Topic: Can Bitcoin be sold/given back? (Read 884 times)

IMO, tx volume will see tx fees in excess of 1 BTC per block in 5 years. Since block reward won't drop near that for 20 years, as long as BTC is trending above $10,000 each by then, I don't think there will be a lack of incentive to keep the current level of participation.

Yes, the reward will continue to decrease on a predetermined schedule. The idea is that as the reward decreases the number of people using bitcoin will increase and each of them will pay a fee larger than the fee we have today. In theory, the amount miners make can actually be greater with the fee system than they earn now with the block reward system. You need to understand that the block rewards were necessary in the beginning because there were not enough people using Bitcoin to make mining worth doing. Understand? 

Yes you understand the question

So, when all the coins have been mined 25 BTC reward is no longer paid, the BTC transaction fee will reward the miners. I assume the reward wont be as substantial as 25BTC.

Ok, you understand but there are people answering him that are saying, yes its technically possible. No, it's not possible to keep mining the same coins over and over again never using up the 21 million limit forever. This is one of those questions newbies ask when they don't understand that the transaction fee will take over for the block reward when the reward runs out. Or they're pissed because the block reward keeps declining from 50 to 25 etc. Why can't we just keep it at 50 coins forever with a low difficulty and mine solo with CPUs so we can all get rich together? ROFL

It is a ludicrous question. Where would the money come from to buy them back? The miners sell them because they need the money or want the profit.

 no I get it., as I said: what would the system give the miner in exchange?

I don't think anyone understands what he means. I think he wants to return them to an unmined state perpetually "...prolonging the 21 million threshold" so they could be remined as new over and over again "perpetual motion" not just transmitting them like any another transaction. I also don't think he means taking them out of commission forever by destroying them.

You can technically "unmine" a bitcoin by including it in the transaction fee, thus allowing a miner to collect it after solving a block.

Otherwise, there's also destroying bitcoins via OP_RETURN or the like.

Right. Plus all that this proposal would do would be to sell the coins the miners mined, but without the extra step of sending the mined coins to an exchange

This is outside of the ruleset and not possible.

If someone wants to give their coins to miners, all they have to do is pay a transaction fee. Anyway, perpetual motion is impossible, even if powered by bitcoin.

In this case the network would behave like a  bank, and I don't think they would look forward to take a loss.

You seem to be asking 2 unrelated questions and then mashing them together somehow into a sentence that contains words but that doesn't actually make sense.  I suspect that this is largely due to a lack of knowledge about what mining is, how it works, and what it accomplishes.

Your first question seems to be about "using some crazy ass algorithm" to some how take bitcoins that have been created and uncreate them.  It actually is possible for any miner to "unmine" bitcoins if they want to.

When solving a block a miner is allowed to assign to himself a reward that is no greater than the sum of the current block subsidy and the transaction fees from all the transactions included in the block.  "No greater than" means that it can be less than.  In other words, the miner can solve and broadcast a block that pays himself no block reward at all.  This means that the 25 BTC that he would have received is never created in the first place.  It also means that all of the transaction fees from all the transactions in the block are "vaporized".  They just cease to exist.  This reduces the total number of bitcoins that will ever exist, and it has actually happened in the past (meaning that we will actually fall over 100 bitcoins short of 21 million when all the bitcoins have been mined.

There is no good reason for a miner to do this (especially with bitcoins exchanging at a rate of over $300 per bitcoin).  Essentially a miner is doing all the work, and then saying, "No, I'm not interested in $7500.  I'll just destroy it instead."  It has only ever occurred from bugs in mining software which are quickly identified and fixed, obviously.

Your second question seems to be about "perpetual motion" (I assume you mean "perpetual mining"?).  If I understand correctly, you would like for the bitcoins that have already been created to be used to reward miners in the future for creating blocks, even after the block subsidy is reduced to 0 BTC.  I've got a big surprise for you.  This is exactly how bitcoin is designed, and how it is intended to work in the long term.  Participants in the network create transactions that use bitcoins that were mined in the past.  To encourage miners to confirm their transaction, they voluntarily include a transaction fee that is also taken from bitcoins that were created in the past.  These transaction fees are "paid back into the network" to reward the miners that confirm the blocks that include the transactions.  Therefore, the miners continue to be rewarded by the network for the work they are doing from bitcoins that were created in the past and are being "sold back to the network" in exchange for priority confirmations.

That would be a centralized approach for bitcoin and might kill the purpose of having a decentralized currency.

yes, very unusual question.

even if you could do this, what would the network give you in return
for the coins?

Why would they do that and who would give those bit coins? nothing comes from thin air. Someone might do it, if they find a reason why. but you did not stated a reason.

I think you're asking if the coins can be un-mined. No, that's not really possible or desirable. The "network" isn't a single entity but a collection of efforts by people all around the world where agreement is necessary for any change. No one would want to and their is no real reason to vaporize coins. Also, you win the prize for the most unusual newbie question I've ever heard. Congratulations!

Probably a ludicrous question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.

Miners are paid for there effots in BTC, then the money is either spent or converted to cash. Instead of selling the coin to an exchange, could the network (using some crazy ass algorithm) buy those coin's back, thus prolonging the 21 million threshold. As im writing this im thinking, perpetual motion.