Perishable UTXOs

[GreenBooth]

Please give a link to another topic if this has already been discussed (and solved ?), if I post this it is because I did not find anything.


Hello !

First post here, did not crawl a lot through the forum other to research material on this question - and I did not find.


Context that lead to this thought

This might be a false idea, but again I did not find anything (I'm not that good at searching either) so I consider these scenarios possible.

I started thinking, almost a year ago now, about what will happen when we got secp256k1-breaking quantum computers.
I know that we will have developed a replacement quantic-proof algorithm that will secure our current funds, but here is not the thing.
What will happen to old, lost UTXOs ? How will them be protected ? Should them even be protected ?

Because here it is:
If we patch old UTXOs with a locking script condition, like

Code:

if (quaticPatch has been there for over X blocks && thisUtxoIsNotPatched) { unusable UTXO }

We definitely burn all the lost supply.
Burning the lost supply is the current way of doing things, and it fits well for now, but as unspendable UTXO dust accumulates, and mnemonics get lost, maybe in the near-future we will change our minds.

I'm no expert in burning sats, but I think we already got less than 20 millions bitcoins to play with, right ?
Even if somehow, getting my sats scarcer seems nice, I think that profiting from the entire 21m supply Satoshi gave us, in a global scale, would be good.
Especially when considering that gigacorpos and giga states will probably push for an "unlocking fork" one day or another, because we will be talking about getting hands on nearly 20% of the Earth's monetary wealth.

So I think that we will just keep those old coins unprotected, and the corpos will crack their private keys to spend them.
"Satoshi is back ! Thousands and thousands of entire bitcoins moved !"
"Bitcoin OGs are from {insert first country to do that} ?"

I think this is a bad future, a future I do not want to live, where the very same people Satoshi wanted us to be protected from loots the first epoch or so.

And I think that you can already imagine what I mean by Perishable UTXOs !


Perishable UTXOs

It is because I do not want states nor corpos to loot all the "lost" coins that I've thought about perishable UTXOs.

The concept speeks for itself: after a determined amount of time alive, let's say E epochs, where E could be 4, any UTXO becomes claimable by miners.
Why miners ? They are big corpos, they will even be states, but they are forced in some way to make sats circulate. Wether it is directly, by selling / spending fresh coins (or fees), or indirectly, by storing those sats and rely on a friendly actor to cover power expenses.

This would allow the total supply to be circulating in the economy at some point, hopefully before quantum computing gets used to crack this old coins.
To enhance our chances to avoid this last case scenario, we could "sentence" un-quatum-upgraded UTXOs to be unspendable in any case, some blocks after the quatum-protection address soft-fork, so they would be "protected" from quantum attackers untill perish.

The distribution to the miners could be limited to X amount of UTXOs per block, so it helps spreading the old coins among miners. X could be ten.

The implementation of this feature does not seem too complex, even though I did not crawl Bitcoin Core's code yet, but I think it will be in the form of when creating a new UTXO, using a different unlocking script which would contain a "I'm a miner and this UTXO is old" flag, then the nodes would check the time the UTXO has been alive, and agrees if it is older than E, and of course verifying there are no more than X inputs. Outside of this specific transaction, every node should be verifying that the new locking script is similar to the coinbase transaction, to ensure it really is a miner doing this.
Again, I am not a Bitcoin Core expert, this is just a hint that could be in fact a terrible way of implementing this feature.


I think that's it, thank you if you read it all, now this is an open debate on if this all makes sense or not at all and I just wasted time and brain juice.
If you partially agree with all of this, please lt us know your version of the story so we can think together to enhance things.

[NeuroticFish]

The concept speeks for itself: after a determined amount of time alive, let's say E epochs, where E could be 4, any UTXO becomes claimable by miners.

This was discussed a lot of times. No. No matter how old some untouched coins are, no matter how nice is the name under which you're saying it, what you propose is stealing.
Some are HODLing, some have collectibles with coins stuck on them - on purpose - virtually forever. Why would they move their coins because of a new rule? Again. No.


Edit: you've asked for link, here you are: https://www.google.com/search?q=lost+bitcoin+site%3Abitcointalk.org&hl=en

[Eleutheria]

Presumed lost bitcoins from the very early days mostly did not have any spent UTXOs so they are protected from any advancements in computing that will arise in the future. The public address will need to be available and used to get the private keys, satoshi for example has never spent his coins, so there is no way to get to the public key or the coins in them.

Bitcoin is freedom, no coins should be presumed lost and recirculated to anyone else. That is against what Bitcoin is.

[GreenBooth]

The concept speeks for itself: after a determined amount of time alive, let's say E epochs, where E could be 4, any UTXO becomes claimable by miners.

This was discussed a lot of times. No. No matter how old some untouched coins are, no matter how nice is the name under which you're saying it, what you propose is stealing.
Some are HODLing, some have collectibles with coins stuck on them - on purpose - virtually forever. Why would they move their coins because of a new rule? Again. No.


Edit: you've asked for link, here you are: https://www.google.com/search?q=lost+bitcoin+site%3Abitcointalk.org&hl=en

I see the point, thanks for the search link, I'll give it some look
Though do you have some more info about the quantum problem I mentioned ?

[NeuroticFish]

Though do you have some more info about the quantum problem I mentioned ?

I'm not sure I understood your point on QC, but:
* you try to fix a problem we don't have (maybe you'll say "not yet", but I think that proper QC is not that close)
* if QC will be able to easily "crack" bitcoin and old addresses, then I expect there are other things (from SSL to bank accounts and nuke access) that are at higher priority to be fixed; but imho QC are not stable enough yet to perform something useful
* There's a very interesting image, it's all over the internet. Just read the text around it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=430000.msg4713025#msg4713025  I guess that QC can't do magic and has to obey the physical laws, right?

[franky1]

to OP:
if old PK keys became at risk then that should be for those able to brute PK to win.. without asking to add code now to purposefully break bitcoin security to have a free giveaway via code added to bitcoin. as it would be the giveaway code that becomes the exploit not the FEAR of QC

also if you think value held for X years should be come open to a giveaway..
how about we ask the OP to open up his own pension portfolio first. and let anyone take that. and see how he feels of someone accessing his pension plan that suppose to be untouchable for XXyears and then only accessed by the intended owner, suddenly be open to anyone to take..
how would he feel if a new law was made that anyone with a pension was no longer guaranteed a pension. no one was guaranteed a savings account, no insurance, and no protection.. it was all up for grabs.. all out of a FEAR that a computer might steal it, he employed a exploit that made it possible before the fear ever even arrived in reality

he should propose himself, his family and his descendants should opt-in to a pension plan anyone can steal, as a proof of concept where he feels we should never have any financial security/law/rule where people can store value long term, not have inheritors, nor locks to ensure only intended owner gets to control it

i propose the OP should take all of his families funds, whether its pension, savings, assets, jewellery. put it in a suitcase and then one day announce in national press that his house is open and unlocked and all his wealth is on the kitchen table for anyone to take.. and then see how far his idea then serves him

once he wises up to the reality that his idea backfires on his own income, he will realise the purpose of not having back doors to steal funds, and also not creating real backdoors out of fake fears of fears of feared backdoors via QC

in short
asking to break the entire bitcoin security of #your-key-your-coin to add code to make coin stealable without signature..  just out of FEAR of QC is more foolish than just letting some QC owner brute old PK keys

the main genius of satoshi was to make bitcoin, his secondary genius was to make a few transactions leaving some signature proofs for some addresses, and then leave... which 13 years after leaving has been battle tested and no one has been able to steal his coins on old PK keys. which has provided good proof of security.

[pooya87]

There are two parts in your topic.
One part is the ECC being broken and needing to be replaced.
Second part is lost/abandoned coins/keys.

Considering how the concept of "lost coins" makes no sense in a system like Bitcoin, nobody should ever touch them. Even if ECC is broken and anybody could spend those. That simply goes against Bitcoin principles.

The only thing I could see happening is the very special scenario where ECC is considered broken. In which case, there should be migration period where we replace ECC (or components of it like the 256-bit curve) with something else. It could last a year or a couple of years. In that period people should move their coins to the new algorithm themselves and after the deadline any coin that is not moved should be locked forever (instead of being claimed by a miner or anything like that).

[larry_vw_1955]

It is because I do not want states nor corpos to loot all the "lost" coins that I've thought about perishable UTXOs.

As you found out, no one is going to agree with you on their bitcoins expiring. They don't agree with that at all. Even if it was 100 years. Or a million. I think that's a ridiculous point of view to have. After all, try depositing money into any financial institution and never touch the account and see if it's even open 20 years from now. It won't be. They will have turned the money over to somewhere else and you'll have to go there and try and get it if you can even get it at all. So I don't think its unreasonable for utxos to have a time limit of 100 or 250 years. Now would I actually WANT that? I don't know but everything else in the real world has an expiration date. EVERYTHING.

 

The concept speeks for itself: after a determined amount of time alive, let's say E epochs, where E could be 4, any UTXO becomes claimable by miners.
Why miners ? They are big corpos, they will even be states, but they are forced in some way to make sats circulate. Wether it is directly, by selling / spending fresh coins (or fees), or indirectly, by storing those sats and rely on a friendly actor to cover power expenses.

yes, instead of expiring and becoming unusable by anyone you could plow them back into the bitcoin ecosystem so someone could actually use them. but i think it should be distributed equally to all bitcoin addresses that have been active in the last however many years. that would make more sense than concentrating them into the hands of miners...

[franky1]

yes, instead of expiring and becoming unusable by anyone you could plow them back into the bitcoin ecosystem so someone could actually use them. but i think it should be distributed equally to all bitcoin addresses that have been active in the last however many years. that would make more sense than concentrating them into the hands of miners...

no. just no
else that  is incentivising mining pools to empty block for years apart from only adding tx of old utxo that are say 15 years old so the mining pool can then claim the coin for themselves by being the only tx added along side 'expired' utxo

by empty blocking active users you cause active users to not be spendable to become unspendable until their own 15th year which then the pools would steal

..
why do people keep thinking other people should have access, awardings to other peoples funds..
if you want to steal peoples funds because they dont touch them for 15 years, start with offering up all your assets in your home/bank/pension that you have had for 15 years.. allow your own wealth to be subject to disposal to anyone else and then see how happy you are about such idea's

..
i have coins never moved since 2012 that does not mean they are lost. with only x years to go before being stolen
many people have fiat funds locked in pensions they have not touched for 40 years. does not mean they are lost.

but if you want to consider them stealable after X. first let other people steal your funds

if there is a weakness in pk and pkh then we will start seeing it...
lets not purposefully introduce a exploit to purposefully steal coins.. thats some scummy CSW idea.. lets not do that

[larry_vw_1955]

no. just no
else that  is incentivising mining pools to empty block for years apart from only adding tx of old utxo that are say 15 years old so the mining pool can then claim the coin for themselves by being the only tx added along side 'expired' utxo

by empty blocking active users you cause active users to not be spendable to become unspendable until their own 15th year which then the pools would steal

those miners must be a devious bunch  always trying to figure out how to steal from ordinary users. but i didn't say 15 years, i said more like 100 or 250 years. but i guess the same thing could happen. they would stop mining actual transactions. they really need to get those miners under control because they seem like they are just trying to raid peoples' wallets.

..
why do people keep thinking other people should have access, awardings to other peoples funds..
if you want to steal peoples funds because they dont touch them for 15 years, start with offering up all your assets in your home/bank/pension that you have had for 15 years.. allow your own wealth to be subject to disposal to anyone else and then see how happy you are about such idea's

in satoshis' case though, he himself said he had "moved on" to other things. that means he doesn't care what happens to his bitcoins. it couldn't be more clear that satoshi doesn't care about bitcoin anymore. hasn't cared about it since he disappeared. that's why none of his coins have been used he lost interest in the project he moved on. some people think he is no longer living. i don't know if he is or not but what i do think is he left bitcoin because he lost interest. and admitted it. he probably didn't even keep his private keys see?

or burn addresses, i don't agree with the idea of "burning" money. isn't it even illegal to destroy us currency such as setting it on fire or something? should be for bitcoin too. 

lets not purposefully introduce a exploit to purposefully steal coins.. thats some scummy CSW idea.. lets not do that

yeah the miner exploit i didn't anticipate. but i don't think an individual should have to worry about their bitcoins expiring in their lifetime.

[ABCbits]

The concept speeks for itself: after a determined amount of time alive, let's say E epochs, where E could be 4, any UTXO becomes claimable by miners.
Why miners ? They are big corpos, they will even be states, but they are forced in some way to make sats circulate. Wether it is directly, by selling / spending fresh coins (or fees), or indirectly, by storing those sats and rely on a friendly actor to cover power expenses.

Each UTXO store different amount of Bitcoin, so some miner/pool would receive far more Bitcoin than others. In addition, claiming one or more UTXO which contain tons of BTC will give incentive to perform 51% attack in order to claim those UTXO for themselves.