Bitcoin Forum

Lets say If someone purchase ALL the bitcoin in the bitcoin industry or even half, and saves it in his/her hard drive and burn that hard drive to death or throw it in the sea, does that mean those bitcoins are permanently gone forever?

yup

Let's say if someone bought up all the gold in the world and shot it into the sun.  Would that gold be gone forever?

Once you lose access to the private keys they're gone, but it's not reasy feasible to buy up all the coins.

Yes... but the cost of my final BTC is $1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.00

soooooooooooooo the odds are pretty low.

Who the hell will buy all of bitcoin?? Just to lose his all money? seems impossible.

They'd have to pry it from my dead, lifeless hands for that to happen.  Sorry, I can't be bought.

I'm sure alot of HODLers feel the same way with their private stash.

hypothetically yes, but practically no.

out of 12.8million coins in existence right now. only maybe 100k exist on active sale orders of an exchange.

by the time he has bought just 50k coins, the price rise he causes would exceed being able to afford the other 50k sitting on sell orders, let alone the other 12.7mill coins in existence now, or even the other 8mill yet to be mined.

so i do love all of theses hypotheticals about what happens in 120years, which wont affect us. and attempts to destroy all bitcoins which wont affect us. i truly do love them all.. but the reality is...... you guessed it, it wont affect us

Hey Thank you all for your kind answers. I just wanted to understand the concept.

Also, how does bitcoin "exist" in computers?
for example, someone with 1 BTC and 20 BTC their wallet must be different other than just number 1 and 20 right?
do they exist in a line of codes or...?
I'm familiar with computers and programmings so you can be much technical as you want explaining this.

Thanks in advance

No need to buy all of the BTC.  I'm actually working on a quantum computer that will crack everyone's private keys.  I will be transferring all of the BTC to my own personal offline wallet and then I will destroy the hard drive.  No more Bitcoin.  I can't wait. ;D

someone will replace it..

the wallet does not contain a balance.

here is the easiest explanation of it.
having the bitcoin-core (and other main bitcoin wallet clients). downloads the whole blockchain.
the blockchain is a list of transactions (movements of funds).
the blockchain is not saved as 1Addressblahblahblah = 1btc
the blockchain is 1Addressblahblahblah recieves 0.5btc 1Addressblahblahblah receives 0.5btc from 1AnotherAddressblah

so again the blockchain is just a list of 'to' and 'from' and NOT 'contains'.
it is then the client or bitcoin explorer websites that read the blockchain do the maths to add and subtract th transactions involving certain addresses, to display a balance. but again this balance total is not saved. it is just for easy display purpose.

the wallet does not save the balance. the wallet just stores the private keys. (imagine it as password storage) that is purely used to know who owns the list of transactions to the corresponding public address.

each time you start up your wallet. it looks at the private key and finds the corresponding public key and then does all of the maths of adding and subtracting transaction values to get a 'balance'.

so to summerise.
if you were to manually read the blockchain you will not read anywhere that shows your total balance neatly wrote out, you would have to read all of the transactions that mention your address and see if its giving you a value or taking a value away. and you have to join it all together.

this is in accounting terms called a ledger. it is not a balance sheet (totalised numbers)

now to get technical

imagine it as a SQL database
from | to | amount to transfer
P1 | P2 | 5000000
P2 | P1 | 2500000
P1 | P2 | 2000000

to check balance of P2:
you would do a select where 'to' = P2 (500,000 + 200,000(700,000))
then do a select where from = P2 (250,000)

and minus the 'from' away from the 'to' = 450,000

you wont see 450,000 total wrote anywhere in the blockchain for address P2. its all worked out by calculating the ledger

This really helped me understand it better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZloserjZNfM

go to 16.30m mark to skip the chatty intro and history part to get right into what bitcoin is as a currency and how it works but in short, it's a transparent distributed ledger and you're purchasing slots in this ledger with your fiat, and then those slots adopt the value of whatever rate you exchanged, and then it can be transferred to another point (like email). It's fundamentally though just debits and credits.

how does a quantum computer crack private keys in cold storage? (there would be quite a few i think) if you can think of a program that waits for wallet.dats to come online-I can think of a program that will detect an attack and prevent it and so on forever!

While that might be a useful analogy, the actual technical details are a bit different than you've described.


There is no "from 1AnotherAddressblah".

There is a specific list of unspent outputs that are referenced as being spent.  In order to include a previously unspent output in the list of outputs being spent, the spender satisfies some requirement that was placed on that output when it was created (typically a requirement to provide an ECDSA signature from a particular private  key).


Keeping in mind that "from" doesn't mean "from an address", or "from a wallet", it means from a specific previously unsent output that is now permanently spent.


Subtraction shouldn't be necessary.  The client should search the blockchain for all unspent outputs for which the wallet believes it is capable of meeting the requirements of spending.  Then it can sum up those outputs and display the result as a "balance".


To save time, and increase efficiency, wallets generally keep track of the information from when they scanned the blockchain in addition to storing the private keys.  That way they don't have to scan the whole thing again every time they are shut down.


Generally not.  That would take too long, and would be too inconvenient.  The wallet must do that once to make sure that it is all caught up and has all the necessary information.  Once it has, it stores the information that it needs so it won't have to re-scan the entire blockchain after shutting down.

If you bought and deleted half the worlds bitcoins, then you have just spend hundreds of millions of dollars to double the price of my bitcoins.
Thanks!!  :D

Scarcity, gotta love it right!   ;)

Impossibility. My Bitcoins are not for sale.

That would be an act of generosity of legendary proportions. I and many others would be made wealthy beyond our wildest dreams.

When you destroy Bitcoins, you're essentially giving your wealth away in perfectly equal shares to every other Bitcoin holder.

I know that sounds a little counter-intuitive, but you'll just have to trust me.

Indeed. The government makes yet another idiotic decision and buys back as many bitcoin as are available with the intention of destroying them.

What happens is the purchase alone drives the price up, making bitcoin even more valuable, increasing everyone's wealth, while simultaneously devaluing the usd in the process...so they basically would be spending a ton of money to make everyone but themselves wealthy in fiat...

true, once he starts to buy, he will made the rest to cost the same or more than the part he bought.. at grade that the last 10 bitcoins would worth billions of usd

Simpleton's understanding: 

The "coins" are assigned to a public address on the block chain.  The blockchain is downloaded onto uses who use a QT wallet (I use a qt wallet to ensure more blockchain copies.. i'm silly like that).

In order to send the coins you must have the private key.

When you send the coins to me the transaction is completed on the blockchain and recorded.  The coins have been moved to my address. 

Basically they are stored on the blockchain.

(I'm sure there are errors in my understanding and obv it goes WAY deeper than this)

The truth is that there are no bitcoins. The block chain is a ledger that keeps track of transfers of things that don't actually exist.

Bitcoin is based on a network of keys, being found that are unused etc.

Bitcoin isnt a physical product.. so it does you no good if you did throw it in the ocean.

The hard drive on the wallet.dat file or back up file cant be restored so in that sense you`ll just have a big balance on your wallet that you can never touch. lol.

i know the chances are extremely extremely extremely unlikely, but there's still a chance that someone could create a wallet and stumble upon the stashed BTC.. so it's near impossible, but not fully impossible.

also, bitcoin wouldn't be eliminated.. if someone lost half of the supply, the price would probably go way up.

I think this video is an appropriate reply: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX5jNnDMfxA

Riiiight...

Just like I know the chances are extremely extremely extremely unlikely, but there's still a chance (through quantum tunneling) that I could walk through a solid brick wall without damaging myself or the wall.  Try running a survey and seeing how many sane people would agree that it is "near impossible, but not fully impossible" for a human to quantum tunnel through a wall.

Or, just like I know the chances are extremely extremely extremely unlikely, but there's still a chance that all the air molecules could spontaneously collect in one corner of the room, leaving a vacuum in the rest of the room and causing everybody to suffocate and die.  It's "near impossible, but not fully impossible".  That's why everybody carries Scuba tanks around with them every day, right?

As you mentioned, a very very small chance ;)

i'm not saying it's going to happen, but my statement still holds true. extremely unlikely by orders of magnitude. there's still a chance that not all the coins are lost, at least based on technicality.

Yes, your statement still "holds true" in the same way that my two statements hold true.

There's a chance that you might be able to quantum tunnel your way through a solid barrier, and there's a chance you might suffocate due to all the air in the room collecting in one small space in the corner, at least "based on technicality".

I'll leave it up to the individual to decide for themselves if that "technicality" is realistic, or if it makes more sense to say that all three of these statements are "impossible" as we humans understand the concept of "possibility".

lol!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You don't save coins to your HDD; you just save the keys so you can access them. But yes, if the coins can not be accessed by anyone but you, and you don't want to sell, obviously they are gone from the market. You don't even have to destroy them; just don't share the private keys and it has the same effect.

Yes that is theoretically possibly but impractical because it's unlikely they would be able to convince everyone to sell, not to mention buying that much would drive the price into the millions.

You cannot kill the bitcoin.

As per your scenario, the Bitcoin community can simply form a consensus on which block is the last trusted block on the chain and fork Bitcoin starting from that block. If the malicious entity objects because it would negate the transfer of wealth as protected by the law, then the community can just modify the Bitcoin protocol to start generating more coins (assuming that the described scenario entails all 21 million Bitcoins to be generated). The Bitcoin protocol was always understood to be subject to change by manner of consensus by the majority, so the malicious entity's solitary dissenting voice won't really matter -- he/she can always brute force every private key to regain his/her coins if he/she wanted to.

The bitcoins are on the blockchain.  All your wallet holds is the keys to your bitcoins, even if it is a paper "wallet" it's still just your keys.  So when you deleted your "coins" on your hard drive all you would be deleting is your private keys.  If someone could somehow derive those keys, virtually impossible today, then the coins would come back.  So technically no, practically yes.

I hope this helps and good luck!

 :D

Just wait and see.

Good job, bitcoin market price is rising  :D

What for they are so?
One time you will trade your bitcoins for something else.
Or lose your private keys.

tertium non datur