What happens to all the lost bitcoins

[drakahn]

I am interested in tracking "inactive", "stale", "lost" coins in the block chain.  For the sake of discussion, I will just call them "dead".

You can call them whatever you want, doesn't change the fact that your idea is theft

Over the _very_ long term, they are a problem.  Their existence in the block chain increases the computational cost without a commiserate increase in monetary supply.  Yes, BTC are divisible down to insanely small amounts now and that can be increased with future computational tweaks yet still, why have 10% of your computational load be supporting dead coins that are unusable?

AFAIK if the coins don't move then there is no extra load (except maybe on a first download of the blockchain, or a rescan... but reclaiming the coins won't do anything for that)

The idea of declaring a coin "dead" is contentious.  My definition of a "dead" coin might be someone else's idea of multi-generational wealth transfer.  While I would consider 50+ years of inactivity to be sufficient to declare a coin dead, others might reasonably argue for 10 years or even 1000.

If we could agree on how long to wait before declaring a coin "dead", the next question is what, if anything, should be done about it.

Personally, I would support using them to continue to fund the block chain.  This keeps the miners working which supports the entire currency and it is a known, reasonable way of adding currency to the monetary system.

The challenge is reaching some agreement on what a dead coin looks like.

there will never be an agreement on what a dead/stale/lost coin is, if you take it, it is theft Even after 5000 years
Even if there was a magic number that everyone agreed to, no one would agree to changing the rules of the network years after it was started.

The good news is we don't need to worry about finding a way to keep the miners happy until 2140.  That makes a 100 year time limit for that dead coin seem pretty reasonable.

We don't need to worry, transaction fees will be plenty to keep miners happy past 2140 and beyond, apart from that there will be businesses that mine themselves not for profit but to secure the profits they make off the blockchain.

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[DannyHamilton]

- snip -
The idea of declaring a coin "dead" is contentious.  My definition of a "dead" coin might be someone else's idea of multi-generational wealth transfer.  While I would consider 50+ years of inactivity to be sufficient to declare a coin dead, others might reasonably argue for 10 years or even 1000.

If we could agree on how long to wait before declaring a coin "dead", the next question is what, if anything, should be done about it.
- snip -

That's a pretty big "if".

I'll tell you what.  I propose that we use a term of 10 million years.  Any coin that remains unspent after 10 million years can be considered "lost" and we can look into methods of reclaiming it.  Will you agree with my proposal?  If not, then we have a situation where consensus will be impossible.  If consensus is impossible, then what is the benefit or purpose behind imagining what we might do with the consensus that will never happen?

If you do agree with my proposal, then my next proposal is that we wait for 9 million years before we start trying to figure out how to reclaim "lost" bitcoins, since the technology available to do so will be beyond our ability to comprehend it right now anyhow.

[footrot_flats]

If the wallet (private keys) are lost then so effectively are the coins.

Although not making any assumptions *if* you were next thinking of starting a topic with a title like "How to fix the problem with lost coins" I would ask you to first *please* search the forum (that kind of thread has been done to death here).

Haha no wasnt going to do that - I dont have any bitcoins to speak of - just started the topic more to see what Id need to do to stop this from happening...