Idea for Addressing Dormant Bitcoin Issue

[ag346]

How about this for an idea to partially address the issue with dormant bitcoins:

Allow users to voluntarily opt-in to a wallet setting that causes them expire if there is no activity in xyz years.
Create a similar setting that causes the wallet and its balance to gradually expire starting in xyz years.

Force wallets with un-usably low balances that have been dormant for say 40+yrs to expire.
Force wallets that have been dormant past the normal human life expectancy, let's say 100yrs, to gradually expire by say 5% every 10yrs.

I expect the last two suggestions to be rather controversial, but the first two shouldn't be since they would be voluntary measures.

[CIYAM]

The issue of "dormant bitcoins" has been flogged to death many times before.

No-one is going to find it any more interesting to raise it again (and no-one is interested in doing this - there are alt coins that do though so perhaps try using them instead).

If ECDSA or some other core technology that Bitcoin depends upon is broken in the future then at that point a migration to new addresses might be required but that is not likely to be something that would occur for years.

[drawingthesun]

Allow users to voluntarily opt-in to a wallet setting that causes them expire if there is no activity in xyz years.
Create a similar setting that causes the wallet and its balance to gradually expire starting in xyz years.

The issue here is every Bitcoin client will have the logic set to drive someones balance to the miners. A buffer overflow attack might be able to remotely trigger such logic and fire off the command against the users will.

I have no issue with a patched client or a different implementation having creative ideas such as this, but I am a firm believer that the official reference client should be minimal with regards to feature bloat.

EDIT: Think of it like this, you are adding another attack vector into a program that may one day be responsible for a trillion dollars of wealth.

[tonychow]

It is really not necessary to expire bitcoins since we can split a bitcoin into a minimum 10^-8. If a bitcoin is gone, then it is gone. The value of the existing bitcoins then goes up. 

[Holliday]

It is really not necessary to expire bitcoins since we can split a bitcoin into a minimum 10^-8. If a bitcoin is gone, then it is gone. The value of the existing bitcoins then goes up. 

Seriously. I don't understand all the fuss. There are better ways to waste one's time than fixing things that aren't broken.

[DannyHamilton]

It is really not necessary to expire bitcoins since we can split a bitcoin into a minimum 10^-8. If a bitcoin is gone, then it is gone. The value of the existing bitcoins then goes up. 

Seriously. I don't understand all the fuss. There are better ways to waste one's time than fixing things that aren't broken.

Apparently we aren't allowed to demonstrate agreement with an opinion or add emphasis to a fact with a simple "+1".  I've recently had my "+1" posts removed.  Therefore, I'm typing out this message to indicate that I believe the quoted information needs extra emphasis to avoid being unnoticed in the rest of the chatter that may occur in this discussion. I may (or may not) also have added bold or underline tags to the text in the quote above to further emphasize the parts that I think are important to understand or be aware of.

[tonychow]

Actually, it is not necessary to generate bitcoins in each block, since that introduces inflation. But if inflation is introduced, then what inflation rate is correct? That is why a fixed amount of bitcoins will be generated. After that, no more bitcoins. So eliminate the problem of inflation. Then where mining profit can come from? From the transaction fees. But why not generate all bitcoins at the beginning, but gradually? The reason is to prevent all bitcoins in the hand of early adopters, that could make bitcoins fail.

[ala2012]

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