The transaction chain is growing and growing.

Would it make sense if in the future bitcoin miners would only assume transactios as valid if the bitcoins used in the transaction were used at least once in the last year for example? So you would have to move your Bitcoins at least once per year to another account, or you would "lose" them. So the chain would have to be only one year long.

I think this would be pretty good way to deal with lost bitcoins - we would know how many are really lost. Perhaps there could be even a method to reintroduce them back into the system? I don't know, some "public" account where people with too old bitcoins to use them could send them, and the Bitcoins from the account would be reused as a prize for generating blocks.

Does it make ANY sense?  



edit: I posted this in the wrong board, sorry. This thread should be in Development & Technical Discussion

Yes but if not making them rot would be simply moving all of them from one your account to another, in a client it could be as simple as one click of a button once per year. And there could be a warning implemented. Clients could even implement "refreshing" your account automatically.

The only real problem I see here would be transaction fee. But is it really? If you hold money safe, don't pay anything, and the others keep the network working for you all the time (which does cost them money)...

Like Garrett said, there is functionally no difference between lost coins and coins in savings. So I proposed to force people to use them at least once per year (for example, could be longer period of time) to prove they are not lost and to not have to keep insanely long chain of transactions. It could be automated process, so you would have to start bitcoin client once / year.

Just adding more is not a solution, because you can't really tell if they are lost.

You're right. We can't really tell if the coins are lost or not.

Even if we do require users to transact their bitcoins once a year, there will be people who don't or people who have genuinely lost them. What do we do then? In fact, requiring users to transact once a year can prove disastrous if they forget to do it - not only will we erroneously assume that the coins have been lost, if a person holds a substantial number of bitcoins, those coins are lost to us forever.

The biggest difference between lost bitcoins and losing coins in a piggybank is that new physical coins are getting minted all the time. We need a mechanism to reflect this reality.

theymos says that precision will keep increasing. I've shown in my original post that losing even 10,000 bitcoins represents a 0.05% drop in the entire world economy. Over a period of say 10 years, we will have lost a very significant amount of transacting units and the precision of just 8 digits will no longer be able to keep up.

Forum member 'asdf' said it best I think... if we lose a massive 50% of the coins EVERY year, will we ever have 0?

Even if 140 years later there's only one Satoshi in circulation (0.00000001 BTC), then we'll just divide that up among everyone no problem and continue to transact with each other in some smaller units.

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000001 for two pizzas anyone?

Why not?

Is your computer incapable of storing a 48 digit number?

Even my old rusty PC from 5 years ago can do that.

The 'global economy' isn't infinite, so bitcoin's divisibility doesn't need to be either.

...yet.

Why do you doubt theymos when he says precision can keep being increased?

Yeah. The 8 digit limit is only in the official client, not in the protocol. You could write your own client to transfer a tenth or a hundredth or a zillionth of a satoshi if you wanted to. The designers probably chose 8 digits because they assumed that the client would be getting updated between now and bitcoin getting big enough to need more precision. Probably a safe assumption. At present, allowing more than 8 decimal places would really just be a waste of effort and memory.

Impossible without breaking the security for everyone else. Make frequent backups to many different places and you're fine.

the biggest loss is going to come through death... people's wallets will vanish most often when the person dies and some idiot doesnt manage their computer....
or some one leaves bitcoins in a 'bank', and if they just float there, waiting for a dead owner to never retrieve them? :p though thats less serious, as most banks would have an activity clause.