Topic: Is there a long-term strategy to deal with "lost" bitcoins? - page 2. (Read 1121 times)

Not unlimited amounts of coins, unlimited amounts of satoshis.

Remember though, if your worried about a diminishing money supply, you can always go out to more than 8 decimal places with bitcoin, which in theory, could create unlimited amounts of coins.

Better to make a repair password from email and another way can help if we lose the password. and give a two verification authentification to make a more secure on the wallet. But one of the problems is not only losing password but it's also losing an email or other data for making this account and us can't repair the password.

yeah, once quantum computing comes out its a whole different ball game, but when I made my post I was assuming that the people with the lost passwords would have some idea of what it could be. Otherwise there would e no point.

save your password on your computer might be risky due to some conditions like hacking,distruction, formating, or any bad situation, i think the best way is just memorize single of it, but if you can't do this you could write it down but never to write it directly, atleast hint password or some clue about it to make you remember the original password, that's all just in my opinion

Dont think so

this question has been asked nearly every 6 months for the last few years.
here is a summery of answers:
1. less coins in circulation=more scarce=more demand/less supply=higher prices.. yay
2. coding in some way to redeposit funds back into circulation destroys fungibility and essentially ruins bitcoins 'trust' as a secure store of value that cant be manipulated
3. even if no one cared about fungibility, there would be civil war in regards to who deserves these released funds
4. how do you know funds are actually lost, and not just hoarded by someone waiting to reach retirement age. who will choose which funds should be released. if you dont have the private key to move them. you cant prove XYZ funds are yours to even suggest moving XYZ
5. we should not even raise the cap to, lets say 22m if we think 1m are 'lost' because what if those 'lost' 1m resurface when the owner retire and decide its now time to spend.. now we are at 22m circulation and scarcity is ruined

now my thoughts
we should not code in any time-release features to destroy fungibility. or cause civil war over who gets "free" coins
instead happily open up a service to crack passwords with the aid of the owner advising possible password combinations that may have been used.. but if they cannot be cracked. refer to point 1 and enjoy a slightly higher demand/lower supply in future.

can't we just save our wallet passwords in a file e.g microsoft word so we won't forget it, or if it's risky of hacking, we can write it down in a piece of paper then save it in a safe place?

If it's a good password and the original password setter can't provide input about possible characters, it's pretty much impossible to crack with today's technology. If parts of the password are known, a custom word list could be created and a brute force crack could be attempted.

When quantum computing is more widely available, all bets are off.

Sounds like its actually a good idea to open up some sort of business helping people with lost passwords ect. You could charge a fortune but is it even possible. How long can it take to try and crack the wallet.

I agree that lost/misplaced (or whatever one wants to call them) BTC will make BTC more scarce, which should make the remaining BTC more valuable.

It is actually very difficult to define "lost coins". For example, some people are very active in the community but hodling quite a bit of coins for long time in the same address- are the coins considered "lost"? Some people are very lucky to generate very special vanity addresses, and therefore we can't say those are addresses with no private keys...

I think this has been discussed by Satoshi himself and there is no action needed for these presumed lost coins...

This is a good thing for the wider community because it increases scarcity. No plan needed.

People will forget/lose their wallet passwords. For some multisig wallets, some funds will never be released due to disagreements. Over time, the number of BTC in circulation will decrease because of these things. I don't want to use the word "risk" because this is more like an inevitability, but has a mitigation strategy been planned for this?