How lost Bitcoins might be handled in the future...

[Baja_Yaja]

Does anyone else see a major problem with lost bitcoins?

A lot of lost gold and treasure was found using metal detectors. In the case of bitcoin there is no equivalent of a metal detector, and based on my understanding there would be no way to create something that would recover lost bitcoins like you can do with gold with current technology and protocol design.

This alone is a huge deterrent for a lot of people and could negatively impact the network. Especially since in the early days a lot of un-savy people will lose keys and hard drives, etc. Should there be a plan for "resetting" or re-mining lost bitcoins in the future. If bitcoins wallet holders declare there bitcoin lost, maybe there should be a way that it could be recovered using mining equipment. Similar to lost gold, lost bitcoin might never be recovered. Should it stay this way or should there be a way to "find" lost bitcoin other than somehow finding the private key in some sort of treasure hunt?

Baja Yaja
Bitcoin Enthusiast//Aspiring Author:

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[bitbollo]

Lost bitcoins have always been "predicted" and considered part of the existence of the network.

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

I don't think this is a deterrent for users but simply a sort of "memento" reminding everyone of the importance of managing private keys.
 
But the real question become...
how do you define bitcoin lost?
let's say someone decides to do a 100-year long term storage... or bigger time without setting a time limit?

would you use a resource that you have to spend or "move" every certain amount of time otherwise someone else can take it from you?

[noorman0]

-snip-
This alone is a huge deterrent for a lot of people and could negatively impact the network. Especially since in the early days a lot of un-savy people will lose keys and hard drives, etc. Should there be a plan for "resetting" or re-mining lost bitcoins in the future. If bitcoins wallet holders declare there bitcoin lost, maybe there should be a way that it could be recovered using mining equipment.

Yep, someone asked something almost similar a while ago.

In essence, determining the status of a "lost" bitcoin is complex enough to be "recovered" without future disputes. I'm not a technical expert in this area, but I don't think this proposal will be compatible with the main bitcoin protocol either. cmiiw

[NotATether]

Does anyone else see a major problem with lost bitcoins?

A lot of lost gold and treasure was found using metal detectors. In the case of bitcoin there is no equivalent of a metal detector, and based on my understanding there would be no way to create something that would recover lost bitcoins like you can do with gold with current technology and protocol design.

This alone is a huge deterrent for a lot of people and could negatively impact the network. Especially since in the early days a lot of un-savy people will lose keys and hard drives, etc. Should there be a plan for "resetting" or re-mining lost bitcoins in the future. If bitcoins wallet holders declare there bitcoin lost, maybe there should be a way that it could be recovered using mining equipment. Similar to lost gold, lost bitcoin might never be recovered. Should it stay this way or should there be a way to "find" lost bitcoin other than somehow finding the private key in some sort of treasure hunt?

When your wallet with $1000 inside falls into a river by accident, does that deter anyone from using cash? I thought so.

Unlocking bitcoins like this is equivalent to turning on a money printer except instead of printing money, it is printing new coins such as how Dogecoin is working right now (part of the reason why DOGE should not be used as long-term HODL, but that's a different story). This discussion has already been had before more than once here. Why should we give Bitcoin one of the drawbacks of cash?

[MarjorieZimmermanGinger]

This alone is a huge deterrent for a lot of people and could negatively impact the network. Especially since in the early days a lot of un-savy people will lose keys and hard drives, etc. Should there be a plan for "resetting" or re-mining lost bitcoins in the future. If bitcoins wallet holders declare there bitcoin lost, maybe there should be a way that it could be recovered using mining equipment. Similar to lost gold, lost bitcoin might never be recovered. Should it stay this way or should there be a way to "find" lost bitcoin other than somehow finding the private key in some sort of treasure hunt?

That's what makes Bitcoin unique and not bound by other than the owner, if you hold Bitcoin in your wallet and you lose access to seed and key then Bitcoin will disappear from your ownership, others also cannot take the Bitcoin you have because the Seed and Key cannot reached again. Technology makes people learn to be caution in storing Bitcoin that we have and there are positive and negative talking about technology, but some people consider technology to bring someone to reach the desired stage without a third party intermediate.

Gold has a tool that is able to detect and gold has a shape that can be sought using a detector. For now what I know is there is no way to find Bitcoin for someone who loses Seed and Personal Key access. Accuracy in storing seeds or personal keys is a decision that must be well guarded and we are one that can secure ownership.

[Baja_Yaja]

Lost bitcoins have always been "predicted" and considered part of the existence of the network.

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

I don't think this is a deterrent for users but simply a sort of "memento" reminding everyone of the importance of managing private keys.
 
But the real question become...
how do you define bitcoin lost?
let's say someone decides to do a 100-year long term storage... or bigger time without setting a time limit?

would you use a resource that you have to spend or "move" every certain amount of time otherwise someone else can take it from you?

I think it would be something like a mining or discovery effort where using some currently unavailable technology people could be able to gain access to tools to discover the private key somehow. I like comparing bitcoin to gold and a treasure hunt is the only way I can keep the analogy going. Otherwise they aren't all that similar. If bitcoin is digital gold then there should be a digital recovery system in my opinion. This would take some kind of technological breakthrough plus a consensus on how to handle these sorts of issues.

Baja Yaja

[ImThour]

Lost Bitcoin is considered lost until the owner of the account makes a transaction. Maybe they are still holding of the amount of Bitcoins they mined in the early days?
Or what if they have created multiple wallets back then and they do not want to withdraw/move Bitcoin from some of their wallets.

Also, there is no reason to make any change to lost bitcoins, let them be lost. It's good for Bitcoin's price.

[Baja_Yaja]

Lost Bitcoin is considered lost until the owner of the account makes a transaction. Maybe they are still holding of the amount of Bitcoins they mined in the early days?
Or what if they have created multiple wallets back then and they do not want to withdraw/move Bitcoin from some of their wallets.

Also, there is no reason to make any change to lost bitcoins, let them be lost. It's good for Bitcoin's price.

I see what your saying but this is what concerns me: https://www.investopedia.com/news/20-all-btc-lost-unrecoverable-study-shows/

There's only two million left to mine and we already lost 20 percent of them.

Baja Yaja

[Husires]

In bitcoin it's hard to say those coins are lost, I can claims that I lost my coins in a boating accident and then all of a sudden several years later I say I found the paper of my seeds on floating in the bay, I'm lucky it came back to me.
Anyone can claim that he lost his coins while hiding a copy from the master and years later he says he found it.
In the early days, the public key was sent and those currencies might be able to recover them in the future.

The only missing bitcoins are those sent to Proof of Burn (PoB) address https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn

Some Burn (PoB) address

    1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr (2,130.84717717 BTC),
    1111111111111111111114oLvT2 (43.2884582 BTC)

The total will be less than 50,000 BTC.

[Zaguru12]

Should there be a plan for "resetting" or re-mining lost bitcoins in the future. If bitcoins wallet holders declare there bitcoin lost, maybe there should be a way that it could be recovered using mining equipment. Similar to lost gold, lost bitcoin might never be recovered. Should it stay this way or should there be a way to "find" lost bitcoin other than somehow finding the private key in some sort of treasure hunt?

Then there wouldn’t be a definite mining number of bitcoin which is an absolute 21 million because it is like mining back the same coins that have been mined and added to circulation before. If you look at the reward for a block or rather the halving period the price is calculated based on the number of supply and should we re-mined them they add to probably the supply and then affects the value. More so you can’t compare it to Gold since it is a physical commodity. The ability to mine and re-mine gold is what makes it not to be an absolute scarce asset.

Also you can’t be sure whether the coin was actually lost for real, probably the owner actually hide some where and others maybe his kins might feel it is lost and then declare it lost so if it is to be re-mined then it goes against the wish of the real owner. So in as much as no body likes it when people lose there coins it should remain like that because a twitch in the protocol might affect lots of things

[livingfree]

I don't think that lost bitcoins will affect the network negatively. The network is going to continue regardless of how many were gone forever. The value of those lost bitcoins remain and distributed to the market and that's why its scarcity is becoming way better.

We have to remember that bitcoin is decentralized and even if you'll propose something like this, we have to accept the fact that they're gone and can no longer retrieved unless someone is quietly holding the private keys of those lost bitcoins.

We can't print more bitcoins, it has a fixed supply until it's reached so resetting or have a remining process could also be expensive just as how expensive a potential 51% attack will be.

[Latviand]

Lost Bitcoin is considered lost until the owner of the account makes a transaction. Maybe they are still holding of the amount of Bitcoins they mined in the early days?
Or what if they have created multiple wallets back then and they do not want to withdraw/move Bitcoin from some of their wallets.

If there is a confirmed of the address, would that still be considered a lost coin? The notion that they have multiple addresses that they don't want to move the bitcoins in it is baffling to me because I ask myself and put myself in that position where I own those "addresses" and then ask myself, why would I do that? And right now I don't see any reason why I should do what you're saying yhese people might've done with their bitcoins.

[20kevin20]

I don’t see a problem with it. There are these people using their computing power to try and generate an already used Bitcoin address that still contains balance, which I think is closest to what people with metal detectors do. It’s about impossible to find an already used address by generating, but it’s what some people try. The better question is how do you define a lost BTC? A Bitcoin that hasn’t moved in a decade? A Bitcoin whose “owner” (which is a person who can” prove their ownership (See how many .dat files have been sold around to naive people who thought they could prove ownership or decrypt it, but mobody was able to do it)?

Nobody knows which Bitcoin is truy lost. They may be dormant addresses or their owners just haven’t looked well enough yet in the right spot to find the private key or seed to their coins. Fortunately, you’re literally the only one who has access to your coins. Unfortunately, this means you’ve got to be quite careful about this characteristic of Bitcoin because it means if you lose access, nobody can help you out with it.

Like Satoshi said: when you lose BTC, the supply gets scarcer. Think of it as a gift to everyone.

[m2017]

I don't see any serious problems with the lost bitcoins. Even with the lost btc, the network still has enough to circulate. In an extreme case, btc is a divisible unit, which will allow you to split it into parts if there are not enough bitcoin left (which I doubt).

It was at first that people neglected bitcoin because of the then cost. Now, when the price is high, people are already acting differently and the probability of losing btc is very low (though not zero). People have learned to appreciate and cherish it.

There should not be any plans to BTC-reset again. This is silly. Everything should remain as it is. Otherwise, it will create confusion and chaos in the bitcoin network.

It is possible that in the future methods and technologies will be found or invented to restore access to the lost btc. It may turn out that the BTC-detector will be created a little later, because the treasures and gold you are talking about have also lain for more than one hundred years before they could be found.

[joniboini]

Otherwise they aren't all that similar. If bitcoin is digital gold then there should be a digital recovery system in my opinion. This would take some kind of technological breakthrough plus a consensus on how to handle these sorts of issues.

I'm not sure if that's how most people see the comparison. As far as I can tell, people believe Bitcoin is digital gold because it can serve as a store of wealth quite well, not because of its technicalities.

It is a bit surprising to see new threads talking more or less about the same issue. Is there a new narrative on social media that discuss it? I wonder why though. Most people already know that losing your coins means a dead end most of the time, which is why self-custody is important. Other than breaking the trust people have in the network, I don't see how a new "recovery" mode will be accepted by the network. Maybe you can fork the chain and see if there is interest in your solution.

[kryptqnick]

There's nothing like a metal detector when it comes to lost BTC, but it's not like metal detector is very efficient (there's a need of close proximity, and it reacts to tons of useless things because they have metal in them). As for Bitcoin, some coins are at the point of no recovery, but some are lost because people memorized their pass phrases and forgot them or put pieces of paper with crucial information somewhere and then also forgot where that was. Some might remember enough to use specialists that can help brute force the rest, and passphrases can also be found by some people later on. So there is a possibility to recover some coins, at least in theory. Also, let's not forget that there's no good estimate of how much is actually lost rather than presumed lost due to inactivity.

[CryptSafe]

It is quite interesting your proposals but you must know that lost bitcoin are part of the existing and already minted bitcoin. There is only 21,000,000 maximum bitcoin supply so anything contrary to this I think would be frowned at and would not go down well with the bitcoin community. But instead missing or lost bitcoin would make the  existing bitcoin more valuable and a scarce commodity.

Nevertheless, of lately, wallet addresses holding large volume of bitcoin started waking up and these are the wallets assumed to be  holding lost bitcoin but it wasn't as the thought goes. So it would be very difficult to decipher if a wallet holding bitcoin for long without any activity is assumed to be a lost coin unless otherwise if the owner of such wallet comes up publicly to declare that such wallet holding certain volume of bitcoin belongs to them and possibly verification is done that is when it could be said that such bitcoin is a lost one.

[lassdas]

... people could be able to gain access to tools to discover the private key somehow. ..

The thing is: there is no difference between "lost" and "not-lost" bitcoins.
You simply can not tell if coins are lost or not (except for those on "burn addresses", but those are "burnt" not "lost").

If you somehow come up with tools to discover private keys you can of course restrict yourself to only ever discover PKs of "lost" coins, but why stop there? You can use those same tools to discover any and all other coins, lost or not.
That's basically the end of bitcoin as we know it.

  

[Doan9269]

A lot of lost gold and treasure was found using metal detectors. In the case of bitcoin there is no equivalent of a metal detector, and based on my understanding there would be no way to create something that would recover lost bitcoins like you can do with gold with current technology and protocol design.

Let's not debate on lost bitcoin here being compared to lost gold or other physical profitable assets of an investment, any lost coin due to hack or wrong address is gone ad remain unrecoverable which makes bitcoin transactions irreversible once confirmed because they are protocols that works along with this that cannot be changed, those lost coins are release into the bitcoin network back for random redistribution, we can also consider the rate at which this occurs to be very small, it rarely occur because people cannot afford making such a costly mistake knowing the repercussion thereof.

[SeriouslyGiveaway]

Does anyone else see a major problem with lost bitcoins?

Let they lost like they already lost.

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

They are lost for good.  Think of it like someone losing their wallet in the ocean.  It seems like it would be a problem but it's really not that significant.  People lose their gold jewelry all the time but it doesn't make much of a difference to the value of gold.