for thinking ahead an risking money in a revolutionary project. Above I'm referring to the fairness *perceived* by the general public in 2022 after a major increase in price.)

not underestimate the urge to cash out. The bitcoins will eventually be in the hands of the people who possess the wealth these days anyway...