THIIIIIIIIIIIIS. I'm quoting it again to improve the signal to noise ratio of this thread.

So you did not read my post #21 then? The one where I agreed with an earlier poster who explained that yes, it is indeed not a problem having known lost coins, but it IS quite a problem to have large numbers of coins whose status is unknown? Where I explained why this was? And what we might do about it?

TLDR: I agree entirely with you. And you did not read my post. Which isn't about what you say it's about.

[Tinfoil hat]
I reckon somebody wants to find out as much as possible about the identities of the people using bitcoins. If you post 'hey who gave me a millibtc' on this forum, they now have a username to connect to that address. Even if you don't mention your address in your post, you're still one of a comparatively small number of known addresses.
So, if you've been lucky enough to get a seemingly random milli, shut up!
[/TH]

Christ, I don't know why I bothered.
 
From now on, when I disagree with someone I'm just going to say NUH-UH!   and stamp my feet. It seems to be the MO around here and it's so much less work than typing out a long, considered post detailing why we should think about this issue, how to go about solving it, and how to allay people's fears that people will 'up and steal their coins'.

TLDR: would it kill you to just move your coins around once every fifty bloody years?

I would rather like to retract my bid too. As TF says, we are expected to stick to them though.

TF, would you be willing to permit my retraction if b!z wants to jump back in?
b!z, would you want to jump back in?

If the answer to either of those is no, then I guess I just have to suck it up. 

I use four 16-sided dice from here: http://www.thediceshoponline.com/dice-search/D16
I use four different pretty colours and decide on their order in advance. Each throw gives me 16 bits. So eight such throws give you 128 bits, enough for an electrum wallet seed, while 16 throws give you 256 bits, which (pretty much always) make a private key.

If you don't have and don't want to buy 16-sided dice, but you have ordinary cubies lying around, you could, say, throw a pair of dice. If the first dice comes up 'm' and the second comes up 'n', work out 6*(m-1)+(n-1). If it's between 0 and 31, convert to binary and you have five bits. If it's between 32 and 35 you'd better throw again.

Once you have a dice-generated private key you will really HAVE to use a computer to get the public key from it. jl2012's link looks good, though it bears repeating that YOU MUST RUN IT OFFLINE. You may want to eat the computer afterwards to be absolutely sure.

Okay, not really a promise. I just remember seeing some post here that dissected some recent communication from our favourite cooked feline, strongly implying that there would be some kind of hopefully uplifting communication on Monday. I'd look for it, but... 668 TITTYFUCKING pages.

I have received tips occasionally from people to whom I gave advice that seemed rather banal to me.

I've just gone back to BTC-TC to check out ASICMINER-PT again.

JESUS TITTYFUCKING CHRIST.

Time to hit the vodka I think.

Ugh. Low dividends and a share price gliding down for weeks. A sharp drop in today's dividends. A corresponding sharp drop in share price. A promise to communicate two days ago. A complete lack of such.

First BFL, then Avalon...

Et tu, Friedcat?

FUCK.

(Is my response to the latest dividend payouts and corresponding freefall of ASICMINER-PT shares on BTC-TC).

90 @ 1.99 BTC

I would be perfectly fine with being #250 on that list.

Just saying... in case anyone's feeling generous...

I'm pretty sure this isn't correct, at least as the protocol is designed at the moment. The block reward is designed to keep halving until we run out of bits to continue halving accurately. Then the reward will keep being truncated downwards. The block reward at the last halving will be 1 satoshi, and after that it WILL be exactly zero. Mining will of course continue, being subsidised by transaction fees. And as has been pointed out earlier, it's the unlimited divisibility of EXISTING coins, not particularly newly created ones, that means that there won't ever be a supply problem unless ABSOLUTELY all bitcoins were to be lost. And that wouldn't happen because, for instance, long before the remaining supply was one satoshi, the decimal places would have been extended, and billions of people would own various billionths of that satoshi. There'd never be a situation in which the entire remaining unlost supply of bitcoins was concentrated in a single owner, who'd then decide to eat their wallet.

What am I, chopped liver? 

This doesn't really hold water. By the same logic, none of us should give a fuck about bitcoin, we should all happily accept government backed money, because after all whenever the central bank prints a few more kajillion USD or EUR or GBP, it's 'not our money'. The truth is of course that other people's money affects your money, as we bitcoiners keep trying to explain to everyone who prefers their state's toilet-paper version of money.

mgio hit the nail on the head here:


This is the real problem. As time goes on we simply become less certain how much money actually exists. This runs counter to the whole purpose of the btc allocation mechanism, which was to make everyone clear as to exactly how many btc there are at any given time. It's not quite the same scenario as a central bank firing up the printing presses but it's quite similar.


I think this is actually thinking along the right lines (and I know I'm very much in a minority here, and I have seen a poster whose opinions I almost always respect and consider carefully, start screaming 'THIEF!!!' at anyone who proposes this). This WOULD be a workable strategy, though it can't be implemented quite the way the OP says. It simply isn't possible (okay, 'computationally tractable') to find the private key of a lost wallet, so the wallet cannot be raided. That's not a matter of changing the protocol, it's a matter of fundamental mathematics.

A different implementation might work something like this: if a UTXO remains U for, say, 50 years, the revised protocol considers it unspendable. The revised protocol then looks to see how many BTC were in the UTXO, and distributes a precisely equal amount of new BTC in the next few coinbase transactions in the next few blocks. This need not cause a problem to people who have stashed BTC away somewhere, as every bitcoin client developer would have big flashing neon signs on their download sites explaining the situation to newbs and reminding them to shuffle their coins around at least once every 50 years. Hell, they could even make the clients check for this and do it automatically.

I can also think of a way we can all reach a consensus on this issue in a timely fashion. Let's say every bitcoin client includes an optional hack in their code, a command line switch or something, making their client behave in the revised way. So you can choose whether you want your client to behave as PureOldSchoolCoin or OMGThief!!!Coin. Also (I'm assuming this is possible, knowledge a bit sketchy here) when the client broadcasts a valid transaction and/or the miner broadcasts a valid block, it sets the value of some bit somewhere (we have spare bits in transactions and blocks, don't we?) to explain which version it's going by. Other validators can then accept or reject according to their economic philosophy as expressed by command line option.

Here's why I don't think there'd be a massive fork, human sacrifices, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria: if we implement this optional switch NOW, it doesn't make any difference to the actual blockchain for another 45 years. It basically will only act as a barometer of public sentiment, and an adaptable one at that. 45 years from now, anyone who is starting to worry about whether they're going to be in the losing fork, just needs to look at the votes. I assume of course that 45 years from now, the votes WOULD have come down on one side a lot more than the other.

My 2 sats, anyway.

I thought this too when I was looking for dice to generate private keys (actually, to generate electrum wallet seeds, but the principle is the same). But actually you are mistaken. The dice need not be platonic. I bought a bunch of 16-sided dice here: http://www.thediceshoponline.com/dice-search/16-sided. They need only possess sufficient rotational and reflectional symmetry, so that each face has an equal chance of landing up. It seems to me, the general idea behind the 16-sided models is adaptable to any even number of sides from 6 up (though for 6 itself you'd prefer a cube, and for 8 that gives you the platonic octahedron anyway).

Whoa man. Deja vu. Like, whoa.

Bitcoins are a currency. You earn bitcoins the same way you earn any other currency. Provide goods and/or services to people, who will give you bitcoins in exchange.

You cannot mine coins that use the scrypt algorithm, with ASICs that use double-SHA256. All bitcoin ASICs use double-SHA256, Litecoin is scrypt. There are no scrypt ASICs at the moment, nor have I heard of any serious proposals for their development. I don't know much about how scrypt works, but apparently it is hugely memory intensive and also highly variable in the amount it uses at any instant, and these aspects mean it's much harder to develop ASICs for.

For the record, I've also voted for a refund on your googledocs poll. That's on my 320 chips, and if possible the 20 boards too. It comes to BTC41.98 total, but I'd accept BTC41, keep the change as a thanks for the hard work you had to put in.