The great "Lost btc problem"

[LilGhost]

Ummm for each BTC lost the BTC value goes up! I'm all for people dying who have BTC! 

Was about to say that.

Every lost bitcoin just makes the BitCoinsAvailable/NumberOfUsers ratio better for bitcoin value! if all the bitcoins were mined and there are exactly 21 million users in the market and 21 million bitcoins available, the ratio is 1:1. If 1 million of these bitcoins go missing for some random reason, but we still have 21 million users, the ratio is 20:21.
20/21 = .95 bitcoin
.95 is better than 1 because it's reverse inflation. That's said because .95 will then buy what used to cost 1 bitcoin. Thus the bitcoin has gained value.

[Cudahuda]

Yep haha this is not a "problem" nor is it a "great" problem.

[Trongersoll]

Yep haha this is not a "problem" nor is it a "great" problem.

But, the people who want to think it is will never be disueded. These annoying threads will always pop up. And the same people will always chime in.

[smoothie]

in 2140 you wont be here anymore. So why worry?

[Nancarrow]

A solution to this would be creating an expiration on Bitcoins. Say after 10 years if there is no activity in a wallet the bitcoins get returned to the bitcoin community to be mined again.  No flames - since I know this idea would be repugnant to some people and may not even be technically possible - just an idea I'm throwing out there.  The fact is this wont be an issue in the near future.

That will not work.  What if I buy now and want to hold until 2030, when I think BTC will be worth 2k each?  You cannot just up and steal my coins....

Christ, I don't know why I bothered.
 
From now on, when I disagree with someone I'm just going to say NUH-UH!   and stamp my feet. It seems to be the MO around here and it's so much less work than typing out a long, considered post detailing why we should think about this issue, how to go about solving it, and how to allay people's fears that people will 'up and steal their coins'.

TLDR: would it kill you to just move your coins around once every fifty bloody years?

[marcovaldo]

It has already been discussed and it is NOT a problem.


Even with 1 remaining bitcoin, you can still use 0.000000000000000000000001 btc for buying and selling stuff, and you can divide it even more.

[Nancarrow]

It has already been discussed and it is NOT a problem.


Even with 1 remaining bitcoin, you can still use 0.000000000000000000000001 btc for buying and selling stuff, and you can divide it even more.

So you did not read my post #21 then? The one where I agreed with an earlier poster who explained that yes, it is indeed not a problem having known lost coins, but it IS quite a problem to have large numbers of coins whose status is unknown? Where I explained why this was? And what we might do about it?

TLDR: I agree entirely with you. And you did not read my post. Which isn't about what you say it's about.

[medicine]

I am a little confused about the adding another 0 idea.  If even one extra decimal place is added, that increases the number of units by a factor of 10.  Doesn't that mean that bitcoin is in fact inflationary in the long long term.  In the real world countries can print new money as needed, and the inflation rate is supposed to be kept in close check.  those countries generally aren't increasing the money supply but a factor of 10 all at once, except some small 3rd world examples.

Isn't adding a zero an inflation supporting move? A massive step.


 

[Rannasha]

I am a little confused about the adding another 0 idea.  If even one extra decimal place is added, that increases the number of units by a factor of 10.  Doesn't that mean that bitcoin is in fact inflationary in the long long term.  In the real world countries can print new money as needed, and the inflation rate is supposed to be kept in close check.  those countries generally aren't increasing the money supply but a factor of 10 all at once, except some small 3rd world examples.

Isn't adding a zero an inflation supporting move? A massive step.

It's not really the same as inflation of fiat money since everyones money supply increases by the same factor if an extra decimal place is added. In the case of fiat-money inflation, the number I see when I check my savings account doesn't increase after new money has been printed. So the total money supply increased, while my amount of money stayed constant, which means I now own a smaller piece of the pie. Adding a zero to Bitcoin is just a notational thing. You can compare it to expressing fiat-prices in cents instead of dollars/euros/pounds/whatever.

What truely matters is the fraction of the total money supply that you possess, not the numerical value that goes with it.

[jackjack]

This thread pops up every fortnight

[Nancarrow]

...
Isn't adding a zero an inflation supporting move? A massive step.

It's not really the same as inflation of fiat money since everyones money supply increases by the same factor if an extra decimal place is added. In the case of fiat-money inflation, the number I see when I check my savings account doesn't increase after new money has been printed. So the total money supply increased, while my amount of money stayed constant, which means I now own a smaller piece of the pie. Adding a zero to Bitcoin is just a notational thing. You can compare it to expressing fiat-prices in cents instead of dollars/euros/pounds/whatever.

What truely matters is the fraction of the total money supply that you possess, not the numerical value that goes with it.

THIIIIIIIIIIIIS. I'm quoting it again to improve the signal to noise ratio of this thread.

[medicine]

I am a little confused about the adding another 0 idea.  If even one extra decimal place is added, that increases the number of units by a factor of 10.  Doesn't that mean that bitcoin is in fact inflationary in the long long term.  In the real world countries can print new money as needed, and the inflation rate is supposed to be kept in close check.  those countries generally aren't increasing the money supply but a factor of 10 all at once, except some small 3rd world examples.

Isn't adding a zero an inflation supporting move? A massive step.

It's not really the same as inflation of fiat money since everyones money supply increases by the same factor if an extra decimal place is added. In the case of fiat-money inflation, the number I see when I check my savings account doesn't increase after new money has been printed. So the total money supply increased, while my amount of money stayed constant, which means I now own a smaller piece of the pie. Adding a zero to Bitcoin is just a notational thing. You can compare it to expressing fiat-prices in cents instead of dollars/euros/pounds/whatever.

What truely matters is the fraction of the total money supply that you possess, not the numerical value that goes with it.

Ok cool, I get it.  I'm no economics major and hadn't seen any of "the other" threads on this topic, and it never hurts to ask.
Peace

[zebedee]

You are correct and great observation, this will be a very serious issue as time goes by. If millions of coins enter the market at once it will cause the value to plummet. It is important to know the number of coins that are in the system. Maybe the Devs can come up with something.

No.  What you are missing is that, for the time until your hypothetical time X, this will have been the situation - i.e. the uncertainty of knowing how many coins there are.

As long as everyone has the same information, there is not a problem.  If you ignore the available information (and are therefore "surprised") in formulating your decisions, that is your problem because of your lack of research, and a cost to be borne by you alone and not foisted onto others.

Free markets are a wonderful thing, and remarkably stable if there is no "authority" pretending to protect people from themselves.

[Nancarrow]

As long as everyone has the same information, there is not a problem.

I agree. It should also be bloody obvious that, in the situation we are discussing, everybody does NOT have the same information. Specifically, whoever originally had the private keys to old coins knows something that everybody else does not, namely, whether those coins still exist or not. Recycling 'expired' coins *puts* everybody's information on the same level, which is why you ought to approve of it.

Damned if I can see how any of the rest of your post responds meaningfully to anything anyone has written here. It's like one of The Onion's 'Ask Someone who is...' parodies. "Ask someone who just picked up a copy of Milton Friedman's Collected Works in the library", perhaps.

[Trongersoll]

As long as everyone has the same information, there is not a problem.

I agree. It should also be bloody obvious that, in the situation we are discussing, everybody does NOT have the same information. Specifically, whoever originally had the private keys to old coins knows something that everybody else does not, namely, whether those coins still exist or not. Recycling 'expired' coins *puts* everybody's information on the same level, which is why you ought to approve of it.

Damned if I can see how any of the rest of your post responds meaningfully to anything anyone has written here. It's like one of The Onion's 'Ask Someone who is...' parodies. "Ask someone who just picked up a copy of Milton Friedman's Collected Works in the library", perhaps.

any type of "recycling" undermines the concepts of both Saving, and Investing. Bitcoin ceases to be a means to retain value. My Bitcoins are MINE and if i choose to take them out of circulation that is no one elses business.

You haven't touched your bank account in 20 years, We are going to take your money give it to the people maintaining the banking system.

[odolvlobo]

You haven't touched your bank account in 20 years, We are going to take your money give it to the people maintaining the banking system.

Actually, in the U.S. it is 3 - 5 years (depending on the state), but the money goes to the state.

For most states, a bank account is generally presumed abandoned if it is unclaimed by the apparent owner after three or five years. ...

edit: added link

[jackjack]

You haven't touched your bank account in 20 years, We are going to take your money give it to the people maintaining the banking system.

Actually, in the U.S. it is 3 - 5 years (depending on the state), but the money goes to the state.

Wow
Really?

[Nancarrow]

You haven't touched your bank account in 20 years, We are going to take your money give it to the people maintaining the banking system.

I'd be furious if my bank did that.

The reason why I'm perfectly happy to contemplate a Bitcoin with that feature is precisely *because* of all the ways Bitcoin is already different from money that the banks have control over. In my proposal, ALL you have to do to keep hold of your precioussss coins is MOVE them once every fucking fifty years. There's 'respecting property rights', and then there's 'being willfully obtuse', and I feel too many bitcoin enthusiasts mistake the one for the other.

Here's another crucially important way in which my proposal differs from your hypothetical Evil Bank Manager, an aspect I didn't *think* I'd have to emphasise, but *every* *single* *person* who goes OMGTHIEF!!1! willfully ignores:

In my scenario, the recycling aspect is NOT sprung upon the poor unsuspecting saver at the last minute. It is SHOUTED FROM THE ROOFTOPS continually from the very first moment the saver hears about bitcoin. Regular popups come up in all bitcoin wallets saying "Don't forget to move your coins in [xx] years! Would you like to auto-enable this feature? Really? Are you suuuuuuuure?".

Now I'm quite sure that *some* people would throw vast wealth away just to make some foggy, poorly thought out statement about how they're the brave producers being ground down by the mean grabby bankers. But that's because some people are just idiots. Some people genuinely deserve to have their money confiscated. People who can't understand extremely simple instructions, for example.

[Nancarrow]

Oh this bit also needs comment:

My Bitcoins are MINE ...

No argument from me there.

and if i choose to take them out of circulation that is no one elses business.

But this is incredibly myopic. To see why, let's get back to one of the key reasons we're all on this forum in the first place.
What is it that central bankers can do with money, that no one can do with bitcoin, that's why we all hold fiat money in contempt? It's changing the money supply at their whim. Well you can't have it both ways. If you want a currency that no one can print out as much as they like whenever they feel like it, then no one should be able to destroy it whenever they feel like it either. I presume you would NOT accept an argument from, oh Bernanke or whoever it is, that whenever he prints another billion dollars, those are HIS and if he chooses to put them into circulation that is no one elses business?

The protocol was designed so that we should all know exactly how much BTC exists at any moment, and we should also know how that supply is going to change well into the future. So that we can make wise decisions about what to do with our piece of the pie. It seems to me an unfortunate oversight that as things stand now we only have an upper bound on the money supply. All I'm proposing is a simple fix. It doesn't confiscate money from anyone unless they really really REALLY WANT their money to be confiscated. What it does do is improve the quality of information. Free markets are only 'free' to the extent of the information the participants have, as was alluded to in an earlier post.