4.45 million bitcoin untouched for 5yrs,do BTC community can retrieve in future?

[hZti]

I think many people overestimate the amount of Bitcoins that are actually lost forever. Many people don't want to sell them and there is also no point in sending them around. Also there is a big security concern to take them out of cold storage. So to me it is normal that many coins are not touched for 5+ years.

[kryptqnick]

My questions is that ' is there any possibility that some point in time in future BTC community might decide something which can retrieve this lost BTCs?

For now, it's impossible and likely to stay this way. It's also a good point that some coins which are presumed to be stolen might be unmoved for other reasons, a person has the right to not move one's coins. If you didn't touch the money in your bank account savings for 5 years, would you find it fair if the bank redistributed all your money to some random people? If not, then you shouldn't want the retrieval of "lost" coins either. Also, if one day it does become possible to crack the keys (say, due to huge progress in quantum computing), the moment it becomes possible Bitcoin itself becomes obsolete because the money isn't protected any more. So there won't be a point of retrieving something worthless.

[bananas]

I think many people overestimate the amount of Bitcoins that are actually lost forever. Many people don't want to sell them and there is also no point in sending them around. Also there is a big security concern to take them out of cold storage. So to me it is normal that many coins are not touched for 5+ years.

I believe te estimates are probably about right, in 5+ years coins tend to move for whatever reason. I do "have" a few coins lost forever in the blockchain myself. Probably most early adopters do "own" lost coins.

[Argoo]

[...]

What I meant is that I'll never accept to freeze coins or move them arbitrarily without a digital signature. That'd make bitcoin susceptible to censorship.

In the first place, how would you know if coins on certain wallet addresses are actually 'lost' and not with the owner just holding silently by not spending or moving the coins around?

Exactly. We don't know if those early outputs are still accessible, and therefore can't make a conclusion. In fact, we keep seeing people, occasionally, who unlock outputs that are more than a decade old.

Nevertheless, the problem of accessibility to previously lost bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies remains and it continues to be relevant. Experts have calculated that in ten years quantum computers will be able to do this, and this is subject to the current pace of their development. In addition to positive aspects in this regard, this will also mean the possibility of our wallets being hacked using such computers by various malefactors who will surely gain access to them. We do not know which way the further development of the cryptocurrency will go, but I hope that we will be able to solve this emerging problem in time.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Experts have calculated that in ten years quantum computers will be able to do this

Quantum computers aren't said to reverse hashes, since that's, if not impossible, infeasible. The danger from quantum computing lies to addresses that have revealed their public keys, because ECLDP is said to be solvable. That affects mainly the early P2PK outputs.

We do not know which way the further development of the cryptocurrency will go, but I hope that we will be able to solve this emerging problem in time.

Sure, it can be resolved with consensus. There just isn't a point to do it now; it'll just worsen the scaling problem without tangible benefit.

[justdimin]

For now, it's impossible and likely to stay this way. It's also a good point that some coins which are presumed to be stolen might be unmoved for other reasons, a person has the right to not move one's coins. If you didn't touch the money in your bank account savings for 5 years, would you find it fair if the bank redistributed all your money to some random people? If not, then you shouldn't want the retrieval of "lost" coins either. Also, if one day it does become possible to crack the keys (say, due to huge progress in quantum computing), the moment it becomes possible Bitcoin itself becomes obsolete because the money isn't protected any more. So there won't be a point of retrieving something worthless.

We can't make any decisions, that is the difference. I mean the talk here is that "maybe we should redistribute it again" or something like that but at the end of the day we can't do that. We can't retrieve it, so all the discussion about "should we?" goes to nothing at all.

If the discussion is about something that we can't do, can we please talk about how I would like to spend a day with Kate Upton and Alexandria Daddario at the same time? That has more chance of happening than Bitcoins untouched to be redistributed, one is "technically" possible, obviously not going to happen, but at least it is not "impossible", the other one is literally impossible to do.

[blatchcorn]

My questions is that ' is there any possibility that some point in time in future BTC community might decide something which can retrieve this lost BTCs?

No.

Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more.  Think of it as a donation to everyone.

We can say that lost bitcoins are like token burning in deflationary tokens. Where token burning reduces the circulation of coins and that makes token demand to surpass token supply. There are 21 million bitcoins that will be ever generated, if out of those 21 million let's say 5 million are lost forever then we are left with 16 million bitcoin only.

[fullhdpixel]

My questions is that ' is there any possibility that some point in time in future BTC community might decide something which can retrieve this lost BTCs?

How do you know these coins are lost? Maybe they are just "holding" these coins? BTC community can't do anything about this at all. The system is decentralized and immutable. Meaning you can't retrieve lost coins and you don't know if they are lost in the first place. This is the beauty of blockchain. A mistake or not, once it is done, there is no turning back. People may try to fork bitcoin off but all they'll have is a worthless chain which nobody will be using.

He instantly assumes that the coins are lost just because they are untouched for 5 years now but you can be right with that. What if the coins aren't really lost but what if someone is just holding them? They are not an ordinary person like us that are emotional and can easily sell our btc when we see a small dump or pump in the price but they can be big institutions or whales whose aim is to hodl for a long time to reap maximum benefits since they already figured out the potential of btc.

The guys prolly started buying and hodling btc on the year 2017 because if we will count it, that will be exactly 5 years up to this date we have now.