Thanks everyone except one of you for responding so politely *ehm ehm*
Here are my responses.
Although this May sound horrible, it's quite legally correct. I run a banking group in London, and this is what the regulations call for. When someone is not actively using his personal or real property, it can be subject to adverse possession, where 3rd parties can simply legally take possession …
Interesting, learned something new.
That said, it's fitting for a majority decision whether or not clearly abandoned coins are redistributed or not. Let the decentralized majority decide to adversely possess dormant bitcoins. No one can complain because it is a majority vote
You actually need a supermajority to activate this as a soft-fork, but yes I agree.
this is the key problem with your idea.
your only base for calling some funds lost is the last time they have been accessed. so what you are calling "lost" others may call their "retirement funds".
Well only if they can't bring themselves to make a simple transaction at the necessary intervals, but as Franky1 said there are situations where this is actually the case. So in those specific cases this is a problem, I agree.
So if I want to store my coins in a time-locked address using OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY (OP_HODL) for, say, 4 years after that soft-fork, my coins would slowly start to erode at the 3 year mark?
Good point.
What if locked coins don’t erode, i.e. count starts from the point the lock is released? This half-solves the point about the retirement funds / hodling, as you can lock funds and have them not erode. This also makes the proposal less effective, but not moot.
This will discourage people to invest in Bitcoin. What Store of Value will Bitcoin be, if you wealth will erode over time?
Once again, it only erodes if you fail to do a very simple procedure every few years. And if it helps stabilize the market price and incentivizes mining, then the pros could outweigh the cons, thus
encouraging investment. As it is now, Bitcoin suffers from the same problem fiat and gold do, which is no one really knows how much exists of them.
If I find my lost private key some years later, and see that my bitcoins are vanished, makes me feel very sad.
They won't vanish after a few year, erosion should be very slow. The numbers I gave in the example are perhaps too high though, as I've mentioned whatever passes 95% consensus is what will eventually be implemented.
A central value in bitcoin is that we don't tell each other what to do with each others money.
I don't see this as losing control in any way. It's just a stronger requirement of proof of possession.
There is absolutely no way on Earth to tell what coins are in cold storage and what coins are lost.
The whole point of this proposal is to create such a way.
There is also no reason whatsoever to do this and it addresses no problem. Bitcoin would work exactly the same way even if there were only 1 bitcoin. Or even less. The total production of BTC, 21million coins, is an arbitrary number and could have been 10 million or 100 million. The coins that are now inaccessible are gone forever. Stop thinking about them, lol.
Yeah I also think the units thing is dumb, this isn't about that. This is about knowing how many units there are in circulation, to add transparency in the market.
I dont like the idea of forcing others to use the coins under the threat of confiscation. The confiscation resistence is one of the main advantages of Bitcoin, not its weakness!
I don't see it as using, since you're sending to yourself. It's more like signaling "hey, someone is still using these."
Maybe you should describe better how it could be a softfork change, because it all looks like hardfork to me.
You would need a new field in the block to list the erosion effect, and a new kind of transaction (like Segwit) that can spend these eroded coins, both of these in places that are ignored by old client. Also new clients will not accept transactions that disregard erosion.
However, as I said I may be completely wrong here, and I am definitely not advocating a hard-fork for this.
Others have said that it is a terible idea because so many things that I will not repeat those arguments.
What I want to say is that I really cannot see any benefits to this idea, either. What is the difference if the total supply is lowered by say circa 5% to 20m? It only means that the bitcoins remaining in circulation are that little bit more expensive in a long run.
Again, not about the units. The problem is no one knows if its 5% or 10% or 15% or 50%, so you estimate, which could blow up in your face one day. Imagine Satoshi starts spending their coins today...
