WHO has the power and how can changes to bitcoin be effected?

[qwerty555]

On another thread the issue of lost wallets affecting loss of total supply of coins now and over many years has been raised.

If there was an attempt to solve this issue and others, WHO has the authority and power to do so?

How was that power derived and is there a process which has to be undertaken before such changes are made?

Or is there no one and it is what it is and always will be "warts and all"?

[MineForeman.com]

We are the people who have the power to make changes, that power is derived by our choice to run bitcoin clients of a version that we agree with and optionally mine with them.

Neil

[DeathAndTaxes]

Bitcoin is a consensus based system that makes implementing changes especially controversial ones incredibly difficulty. 

Lost coins are lost.  That is never going to change.   Even less controversial changes are tough (dust rules, min fees, max block size, etc) something which is essentially theft of property is not going to be universally accepted.  It is not going to happen.

[Bitcoinpro]

On another thread the issue of lost wallets affecting loss of total supply of coins now and over many years has been raised.

If there was an attempt to solve this issue and others, WHO has the authority and power to do so?

How was that power derived and is there a process which has to be undertaken before such changes are made?

Or is there no one and it is what it is and always will be "warts and all"?

its to early to consolidate lost coins

[qwerty555]

We are the people who have the power to make changes, that power is derived by our choice to run bitcoin clients of a version that we agree with and optionally mine with them.

Neil

ok so it is the miners that have the major control?

If mining goes industrial which seems to be the trend due to cost of equipment and massive increase in difficulty levels the time could come when 90% of mining is in the hands of a select and well capitalized few..does that make sense?

At that point they are effectively in control of bitcoin and can opt to change without discussion simply by all agreeing to run a new version that suits them. Would that be correct?

Could they change to a version that allows the probable lost wallet coins ( currently estimated at 463,000 coins) to be cancelled and 50% re mined and 50% placed in escrow for future claims on those coins? Or would that be impossible?

Yes I agree its too early to consolidate lost coins Can it actually be done even if we wanted to? ( 10 -15yrs seems reasonable ..if ever it can be done)  but the issue can be discussed with potential solutions

[Bitcoinpro]

First thing is to get transaction fees lowered as its strangling price growth atm. Transaction fees should only be hitting potential abusers of the network not just a single user trying to make a single transaction.

[DeathAndTaxes]

We are the people who have the power to make changes, that power is derived by our choice to run bitcoin clients of a version that we agree with and optionally mine with them.

Neil

ok so it is the miners that have the major control?

If mining goes industrial which seems to be the trend due to cost of equipment and massive increase in difficulty levels the time could come when 90% of mining is in the hands of a select and well capitalized few..does that make sense?

At that point they are effectively in control of bitcoin and can opt to change without discussion simply by all agreeing to run a new version that suits them. Would that be correct?

Could they change to a version that allows the probable lost wallet coins ( currently estimated at 463,000 coins) to be cancelled and 50% re mined and 50% placed in escrow for future claims on those coins? Or would that be impossible?

Yes I agree its too early to consolidate lost coins Can it actually be done even if we wanted to? ( 10 -15yrs seems reasonable ..if ever it can be done)  but the issue can be discussed with potential solutions

No miners don't have control. 

Change the code so the block reward is 100,000 BTC and mine a block and find out what happens.
The "rules of the game" are in the client, the client run by >100,000 nodes all over the planet.

Changing the rules requires you to convince everyone to upgrade to the new rules.   Well maybe not everyone but a super majority so that the minority abandons their fork and joins the upgraded fork.   This means convincing miners, merchants, developers, software providers, eWallets, everyday users, large coinholders, etc.   

It is nearly impossible for routine changes much less highly controversial ones like "hey you haven't used your money quick enough so we are stealing it".

[MoonShadow]

We are the people who have the power to make changes, that power is derived by our choice to run bitcoin clients of a version that we agree with and optionally mine with them.

Neil

ok so it is the miners that have the major control?

If mining goes industrial which seems to be the trend due to cost of equipment and massive increase in difficulty levels the time could come when 90% of mining is in the hands of a select and well capitalized few..does that make sense?

Yes, it does.  It's expected.

At that point they are effectively in control of bitcoin and can opt to change without discussion simply by all agreeing to run a new version that suits them. Would that be correct?

Yes and no.  Yes they could do it, no it wouldn't be bitcoin anymore.  That would be a 'breaking' change.  Bitcoins would functionally cease to exist.  The price would collapse, and it should.

Could they change to a version that allows the probable lost wallet coins ( currently estimated at 463,000 coins) to be cancelled and 50% re mined and 50% placed in escrow for future claims on those coins? Or would that be impossible?

Nothing is ever impossible, but it would still be astronomically unlikely.

Yes I agree its too early to consolidate lost coins Can it actually be done even if we wanted to? ( 10 -15yrs seems reasonable ..if ever it can be done)  but the issue can be discussed with potential solutions

If ther i s aflaw discovered in the address keypari algos, then everyone using bitcoin would migrate to a new address format with a new algo.  Whatever was left after some transitional period would be assumed to be lost coins, and thus salvage.  Perhaps such a flaw could be exploited to permit breaking of the addresses, but that is unlikley.  Such as it is, those lost coins will remain lost for well beyond our natural lifetimes.

[qwerty555]

First thing is to get transaction fees lowered as its strangling price growth atm. Transaction fees should only be hitting potential abusers of the network not just a single user trying to make a single transaction.

Also agreed and I made a thread that got moved to discussion on that issue

How can transaction fees be lowered ? Is that the realm of private investors offering a service with lower rates?

[qwerty555]

Could they change to a version that allows the probable lost wallet coins ( currently estimated at 463,000 coins) to be cancelled and 50% re mined and 50% placed in escrow for future claims on those coins? Or would that be impossible?

Nothing is ever impossible, but it would still be astronomically unlikely.

Yes I agree its too early to consolidate lost coins Can it actually be done even if we wanted to? ( 10 -15yrs seems reasonable ..if ever it can be done)  but the issue can be discussed with potential solutions

If ther i s aflaw discovered in the address keypari algos, then everyone using bitcoin would migrate to a new address format with a new algo.  Whatever was left after some transitional period would be assumed to be lost coins, and thus salvage.  Perhaps such a flaw could be exploited to permit breaking of the addresses, but that is unlikley.  Such as it is, those lost coins will remain lost for well beyond our natural lifetimes.
[/quote]

In summary.

changes practically cannot be made. It is what it is and will stay that way.

The lost coin issue is not an algo flaw it is attrition due to death (.5% year for all currency) and lost addresses. Again there is no short term solution to this. If another crypto is created which has all the attributes of bitcoin and also solves the lost coin issues and other "known" issues which cannot be resolved  for bitcoin would it be more attractive ( all other things being equal or better)?

[Bitcoinpro]

First thing is to get transaction fees lowered as its strangling price growth atm. Transaction fees should only be hitting potential abusers of the network not just a single user trying to make a single transaction.

Also agreed and I made a thread that got moved to discussion on that issue

How can transaction fees be lowered ? Is that the realm of private investors offering a service with lower rates?

client upgrade

[gmaxwell]

ok so it is the miners that have the major control?

No. Trying to find something to simply pin an "in charge" badge on in Bitcoin is an effort doomed to failure.

Bitcoin is, first and foremost, a zero-trust consensus system which assumes its peers are malicious and so it autonomously validates all the information it receives and imposes the hardcoded rules of the system all on its own. Miners are anonymous participants— they self-select and come and go as they wish— and are also generally assumed by the protocol to be malicious.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to validate _everything_ in a fully autonomous manner, because the possibility of double-spends— two transactions which spend the same Bitcoin, something prohibited by the rules— demands knowing an ordering for transactions in order to resolve which of multiple spends is the survivor. A consensus ordering cannot be determined in a fully trust-less and decentralized manner for fundamental reasons (e.g. even relativity teaches us that the order you perceive events depends on your position).

So, instead, we use a weak computational vote to choose an order, which has the benefit of being easily validated by computer so its useful as an automatic consensus tool. But Bitcoin is not a democracy, democracies are inherently oppressive if less so than the other systems that order people around against their will— the majority wolves voting to eat the minority sheep for supper— and the computational vote seldom aligns with actual people, it can be bought. The 'vote' is only used for determining transaction order, and the imposition of all the rules by all the other participants is believed and hoped to remove most of the incentives to abuse ordering influence— a kind of economic hack, because participating in the ordering requires expending scarce resource, and that effort is only rewarded if your work ends up in the chain that the network accepts.

So when you ask the question about changing the rules you have to ask about what kind of change you're talking about:  If it is a change which involves tightening them— e.g. restricting transactions that previously would have been permitted— then you can achieve the change through ordering control, a super-majority (a simple majority is unsafe) of miners can use their ordering control to "infinitely delay" any transaction which doesn't meet the new rule. Sadly ordering control implies the power to censor, but on the plus side it does make adding new restrictions easier.  The Bitcoin protocol was designed with many placeholder "meaningless but permitted" messages, which can later be restricted to add new features.  If instead you ask about a change that would permit something which is currently forbidden, then _every_ remaining participating node must be updated. If the rule weakening shows up in a block it— and all subsequent blocks in that chain— will be completely ignored by nodes not updated to accept it.  This is why miners printing themselves 100btc/block is simply equivalent to them no longer mining, at least in a world where many people run full nodes.

Cheers,

[qwerty555]

ok so it is the miners that have the major control?

So when you ask the question about changing the rules you have to ask about what kind of change you're talking about:  If it is a change which involves tightening them— e.g. restricting transactions that previously would have been permitted— then you can achieve the change through ordering control, a super-majority (a simple majority is unsafe) of miners can use their ordering control to "infinitely delay" any transaction which doesn't meet the new rule. Sadly ordering control implies the power to censor, but on the plus side it does make adding new restrictions easier.  The Bitcoin protocol was designed with many placeholder "meaningless but permitted" messages, which can later be restricted to add new features.  If instead you ask about a change that would permit something which is currently forbidden, then _every_ remaining participating node must be updated. If the rule weakening shows up in a block it— and all subsequent blocks in that chain— will be completely ignored by nodes not updated to accept it.  This is why miners printing themselves 100btc/block is simply equivalent to them no longer mining, at least in a world where many people run full nodes.

Cheers,

The question at hand is the re-mining of coins based on those "lost" in inactive (many years) wallet addresses (which are in fact lost addresses as opposed to just inactive and recoverable even 10 yrs in the future) in order to maintain the equilibrium of supply. Based on your excellent explanation this is prohibited (as its a relaxing/alteration of the rules) so can never be changed and therefore dead coins will exist and increase with a "guesstimate" that currently they are 3.8% of 12 M and this will increase at 0.5% a year ( based on currency loss estimates) until in 50 yrs a further 25% supply reduction will exist...

Any estimates based on a total 21M coins will be incorrect if they do not factor in the lost coins which can well equal 28% + when all coins have been mined. The impact of the reduced supply may well be deflationary or inflationary which is not a desirable effect.

[cr1776]

...
Yes I agree its too early to consolidate lost coins Can it actually be done even if we wanted to? ( 10 -15yrs seems reasonable ..if ever it can be done)  but the issue can be discussed with potential solutions

Merely using a different word does not change the nature of what is being suggested.

"Consolidate" usually does not mean "stealing from some people who have not used property during the time period you want them to and giving them to yourself or others."  Hiding behind euphemisms does not help an honest discussion.

:-)

[polarhei]

There are four groups of people who has power to change what bitcoin should be.

1. Government, One disagreement can ruin it. However government has one serious problem called debt so at this moment, they only just say, they study it, they do not comment about this thing to make infamous themselves, so they will try to adapt with it. If government finally know how to get it work, then government may use bitcoin as a form of reserve, then bitcoin price can be raised.

2. Big exchanges. This is the main problem. I don't think 1 BTC should be labeled at 10 hundred USD for 1.

3. Manufactures. AMD have accidentally added one more axis on their GPUs (HD6000 and onwards), which programmers found that one which is able to speed up the harvest causes high demand.

4. Users. I don't need to be mentioned?!

[Nancarrow]

...
Yes I agree its too early to consolidate lost coins Can it actually be done even if we wanted to? ( 10 -15yrs seems reasonable ..if ever it can be done)  but the issue can be discussed with potential solutions

Merely using a different word does not change the nature of what is being suggested.

"Consolidate" usually does not mean "stealing from some people who have not used property during the time period you want them to and giving them to yourself or others."  Hiding behind euphemisms does not help an honest discussion.

:-)

Yeah, but neither does shrieking dysphemisms. (If that's the right word)

It doesn't matter how many times you or D&T shout that it would be stealing, it still *wouldn't* *be* *stealing*, if it were implemented in the way that most advocates propose... namely with a sufficiently long time period (say at least ten years), plenty of advance warning, great freaking newsflashes to all owners of bitcoins about the new changes, instructions in the bitcoin FAQ explaining you need to actually look at your damn bitcoins once in a while, consensus from a majority of nodes about the new rules, wallets built to automatically shove funds to a new address when they're about to expire, so that joe average and his grandma would hardly even need to do anything more than run their damn bitcoins clients once a decade, that sort of thing.

But no, let's keep shrieking that it's STEEEEEEEEALING, and always start such discussions by impugning the motives of those who advocate such changes, and THEN let's have the brass balls to position ourselves as the reasonable ones.

[BitchicksHusband]

It's escheatment and there's no reason for bitcoin to embrace such a horrible policy.  The lost coins have no effect other than to reward those who didn't lose their coins.

[Nancarrow]

"The lost coins have no effect other than to reward those who didn't lose their coins".

This is not quite true. It would only be true if the coins are known to be lost. The problem for which recycling advocates are proposing a solution, is that there are a vast number of coins for which we do not and cannot know whether they have been lost or are just being kept quietly. This means we don't know how many usable bitcoins exist, contrary to one of the key features that draws many people to the concept of Bitcoins in the first place. Not knowing the total coin supply means the market lacks very important basic information upon which to determine prices. And if we're being good and pure little libertarians, we shouldn't be advocating that powerful players can WITHHOLD information from the market, should we?

The recycling scheme simply says 'there won't be any lost coins'. If coins are gone too long, they are presumed lost and put back into circulation. If you don't want your bitcoins to be OMGconfiscatedrobbedstolen in such a system, just fucking move them. I keep using the word 'fucking' in such a recommendation because I cannot seriously believe how some people would think this an unacceptable or unjust or authoritarian demand, and in fact I cannot take such a person seriously at all. Probably thinks taxes are theft, too. Maybe even thinks escheatment is an awful thing too.

[DeathAndTaxes]

...
Yes I agree its too early to consolidate lost coins Can it actually be done even if we wanted to? ( 10 -15yrs seems reasonable ..if ever it can be done)  but the issue can be discussed with potential solutions

Merely using a different word does not change the nature of what is being suggested.

"Consolidate" usually does not mean "stealing from some people who have not used property during the time period you want them to and giving them to yourself or others."  Hiding behind euphemisms does not help an honest discussion.

:-)

Yeah, but neither does shrieking dysphemisms. (If that's the right word)

It doesn't matter how many times you or D&T shout that it would be stealing, it still *wouldn't* *be* *stealing*, if it were implemented in the way that most advocates propose... namely with a sufficiently long time period (say at least ten years), plenty of advance warning, great freaking newsflashes to all owners of bitcoins about the new changes, instructions in the bitcoin FAQ explaining you need to actually look at your damn bitcoins once in a while, consensus from a majority of nodes about the new rules, wallets built to automatically shove funds to a new address when they're about to expire, so that joe average and his grandma would hardly even need to do anything more than run their damn bitcoins clients once a decade, that sort of thing.

But no, let's keep shrieking that it's STEEEEEEEEALING, and always start such discussions by impugning the motives of those who advocate such changes, and THEN let's have the brass balls to position ourselves as the reasonable ones.

Stealing is still stealing even with moral equivocation.

Someone in a coma wakes up, finds out his Bitcoins are worth millions and then finds out they have been stolen.
Someone in prison faces a dilemma of divulging knowledge of the Bitcoin (and possibly be extorted, robbed, hacked) or see them confiscated by the system he foolishly trusted.

It is a breach of the social contract on which Bitcoin is built upon.  Bitcoin was built with certain promises in place, users voluntarily chose to use that system based on those promises.   It is faith in the network which gives Bitcoins their value, any value.  If you don't believe that then ask yourself if tomorrow blocks which rewarded miners 1 quadrillion coins per block were seen as valid what would happen to the value of your Bitcoins?

If those who advocate such confiscation of wealth got away with it, it wouldn't be the first change.  Why not raise the cap, increase the mining reward, introduce a government override on transaction irreversibility because they demand it, remove that pesky psuedo anonymity, etc while you are at it?

[BurtW]

There are dozens and dozens of threads discussing the "lost coins" issue.

There are four groups of people who has power to change what bitcoin should be.

2. Big exchanges. This is the main problem. I don't think 1 BTC should be labeled at 10 hundred USD for 1.

What are you talking about?  Big exchanges do not set the exchange rate, the market value is set by people buying and selling them.

3. Manufactures. AMD have accidentally added one more axis on their GPUs (HD6000 and onwards), which programmers found that one which is able to speed up the harvest causes high demand.

Again, what are you talking about?  There is no way to "speed up the harvest".  Most mining is not done by GPUs so the entire comment about GPUs does not matter even if it did.

4. Users. I don't need to be mentioned?!

Finally a correct statement.  Users (clients and miners) have the power to change Bitcoin.