Topic: A proposed solution for lost Bitcoins... (Read 1092 times)

The FIAT money loss is being restored every day when central banks print more money!
Without that the world would be in a war because the lack of money, thats why deflacionary coins like gold failed before and bitcoin would failed too if it was the only coin in the world.

The problem would be even bigger with this situation that we have always less and less bitcoins because the developers dont want to solve the problem, if we start to clean blocks older than 10 years for example and give that money to the miners the problem would be solved.

Yes lost bitcoins are a problem, if bitcoin works for thousands of years and if someone in future recovers one lost "wale" address, that could collapse the market and bitcon needs stability without pump and dumps, look the acceptance of the shitty stable coins right now, stable coins are just a representation of FIAT coins.

What if some decides to passe the wallet private keys in paper or cold format to their grandchildren and does not want them to spend the coins and keep it as family inheritance for generations to come ?

OP I have a question for you when you lose your fiat currency be it $, ¥, €, £ etc what happens to the money lost? You have to start seeing bitcoin as a currency more than an investment only then will you understand it isn't the responsibility of bitcoin developers to find a solution to lost bitcoin instead the service providers using the currency should be held responsible.

A possible solution will be, the service providers be it wallet or exchange should provide a form for her users when signing up for Next of kin, in cases when the owner of account dies the next of kin can request for a transfer of ownership but the disadvantage here is, this solution will only work for centralized service providers and a lot of KYC will be involved. MultiSign can alao be used.

Although it is an old topic and have been discussed many times but I didn't came across this thread before.
Many of the people still don't understand what mocacinno described above in simple words.
It doesn't matter if someone lost BTC forever, because even if we left with few bitcoins, those bitcoin can be traded in more smaller units like satoshi.

Good points!
About solutions 1 and 2 for fixing solutions i can imagine the 1st and 2nd together!
21 millions its to little, its not "human" money to look for decimal parts, and we shouldnt need FIAT money to calculate it, if someday with 51% user consensus network the number of bitcoins of each address was multiplied to the BTC unit comes closer to dolar and euro that would be a good marketing move and nothing would change in the real value.

Look Craig Wright, after he said bitcoin would go down it starts to go down, maybe because a fork war.

Maybe the guy dont like the path bitcoin is following or maybe because now he needs money.

When rich people starts to waste money they waste more and more, why he should mantain the money forever and die without moving it?

In that way of think why NASA would waste millions of dolares in a anti-meteorite plan?

If our civilization dont died until now its because there is no risk, look the dinossaures!

But this is not only a Satoshi dead or alive question, this is a technical solution that bitcoin needs sooner or later, so why not to do it as soon as posible?

For some unknown reason I've missed this topic.

Generally speaking, there are two issues mixed-up in this discussion: 1- lost bitcoins problem, 2- blockchain bloat

Although the two are related but each deserve separate discussion. OP tries to figure out a way to solve problem one but to do this he finds himself faced with historical data problem and instead of focusing on this more crucial one grabs the very first ideas that have come into his mind while it is a more critical and important issue compared to lost bitcoins problem that he has started with and deserves more cautious approach.

As d5000 has cleanly discussed it, UTXO commitment technology is the most interesting approach to the second more general problem and I've discussed it in many occasions.

Reaching to a consensus about the state of the ledger in a given time (height)  is the most canonical definition ever for bitcoin. It is what bitcoin has been designed for and will always remain to be compatible with. It is why I think UTXO commitment is compatible with bitcoin and will be adopted in bitcoin and all its clones sooner or later. Without such an improvement bitcoin is exposed to centralization threats more and more because the pace with which communication/computing/storage infrastructures are developing are losing the war to blockchain growth

The problem with lost bitcoins is not a small one like what many authors has treated it in this topic and elsewhere. If we consider bitcoin as a system that is supposed to last like for centuries, it will eventually vanish because there is always a chance for some bitcoins to be lost due to many factors.

To fix this issue, there is just two options: 1- re-considering the 21 millions cap and 2- identifying and recycling lost coins.

The first option is out of context and OP is suggesting utxo age (not his term) as a measure to identify such coins. Once they are identified it would be easy to recycle them e.g. the protocol may adjust inflation rate to keep 21 million cap valid.

As of the measure to be taken, OP is suggesting like a century of age, I'm thinking of a decade, others may fall between the two. In any case 'removing' such utxos identified as 'lost' is where we need an infrastructure like UTXO commitment mentioned above. OP's proposal of "ignoring" blocks that hold no valid (young and unspent) utxo is not bad imo, but not as solid as UTXO commitment, it needs a lot of efforts and technical considerations with limited application unlike UTXO commitment which is useful for a much wider series of problems and at the same time an order of magnitude simpler to implement.

 

@cfbtcman
If Satoshi is alive, whether he is one person, a group, an organisation or a government, he had the chance to manipulate the Bitcoin market when it was at its ATH. Why do it now or sometimes in the future?

Actually some banks take your money out after few years without moving account.
Ok can exist some  account types that can be years without moving, but bitcoin can have is own rules.

If you know that you need to move the money every 10 years to say (im alive) and improve network operation and prevents bitcoin cataclism generated if someone recover a big BTC quantity address lost in time why we shouldnt do it?

Look what happens just in 10 years that everybody is fearing that the really Satoshi starts to sell all his bitcoins?
Look what Craig Wright said that he could put bitcoin in $1.000 if he wants and got many attention from the media and possible speculation.

If we dont do that and let thousands of millions of dolares be lost forever or not, that uncertainty will put bitcoin in a permanent speculation, but if you tomorrow delete genesis block of 10 years ago Satoshi Nakamoto millions and give them to the minning rewards, bitcoin would become more descentralized and out of that type of speculation.

If Satoshi is alive and listening he is in control, he have power to manipulate the market, lets put bitcoin resistant to that power, resistent to that trojan horse of speculation and show that bitcoin is a monster that even the creator cant put it down!

pawanjain my man, now we start to talk "english"!
We need to start to cypher bitcoin balance in each block transactions and delete old blocks or force the users to move the money every X years and make a timeframe blockchain, every new day, we delete everyday blocks of X years ago.

Like Aplister said (Aplister you earned my respect, i need to met you, this is like Einstein-Eddington partnership loool) if somebody could recover 10 BTC someday after we use only one for all the world that would be a colapse.

Why should be me changing something and hardforking alone?
That would be the dead for bitcoin if any supporter that thinks something should be changed starts to make is own changes and hardforking, in 100 years we would have 1 million of coins, this needs to be presented and supported by bitcoin core people and we should stay united.

i can see the value in it---what could be better for money than a completely predictable (but scarce) supply? it's just not something that could ever be implemented in bitcoin. too controversial. it's an interesting idea for an altcoin though. the protocol could periodically burn or redistribute unspent coins as miner fees, depending on the preferred outcome (encourage either hoarding or spending). this would have the added benefit of drastically reducing the size of the UTXO set.

aside from verifiable burn addresses, we obviously can't assume anything for sure. but people will continue looking for solutions to the problem of unpredictable supply. bitcoin's hard capped supply was a novel take on that. i suppose efforts like these try to take it to the next level.

How can one assume that the bitcoins are indeed lost? Don't some people keep valuables in bank vaults for many decades? Don't others bury valuables in their backyards? Gold bullion is passed down through generations without ever leaving the vault or seeing the light of day. Grandpa's old stash of cash that he hid in the crawlspace is still legal tender (at least in countries that didn't hardfork their currency). What if I want to pass down bitcoins to my children, but they're still young and cannot yet be entrusted with the private key? What if a private key is held in trust for decades? What if the bitcoins I mined in 2010 are still under my control, and I intend to keep them indefinitely? As regards the quantity in circulation, decimalization allows for nearly any quantity of bitcoins to circulate without issue. Why assume that coins are lost if they haven't moved for an arbitrary amount of time?

This is a solution looking for a problem.

I am trying to grab as much understanding from this post as I can. I do have a doubt here and that is whether the 'blockstate' of that particular block and it's corresponding checksum would be sufficient to verify the entire block ? I mean that would it be possible to know how much bitcoins were transacted to which addresses and at what time. If so then Yes this would definitely save the disk space.
Also, don't you think that keeping the block of data outside the blockchain would be risky? We do still have the option of keeping the pruned blocks on a different blockchain or a second blockchain.

As mentioned above, i personally feel this is a non-issue aswell...
If you're really bothered with the current units, fork one of the open source wallets, edit the sourcecode by multiplying the number that's shown when the wallet show BTC by 100000000 and change the name to satoshi...

Most wallets even use mBTC µBTC and satoshi as potential units... Nothing is stopping you from editing the sourcecode and removing mBTC and µBTC (only leaving satoshi as potential units).

For all i care, fork bitcoin core, work with mSatoshi and call 1 mSatosi 1 cfbtcman... This way you'll be able to send 10.000.000 cfbtcman's to somebody else... Ofcourse, this other person will just see an incoming transaction funding his address with 10.000 satoshi ... Who knows, maybe your wallet will become popular...

Last but not least, the floating point values are a non issue as well, every time i develop anything crypto related, i always count in satoshi (an integer, worth 1/100000000 of a BTC). There's nothing stopping you from doing the same.

Too much units to use and change, more confusing, not human, with bitcoin flutuation nobody can use that units pratically, i know wallets that use it and i immediatly change to Euro/Dolar or BTC units, much better.

If Fiat money finished and bitcoin was the only coin in the world, somebody would create a FIAT money like dolar to be adopted as currency unit and would have great sucess.

If BTC wants to be solution for the world as the only coin, then needs to create more than 21 millions units and make the value +- equal to dolar to the people start to wean of dolar/euro.
Euro coin was one example, they created it with the same value as dolar, there was a reason, USDT the same, etc.

That could be done very easily, just multiply the addresses that have money-in by some number.

LN (and sidechains, too) cannot "live" without on-chain transactions - LN needs them to open/close channels, and sidechains to burn/unburn coins transacted between different sidechains.

Also, on-chain transactions have always advantages versus second-layer ones: they're totally trustless, no attacks like "channel rewinding" or "weak sidechain becomes attacked by miners" are possible. The main disadvantage, the confirmation time, is irrelevant for large transactions.

In a scenario where really "everybody is using LN", on-chain transactions could become very cheap and no transaction fee would be needed. As on-chain tx do have advantages over off-chain tx, there will be people using them (apart from channel-opening/closing transactions).

In short: if the on-chain transactions are cheap, blocks will fill again fast, and transaction fees will rise. So the transaction fee should self-regulate and be greater than zero. In a massively used Bitcoin environment miners will still have significant income.

Many proof-of-stake coins do something very similar - they use a checkpoint system where reorgs longer than X are simply not allowed. If X=1000, then the block 1000 blocks before the current block becomes the earliest block from which a "tree" of different chains is allowed to exist, and all blocks before are considered "finalized". Chains that depart from the tree earlier are ignored by clients. So transactions that are confirmed in blocks before this last "finalized" block are assumed to be valid (they're also finalized).

The same thing would occur in cfcbitman's system. However, I think an account-based system like Ethereum's (instead of an UTXO-based one like in Bitcoin) would be advantageous.

I think not - afaik the chain length would be determined by the accumulated difficulty since the last block which is considered "finalized". (Maybe I understand your issue wrong)

How you validate the transactions from the genesis block? From what block comes the input?

About longest chain, the block database dont have one ID number or dont use date?

If i put one new genesis block with reverse engineer i would fake all the network?

This ^^ is the point i was trying to make... As soon as you throw away blocks or transactions, you'll have to start using a trust based validation system... In my personal opinion, this isn't a good basis for validation. It doesn't matter if a group of 1.000.000 trusted individuals provide a trustbase for everybody else, it's still not good enough for me... I want to be able to mathematically verify the complete chain right from the genesis block by myself. As soon as the information is removed, there is no way for me to do this verification and in my honest opinion, at this point the system becomes broken.


Interesting point, i didn't even think about this yet, but this observation is also a valid counter-argument.