Topic: A proposed solution to adjust for lost Bitcoins: wallet 'heartbeats' - page 3. (Read 12205 times)

Another thought:  What about just increasing the mining reward based on coins that haven't moved, but without destroying those old coins either?

For each coin that hasn't moved in 10 years, generate a new coin with the next block for the miners.  Have it be a rolling 10 year period.  And to prevent inflation, if adding more coins would bring the total number of coins that HAVE been used in the last 10 years up above 21 million, then don't add more coins.

Example:
- Joe loses a 20 BTC wallet in 2012.
- Jan loses a 30 BTC wallet in 2012.
- Jack loses a 10 BTC wallet in 2013.
- 10 years later, in 2022, a block is generated, and the mining reward for that block is 20 + normal reward.
- A mining reward of 30 BTC is also generated in 2022 for Jan's lost wallet.
- In 2022, Jan finds an old backup of her 30 BTC wallet.  She spends the coins.
- In 2023, no additional mining reward is given for the lost 10 BTC wallet, since the current coins circulated in the last 10 years is more than 21M (well, this would be assuming that all 21M coins have been generated, but still, you get the point).

So, it wouldn't ever cause much inflation of BTC beyond 21M, but it would help prevent deflation from lost coins.  I know some of you don't think deflation is a bad thing, but I do.  An ideal currency would be neither deflationary nor inflationary.

What difference does it make how many bitcoins there are or how many are lost? And as mentioned before what if the bitcoins are just offline?
The overwhelming majority of mine are NEVER online and may remain so for 20 years. I would be awful pissed if one day I cashed some out, only to find they have been given to someone else because it was thought they were lost. It would be like someone re-selling my certificated stocks or bearer  bonds because no one knew where they were.
No thank you, lost means lost.

Fixed that for you.  If every single BTC already mined was lost today, the currency would still work just fine.  In 200 years, long after the subsidy was done, even if only a single satoshi remained, the currency would still work.

Bitcoin uses a scaled integer representation.  We can change the scale factor to renormalize, if needed.  We will almost certainly do it to match future CPUs many decades before we need to do it for economic reasons.

There are no problems with lost coins. And there will be no problems with it.

This currency is designed to work fine even if 90-99% of coins are lost.

Looks like you are living in a very strange country :)
Average prisoner don't have even a phone, decent food or good healthcare.

Yes, I hope this change will never win the "voting" :)

In many parts of the world leaving "lost" land as is may me bad, but no one will be hurt by "lost" bitcoins.

It isn't a problem, it will never be a problem.  The entire global economy could function on 1 BTC.

Confiscating property is theft.  You don't own anything on Blizzard's servers.  Those conditions are made perfectly clear.  Anything you do on their servers remains their property.  If you don't agree then you can choose to not use Blizzard's products.


But it wasn't designed to work that way.  Bitcoin was designed to be IRREVERSIBLE.  This isn't a minor protocol technicality it is a cornerstone of the entire social contract between participants.  Bitcoin tx can never be reversed.

I think the OP has a point. There might very well be a problem, and no matter how we end up solving it, we should have some solution ready.

(If you intend to post in this freshly resurrected thread, please read the whole thing first. The potential problem being discussed isn't entirely clear in the first few pages.)

Not if the currency is designed to work that way. It depends on how set in stone you think the Bitcoin rules are at this point. The answer, I'd imagine, is "very". Still, you can't just decide that the particular cryptographically secured tokens that make up this experimental new type of currency constitute property in the "You wouldn't steal a car" sense.

"Theft", by the way? By who? Is the open source accounting project governed by a group of software developers and majority consent that you decided to participate in knowing that that's how decisions were made robbing you?

Prisoners don't have access to computers?



You mention "due process". Is Blizzard taking away my +5 Sword of Swordery because I forgot to anoint it with orc spleens last Thursday theft? Why not? Because of the EULA? What if Bitcoin had a similar "we are not responsible for whatever happens to your money as a result of changes to the protocol adopted by means of majority consent" agreement? Would that change your opinion (of the "theft" aspect, at least)?

If you want to get really technical, they're not taking your money. You are free to stay on the old chain with everybody else who thinks the new rules are bad.
Don't get me wrong, I think implementing some sort of stale coin expiration should be a last resort. A big, red "use only if absolutely necessary and with the consent of a significant majority (which is the only way it could possibly be implemented anyway)" button.
Would it be theft, though? Absolutely not. No more than the government reclaiming a plot of land from somebody who's been missing for the last 100 years.

Ok, you make a point here.

I agree.

It doesn't matter how easy it is to avoid theft, taking/confiscating property without due process is theft.

You have no RIGHT to the property of others.  Period.  If someone makes a deterministic wallet based on a passphrase and then say gets sent to prison for 30 years you should have a right to their personal property because they didn't use it?

Confiscation of property without due process is theft.  I don't care if it is 1 year or 10,000 years.   Worse it is theft that isn't necessary.  Users should have confidence that coins they acquire are theirs and theirs alone without exception.

While I agree completely on your position and explanation (every quantity of money is sufficient and perfectly functional for a good economy), I do not agree that this can be considered "theft":

- refresh the deposity every 10 years (or every 1 million blocks, or whatever it is) is simlple to do by hand and completely automatable, so without any risk of "theft"

- reclaim of lost bitcoins must be made from miners, and so it needs a lot of work for it, and this gives them incentive to mine. So this enables to have less transaction fees.

Entire world economy could function using a handful of Bitcoins. 

There aren't 21M coins.  There are  21 quadrillion finite units (each worth 1E-8 BTC)  that's 2,100,000,000,000,000.

Total global money supply is ~$60T.  If entire world used Bitcoin as a one world currency then each satoshi would be worth ~3 cents.  Under any more realistic scenario a satoshi is worth a tiny fraction of a penny.  Even a 99% loss of coins would make a Satoshi sub 1 cent.

If due to deflation 1 satoshi ever became larger than the min unit necessary for commerce (for many countries that is ~$0.10 or $0.05) the number of sub units could be increased.  i.e. instead of min unit of 1E-8 it would be min unit = 1E-9 or 1E-12.

There is absolutely no reason to seize coins which haven't been used in a "while".  It is theft.  Pure and simple and worse it isn't even necessary.

Shouldn't his post be moved to the topic "deflation and bitcoin - the last words on this forum" ?
We can't have the same discussion over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, can we ?

Oh God, not this post again.  Can you people please try to understand that saying something doesn't make it true?

A decreasing bitcoin supply lends to price instability, because there will be a greater oscillation between the market thinking the supply is too deflationary to promote a large bitcoin economy, and the market thinking bitcoin value will skyrocket due to growing usage and decreasing supply.

It also creates more uncertainty as a larger percentage of the bitcoin supply goes off-line, with a possibility, but not a certainty, that a large amount will come back into use suddenly when someone discovers an old wallet.

Re-issuing lost coins improves bitcoin's security at a time when block rewards will be much lower, and it will do so without inflating the bitcoin supply. With lost coins, either present bitcoin holders can be rewarded with deflation, or people who mine bitcoins can be rewarded for contributing to network security with bitcoins.

The latter can actually increase the value of bitcoin more then rewarding bitcoin holders with deflation, for the three reasons mentioned.


I would too, but this is a far cry from calling for block rewards to be continued indefinitely. With this, there would never be more than 21 million bitcoins, and any one that keeps track of theirs would never suffer inflation.

Any way, rest assured, there's zero chance of this being implemented. There are a lot of potential problems with this proposal too that haven't been explored since no one is taking it seriously enough to really try to find holes in it.

I'm not sure if something like this should be implemented but if, I sugest time until coins expire should be average lenght of human live

This actually a totally awesome idea.
+10

I came here to say something similar to this, yet after reading the posts about people wanting the block reward to never end… now I'm a bit scared.

Should I one day find that the block reward has been extended or continued indefinitely, I would sell any and all coins under my control and dissolve or exit any Bitcoin related business which I am involved in.

Just integrate Bitcoins (the solution to everything).  Topics older than 30 days become locked.  A bot puts a final locking post on the thread w/ a revive Bitcoin address.  The cost to revive is (days since last post - 30)^2  / 100 BTC.    The spell cost will keep younger wizards out of trouble (unless they have deep wallets).

A mighty wizard we need to put a powerfull anti-resurrection spell a on this forums.

I mean all the ancient magical topics get revived over and over and over again by young, foolish necromancers. We can't have this kind of power roaming freely the middle-earth. It may awaken the dead from their graves !

I have not read every post of the thread, I apologize if I repeat some already discussed idea.

After laughing hard at the proposal I startes thinking that such an idea (i.e.: reclaim unused coins after some time, let's say 20 years) could have one interesting upside:
assuming that it's a miner that claims the unused (or lost) coins that could help address (or ease) the issue of mining when the base coins reward approaches zero.

So the miners would get all the fees of the transactions plus all the coins of "expired" transactions: that kind of reward (when existing) would reward the miner without inflating the money supply.

Another benefit could be reducing blockchain bloat allowing deeper pruning, but I'm unsure on that point.

+10
No more so than lost gold.

The block reward design seems correct to me. I certainly wouldn't want to change that before the first decrease happens, and we see the ultimate result. My suspicion is that after it happens, we'd all like to keep the block reward decreasing as planned. Supply & Demand will rule the day, and scarcity will likely provide more value than continuing the subsidy rate.