You are clearly the one here trying to present your opinion as absolute facts with no flexibility. I'm not demanding that we change bitcoin, I'm presenting my opinion and my rationalization, with the clear understanding that what I am proposing is extremely unlikely to happen; I have stated that multiple times now. You are the one taking it very personally and getting emotionally charged, as if I were attacking you directly. Calm down and stop acting like I'm not allowed to voice my opinions or concerns. I'm not interested if you think I need to shut up or stop using bitcoin, I will do exactly as I please regardless of your bickering and ridiculous demands.

Also can everyone please read what I said at the bottom of the last page to understand my current position on lost coins.

After really thinking about this some more, and reading through that other thread about a bitcoin design contract, I've reached a conclusion on this. It seems to me that due to the ever-weakening cryptographic protection, there will eventually come a point where people are going to have to transfer their coins over into another address unless they want them to be stolen. This will also mean that all lost coins will eventually get stolen or recovered in some way. This will probably ensure that eventually lost coins will go back into circulation. Although it's not as absolute or repetitive as what I would like, it is probably going to happen at least once. Now this is where coin deletion comes in, some people are saying we should just delete those old coins to make them undependable if they aren't transferred to a new address within a certain time; this really illustrates just how fanatical these people are about infinite deflation.

However I can see the problem with letting all those coins come back into circulation so quickly, it will happen MUCH quicker than the system I propose here, which would have them re-mined at a rate close to the rate they are lost. The market would be flooded with lost bitcoins relatively quickly in a situation where the cryptography weakens to a point where coins become stealable, unless it only weakens to a point where it's still quite hard to steal them and they get reclaimed very slowly, but it's still likely to be much quicker than the system I propose here. However, simply deleting those coins to avert such a problem is absolutely absurd, and that would be much closer to the premise of actually stealing coins from people, since presumably they will have very little time to act before the coins are deleted.

Someone in that other threads puts it very nicely:

It's obviously not ok to reclaim your coins, and all you have to do to prevent that is to prove the address is still active. Problem solved, your coins remain yours and the wont get re-mined for at least another 100 or more years. It's as simple as that. It's a small price to pay to secure a long term stable money supply which doesn't have the property of infinite deflation imo.

But I'm getting very tired of debating this topic as clearly you folks don't give a damn about the long term stability of the money supply, and you're no better than the folks who can't understand the damage caused by infinite inflation, you think infinite deflation is some how more reasonable. No, no it isn't. True Austrian economics is based on a finite stable money supply, not a dwindling one.

I have presented plenty of rational justification for why infinite deflation is not healthy, you obviously just refuse to see it or comprehend it. Just like the inflation freaks refuse to acknowledge the problems with infinite inflation, you refuse to acknowledge the problems with infinite deflation. You are obviously taking this much too personally and letting your emotions drive your responses instead of actually considering what it being said here in a rational way you just go on about how we're trying to steal your coins.

I have answered extensively that the solution is to give an indication that the address is still active. This is one method to detect if the coins are lost, admittedly not a fool proof method, because some people may forget to reactivate their addresses every hundred years or something, but it clearly is the most fair solution anyone could offer and it in no way equates to stealing your coins, such an argument is sensationalist at best.

It's not quite as elegant as people might like it to be, but it's the only realistic and workable solution I can see to ensure lost coins are eventually recovered which has a remote chance of ever being adopted.

Because infinite inflation and infinite deflation are both fundamentally flawed.

There's a difference between making sure coins are recoverable, and hoping they will be recoverable due to weakening protection. That does not ensure that lost coins will be the main target and it does not ensure that all lost coins will in fact be recovered. They are completely different things.

lol, that's good to know. I must have thick skin.

Yes I agree, the self-regulation that coin re-mining would result in is also another great advantage. But mostly I think it's an economic principle which needs to be addressed. As I mentioned on the last page, a system where lost coins can be reintroduced into the system is in fact closer to gold and more aligned with the Austrian mind set.

Well as I already mentioned a few pages ago, this problem could easily be remedied by having it so that removing some coins from an address would be the only way to prevent it from expiring and prove active ownership.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing, but it is a bad thing when people are using that potential profit as an excuse to circumvent changes which could help create a more sound currency. Furthermore, the limited nature of bitcoin already makes it inherently deflationary (in terms of price change), since demand tends to increase over the long term and leads to economic growth. We don't need to have lost coins to have deflation in the value of bitcoin. The value will tend to go up regardless, in fact lost coins will probably play a very small role in the price deflation compared to economic growth.

Clearly you haven't understood much of what I've said in this thread. I'm not talking about anything related to infinite inflation. Let me repost some things I've said in this thread and the other thread about a design contract so that you can see what I'm describing is CLOSER to gold and MORE aligned with the Austrian mind set.


This is a sarcastic remark which helps illustrate my point further:

And this was my first analogy using gold:

I already have jumped in and I already do own a fair amount of BTC. That's not the point here, I'm not trying to profit from infinite deflation, my motive is to create a more economically sound currency which will be more stable over the very long term. My main motivation is not greed or irrational fear of having my coins stolen 100 years from now.

Even if these ideas were incredibly similar, his argument is still entirely invalid because most alt coins fail regardless of their apparent advantages. Not to mention, we are talking about the recycling or deletion of coins which will happen a long time from now, so anything which implements that idea wont even be able to test how well it works until that time is reached when it comes into effect.

The only reason they want to delete them is because they don't want truly lost coins to come back into circulation, which reveals the real motive for why some people here don't want coin recycling to happen, but would be fine with coin deletion, even when that's clearly the worste option. It has nothing to do with the potential to "steal" coins, but because they want infinite deflation and the benefits it offers coin hoarders.

edit: clarified above statement, wasn't thinking clearly when I first wrote it.

In the real world if you leave something untouched for over 100 years and then fail to prove it's yours when some one else tries to take it, they have every right to take it. What reason do they have to actually believe it's not lost if you can't prove it's not lost? Of course you might say "it's sitting in my house", but unfortunately there is no such easy way to prove that bitcoin is sitting in an address which proves you own it. But there are still easy ways to prove you own it... but that's not the problem here, the problem here is that you simply don't want to have the network discern any difference between lost coins and active coins, because you only want to make a profit from infinite deflation, regardless of the economic holes in such a system.

I could argue infinite inflation really isn't bad... you know it just benefits a few people, but in reality the market will always adjust even if we have a quadrillion trillion trillion dollars in circulation. No problem folks, that's entirely economically healthy and I see no reason why we should try to avoid that if the system can still work with that much money in circulation.  

But I don't think you will even be able to read this since you've ignored me and don't see anything you don't want to see. Well done.

Of course you can never truly know if they are lost, however if people are given a truly fair window of time to show the network that they aren't lost I fail to see the problem. You could tell your grandchildren to make sure they they enforce their right to the coins before that window expires. And if they also want to put coins in storage for a long period of time and hand them down, they can do the same thing. It's not rocket science, nor some tedious task which needs to be repeated every year. We are talking extremely long periods of time here.

No the price would not be more stable. It would shift in one direction constantly for as long as we used it. But we don't live in some irrational world where lost gold can never be found again, so the opposite thing also applies; when gold is found the market adjusts and factors that into the gold price. In a world where all the gold has been mined, we would only have some gold being lost and some gold being found. Overall, this would result in the value of gold remaining at a stable pace, and not shifting infinitely in any one direction. The main factor applying a change to the value of gold will be natural market forces such as supply and demand in accordance with natural economic growth. It doesn't take a genius to see that this economic model is by far superior to a model which shifts infinitely in one direction, whether that direction is inflation or deflation. Both options taken to infinite extremes are not economically sound.

lol so now we have people in this thread suggesting the old coins should just be destroyed. Yeah that's certainly a more sound and rational alternative to having them re-mined. Wouldn't want to cause any unnecessary volatility in a few decades now would we.  

Your comment above I think really illustrates the main problem with recycling or destroying old coins, people are scared of losing coins held in long term cold storage. However, in my other thread, which is presumably the reason this for this threads manifestation, I suggested a very easy way to circumvent that problem.

One must simply show the network that the address in question is still active within a reasonable time frame, 100 or 150 years, or what ever. This is most certainly not unreasonable in my opinion. If you leave something sitting untouched and abandoned for over 100 years someone is going to find it and take it thinking it's lost.

Ok let me give you an analogy. You place some gold in a locked box and then 100 years later I find the box just sitting in some remote location covered in dust. I am going to take that box and bust it open and take the gold, because clearly some one has lost it and left it there. Now if it weren't lost, I wouldn't have the chance to find a 100 year old box covered in dust because someone would have come in, cleaned the dust off and relocated it to a more secure location, giving clear indications that the box is certainly not lost or abandoned. The fact is that anyone would have a very large chance to stop their coins from being re-mined, and if they fail to do so then the coins are fairly considered to be lost, because there are real lost coins out there which need to be found. If you happen to get caught up in that process it's you're own fault for not taking action to secure ownership of the coins within a reasonable time frame.

I have already explained throughout this thread why a stable money supply is more economically sound than infinite deflation. Infinite anything is absurd. Of course it's not necessarily an absolute necessity, but it is more economically sound and therefore superior and more desirable.

It already is a scarce commodity because the supply is limited. I'm suggesting that we make it a stable scarce commodity, a bit like how gold doesn't just disappear into thin air, the supply on Earth remains consistently stable.

I am not missing that point, I am well aware of it and well aware that the chance of this change ever being implemented is extremely remote. But I am still going to discuss my reasoning and opinion for why it does need to be changed.

Oh here we go again with the profit argument. Yeah lets just ignore this idea of stabilizing the money supply just because you ELITE BITCOIN HOLDERS with a crap load of coins can make a profit from it.

And your logic is completely flawed anyway, because people not holding coins are hardly going to give a shit about something which will happen 100 years from now. I do in fact hold bitcoins, and quite a few of them, so this move would not be in my best interest.

No one is saying they aren't yours. You can easily keep them if you take the effort every 100 years to show the network that those coins are still active. I mean what is so blasphemous about this if it can help stabilize the money supply. Oh the horror...

I don't want to create a new fork of bitcoin, I have no intention to do so, nor the skills to do so. I want to make bitcoin more economically sound and stable over the very long term. Sure, the network could continue operating with only one BTC, but that is not healthy or sound in the long term. The fact this argument has been turned into some vendetta against a cartel of elite bitcoiners is absolutely ridiculous.