A Proposed Use For All The Lost Bitcoins

[benchi10]

As bitcoin reaches a peak level point of global awareness, there has been talks amongst the community looking forward the future for the first successful P2P, open source, decentralized, and trustless network. Since bitcoin beginnings, nobody expected such a tremendous rise in adoption for the internet of value created by Satoshi Nakamoto. In this article we will provide a solution to one of bitcoins biggest problem: lost BTCs.


Bitcoin is known for successfully adapting a community driven collaboration that goes beyond the sharing economy. Conventional wisdom and traditional ideating would tell you not to share your ideas, and let one entity control the executive decisions. Bitcoin has proven that community collaboration and open source protocol can work tremendously reaching an all time high market cap of $300 Billion in less than 10 years. Less NDAs, secrets, and centralized entities and more collaborations, transparency, and decentralization.

From Lightning Networks scalability solution, to wallet security, and global adoption, bitcoins community that consists of thousands of volunteers work non-stop to create a better network.

If the community does not agree on how to proceed with certain aspects of bitcoin, they can propose a fork. If they want to change an essential aspect of bitcoins network they can create a hard fork (for example bitcoin cash, bitcoin gold, bitcoin diamond etc) so future nodes deny old ones to change some rules.

Bitcoin Core is the biggest community of developers that intend to keep bitcoin values intact.


Lost bitcoins
According to an article made by Fortune, there are around 4 million lost bitcoins forever. Chainalysis claims that 17%-25% of Bitcoins total supply has been lost forever due to original coins minted and early investors not paying attention to them, and transactions mismanaged. It is claimed that Satoshi Nakamoto owns around 1 million BTCs but no one can back that claim and they haven’t been in movement for years, maybe they are held as reserve when we mine all bitcoins? Anywho, according to the research there are $5-$20 Billion worths of bitcoins lost forever.

What if we could make a new bitcoin while containing all the original aspects and not hard forking it?


Token Swap
Tokens that use Ethereums ERC20 standard and wanted to leave the network for their main network have used the token swap method. This method consists of migrating old tokens into the new protocol leaving the old ones behind useless. Tron, EOS, and Vechain have migrated all their tokens into the new protocol consisting billion of dollars in movement. This process is easier said than done, but it’s definitely possible.

Bitcoin token swap
What if we would migrate all the bitcoins in circulation, keep all the components but take recreate all the “lost” bitcoins and set them aside for mining rewards, social impacts, or anything with a decentralized community driven vote. The scarcity of bitcoin will stay intact as there will be always 21 million bitcoins, but the mining reward can be increased to incentive more miners to join the network.

Some solutions for the 4 million bitcoins I can propose for good use is investing in the future of economical disasters countries such as Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and others. What if we can go beyond internet of value and create a direct impact on people’s lives in a decentralized manner where the community can decide a budget. Dash has a system that the community can propose a budget and the winning proposers take action to achieve their proposal. The 4 million BTC can act as budgeting for future initiatives that will help the community grow and make the world a better place.
What other solutions or uses do you see good fit and fair for the 4 million Bitcoins? Let me know what you think, we are all trying to make the bitcoin network more reliable for different uses such as a store of value, currency, cross border transactions, investment tool etc.

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[dothebeats]

For one, how do you determine if the coins are lost or not? You can't just go on and devise an algorithm that will record addresses that have not been used in the past x months/yrs since I know a lot of people who keep their bitcoins as is, including me (I have a few coins left in an unused address since 2015). That alone is hard, how about the othrr things/points? Perhaps Satoshi has already saw this before he even left the project, and made an important note that if coins were lost, consider it something that adds value to the whole of bitcoin and nothing more.

[melallgarant2015]

lost - it means lost

[odolvlobo]

A swap would require a central authority to manage and enforce it. Does Bitcoin have a central authority? I hope not. Anyway, there are lots of other reasons why your idea will not (and should not) happen.

[1Referee]

It's quite funny how people think that just because coins aren't moving on-chain, they aren't being used. There are plenty of examples of how physical Bitcoins can be used as means of exchange (just like a Gold bar) without needing internet or whatever client. It's a great way to fool authorities into thinking that coins aren't moving or belong to x entity, while they have moved and changed owner plenty of times already.

I have turned like 10% of my total Bitcoin holdings into physical Bitcoins this year, and it feels great to have actual value in Bitcoin that I can use in the worst case no-internet/no-power circumstances. It's just like Gold in physical form perfect worst case scenario money. I'm confident that there are plenty of more people like me doing the exact same thing.

[pooya87]

What if we could make a new bitcoin while containing all the original aspects and not hard forking it?

you can't do that without a hard fork because you are introducing a new rule in the system that didn't exist before. bitcoin is just a set of rules that need to be satisfied, when you want to remove a rule or add a new one, you need to perform a hard fork. in this case what you call "token swap" needs introduction of a new set of rules hence needs a hard fork.
those altcoins that are doing it already have that rule!

as for the process itself, even if 100 years pass you still can not call any of the  coins that have not moved "lost". maybe some line of family is HODLing bitcoin like that. you can not prevent it and you certainly can not force people to move their coins. for instance i started with bitcoin in 2014, today after 4 years i have coins that i have not touched for 4 years. you can't force me to move my coins because you think not moving is equal to being lost. i won't follow that bitcoin with that kind of "rule" in it.

[hatshepsut93]

Propositions to do something with the so-called lost coins have been made countless times already. They all won't be passed because they violate the core principle of Bitcoin: no one can touch coins that they don't have private keys to. It also would be unfair to every user to create 4 million coins out of thin air, while people were always assuming that there can only be 21 million coins. This idea can only be implemented as an altcoin fork, akin to all those shitcoins that were spawned since the last year (by the way, Jeff Garzik wanted to redistribute Satoshi's coins in one of his shitcoins), but who really cares about those stupid forks? I didn't even bother to claim anything outside of Bcash and Bgold.

[Pursuer]

Some solutions for the 4 million bitcoins I can propose for good use is investing in the future of economical disasters countries such as Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and others.

bitcoin is a currency and a payment system, not "solve-the-world's-problems-system". if you want to help with the situation in other countries then go ahead and donate out of your own pocket and try to help them, why are you trying to put your hand in other people's pocket and use their money to donate?