Bitcoin design contract

[smickles]

I have a sort of "retirement" cold storage key (also, not ever having been on a harddrive, but stored in another way). Destroying coins on a timescale of anything less than a lifetime makes it more difficult and less secure to handle these coins.

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.

The thing is, through the magic of technology, we can keep track of who is the rightful owner of that something sitting untouched for over 100 years. It wouldn't seem to be lost. It would belong to the person in control of the associated private key. If someone loses their private key, that is their problem. It doesn't harm anyone else. I'm sure that the size of the blockchain files can be handled in much better ways than destruction of property or theft.

I think you are applying 'old world' methods of thought to the 'new world', so to speak.

[1715436991]

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[justusranvier]

1. The conditions needed to spend an unspent output shall not be changed after it is created.

2. The fraction of the total generated coins an unspent output represents shall be predictable for any point in the future.

Promise 1 would exclude demurrage but would allow new transaction types to be introduced. Changes to the mining reward would break promise 2 but increasing the number of decimal places would not.

[Rudd-O]

I think you are applying 'old world' methods of thought to the 'new world', so to speak.

This is fundamentally great insight.  Bitcoin, unlike other digital technologies, shares elements both from "old world" thinking and from "new world" thinking.  it does so -- some would say unfortunately -- because it ultimately must.

A store of value is fundamentally useless if it can be replicated infinitely, like everything else in the "new world".  And all stores of value "guarded" by "old world" methods (giving the keys of the empire to a bunch of sociopaths) have failed or are in the process of failing, victims of sociopathic greed and sabotage.

So what is one to do faced this constraint imposed by reality?

One invents -- or discovers, some would say -- the math necessary to bring the "old world" restriction of scarcity into the "new world" of infinite replication.  One invents Bitcoin.

Now, the way of producing scarcity that makes Bitcoin Bitcoin has the disadvantage that lost coins are truly lost.  They can't be recovered.  We don't know of and we don't have an algorithmic mechanism to produce a Bitcoin that doesn't have this alleged "defect" yet shares all the good properties of Bitcoin (including decentralized operation, scarcity, and long-term resistance to theft).

Now, as you can see in this and other threads, the one and only proposal to address this "defect" consists of deliberately weakening the long-term resistance to theft property of Bitcoin.  Since this "defect" is not really an issue (lost coins just add value to the economy in general), and theft is an issue, Bitcoin chose to prohibit theft of long-term stored value.

This choice is no accident.  This is deliberate in Bitcoin's design.  Satoshi could have written demurrage of long-term savings in the code -- it is just a computer program, it's not very difficult to implement, and the Freicoin team doing that right now -- but he didn't.

Now why do you think that is?  Do you think it's because Satoshi is supremely dumb and couldn't figure out how to make that happen?  Or is it more likely that allowing people to steal "stale coins" is just a terrible idea?

Whoever wants to have a Bitcoin that deliberately chooses to allow people to filch from others' savings, will certainly have something Bitcoinish, but it won't be Bitcoin because it doesn't share Bitcoin's properties.  They can try, but the slogan "Filchcoin: a revolutionary digital store of value that allows people to steal your coins if you keep them for too long" somehow, I suspect, won't exactly make the greatest catchphrase.

Until someone invents the math that will allow for a Bitcoin that doesn't allow for theft of long-term savings and allows retrieval of lost coins, you're going to have to live with what we have.  If you're so worried about losing coins, do yourself a favor and lose some.  Be charitable with the rest of us.  And take up math.  Maybe you'll learn enough to invent the math necessary to recover lost coins without stealing people's savings.

[SimonL]

I don't understand why this keeps coming up, the issue of destroying or recycling old coins that is. But if it even seems like this is going to happen. I will stop using Bitcoin. And I suspect that I am not the only one in this category.

I have bitcoins stored in such a way that their private key has never been on a harddrive and they are stored in a way that was designed to be passed down from one generation to another. Destroying coins is destroying these.

I have a sort of "retirement" cold storage key (also, not ever having been on a harddrive, but stored in another way). Destroying coins on a timescale of anything less than a lifetime makes it more difficult and less secure to handle these coins.

Please don't destroy old coins. Please don't recycle old coins.

Please stop bringing up the topic.

+1

+1

[mc_lovin]

If someone loses their private keys, that just makes the rest of the coins more scarce and valuable, that's one of the perks of Bitcoin!

We have enough units to denominate and function no matter how many are lost. 

It would be so hard to get people on-board with Bitcoin if they expired.  Hey here's a Bitcoin, be sure to spend it before it expires!  I don't see any benefit of coin recycling at all.  It's a ridiculous subject, but I suppose that is what forums are for, voicing opinions and shooting ideas back and forth.

I was sitting there trying to figure out why on earth would theymos propose such a thing.  And then it hit me.  I read the OP.  He was pointing towards putting a contract in the 'satoshi client' that would show people, like, the rules of Bitcoin, and a contract set in stone.  I think it's a great idea.  right now the client basically tells you that this is experimental software, have fun!  We should have a document in the window there, I don't think a blob of text is going to take up much disk space (considering the ballooning blockchain size) and it will give newbies something to read. 

Right now the two options under 'help' are 'about Bitcoin-QT' and 'about QT' which don't provide a lot of information.  Now, we can't really have a whole wiki in there, but a contract stating the cold hard facts about the network and what will never change, I think that should be in there.  The contract wouldn't really be enforceable though, since who would enforce it?  There isn't even really a need for a contract, but if it was a contact to prevent other parties (like the bitcoin foundation) from submitting any huge changes to the protocol and messing the whole network up, that would be great as well. 

Some sort of blob of text protecting us is never a bad thing. 

[Rudd-O]

Yeah, it wouldn't be an actual contract -- just a responsible disclosure that the developers are providing because they're nice and they don't want anyone to lose money just because they didn't know or couldn't deduce a particular detail about Bitcoin.

[ldrgn]

To make this stuff clear, I think that an explicit "Bitcoin contract" should be written and included in all Bitcoin clients which says exactly what properties are guaranteed by the Bitcoin network.

I agree and nominate Atlas to be the author of this contract.

[Rudd-O]

Who would be the parties of the contract, for starters?

[molecular]

Are you guys high!!???  Don't fucking recycle or make unspendable old coins!  ONE OF THE MAIN FEATURES OF BITCOIN IS A STORE OF VALUE!!!

Your beloved feature "store of value" would be destroyed.. not by "Meni and Theymos", but by ECDSA weakness. Are you guys even reading the OP and what Meni suggested? We're talking about a case where ECDSA is becoming more and more "crackable". Store of value my ass. That's no store of value when the first math genius with a big calculator that cares enough can grab any old coin and I'm pretty sure all the people here that say: "the contract can't be changed, that would totally destroy trust in bitcoin" would think quite the opposite: "The contract has to be changed, otherwise trust in bitcoin is lost". I'm thinking you guys are reading "destroy old coins" and having a knew-jerk reaction because you've been involved in related discussions that do not involve the assumption of weakening ECDSA.

It might be too early to talk about this now and if I can believe the cryptonerds, we will have plenty of time to talk about it when the process starts.

From the point of view of a brainwallet for my grandchildren, well: it doesn't make much difference then, does it: the money would be gone by the time they find my will containing the worthless passphrase so  I would definitely move the coins to a new secure address anyhow. The risk of fucking that up is much smaller than the risk of the old address getting "cracked".

While I'm not sure I'll be alive at the time, somehow I'm really looking forward to ECDSA becoming weaker: we would gain some knowledge about how many coins are really lost. Maybe we'll have a second gold rush (will butterfly labs accounce an ECDSA cracker?)

[Rudd-O]

I read the whole "ECDSA will be breakable" (which is debatable, but moot) and all I hear is this logic:

"Oh, the lock on your door might be pickable sometime in the future.  Might as well build a backdoor in your house now, so others can just steal your shit then."

That's how absurd this whole argument is.  It's not even an argument, since the conclusion does not follow from the premise, which is purely speculation that isn't even supported or proven to begin with.  The arguably best expert in cryptography in the world says 256b ECDSA is most likely simply unbreakable: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131175.msg1405345#msg1405345

It would be risible if people proposing it weren't serious about it.

[hazek]

Who would be the parties of the contract, for starters?

Yeah that is a problem that I don't think can be solved. Theymos, you know, while I support spelling out the rules Bitcoin adheres to so ordinary people can understand it maybe a statement displayed in the gui and being called a contract isn't such a good idea after all. How about instead we ask the devs to insert a sort of a personal voucher that the code they wrote conforms to these rules. This way no one is really bound by them, there's no one who can think anyone is bound by them and devs risk their reputation if they insert a different kind of code than what their plain spoken english voucher said it is.

[justusranvier]

This way no one is really bound by them, there's no one who can think anyone is bound by them

I'm not sure this is the case. There is an theoretical enforcement mechanism in the form of the Jim Bell protocol. What would happen if a consensus developed that it could be employed in any case where someone distributes a contract-breaking change to the currency and calls the result "Bitcoin"?

I'm not an expert in game theory but it seems likely that merely talking about the possibility would at the very least change the way public figures involved in Bitcoin development think about their personal security. Being a publicly known figure has the advantage of allowing them to leverage their personal reputation, but at the same time makes them potential targets for bribery and coercion. I wonder if it would be better or worse in the long term if more Bitcoin development was done in the darknet.

[galambo]

Here's how I know that implementing "theft of long-term storage coins" is a bad idea: someone already implemented this very concept -- called demurrage, purported to be "fair" -- in an altcoin called Freicoin; that shit tanked and went nowhere.  That was 100% predictable -- lots of people want other people's money to be stolen, but nobody wants their own money to be stolen.

It's really simple to know whether something is a bad idea or not: just observe people's choices (when they are not being forced to do a particular thing), and you'll know what's "better".  People choose Bitcoin over dollars because people judge Bitcoin to be better than dollars.  People choose Bitcoin over Freicoin because people judge Freicoin to be worse.

  pointless, mindless trolling

FREICOIN WILL NOT STEAL YOUR "LOST" BITCOINS

FIRSTLY Freicoin is not released, it will be released on 21-DEC-2012. Please click this link for real information on the coin.

Guys. Please do not believe Rudd-O's troll attempt to youtube RawDog the unreleased Freicoin software.

I cannot any longer ignore Rudd-O's attempts to tie Freicoin to stealing your lost Bitcoins.  He is even posting Reddits on this topic.

Lost coins was not even a design consideration of Freicoin.

[Gavin Andresen]

This is part of it, though I also want to specify which major changes are "allowed" to the core Bitcoin design in the future. Obviously this contract can't be enforced by the network, but it would be useful to write it down to make sure that all developers and users are on the same page.

I'm feeling grumpy this morning, so my reaction is "good luck with that."

[paraipan]

This is part of it, though I also want to specify which major changes are "allowed" to the core Bitcoin design in the future. Obviously this contract can be enforced by the network, but it would be useful to write it down to make sure that all developers and users are on the same page.

FTFY the network is us

[NeoCortX]

I assume that those arguing for "recycling" of bitcoins after a certain period of time are the miners. The miners will collect extra revenue if they can recycle bitcoins, but this is at the expense of the rest of the economy. Lets say that 100 years goes by, and BTC is still operational. An address containing 10 000 BTC has not been active since 2009, and now everyone agrees that those funds are "expired".
In 100 years there is a very high chance that mining is a very small niche of the bitcoin economy, since they have to continually increase productivity, like everyone else in a free market. So perhaps the transaction costs are down to 0.001%, as opposed to todays 1% (http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction).

What will happen at this point is a close approximation to what's happening today with QE. Today the bankers gain massively by being first in the queue for the fresh money. We see this with the banks receiving billions and billions in fresh funds from the FED. The losers are the savers of currency, and the people who are last to get their hands on the new currency. By the time that the last person gets their hands on the newly minted currency, the prices has adjusted already for the extra currency in circulation.
So we should expect miners and people who can get their hands on newly minted “expired” bitcoins (like vendors to miners, like BFL) to like such an idea, while savers of bitcoins and non-miners will be opposed to this idea.
If we look at how much the miners stand to gain from such a future event in the Bitcoin economy, we should not be surprised that there will be some people who thinks this is a fabulous idea. Imagine that the miners are a tiny 0.001% of the Bitcoin economy, and all of a sudden they can strike it rich by being in the right place at the right time. 10 000 BTC in one big chunk.

I’m a miner, but even if the coins really are lost, this seems unethical to me. Lost coins are lost. Infinite deflation already happens in ALL computer/technology products, and I don’t see anything wrong with it. I love it when prices are falling, then I can afford more. It’s that simple.

[NeoCortX]

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.

Then why does this problem need solving, anyway?

Because infinite inflation and infinite deflation are both fundamentally flawed.

Why is it a bad thing? You don’t have any argument to support your hypothesis. Why is it horrible that technology gets cheaper? Why is it negative that information becomes cheaper and more available? This is deflation in practice, and I have a hard time understanding why you think this is such a bad thing.

[smickles]

Are you guys high!!???  Don't fucking recycle or make unspendable old coins!  ONE OF THE MAIN FEATURES OF BITCOIN IS A STORE OF VALUE!!!

Your beloved feature "store of value" would be destroyed.. not by "Meni and Theymos", but by ECDSA weakness. Are you guys even reading the OP and what Meni suggested? We're talking about a case where ECDSA is becoming more and more "crackable". Store of value my ass. That's no store of value when the first math genius with a big calculator that cares enough can grab any old coin and I'm pretty sure all the people here that say: "the contract can't be changed, that would totally destroy trust in bitcoin" would think quite the opposite: "The contract has to be changed, otherwise trust in bitcoin is lost". I'm thinking you guys are reading "destroy old coins" and having a knew-jerk reaction because you've been involved in related discussions that do not involve the assumption of weakening ECDSA.

It might be too early to talk about this now and if I can believe the cryptonerds, we will have plenty of time to talk about it when the process starts.

From the point of view of a brainwallet for my grandchildren, well: it doesn't make much difference then, does it: the money would be gone by the time they find my will containing the worthless passphrase so  I would definitely move the coins to a new secure address anyhow. The risk of fucking that up is much smaller than the risk of the old address getting "cracked".

While I'm not sure I'll be alive at the time, somehow I'm really looking forward to ECDSA becoming weaker: we would gain some knowledge about how many coins are really lost. Maybe we'll have a second gold rush (will butterfly labs accounce an ECDSA cracker?)

Actually, the way the discussion has been going, there is one discussion related to ECDSA being broken, and one which is not.

EDIT: Conflation abound.