Bitcoin Forum

My questions is that ' is there any possibility that some point in time in future BTC community might decide something which can retrieve this lost BTCs?

No.

1. We cannot foresee what the future holds.
2. Untouched coins are not necessarily lost. One very common example is the funded collectible coins and items. Hence if it's ever decided that those coins will "return into circulation", that would mean in some cases stealing/confiscation (!).
3. My questions to OP is: why do you think that such move is necessary? Do you know that the maximum (almost) 21M Bitcoin we'll ever have means (nearly) 210 000 000 0000 000 satoshi?

I will speak for myself, as I don't know what's the others' opinion (neither do I care): I will never configure my node to do such thing.

I'm with you.

@OP: I already came up with a name for your Forkcoin: Bitcoin Steal!


While on the subject of Forking, if I ever make a Fork, I'll call it BitcoinLV (BLV): Bitcoin Loyce Vision or Bitcoin Loyce Valenzuela. I wouldn't hold my breath though.

If technology (especially quantum computers) develops and the value of bitcoin increases exaggeratedly, some may try to (restore) some of the old bitcoins as they were sent to the public key directly (P2PK.)

Other than that, as long as you are generating seeds randomly, you are not sending from your cold storage address, it is impossible for anyone to spend your money other than you as long as you are the only one who knows your seeds.

[I assume you're referring to the [impossible] possibility that one day the BTC network decides to distribute the coins to everyone? ???]

Anyway, you can already make your node configured as strictly as a peer only, and disable the wallet functionality with wallet=0. I have actually done that already some time ago. Not that the protocol can force you to create a wallet or access and RPC calls purely by a message from a peer though, so adding this is not necessary.

In the first place, how would you know if coins on certain wallet addresses are actually 'lost' and not with the owner just holding silently by not spending or moving the coins around?

No one has the right to interfere into how other people are spending, storing, or using their Bitcoin. Bitcoin is censorship-resistant and immutable. If you change that principle, you no longer have Bitcoin. You have an altcoin where a centralized group decided to change year-long rules.

Each Bitcoin holder decides for himself. I can keep my coins on the same address forever without moving them if I want to, without fear that someone might attempt to steal them for whatever reason.

If that happened, then it would destroy the idea that bitcoin is a long term store of value.

Outside of the obvious no answer they can't be taken. I find it amazing the number of people who don't understand the concept of long term things.
I actually have some 30 year bonds that I bought while I was in college. Just sitting there earning interest for the last 2 1/2 decades. What if people decided to do the same with their BTC do you just want to take that?

Years ago (and they may still exist) there were 50 year bonds. Do you just want to take those from people?

How about show up at their house and take the cash they have in a shoebox in the back of the closet that they have been collecting since they were young?

-Dave

With Bitcoin, your money is secured by laws of the universe (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ohwvu/bitcoin_your_money_is_secured_by_the_laws_of_the/)


Brute force Bitcoin private key is very hard if you don't have any information, like wallet ID and json file in this video, it is impossible to brute force a Bitcoin private key. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMtW8vIHHek

What I meant is that I'll never accept to freeze coins or move them arbitrarily without a digital signature. That'd make bitcoin susceptible to censorship.

Exactly. We don't know if those early outputs are still accessible, and therefore can't make a conclusion. In fact, we keep seeing people, occasionally, who unlock outputs that are more than a decade old.

What this can lead to is hardfork that will lead to the creation of an altcoin, just like bitcoin cash.

If the lost bitcoin are to be recreated, who will be the owner? The lost coins are lost but not lost in value, the value of the lost coin will be added to the ones that are not lost as the circulatory supply is reduced. So, why creating it again, even no one knows the coins that have lost, because a coin is not transferred over 50 years does not mean it is lost.

The more the circulatory supply is reducing the more the increase in price as the coin become more limited in supply and will become more valuable.

Protect your wallet, seed phrase, private key and bitcoin so not to be a victim of a lost coin.

Nah, but i dont think we should be too concerned about lost coins, because in the unlikely case that the circulating supply gets too low(because of lost coins) to still be functional, we could add more decimal places to it and so never run out of it(with the positive side effect of not screwing anyone up, because their amount of coins remains the same).

Does anyone still believe in the theories launched by a spy company (blockchain analysis) to promote themselves and their business a few years ago? If memory serves me well, they based their theory of lost coins on a period of 4 years of inactivity, which is a completely meaningless methodology to determine how much Bitcoin has been irretrievably lost.

Although the exact number will remain unknown, I think that given the human exaggeration around everything, the number of BTCs currently lost is close to 2 million - although this is just speculation.

That refers to a brute force attack on your keys alone.
No law in this universe will be able to prevent a hard fork if the community is stupid enough to decide on it for whatever reasons that make no sense right now. Satoshi will keep his coins on his own chain but if that is abandoned his coins will have nearly the same value those currently mined on the BSV network have.

Stupidity is the only thing in this universe that has no rules or limits, but I seriously doubt I would see something as stupid as this, at least in my lifetime. After that, who cares!


As I said there is no limit to stupidity, I can perfectly see somebody coming up with an idea of recreating the chain where everyone has to come with his addresses and all KYC details to receive clean coins in a new chain while the ones not claimed by anyone else are presumed lost and destroyed. And trust me, you're going to see people cheering for this as it will give BTC legitimacy or whatever!

Just looks at the number of topics like this one where random guys want a piece of satoshis coins, just because they think they deserve!
Greed and envy will always manage to ruin a lot of nice things and ideas.

There is nothing you can do about it. Anyway 5 years is a short amount of time, for sure we don't have 4.5 mln of bitcoins lost forever, many of them are just sitting in the wallets of some real hodlers. There are addresses without any transaction for the last 10 years and then suddenly the bitcoin move, so what you're asking could even be dangerous because it would suggest to take the bitcoin from someone who didn't actually lose them.

Well, I don't think so, lost bitcoins are lost, and it's up to their individual owners to individually look or find a way to get their lost bitcoins back, and if they can't, then those bitcoins continues to stay lost forever.
4.45 million bitcoins is no small amount and if this number continues to stay unaccessible to its owners, then this will help the ones in circulation to worth slightly more in price.

Come to think of it, how do you expect the entire bitcoin community to collectively work together to retrieve lost bitcoins when the community doesnt own those bitcoins?, and when at the end of it, the owners of those bitcoins will claim their lost bitcoins and not give anything back to the community, I don't think it's worth the community's time and effort.
Those who lost their bitcoins by carelessly misplacing or forgetting their password should carefully find a way to retrieve their lost bitcoins.  ;D

as a member of the community, whereby i have coins i have not touched for more then 5 years. i have decided that you shall leave my coins alone!!

my coins are not lost. i am just treating them as a retire plan.

but if you think 5 years is enough. how about i come to your city, approach your employer and demand that i take your employment retirement plan of all funds over 5 years old.

if you wish to steal funds that do not belong to you, first start by surrendering your own funds first.

We don't know if they arr lost or not. How do you know? It os very unlikely that there are BTCs which are stuck (lost). Owner/someone else can get private key too.
Imagine, in 2050, someone will dig soil and found a hardware wallet which will have X amount of BTC lol.

Regarding your questions, if someday some steps will be taken, that won't anymore be bitcoin blockchain. That will be another altcoin chain.

It's not possible at all, first of all how do you form a consensus that this money is actually all lost? There is a high possibility that this might not be lost, it's just that owner must have kept it safely and securely person saying he has the key and lost it might be lying even if you realise that it's true you'll have to cheat the system protocol in order to get this money which not only sound unethical but foolish at the same time, so I don't think such a thing would happen.

What for? in what way? and if it can why not now?

This is what is called complete control only in your hands. It's not impossible it's just that everything must have a probability rate above 5%. If I could, then I wouldn't tell you that I've taken the 99% lost Bitcoin and 1% just let it go live on Twitter.  ;D

Would you mind getting negative tags from the Bitcointalk community and getting distrusted by 10K accounts for doing this?  ;D

Nope, 2nd post of this thread does explain and this comes from the creator itself which means its the absolute rule when it comes or in talks about lost Bitcoins, thats why you should really be careful

on storing up your coins and never ever tend to forget your private keys or seeds which could really be the thing needed on accessing your wallet.
There's no way that community could make out retrieval and if you do tend to understand the basic concept of Bitcoin itself then you would clearly understands.

We can't get into conclusion those bitcoins that weren't transacted for 5years is a lost one. Among that will be coins that are kept hold for years.

To retrieve bitcoins that are being lost is impossible thing. These days we've got some people claiming that they'll be able to get back stolen and lost bitcoins. Don't believe it.

If this gets added up to the circulation, we'll experience an increase in the volume as well as the dominance level.

James Howells accidentally threw his hard drive during an office cleanup in 2013. He have been struggling hard to find it, even reached NASA for help. Similar incidents can be found and this can be considered a lost one.

Really hard to determine whether its a lost coin/wallet for a dormant account/wallet that we do see in the market and its true that we wont know if the owner is tending to hold it off for years
or simply those wallets are totally lost or cant be accessed by its owners or simply been forgotten thats why its really hard to determine.I remember that Hard drive which does have lots of
coins inside of it which is unfortunate for  someone to experience but there's nothing we can do and its just stressful on minding those situations back.

The community is not built to retrieve any bitcoin for anyone, what is the assurance that the key to that bitcoin has lost as you said? There are people who have bought bitcoin for more than 7 years, they haven't spent a single sats from it, despite some soft fork like the use of native segwit address, they still prefer the first legacy wallet address to avoid chain surveillance from puting nose in their holdings.
If anyone do this, you are breaking the trust of the community, it will be impossible to even break into these wallet address except you have some tips about that wallet addresses like some missing part of the private keys or wallets dat

I agree with you.

The Bitcoins remaining untouched doesn't mean they are lost. Maybe some of them are lost but not all of them. Often we see news that A Bitcoin dormant account wakes up with million worth of BTC. Here is some news you may want to check.

• Bitcoin Whale Wallets Dormant Since December 2018 Suddenly Add BTC Worth Rs. 62,789 Crores: All the Details (https://gadgets360.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitcoin-price-dip-whale-wallet-dormant-wake-up-suddenly-buy-btc-28377-worth-crores-2491482)
• This Dormant $720 Million Bitcoin Wallet Has Woken Up – But Who Owns It? (https://www.ccn.com/dormant-720-million-bitcoin-wallet-owner/)
• Dormant Bitcoin wallet turns $29 million after 8.8 years (https://www.cryptopolitan.com/dormant-bitcoin-wallet-29-million/)
• Hundreds of Millions Worth of 'Sleeping Bitcoins' Woke up After BTC's Mid-November Price High (https://news.bitcoin.com/hundreds-of-millions-worth-of-sleeping-bitcoins-woke-up-after-btcs-mid-november-price-high/)
• Bitcoin Account Dormant for 9 Years Now Worth $33 Million Shows Why You Should Hold Cryptocurrencies Long Term (https://gadgets360.com/internet/news/bitcoin-whale-account-900-btc-cryptocurrency-dogecoin-price-trading-investment-coinbase-2454396)

Also, There is Twitter Account named Whale Alert (https://twitter.com/whale_alert) often Post Dormant account waking alert like This One (https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1473126731292807172).

Satoshi’s creation has had changes it will have more.

I am pretty much certain that a time limit forfeiture will be proposed around 2075.

I will be dead and since I have no kids I don’t care one way or another.

My guess is the rule will be simple.

block 1 stays frozen 🥶

any addresses after that one with 60 years or  more and  no withdrawal will be forfeited.

You need only move a little out of the address and clock starts again.

I would think that well under 2 million are lost not 4.5 million.

Many disagree with me and say it wont  happen.

At the current configuration of the Bitcoin protocols, it is a NO, but who knows, maybe one day a consensus can be agreed upon where idle Bitcoin for x amount of time can be retrieved but of course, it needs a fork for that.  I am not into forking Bitcoins just for the sake of retrieving "lost Bitcoins" because this may cause a huge problem when one day the owner of those "lost Bitcoin" decided to move or use it.

Can it really be done by configuring a node? Then what about the security of the coins of a long term holder? You never know when a person decides to use their bitcoin that is untouched for years.

My understanding was, if we need any such changes, a consensus needs to happed and a fork should follow after that. Is that not the case?

Let's turn the table for a moment....

Imagine that some of those coins was yours... will you like it if someone "touch" your coins, just because you hoarded those coins for 5 years? Do you think Bitcoin will be embraced and trusted by the public, if uncirculated coins are moved, without the owners permission?

The Banks will "lock" inactive accounts, if you do not use them, because they want you to use that money... so that they can charge you fees. In Bitcoin ..YOU are your own Bank and you have FULL control over your own coins.  ;)

Just ask yourself, why would the Bitcoin community decide to do such thing?
Will this bring some sort of benefit for the entire BTC community? Some Bitcoiners might recover their access to lost BTC(if they provide sufficient proof, which is highly unlikely to happen, in 80% of the cases), but the Bitcoin price will go down. We as a community will lose money, just because we want to help the people, who were irresponsible enough to forget their passwords, sees phrases, private keys, sent BTC to the wrong address, etc. Rewarding the irresponsible people and punishing the responsible people? This sounds like dumb socialism to me.

The coins lost cannot be retrieved as you need the keys for the same and only the owner of the funds have it which is why it's said you need to secure it properly on your end.The supply is shrinking due to these lost coins and we all know there will never be 21 million coins in circulation which will boost the prices even more when demand gets too high.

How do you know these coins are lost? Maybe they are just "holding" these coins? BTC community can't do anything about this at all. The system is decentralized and immutable. Meaning you can't retrieve lost coins and you don't know if they are lost in the first place. This is the beauty of blockchain. A mistake or not, once it is done, there is no turning back. People may try to fork bitcoin off but all they'll have is a worthless chain which nobody will be using.

To begin with the fact there are coins which have not moved for a long time does not mean those coins are lost, we have seen many cases of coins that were thought to be lost eventually moving, so unless someone which was the confirmed owner of the private key of a particular address later stated they had lost their private key we cannot know for sure if the coins are lost or not, also what you are proposing goes against the spirit of bitcoin, which is that no can spend their coins without the private key, and if something like this were approved I can guarantee you bitcoin will stop existing, as at that point it would not be different than fiat at all.

The act of allowing anyone to spend coins that they do not own, for which they do not have private keys, would mean that Bitcoin has failed in its primary function, and ultimately that would be the end of Bitcoin. The reason that Bitcoin has survived for so long is because the blockchain is immutable and untamperable.

The OP knows that once the owner of a bitcoin wallet loses access to his wallet, he will no longer be able to move bitcoin. But I think he just wanted to know if there is any possibility that bitcoins from that wallet could be moved especially as technology advances.

We're probably pretty sure that it can no longer be moved because no one else has the private key to access the wallet, so the answer is probably pretty self-explanatory as satoshi says in the quote.

Since he was asking about the funds getting redistributed back for the community (at least that's how I see his question), the problem is that you don't know if an untouched fund it like that on purpose or because one has lost access. And even if it's on purpose, one should not be forced to move his coins away (again, see collectibles).

If he was asking about "technology advances", (afaik) the oldest generation of addresses is considered relatively unsafe. But, as you can see, they are still pretty much safe enough. Satoshi's funds are still there.

I think many people overestimate the amount of Bitcoins that are actually lost forever. Many people don't want to sell them and there is also no point in sending them around. Also there is a big security concern to take them out of cold storage. So to me it is normal that many coins are not touched for 5+ years.

For now, it's impossible and likely to stay this way. It's also a good point that some coins which are presumed to be stolen might be unmoved for other reasons, a person has the right to not move one's coins. If you didn't touch the money in your bank account savings for 5 years, would you find it fair if the bank redistributed all your money to some random people? If not, then you shouldn't want the retrieval of "lost" coins either. Also, if one day it does become possible to crack the keys (say, due to huge progress in quantum computing), the moment it becomes possible Bitcoin itself becomes obsolete because the money isn't protected any more. So there won't be a point of retrieving something worthless.

I believe te estimates are probably about right, in 5+ years coins tend to move for whatever reason. I do "have" a few coins lost forever in the blockchain myself. Probably most early adopters do "own" lost coins.

Nevertheless, the problem of accessibility to previously lost bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies remains and it continues to be relevant. Experts have calculated that in ten years quantum computers will be able to do this, and this is subject to the current pace of their development. In addition to positive aspects in this regard, this will also mean the possibility of our wallets being hacked using such computers by various malefactors who will surely gain access to them. We do not know which way the further development of the cryptocurrency will go, but I hope that we will be able to solve this emerging problem in time.

Quantum computers aren't said to reverse hashes, since that's, if not impossible, infeasible. The danger from quantum computing lies to addresses that have revealed their public keys, because ECLDP is said to be solvable. That affects mainly the early P2PK outputs.

Sure, it can be resolved with consensus. There just isn't a point to do it now; it'll just worsen the scaling problem without tangible benefit.

We can't make any decisions, that is the difference. I mean the talk here is that "maybe we should redistribute it again" or something like that but at the end of the day we can't do that. We can't retrieve it, so all the discussion about "should we?" goes to nothing at all.

If the discussion is about something that we can't do, can we please talk about how I would like to spend a day with Kate Upton and Alexandria Daddario at the same time? That has more chance of happening than Bitcoins untouched to be redistributed, one is "technically" possible, obviously not going to happen, but at least it is not "impossible", the other one is literally impossible to do.

We can say that lost bitcoins are like token burning in deflationary tokens. Where token burning reduces the circulation of coins and that makes token demand to surpass token supply. There are 21 million bitcoins that will be ever generated, if out of those 21 million let's say 5 million are lost forever then we are left with 16 million bitcoin only.

He instantly assumes that the coins are lost just because they are untouched for 5 years now but you can be right with that. What if the coins aren't really lost but what if someone is just holding them? They are not an ordinary person like us that are emotional and can easily sell our btc when we see a small dump or pump in the price but they can be big institutions or whales whose aim is to hodl for a long time to reap maximum benefits since they already figured out the potential of btc.

The guys prolly started buying and hodling btc on the year 2017 because if we will count it, that will be exactly 5 years up to this date we have now.