Fuck off with your stealing from the early adopters and miners.
Seriously the whole point of bitcoin is that it is a
neutral currency.
It doesn't care if it is sent from USA to Somalia; it doesn't care about bankrupt banks and governments wanting a bail out at the expense of pensioners; and it sure as he'll doesn't give a flying fuck about your opinions on the early adopters' coins.
If you want a currency that changes the rules frequently to suit those in power, or with the majority of power, there are a few hundred fiat currencies you can join.
Bitcoin's rule have changed and will change again. The only question is, what kind of client do YOU run? Yep, it doesn't even take a majority, it just takes two computers to fork. Even considering mainstream bitcoin and the supermajority of users, there have been and will be hard forks.
I don't know why you think this would be a change to 'suit those in power'. Do you think I am in power? But a rule change to suit the majority or super majority or bitcoin users? Of course! This is open software.
And, where did you see that I was interested in targeting early adopters? The dates I gave were hypothetical. My only target is coins that have been lost forever. How can you steal something that belongs to no one?
What does this have to do with anything?
If BTC goes up in value and old coins are removed from circulation then BTC goes up more. Problem? Not really.
Several of you have asked this, or suggested that it is not my business. My answer is that the size of the money supply is everyones business. There have been many threads on these forums that have touted bitcoins ability to survive deflation by pointing out that even just one coin would be sufficient to run the world economy thanks to the magic of moving the decimal place to the right. Lets say in the future this is the case, that between the years 2140 and 2150, only one bitcoin in total is in active circulation. It seems that the other 20,999,999 BTC have been lost. Then all of a sudden, Satoshi's addresses become active, showing that the usable monetary base is 1,000,000x larger than people thought.
Well yes and no. I don't agree with the OP's proposal but leaving your coins forever and ever is also not an option. At some point in time EC cryptography is going to be broken and then people will have to migrate their coins over to some thing else or loose them entirely.
I think that people will always need to stay on the ball and keep up with the world if they want to preserve there wealth. This includes knowing about laws, finance, wars, culture, technology, etc. What if the cryptography gets broken? Of course we can agree to add new encryption to bitcoin so that it remains usable, but what about the previously lost coins? Will they just be open to plunder and reintroduced into the supply? Or will the community make a decision to block all of the coins that have not migrated to the new crypto by a certain date?
I'm not entirely sure, but I do feel that there would be some fear of someone hitting pot of 10k BTC in future.
Just think about how much that would mess up things in 100 years time or so...
I don't know if the situation is even fixable with bitcoin... Likely unless there is periodic resets it will always exist...
Either way, things don't look good from this perspective for bitcoin in very long run.
If this is a bigger issue in 50 years, we could still do it then.
Atm it would most likely do more harm than good.
I am very sympathetic to idea that this may do more harm than good at the moment. And yes, it could still be done at any point in the future. Bitcoin can die either because it is not managed at all, or because it is managed poorly. Some people think Bitcoin should never be managed and just left alone. I can certainly see the appeal in this. Good for those folks that they can keep running bitcoind 8.5 forever and it will never change.
The rest of the community will adopt sensible innovations and management as they see fit. Bitcoin is powerful not because it will never change, but because the ability to make changes rest in the hands of its users.
