I was watching the Bitcoin show and Yifu Guo mentioned having a 3 year window for bitcoins to be immobile, and then they go back into the mining pool, so that they can be recovered. This seems like a good idea with one caveat. That makes it less desirable to hold onto as long term investments, e.g. bitbills. So I'm thinking about a way around that.

I'd suggest a 10-20 year window, because it's not all that crucial that they come back into circulation, it's only for a time when most bitcoins are completely lost that there are perhaps only 1 million in circulation because 20 million of them have been lost. So I think after that amount of time we should allow those coins to be mined again.

However, I think it's important to allow those who do have a legit claim on old "lost" coins, to be able to access coins if they have the key. So I suggest there be a pool of lost coins that all coins older than the window go into. Claiming coins will be given priority, so if you have a "lost" key, you get the coins from that pool. As other coins are lost that pool will be continually fed, and with a 10 year window it will be increasingly unlikely that that pool will be depleted. The pool will be continuously mined normally at some equilibrium rate with the Loss rate and the Reclaiming rate.

Let me know what you think.

I just created a new video explaining how bitcoin has a use value beyond exchange. It's along the lines of proof of work being used for capcha. But I thought it'd be nice to have the explanation in video form.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1r7Fcm4pwA

Hope you guy's like it.

Edit: Re uploaded to better audio.

Sorry I deleted the other version, which took your comments off. Feel free to re-comment and re like as well

Here's the best response to the no "intrinsic" value argument. This isn't to say that the exchange argument isn't valid, it is. But this is more of a "hard" value for those who continue to not accept that argument.

Bitcoin is a proof-of-work system and can be used to prevent spam by requiring BTC before performing actions such as joining a website, posting a comment on a forum or sending an email. I don't see any acknowledgement of that fact in your reply. BTC has a use outside of being a currency. It's a replacement for CAPTCHA's.

Now, we have a "use basis" for it's value outside of its exchange. It's worth has gone up much farther than due to difficulty of of work required, but the same can be said of gold, which isn't really used for industrial purposes.

Any questions?

So from what I understand, the amount of computation that goes into finding the hash of a new block is what makes bitcoin secure. Because of the proof of work, it would be hard, and gets harder, to spoof the chain.

So then in order to convince people to spend their computation time on finding harder and harder hashes, bitcoin allows them to mine coins. So then, my question is, why would people to continue spending more and more computation time to create more secure blocks once you can no longer mine coins in 140 years?