What happens to inactive Bitcoins?

[aarreeaa]

A lot of people (probably 20%-40% per year), who somehow got bitcoins, will end up forgetting them.

Within few years a lot (if not most) of the bitcoins could be hold by inactive accounts.

How does bitcoin system handle that?

[JoelKatz]

It doesn't do anything special. They just sit there, possibly forever.

It's theoretically possible that some means of recovering them could be added in the future, but it's not very likely. I proposed adding them into a mining reward fund and allowing each miner of a block to claim up to a certain amount from the fund if there was any left. But the last time this was discussed there was a consensus that you should be able to go to jail for 30 years and get back your Bitcoins from your brain wallet. I don't think changing it is a particularly good idea because we want people to be able to rely on Bitcoin's stability of its rules.

[BTC Books]

They get fat.  Clogged arteries and obesity set in.  Usually diabetes, too.

But seriously - with a $45 exchange rate, I don't think a lot of people are going to forget their bitcoin.  Maybe there's some from 2009 that got forgotten - but probably not many after that.

Interesting fact:  there are about 45,000 wallets out there that have exactly 50 BTC in them.  No more, no less - except maybe some transaction fee dust.  Think about that...

[comlink]

New to site. Great info. Thx

[stienski]

interesting thread for sure...get you thinking.

[Bitcoinm]

They are either left abandoned, making everyone else's bitcoins more valuable, or, one day computing power increases and people can break into weakly encrypted old wallets, with only up to date wallets still being safe.

[Gabi]

This is awesome

[wachtwoord]

Nice picture but that is not how a star surrounded by a Dyson sphere would look. You would not be able to see it. (Read the commonwealth Saga by peter F Hamilton if you are interested in some nice fiction involving Dyson spheres)

[biodieselchris]

Once BTC reaches full value: = Global GDP / All outstanding BTC (that is, ~$3M per coin), there will a small and dedicated group of people easter egg hunting old hard drives for coins, in landfills, abandoned buildings, etc., anywhere an old, forgotten hard drive might turn up....

[xaci]

What the text in Holliday's picture says may be true, partially so, or not at all (I don't know), but regardless, I'm pretty sure that most cryptographic schemes that have been found insecure have been so because someone finds a flaw in them, and not necessarily because computers became powerful enough to brute force them. Once a flaw is found, one can attack a scheme more efficiently than by brute force, which means that the presumably impossible power requirements for brute forcing are not as important anymore.

[Portnoy]

Nice picture but that is not how a star surrounded by a Dyson sphere would look. You would not be able to see it.

All the best Dyson spheres are transparent.  I suppose you are still using those old Bradbury X9000 models?    Lame!        

[wachtwoord]

Nice picture but that is not how a star surrounded by a Dyson sphere would look. You would not be able to see it.

All the best Dyson spheres are transparent.  I suppose you are still using those old Bradbury X9000 models?    Lame!        

[seriously responding to a joke]
Dysons spheres absorb all energy and therefore make the star they enclose invisible on all spectrums from the outside

edit:

And please don't put a Dyson sphere around Sol unless you enclose the Earth as well. Otherwise we'll all die pretty quickly

[papamoi]

hi guys,

by the way whats happens if the disk crash or else?

[papamoi]

ok and how you do that?

[ndr]

Make a copy of your wallet.dat

keep it offline/online whereever you want

wallet.dat is in your bitcoin file or just use search

[papamoi]

thx guys