Bitcoin Forum

Most of you might already know about QuadrigaCX (Canada's largest crypto exchange) owner's death:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/04/quadrigacx-canada-cryptocurrency-exchange-locked-gerald-cotten

If he has actually died, then it means that about 0.25% of the bitcoin's supply has been burnt. However, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (Zcash's founder) seems to have come up with a solution for the confirmation of this:

https://i.imgur.com/HZqoj0L.png

Not sure if Zooko thought of this, but if we really recycle those 10-year-old unmoved bitcoin into new mining rewards, then all of Satoshi's addresses will be emptied too! This could possibly boost up the confidence of investors/holders, as the fear of Satoshi dumping his/her bitcoin will vanish.

Quite interesting...

Interesting and how do we do it?
Why 10 years by the way? I guess it needs to be longer if this is achievable.

Thanks for the link on WO or I would miss it.

Bullshit ....so somebody's money is taken away, just because he saved it for the future? Why I have to move my money, if I don't want to?

This stands against some of the most important core values of bitcoin. Satoshis coins belong to Satoshi, nobody's business what he does with them.

This.

Also, if people lose their coins, be it by proxy or not, it's their problem. It's about time we stopped babysitting adults.

Agreed.

Taking away satoshi's coins is no different than what happened with ETH&DAO in the past. Immutability is bitcoin's core feature. If you take away satoshi's coins and redistribute them, you'll just fork yourself away into another shitcoin which nobody uses.

About the investor confidence thing, personally I have enough confidence right now and fucking with immutability is not going to increase it, on the contrary, I would lose all I have now.

If a group of person can decide to take one person's stash and redistribute them, then they can decide to take mine later too.

I am not dumb.

Fuck that shit.

It is rumored that he is not so dead as it seems...
Here are the proofs:

exactly this.

need to move your coins every 10 years? riiiight so when will it be 5 years? 3 years? 1 month?

i had btc in paper wallets for over 5 years. only moved them to split out the bcash_lol from them, or they would still be there.. so that would be 7+ years without moving. so what? they are MINE to leave there forever if i so chose.

bitcoin ever implements this im out 100% because i wont trust it any other way than coins stay where they are put forever until the private key holder moves them.

This dangerous idea keeps coming back Theymos: “Bitcoins Belonging to Satoshi Should Be Destroyed” (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1469099.0) <--this is BS
You are not alone friend, this would mean the end of the original chain. Question is would it result with fork?
I'm quite shocked that theymos actually put this idea out. Was it a moment of weakness on his part?
Although destroying does not equal re-minted but still, it is tinkering with someone's possession.
I would rather see bitcoin down due to satoshis wallet hack than due to consensus robbery.
Who is this Zooko anyway? SJW or something?

Try actually reading the thread...

:) thought so
Sorry for spreading nonsense then.
But as you see, there was none to set the record straight. Glad that you did.
I remembered that you once told me that there can only be one genuine satoshis chain, but was unable to find it.
Always best to check with the source though.

might as well call it E-Socialism blockchain.

where i live, we used to have socialism system the country was based on, there is a long detailed explanation regarding it, but long story short, the government can confiscate your money, property or anything you own - for whatever reason they see fit, they can just assume it's too much for you or simply you are not using it ,  this proposal  is not much of a difference.

Actually I don't see any bad intent in this proposal but the results will be bad so intentions  don't matter.

Whoever said this, desperately wants to increase the circulating coin supply but again, bitcoin doesn't work that way. If it is lost, then it is lost forever. If a person wants to hodl his coins more than 10 years without touching his address, that's his right to do so. He doesn't have to check what the devs are going to do everyday.

The full quote:

---

There have been some reports that Blockchain analysts experts do not believe the exchange has the claimed amount of coins in cold storage, or at least not in a cold storage address with many transactions to the address. It may have used a new address each time a transaction to cold storage was made. Some of these experts believe many of the withdrawals from their hot wallet went to various other exchanges, although this may have been legitimate customer withdrawals.

I am not sure how the intention could be good if the objective is completely unnecessary.  There is absolutely no need to re-distribute Satoshi's coins, even if we believe that Satoshi had mistakenly lost access to his keys and died or something very unintentional that changes the initial conceptualization of total supply.  O.k.  So, instead of 21 million coins, there are now 20 million coins. 

If there ends up being a shortage of liquidity because all 7 billion people on the planet want to get themselves some coins and to use them, etc etc, then the most obvious solution would be to move the decimal point further to the right. 

Another conceptual problem is the issue of too much BTC scarcity because almost inevitably coins are going to be lost, that would not justify reviving those keys, but there could be some justification to some kind of ongoing BTC inflation, such as 1% a year or perhaps less, even though, from what I understand, such a change to add constant inflation would require a BTC hardfork... Currently, there is a natural around 3.6% inflation, that reduces to around 1.8% at the 2020 halvening.. So BTC's inflation rate is still well over 1%, until after the next halvening in 2024.

So... did immutability win in the case of ETH&DAO? ::) Ethereum did the right thing and people agreed to it, see the current situation of Ethereum Classic for proof. Immutability didn't succeed!


Contradiction detected

Cannot break immutability PERIOD.

Ethereum is a shitshow they blindly followed what Vitalik said. (Not all though, that's why etc exists)  It is because eth holders are morons without any self conscious. I got zero eth and probably never gonna have any.

Vitalik made a bad decision that day and it will haunt him till the end of his days. That's why he is desperately saying that he has no influence over the eth development no more which is another lie. As long as he is alive and around, vitalik is eth.

That's why we don't have a vitalik/satoshi here.

We got a theymos but he is responsible for the forum;) not the coin.

This idea is contrary to what Satoshi (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=198.msg1647#msg1647) himself say about this problem :
 

So every discussion on this subject actually challenges the ideas of the creator himself how things should work. What is lost must remain lost, and this is not bad thing at all.

Correct, He said nothing about destroying lost coins only that without them being available all the others are worth more and for all we know they are not lost and forking them away would be stealing them..

Zooko has no right to say what everyone should mutually agree or not. Remember, blockchain is not a democracy, that majority will decide its future.

He has his own trusted shitcoin to worry about.

Just playing devil's advocate here. 8)

TL;DR: The idea of "recycling" unused Bitcoins is intriguing.
Unfortunately, it is most likely unusable any time soon.

1. satoshi's stack is a ticking time bomb
We're using a currency where at least 5% (probably much much more) of the supply are in the hands of a handful of unknown entities.
They could, at any time, drop their stash on the markets and crash the exchange rate, thus destroying the wealth of thousands, if not millions of HODLers.
No prudent person, responsible for the wealth of others, e.g. a pension fund manager or a secretary of the treasury should even think about storing a significant share of his funds in Bitcoin, as long as the time bomb is active.
No prudent politician should advocate the widespread use of Bitcoin for fiscal matters.
Thought experiment: let's assume I'm an advisor to POTUS and he asks me "should we stop using the Dollar and use Bitcoin instead?", my unequivocal answer would have to be "no Sir, Satoshi could be the Chinese or the Russians, and once we're at war with them, they'll destroy our economy".
Destroying the stash could defuse the time bomb.

2. diminishing block rewards might become a problem
The general consensus when it comes to ever decreasing block rewards seems to be that "transaction fees will cover that".
But the truth of the matter is: we don't know.
Transaction fees are a special case of "tragedy of the commons" where higher fees might be in the interest of everyone, but each and every single one's interest lies with low or zero fees.
This situation is prone to abuse.
Political entities might take over from economically driven miners, concentrating mining power in the hands of states rather than individuals, offering low or zero fees in return.
A situation with an overwhelming percentage of mining power in the hands of states is ripe for censorship (if not worse).
Even the build-up of "51%-first-strike-capabilities" in an arms race of deterrence in the age of cyber-warfare is not an unthinkable scenario.
Recycling "unused" coins into new block rewards might defuse that situation, by incentivizing private miners.

Caveats
Recycling "unused" coins into new block rewards is a "good idea", but most likely unwanted by the community.
I actually expect basically zero support.
Even if consensus could be reached about recycling, finding a workable, agreeable threshold for the time after which coins may be safely regarded as unused would have to be highly conservative.
Let's assume we could agree on recycling 100-year-old coins.
That would not solve the "satoshi time bomb" for another 90 years, but still leave us with possible "state-miners" within the next 50 years or so.

Conclusion
Nothing gained for another 90 years, but a whole new era of "blockchain wars" on an even greater scale than with the block size-debate?
No thanks. ::)

Indeed. ;)

You could make this same argument for anyone who has a very substantial stash of coins. I believe Tim Draper purchased enough coins from the DOJ (who got them from SR/DPR) to do similar damage that you describe. The Gox trustee is in a similar situation (who actually represents the interests of thousands of people), and ACTUALLY DID crash the price by nearly 2/3 in late 2017/early 2018 by selling off a portion of its stash. Once the GOX coins are eventually distributed to former accountholders, there is a good chance many will sell, similarly crashing the price as if a single person was selling as many coins.

Similarly, we do not know if satoshi is one person or a group of people. We also do not know if he was mining for himself or mining for many people when he was mining -- for example, 10 people could have each given him a list of addresses to payout the block rewards to, and satoshi used a custom implementation payout the block rewards to those addresses.

You are highlighting a flaw in a POW based cryptocurrency that has diminishing block subsidies. I believe etherum initially had a solution to this by never dropping the block subsidy to nearly zero, and having constant, small inflation (which actually also solves some economic problems, but that is off topic here). IOTA's solution to this problem was to require a small amount of POW to confirm your own transactions, and have nothing resembling a block reward.

Your solution also will only delay the inevitable when these long unspent coins are "recycled" back to the miners. It would also encourage spending coins without a corresponding economic transaction, which will result in higher tx fees for everyone. 

Again, just playing devil's advocate ;D

Absolutely.
Of course, a 1-Million-BTC-size nuclear warhead in the hands of an unknown and potential irrational entity is probably a little more terrifying than a, say 100K-BTC-load in the hands of a well-known entrepreneur with comprehensible motives.

Right.
Then again, the whole argument is a little far-fetched, because it's most likely a problem of the more or less distant future.
If, by recycling, we turn it into a problem of the far distant future, I consider it "problem solved" for my lifetime ;)

https://i.imgur.com/JOMeb7N.png

https://i.imgur.com/kwknvXD.gif

True, I hadn't considered that.

The ideas of this whole thread causes me to consider the expression "let sleeping dogs lie," and perhaps, your (qwk) meme above sparked more of this sentiment.

The initial idea is like this:

https://parysgazette.co.za/wp-content/uploads/sites/116/2017/01/image-300x181.jpg

which includes the concept that overall the matter is likely better to just leave alone.

However, some members (likely a very small minority who are either lacking in logic or attempting to be too efficient in a futile attempt to conquer nature for no good reason) keep considering that there could be some value in attempting to recover or recycle satoshi's coins and have an inability to learn a lesson, like this:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/lowres.cartoonstock.com/miscellaneous-let_sleeping_dogs_lie-phrases-idioms-expressions-trouble_makers-phan124_low.jpg