Dead Coins

[tryptamind]

What happens to the bitcoins if I have 100,000 BTC, and I die?

Are they out of "circulation" forever?
Or does something else happen to them?

[Stuartuk]

What happens to the bitcoins if I have 100,000 BTC, and I die?

Are they out of "circulation" forever?
Or does something else happen to them?

It depends where you store them. You can store your coins on an online exchange, in a wallet or as a code on a piece of paper. So if you die then whoever you told your passwords to for the online wallet wil get your coins. Oh hold on you didn't tell anyone the passwords? Well then they will stay there possibly forever. If your family knows about them but not the passwords I would imagine they could go through a very long process to regain access involving showing death certificate etc. But that's only if you gave real name and they can trace the ISP/PC you used to log in to the wallet to deposit the coins.

You can see where this is going - make a back up of your passwords and let your next of kin know where the passwords are.

[cp1]

If no one knows the private key or can get access to your online account then they'll just sit there forever.

[tryptamind]

If they don't get back into circulation, we will be using pico-pico-pico-pico-pico-pico BTC soon.
Is that the plan?  If so, I guess BTC increases in value over time.  But the units will be shrinking
into infinity.  There may even be 1 BTC for the entire earth, or less ...  relatively soon.

I am thinking there is no other way, but this seems like a "bug" in the system.
Or maybe it is a feature ...  I don't know.   Any thoughts?

[DannyHamilton]

Or maybe it is a feature ...

Correct.

If they don't get back into circulation, we will be using pico-pico-pico-pico-pico-pico BTC soon.

Please explain what you mean by "soon".  There are still over 9 million bitcoins that haven't even been mined yet.  New bitcoins (or fractions of bitcoins) will continue to come into existence through the mining process for another 120 years or so.

[tryptamind]

Well,   the population of Mexico went from 12 million to 112 million in 112 years,
and there is over 7 billion people in the world, and only 21 million possible BTC.
And many billions of people will die with bitcoins in their wallet, assuming
bitcoin goes mainstream.  I am sure it will happen to 1000s per day.  There are
several factors at work in this, but if bitcoin does go "mainstream" with 100s of
millions or billions of users, you will see millions of bitcoins or decibitcoins or
whatever removed from circulation from death ... every year, or 2, or 5, or whatever.

[tryptamind]

Or maybe there will be businesses that spring into action to crack wallets (that have not seen any transactions in a period of time) with yet unknown technology.

I don't know, I haven't seen this issue ever addressed, and something inside me thinks that there should have been some expiry mechanism attached to bitcoins, so that if they aren't used for 100 years, they get recycled somehow, to prevent infinite draining of bitcoins from the system.

[cryptonibb]

He is right. 21 million is not enough for a global economy.

Also, besides people dying, there would be always allot of users, that

a) Forget their wallets passwords forever
b) Do not care about bitcoin anymore, and just never use them.

Who never lost a dollar? So the same is true for Bitcoins, people will lose their bitcoins, or just don´t care if they reformat their PC with 0.001 BC on them.

As far as I see, millions of BC would fail to this faith. Its inevitable. So there will be less and less BC in circulation as time goes on.

Also, someone mentioning cracking wallets. Really? Would that not make the whole Bitcoin itself nulled? If you can crack open and widely someones wallet, there is no point in using that unsafe in the first place.

Also, how many wallets are just going to be lost, like lost in drives for ever...

Nobody will request to crack this either. This is a huge error in the bitcoin system, since 21 million is the cap, which seems will be hit allot faster than people thought, there will be no more bitcoins left, what then? Will the remaining ones be enough to sustain the Internet economy like in the next 50 years?

[tryptamind]

Wallets can be cracked of course, it's just that it takes computing time.
I think the average PC can crack a wallet in a few years or at least
current supercomputers can.  Just takes enough trial+error
(brute force) computations.

[cp1]

If everyone loses their bitcoins I'll sell some to them.  At a high fee of course.

[pinacolada]

Yes, the wallet could probably be brute forced if it is determined that no other existing hacking method or vulnerability works to recover the bitcoins.  It depends on how long the password for the wallet is. The time it takes to brute force the password is exponential and increases as the password length is increased. A 10 character password could take around 1000 years to decrypt. If the password is really complex, it could take more than a million years to recover the bitcoins. If this is the case, unless the password is stored in plaintext it would be impossible to recover the bitcoins.

[tryptamind]

If everyone loses their bitcoins I'll sell some to them.  At a high fee of course.

Hehe, sounds suave and debonaire, but you won't have buyers, you'll just have "employees" trying to earn your bitcoins at that point ... and we are back to square 1.  I think that is where the "bitcoins are dead" poster is going.  The miners are using technology to become hoarders, and in the end, they will rule just as the bankers do now.

I think that is the real value of some kind of expiry on bitcoins - TO PREVENT HOARDERS that attempt to centralize the market.

[cryptonibb]

That is just ridiculous. If people are losing 0.001 BC on each wallet, are you going to spend 100 times more to crack it?

Most amounts lost would be pretty much insignificant, but once you add millions of people losing tiny amounts, it will affect how many BC are in circulation.

[tryptamind]

bitcoin may be a lesson in why the Constitution trumps Anarchy.

The Constitution was implemented to limit "the gang".

Anarchy allows gangs without limits.

[cryptonibb]

bitcoin may be a lesson in why the Constitution trumps Anarchy.

The Constitution was implemented to limit "the gang".

Anarchy allows gangs without limits.

Care to explain?

[cp1]

What happens when the gangs write the laws?

[cryptonibb]

What happens when the gangs write the laws?

That would never really work because the gang tends to abuse smaller minorities. This is the difference between a gang system and one where law exists.

Gang tends to be mobs, they abuse smaller groups or individuals that do not agree with their opinions.

And eventually you will be a minority in at least one of the ways you think, because we all think differently.

Also, the masses tend to be stupid. And allot. Most % of the population is not composed by brilliant intelligent people, but the opposite.

Do you want idiots making rules?

[DannyHamilton]

Wallets can be cracked of course, it's just that it takes computing time.
I think the average PC can crack a wallet in a few years or at least
current supercomputers can.  Just takes enough trial+error
(brute force) computations.

If you have a copy of the wallet.dat file and are talking about cracking a weak password, I suppose it could be cracked through brute force.

On the other hand, if you are talking about brute force cracking a private key from a bitcoin address, it isn't going to happen unless some mathematicians discover significant weaknesses in all three of the following algorithms:

• ECDSA with the secp256k1 curve
• SHA-256
• RIPEMD-160

Without some significant discoveries of serious weaknesses in all three algorithms, there isn't enough time or energy available to brute force the private keys regardless of how powerful the computer is.

[J35st3r]

The ancient Greeks had Kyklos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyklos to describe the cycle of governments from anarchy through to democracy. Nothing has really changed, modern democracy just seems to be "the end of history" (Fukuyama) . It will pass and the cycle will begin again.

Lost coins really are lost. Other than cracking wallets (which is nigh-on impossible with a good passphrase), coins from a lost wallet (or cold storage) will never be recovered in the lifetime of the universe. The 256 bit private key is an unimaginably huge number for any brute force algorithm to attempt to crack.

Oh POO. Crossposting with Danny. He da man on crypto.

[DannyHamilton]

He is right. 21 million is not enough for a global economy.

Fortunately the base unit of bitcoin is not the bitcoin.  Bitcoin stores the value of 1 bitcoin internally as 100,000,000.  So there are actually 2,100,000,000,000,000 (2.1 quadrillion) units of currency available.  That should be more than enough for it to succeed in mainstream use.