Removing old coin uncertainty

[justusranvier]

If anything, this proposal seeks to alleviate those concerns of potential newcomers by demonstrating that there is not nearly as much money in the hands of the early adopters as they might fear, and it attempts to do so without depriving anyone of any coins that they control.

Bitcoin derives its value from the predetermined issuance rules, and the fact that possessing the appropriate private key is both necessary and sufficient to spend a UTXO.

Changing any of those things destroys the long term value of the currency.

[giszmo]

Honestly, if I had once had 50,000 coins, and I lost control of 45,000, I would be quite happy to see this idea implemented.  By proving that those 45,000 coins were in fact gone, I would increase the value of my remaining 5,000 coins be more than if people were just left guessing about the 45,000.

Hehe, I just defended your OP but I doubt this point a bit. People have bitcoins in truecrypt drives that they forgot the key for etc. and consider it extra save to care about recovering this data in some distant future when it became easy to recover passwords to a truecrypt drive but not easy to guess the private key to their bitcoins

[DeathAndTaxes]

If anything, this proposal seeks to alleviate those concerns of potential newcomers by demonstrating that there is not nearly as much money in the hands of the early adopters as they might fear, and it attempts to do so without depriving anyone of any coins that they control.

Bitcoin derives its value from the predetermined issuance rules, and the fact that possessing the appropriate private key is both necessary and sufficient to spend a UTXO.

Changing any of those things destroys the long term value of the currency.

This.  It is also why no major change will ever occur.

Bitcoin is a consensus system.  The certainty of the rules give it value.  You can call it faith if you want.  Someone buying a Bitcoin for $150 does so because they believe 1 BTC will be a better store of value then $150 will be.  If those rules are changed then Bitcoin will fail.   It doesn't matter that "10 years is long enough".  First of all according to who?   If it can be changed to 10 years it can be changed to 1 year, it can be changed to increase the money supply, it can be changed so governments can block unwanted transactions.

The first core change is likely the beginning of the end for Bitcoin.  There is a social contract.  The social contract is a promise to past and future users that things like "transactions are irreversible" will be honored.  The VALUE of Bitcoin comes from the contract and the faith users have in it.   Stealing coins after the fact violates that contract.  If you make an alt-coin which incorporates these ideas from day 1 it is one thing.  To do a bait and switch and change the rules after the fact is immoral and it will kill Bitcoin.  Luckily there will never be the widespead consensus to make such changes a reality.

[gmaxwell]

It would be much more than a moderate inconvenience for me.

Personally I think 1 year is insane.  5 or 10 and perhaps thats something which would be reasonable for some cryptocurrency to implement. I wasnt attempting to give the impression that I thought 1 year was a good trade-off.  Just trying to point out that the OP's motivation wasn't to take coins from anyone, his definition of sufficient time and notice being crazy is another matter.  

For better or worse I think we've already signed the suicide pact on this one. The gut reaction people have is just too violently negative and no amount of reason will get people through it... so even if you could prove that Bitcoin will die without such a fix (and its not clear that this is the case) then you'll only succeed in proving Bitcoin will die.

The first core change is likely the beginning of the end for Bitcoin.  There is a social contract.  The social contract is a promise to past and future users that things like "transactions are irreversible" will be honored.  The VALUE of Bitcoin comes from the contract and the faith users have in it.   Stealing coins after the fact violates that contract.  If you make an alt-coin which incorporates these ideas from day 1 it is one thing.  To do a bait and switch and change the rules after the fact is immoral and it will kill Bitcoin.  Luckily there will never be the widespead consensus to make such changes a reality.

As a high preacher of the philosophical school of thou-shall-not-fuxor-the-contract and the view that Bitcoin's existence as a mathmatical object as outside the influence of popular opinion as possible is what makes it worth having, I still do feel the urge to suggest a little caution with the width of your statements here.

Bitcoin in its exact form, as originally released, was worthless. Anyone could spend anyones coin. Anyone could pick an arbitrary block and slay it so that new nodes would ignore it and split the consensus. Anyone could crash all the nodes (in a dozen different ways). Anyone could create a block 1/32nd the size of the system maximum and cause the system to fragment. Anyone could create unbounded amounts of additional coin. All these flaws and more were in the original software, coded into the rules of the system.

If changing the software, at all, was Bitcoins death then Bitcoin never really existed. ... But clearly it does exist. These things were fixed, in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013.  I hope that this list never grows, but perhaps it will.  Will we put Bitcoin down and walk away because the software is a suicide pact which can never be changed at all. No.

Should our moral responsibility be to uphold the Bitcoin contract? Absolutely. Does that contract include every flaw and mistaken in the software? Clearly not— mankind simply does not have the engineering tools and talent to build it another way.  Where is the line?  Unclear. Reasonable people can disagree, and thus the taint of the influence of man.

I hope for Bitcoin's sake that serious life or death flaws will remain uncontroversial fixes... and that Bitcoin can survive a few changes here and there, as required, by a true consensus.  If it turns out that can't work, I have noting to offer as an alternative: a tyranny of a majority is certainly not what we signed up for.

If that is the case I think it will be truly sad, because I think such a failure of Bitcoin would salt the earth for a generation for the idea of a system whos trust is in math rather than man... but perhaps it will be. Time will tell.

[tvbcof]

It would be much more than a moderate inconvenience for me.

Personally I think 1 year is insane.  5 or 10 and perhaps thats something which would be reasonable for some cryptocurrency to implement. I wasnt attempting to give the impression that I thought 1 year was a good trade-off.  Just trying to point out that the OP's motivation wasn't to take coins from anyone, his definition of sufficient time and notice being crazy is another matter.  

For better or worse I think we've already signed the suicide pact on this one. The gut reaction people have is just too violently negative and no amount of reason will get people through it... so even if you could prove that Bitcoin will die without such a fix (and its not clear that this is the case) then you'll only succeed in proving Bitcoin will die.

Why the 'know the circulation with precision' itch makes people scratch is beyond me.  It does not seem to me to amount to much in the scheme of things.

OTOH, robbing minor values from addresses which hold tiny fractions for the purposes of re-basing and optimizing the block-chain (and that for the purposes of making full nodes more widely possible) seems like something I would favor.  I am sure that this would be seen (rightly) as an even more abusive violation of 'contract' or whatever.  Although it is an itch which makes me scratch myself raw I could not propose it.  I must lamentably accept that it is a fundamental operational feature which was not part of the original design so I'll resign myself to simply wishing it were.

Sure would be cool if Merkle pruning come into existence someday before the earth stops cooling though.  Some notion of that was in the whitepaper and was a sales pitch which worked on me to the extent that I understood it's goal.

[gmaxwell]

Why the 'know the circulation with precision' itch makes people scratch is beyond me.  It does not seem to me to amount to much in the scheme of things.

I think people are imagining just different scales of things.  Perhaps you think about the problem and imagine something like a 20% uncertainty in the true medium/long term supply of coins.  Someone else, looking at the same trends and facts may be imagining a world where there is a 99.99% uncertainty in the medium/long term supply of coins.

I hope that most people would find a lot more agreement if not for the speculation on what the future would look like... and if so, then should one of those futures come true deciding what (if anything) should be done about it would be easier.  Hope hope hope.

Sure would be cool if

We actually have something much more effective than whats described in the paper in Bitcoin-QT already. This is part of why 0.8 was so much faster than prior versions— it changed to doing all the validation against a separate maximally pruned data structure.  Some additional work is needed to make sure nodes can still be bootstrapped— that there still exist ample distributed copies of the historical data and that new nodes can find them— in a world where a lot of nodes are pruned... but the pruning itself is all there. You can, quite literally, go and delete all the old block files (past 288 blocks or so) and your node will run fine until a peer tries to bootstrap from you and fetches an old block (and then it will crash. ).

[Littleshop]

Funny how the topic is "Removing old  coin uncertainty" yet by these proposals we are doing just the opposite.

If you leave them alone (which we will) you are creating certainty. If you store your coins properly they will be safe and untouched for when you need them and outside forces will not change this.