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1621  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Never recovered bitcoins? Less than 21million? on: September 28, 2014, 02:27:59 PM
I think the total Bitcoins that never going to be used due to lost wallet files, lost passwords, etc will be around 1,000,000BTC MAX

Wrong, it is natures law that number eventually will be 21,000,000.
It only takes time and you and I are going to be dead for sure when that happens.


Yes it's just a matter of time. How long we will never know. Imagine this generation of bitcoin adopters, if half of those people never tell anybody or pass along their private key before they die...

Eventually number of available bitcoin in circulation will be too low causing price to increase insanely just for a few fraction of  sats. This will turn off mass adoption.
You are wrong.  Everyone I personally know that has a large amount of BTC has made provisions to transfer them to their heirs.  Bitcoin can operate just fine if we lose all but one BTC.
1622  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Never recovered bitcoins? Less than 21million? on: September 28, 2014, 02:22:20 PM
At least a meager 0.01% increments added each year to counter the permanent loss. Come on 0.01% wouldn't dilute bitcoin value so drastically. And this would eventually ensure bitcoin continuity in supply. Plus some incentive to ensure there will always be miners after the 21 mil
Quit trying to "fix" Bitcoin before you understand what it is, how it works and why it is the way it is.

Side note FYI:  if any attempt is made to implement a change like this it will not change or "fix" Bitcoin in any way.  By design it is almost impossible to change or "fix" Bitcoin.  Generally, by design, actually implementing a change of this nature would simply cause the creation of a new alternative coin to branch off of Bitcoin, eventually wither, and die - Bitcoin would be unaffected.
1623  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Never recovered bitcoins? Less than 21million? on: September 28, 2014, 02:14:43 PM
Hi guys,

As you may already be aware that there are people who simply lose bitcoins, and there is quite a lof of them!

For example: This guy lost his hard drive with 100k btc on it, another guy lost paper wallet with 30k btc on it and so on...

Now the question that i'm asking myself? Do they stay stuck in blockchain? Because if yes, than i see only about 8million bitcoins in circulation by the time they are mined..

Of course they stay on blackchain. And with time when computers will get stronger, they will be companies, that will search for this long lost wallets.  Same as are now companies, that search fro sunken ships from oceans. Pulling them out and sell their Gold or other things to pay costs and divide profit. So some coins on today lost wallets are not lost forever.
If you mean searching cryptographically for the private key then for sure, no.

If you mean trying to track down who owned it, finding them, going through their old computers, and trying to find the private key, then probably no.

Finding hard drives in the junk yard, searching them for lost private keys, then also probably no.
1624  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Never recovered bitcoins? Less than 21million? on: September 28, 2014, 12:31:36 AM
I think some mechanism should be created to counter this losing bitcoin problem. In my mind, the stuck bitcoins in specific block take a specific period of time to release that coins to miners. Or binding your email address with private key, after specific period, the owner can validate your bitcoin in the blockchain using email.
This same idea.  Again and again and again and again and again and again.

The answer is no, you cannot tell the difference between coins that are not moving due to a lost private key and coins that are not moving simply because someone is saving them for a rainy day.

The ideas you suggest will never happen because they go against everything Bitcoin is.
1625  Economy / Games and rounds / Re: The Bitcoin Limbo Game, 0.1 BTC REWARD on: September 28, 2014, 12:00:37 AM
11cea-1h is still the MinAddress to beat.  Your MinAddress must be lower than 11cea-1h where 11cea is a hexidecimal number.

A few more days and the contest will end.
1626  Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Newbie question about adresses on: September 26, 2014, 03:27:04 PM
Sonny, beat you to it.
1627  Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Newbie question about adresses on: September 26, 2014, 03:14:10 PM
if the bitcoin address didnt exist, would the transaction go through. I didn't have a good answer because I never tried it. Does the transaction go through or are the coins lost forever?
As long as the address is a valid bitcoin address then the network will accept it.
But if nobody has the private key to that address then you can consider those bitcoins to be out of circulation forever.

Isn't this scary? Imagine for some reason.. when copypasting an address or whatever, you don't select the last leter, then send a shitton of money into an address that doesn't exsist.. coins lost forever. Shouldnt the software guarantee that the transaction can be doable (guarantee that the address exists) before going on with the transaction?
If you paste everything except the last letter then the checksum will fail and the address is not valid so you will not be able to send any BTC to the invalid address.

If you copy it "by hand" and make a mistake, for example put in 'h' instead of 'H' then the checksum will fail, the address is invalid, you are protected.

It is possible to create an address with a valid checksum without ever knowing the private key.  The normal process for creating a Bitcoin address is:

(private key) -> (public key) -> (hash of public key) -> (append id and checksum to hash of public key) -> (base 58 encode)

but it is possible to skip the first three steps and make a valid Bitcoin address (the checksum is correct) but nobody knows or will ever know the private key.

1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE

is such an address.  Any BTC sent to this address are lost forever because it was created directly and the private key will never be known.

Notice the random looking stuff after 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSend, that is the checksum.
1628  Economy / Games and rounds / Re: The Bitcoin Limbo Game, 0.1 BTC REWARD on: September 26, 2014, 02:40:19 PM
Does anyone out there have an address older than:

11cea-1h

which was created 2010-08-08 03:58:48?

If we don't get an older one in a few days then I will send the reward to the owner of 11cea-1h.
1629  Bitcoin / Mining speculation / Re: Projected Minimum Cost per BTC over the next year on: September 25, 2014, 10:24:57 PM
Looks like the current difficult bump a few hours from now is about to be about 15.7%.

Edit: Can we update the table based on this data? It would be cool to have this on a website where the data is brought up to date in live time. Smiley
Something like bitcoinclock.com but better.
I will update this again some time in October.  It really does not change that much on a month to month basis since I am looking back one year and forward one year.

A real time version of this, updated after each difficulty adjustment would be totally cool.  Someone could do that.  If anyone wants/needs my Excel spreadsheet as a basis for the web site just give me a PM and I will send it to you.

If this was done on a web site I could stop doing it manually and that would be totally fine with me.
1630  Economy / Games and rounds / Re: The Bitcoin Limbo Game, 0.1 BTC REWARD on: September 25, 2014, 05:27:57 PM
Full address is 1KcBzReYZvbeGgiaMip92MMFtTFgDqB3Vm

1kcb:465eb
Did you even bother to read the rules of the game?  Do you often just play games without even bothering to read and understand the rules?  If so, I have a great new gambling game for you:  send me 1 BTC and I will explain the rules of the game to you once I get the money.  Is that something you would be likely to do?
1631  Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Statistical analysis of Bitcoin public key distribution on: September 25, 2014, 05:17:20 PM
I know this is silly so don't tell me it is silly.

I threw the code snippet together quickly so don't critique the code, it is for illustration purposes only.

I am willing to throw a small amount of BTC your way if you do this for me (I am too busy).  Please PM me with your bid and a super short description of what technology you would use (Java, C++, database, etc.)  to produce the result I want.

Here is what I want:

Scan through the entire blockchain and sort all the Bitcoin addresses found into "bins" by the first N letters.  The number of possible bins is related to N as follows:

Code:
//             Number of 
//    N    possible bins
//    -   --------------  
//    2               58
//    3            3,364
//    4          195,112
//    5       11,316,496
//    6      656,356,768
//    7   38,068,692,544

I think an N of 4 will be good as a first pass.  If this turns out to be interesting then an N of 5 might be interesting.

For each bin 1111 through 1zzz I want to know how many addresses exit in that bin and how many of those addresses have positive balances.  Here is a short code snippet to illustrate what I am looking for.  

Code:
#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

static const int N = 4;

//             Number of
//    N    possible bins
//    -   --------------  
//    2               58
//    3            3,364
//    4          195,112
//    5       11,316,496
//    6      656,356,768
//    7   38,068,692,544

char base58[] = "123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz";

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
    cout << argv[1] << endl;

    if (argv[1][0] == '1') {

        int bin = 0;

        for (int i=1; i<N; ++i) {

            for (int j=0; j<58; ++j) {

                if (argv[1][i] == base58[j]) {
                    bin = bin * 58 + j;
                    break;
                }
            }
        }

        cout << "Increment bin " << bin << endl;

        // Here you would increment AdddressExists[bin]

        // Here you would check to see if the address has a balance and if so
        // increment HasBalance[bin]

    } else {

        cout << "Did not start with 1" << endl;
    }

    return 0;
}

At the end of the program produce a CSV file something like this:

Code:
0,"1111",5,2
1,"1112",0,0
...
195110,"1zzy",1,0
195111,"1zzz",2,1
1632  Economy / Games and rounds / Re: The Bitcoin Limbo Game, 0.1 BTC REWARD on: September 25, 2014, 04:22:14 PM
Daily bump, 4 days left in the contest.
1633  Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Difference Wallet - Brainwallet on: September 25, 2014, 04:18:37 PM
What exactly is the improvement of a Brainwallet in comparison to a standard Bitcoin wallet. Huh
Do not use a brainwallet unless you really know exactly what you are doing.  Brainwallets are "expert only",  I am an expert of sorts and I do not use brainwallets due to the dangers involved.  Many people have had their Bitcoins taken from a brainwallet.

Again, my advice is to forget about brainwallets and stick to the standard wallets out there.

One of the safest wallets on the market is the Trezor hardware wallet, I use it.

Other than that look into deterministic wallets.  They are nice because you only have to backup the seed one time, keep it safe and secret, and then you never have to backup your wallet again.  This is cool because making backups of your wallet is just another thing to remember and it is nice to not have to worry about it.

Good luck!
1634  Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Newbie question about adresses on: September 24, 2014, 11:33:59 PM
if the bitcoin address didnt exist, would the transaction go through. I didn't have a good answer because I never tried it. Does the transaction go through or are the coins lost forever?
Can you explain a bit more by what you mean by "didn't exist".
1635  Bitcoin / Project Development / Re: 2^256 Deep Space Vagabond on: September 24, 2014, 02:51:18 PM
You might be interested in the 50 BTC reward offered in this post:


That is not the same thing.  That is reversing a specific key.  This is about the birthday problem where there is a collision and you can't choose the specific address in advance or the statistics are vastly different.  
Very true.  That is why I said "might be" interested.  I expect the 200,000 addresses Greg generated were generated with a very good random number source so those 200,000 addresses would not fall into the net (possible bad private key generation) being cast by the Hyenas.
1636  Bitcoin / Project Development / Re: 2^256 Deep Space Vagabond on: September 24, 2014, 02:41:37 PM
You might be interested in the 50 BTC reward offered in the following post.  The offer has expired but you might be able to talk Greg into extending the deadline just for you.

So you claim you can crack some random keys provided by people on the forum? Oh really.

Well here, I'll make it very profitable for you then:

Quote
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256


I, Greg Maxwell, do hereby promise to pay 50 BTC to the first person that
provides the discrete log of _any_ of the following randomly generated
200,000 secp256k1 public keys. This offer is open until 2014-04-01.

None of the below public keys have been used on the Bitcoin blockchain as
of the time of the creation of this offer.

04abb9239d3a5131de45b977807c62bf879119b05c3da33e37d8e7be0901985ce73b6ca6dff5b97 34d1225ce0120bbe023066669c29e23d3ea82de9a57dd259b63

Full message at https://people.xiph.org/~greg/keysfun.asc

Surely if you can crack a single key provided by a person in the thread cracking any one of 200k keys should be a cinch.
1637  Bitcoin / Project Development / Re: 2^256 Deep Space Vagabond on: September 24, 2014, 02:34:34 PM
It is true that faulty random number generation can lead, and in the past has led, to bad things happening including loss of BTC.

If it is true that there is a widely distributed faulty random number generator being used to generate private keys and digital signatures then that needs to be found and fixed as soon as possible.

This all leads to a very interesting side issue:  how can you ever prove you have taken someone else's BTC using this or any other method?  Ideally you would have someone very reputable come forward and say "someone took my BTC in this transaction" and post the transaction.  This could be followed by the party that took them coming forward and signing a message with the private key of the destination address of the transaction in question.

The reputation of the person that lost the BTC in the transaction would have to be beyond reproach as there are many ways to fake this whole "Proof of Theft" scenario.

I believe that your idea of having someone of high reputation run your program, with it they create a verifiable address collision, and then they report the address collision would also work as proof that you are on to something.
1638  Bitcoin / Project Development / Re: 2^256 Deep Space Vagabond on: September 24, 2014, 11:30:06 AM
More food for thought:

If you analyse all private keys in base 58 encoded format you would find that all private keys start with 5H, 5J or 5K and none of the other possible two character starting sequences (51 ... 59, 5A ... 5G, 5L ... 5Z, 5a ... 5z) ever occur. 

Does that mean that all random number generators are broken?

No, this is simply an artifact of the base 58 encoding process.
1639  Bitcoin / Project Development / Re: 2^256 Deep Space Vagabond on: September 24, 2014, 02:55:01 AM
The process of Bitcoin address generation is as follows:

1) Generate a cryptographically secure random 256 bit number, if it is too large go to step 1.

     This is the private key "p"

2) Calculate the public key, which is a point on the elliptic curve P = p*G

3) a = hash(hash(hash(P)))

4) add checksum, header byte, etc to the number a

5) Base 58 encode the result in step 4

The point is that statistical analysis of the public key value distribution tells you nothing about the statistical distribution of the random private key values.

Any statistical analysis of the Bitcoin address, especially the encoded Bitcoin address values, tells you even less about the statistical distribution of the random numbers used in the generation of the private keys.

The fitness of the cryptographically secure random number generator can not be tested or inferred from the resulting public key values or the Bitcoin addresses produced.

Food for thought.
1640  Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Statistical analysis of Bitcoin public key distribution on: September 24, 2014, 02:29:23 AM
I understand that the statistical distribution of public key values (points) tells us next to nothing about the statistical distribution of private keys however I am still curious as to whether a statistical analysis of the public key values has ever been done.

Even farther from the private key distribution:  has anyone ever done an analysis of the statistical distribution of the Bitcoin addresses?
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