Topic: Is this idea to counter lost bitcoins possible? - page 7. (Read 9490 times)

You cannot hope to do this, for that is what Bitcoin already is.  Bitcoin's current exchange instability has zero to do with it's deflationary nature, because that won't occur until about 2130.  Bitcoin is still hugely inflationary, and will be more inflationary than the US $ and the Euro for another four years or more; unless something dramatic happens to one of those other currencies.  Bitcoin's current instability is most related to the very tiny size of the market for which it serves.  Even in 2130, Bitcoin will not be particularly deflationary.  The monetary base will simply be very stable, which is not the same as deflationary.  Those who assume that Bitcoin will prove to be deflationary because of lost addresses taking bitcoins out of circulation are still assuming that to be so.  Bitcoin is based upon Austrian Economic Theory, and there is no more 'sound' basis for a currency.  If you want to start a perpetually inflating version, go right ahead, but it's already been done several times, and every time it has faded away in mere months.  Bitcoin was designed to mimic gold, and it does this very well.

I already have jumped in and I already do own a fair amount of BTC. That's not the point here, I'm not trying to profit from infinite deflation, my motive is to create a more economically sound currency which will be more stable over the very long term. My main motivation is not greed or irrational fear of having my coins stolen 100 years from now.

Why sulk, just jump in. You can be an early adopter.

In the real world if you leave something untouched for over 100 years and then fail to prove it's yours when some one else tries to take it, they have every right to take it. What reason do they have to actually believe it's not lost if you can't prove it's not lost? Of course you might say "it's sitting in my house", but unfortunately there is no such easy way to prove that bitcoin is sitting in an address which proves you own it. But there are still easy ways to prove you own it... but that's not the problem here, the problem here is that you simply don't want to have the network discern any difference between lost coins and active coins, because you only want to make a profit from infinite deflation, regardless of the economic holes in such a system.

I could argue infinite inflation really isn't bad... you know it just benefits a few people, but in reality the market will always adjust even if we have a quadrillion trillion trillion dollars in circulation. No problem folks, that's entirely economically healthy and I see no reason why we should try to avoid that if the system can still work with that much money in circulation.  

But I don't think you will even be able to read this since you've ignored me and don't see anything you don't want to see. Well done.

It would work, but it's unnecessary.  It's extremely improbable that the crypto algo currently in use for creating address keypairs will remain secure for that entire time period.  Bitcoin includes an upgrade path to a more secure algo, without exposing any security issues in the meantime, should it start to look like the algo is at risk.  The leading 1 at the beginning of current bitcoin addresses is what denotes the version of bitcoin address.  Bitcoin doesn't presently recognize any other, but it eventually shall.  At some point, it's going to become apparent that the current algo is at risk of breakdown, for whatever reason, and the community is going to transition to another algo.  Any unclaimed transactions that have not been moved to addresses using this new algo will ultimately become salvage to whomever can brute force a collision first.  Thus, lost bitcoins are not really lost permanently, just not likely to be recovered within the lifetime of anyone here.

EDIT: Actually, Bitcoin does recognize a special address version for the "testnet", but those are not usable addresses in the live bitcoin network.

I am positive of one thing: if at some point any "self-appointed elite" with commit access manages to sneak in the source code a proviso to steal existing coins -- regardless of the form of this proviso -- I will immediately fork the code, revert the change, and start running nodes to keep the original non-organized-theft code alive.  Then we'll see if people choose to stay with a currency paradigm that unilaterally decided to steal from them, or continue using the original paradigm.

I think of it more as a community consensus to make sure Bitcoin works the way it was designed to - that lost coins remain lost. I think when the time comes we'll figure out what is a fair solution.

That said I understand the issues with this deletion, and hence I will not press this further at this point.

But, but, but TRULY!  TRULY!  TRULY!  OUTRAGEOUS!

Haha :-) 

He's clearly not engaged in a conversation with anyone here -- the very second anyone questions his terrible ideas, he immediately regresses to unsubstantiated suppositions, opinions and theories, making his participation here useless, bad and boring.  I added him to my ignore list too.

...and you ignored all the rest of my points and replied flippantly to this one.

Ignored.

Translation from statist codespeak to English:

I want to impose on Bitcoin a policy of "Prove to me that you own what is yours, or else I'll pretend it's not yours, steal it from you, and call that 'fair'."

The whole point of this is, of course, to impose Keynesian policy by discouraging long-term saving.

This is why I just love Bitcoin-the-existing-blockchain: it makes it impossible for misinformed and propagandized fools to impose their terrible cached ideas on everyone else.

Adding to ignore list... done.

Of course you can never truly know if they are lost, however if people are given a truly fair window of time to show the network that they aren't lost I fail to see the problem. You could tell your grandchildren to make sure they they enforce their right to the coins before that window expires. And if they also want to put coins in storage for a long period of time and hand them down, they can do the same thing. It's not rocket science, nor some tedious task which needs to be repeated every year. We are talking extremely long periods of time here.

Stealing a couple dozen addresses a day can give you serious amounts of money. There are addresses that have historically had amounts in the low millions assigned to them, and I'm sure the unspent-tx-out set has plenty of addresses with at least tens of thousands attached to them.


That's all well and good, but when the difference to that stealing happening over a matter of years, or a matter of days or weeks is one paper, it'll cause the value of Bitcoin to tank all the same. Mining as we know it is carefully controlled and highly predicable, "mining" by attacks on cryptography isn't.

Also, if a RIPEMD160 attack does happen, we have just two backup options: move to SHA256 for address hashes, or move to pure public keys, both of which are backwards compatible changes. If an ECDSA break happens we have no choice but to move to a new PK algorithm. Doing that is a hard-fork change if you want to be able to spend your coins, and thus this discussion will come up. Given how many people consider protection against inflation as one of the core principles of Bitcoin protection against the risk of inflation by releasing old lost coins will be discussed. You're hung up on the idea of it being confiscated by "decree", but plenty more are just going to worry about their wealth being confiscated however it happens.

Of course all this depends on how many coins are lost; maybe it won't be an issue. Note that one way this all could be handled is to have the new rules in this hard-fork scenario only allow old coins to be spent on a schedule, with limits on the volume of such spending. You could say that after block n only transactions from weak to strong are allowed, and only xBTC of those transactions per block. (with the obvious tx fee competition happening) Or the rules could state that making the coins undependable only happens if a certain percentage of coins in circulation remain under weak keys beyond some date, thus limiting the possible inflation. We may find in such a scenario that that percentage is low enough that people aren't worried about the inflationary wealth confiscation. Of course coming to consensus in any case will be hard. Even just moving to a new PK algorithm will be bad enough.

I really, really, really want to see the look on those Goldbugs faces when someone mines the first meteorite, or someone makes a breakthrough in gold nucleosynthesis... In the latter I suspect they'll start arguing that gold isn't gold unless it's totally free of trace radioactive contamination.

You don't want to create an alt coin? Live with the one you got cos you ain't changing the existing one. Or don't use Bitcoin. It bears repeating: unlike government money (which has the properties you seem to want), nobody is forcing you to use Bitcoin. You already have what you want available to use today. Use dollars and stop trying to bring its fucked-up disadvantages to Bitcoin.

At any rate, you ain't fooling anyone. This whole 'making Bitcoin more healthy' and 'stable money supply' is statist code speak for imposing your opinion on stealing from existing wealth owners. Perhaps that explains why you annoyingly keep repeating the same nonsensical and absurd conclusions of 'stealing old money is good' like a broken record without actually ever substantiating them.

This argument falls on it's face. With BitCoins you CANNOT "clearly" know that they have been "lost." There is no dusty box or other indication besides the last time the address was used. If I have placed some gold in a safe I expect it to stay there. If my great-great grandchildren re-discover and open by old safe with paper bitcoins in it, you want the gold to already be gone.


No, you have not explained, you have claimed this repeatedly (and without attribution) but you have not justified these statements in any significant way. No mentions of the possible consequences or scenarios that you are testing against. You are just saying it over and over again.

Since you are arguing that something which already exists should be changed, and everyone else is arguing for it to stay the same, you have the burden of proof. I'm offering you a way to convince some folks rather than just saying "should be" over and over again.

There have been a large number of substantial objections raised to your idea including practicality, social contracts, existing code, design intentions, market forces, future impacts, and most importantly the immutability of transactions themselves. You are questioning the very foundations of bitcoin by proposing that transactions can EVER be undone, your burden of proof is enormous.

Meh.  2^56 operations would still be roughly the equivelent of difficulty 16 million.  The idea that is "quite practical" is kinda a weak argument.  You are talking building a network say 10% of the size of the bitcoin network would allow you to steal a couple dozen addresses per day.   Of course that assumes that security can be reduced to 2^56 operations.  I pointed out that even SHA-1 which has been known compromised since 2005 still requires > 2^61 operations. 

Will coins be stolen.  Sure in time but it won't be these "insta-hack" nonsense you espouse.   The period of time between improved attacks is usually measured in years.  So when security is reduced to 2^56 you will see the largest dormant addresses "remined" and then it really won't be worth it.  Maybe in 4-5 years someone will improve the attack further and the medium sized addresses will be compromised.   While this brings coins into the network it will hardly be this "instantly every RIPEMD-160 address is owned by a single person in the span of a few seconds.

It will take time and honestly won't be much different than mining now.  There will be risk involved.  Do I bought a $10K RIPEMD-160 cracker out of FPGAs?  What if others get the best addresses first?  What if BFL releases a RIPEMD-160 ASIC before I pay off my "rig".   I would also point out that it would be decentralized.   It would be the FIAT command from on high deeming RIPEMD-160 addresses unfit for use and therefore nulled.  I would never, ever, ever support it.  I would spend the last of my coins fighting it and if it still did happen I would have no reason to use Bitcoin.    Bitcoin where wealth can be confiscated at will because the elites deem it necessary?  I will go back to Gold.    Many Goldbugs BTW fear this very idea that Bitcoin isn't truly Tangible.   If it can be confiscated by decree then they are right.

Ok let me give you an analogy. You place some gold in a locked box and then 100 years later I find the box just sitting in some remote location covered in dust. I am going to take that box and bust it open and take the gold, because clearly some one has lost it and left it there. Now if it weren't lost, I wouldn't have the chance to find a 100 year old box covered in dust because someone would have come in, cleaned the dust off and relocated it to a more secure location, giving clear indications that the box is certainly not lost or abandoned. The fact is that anyone would have a very large chance to stop their coins from being re-mined, and if they fail to do so then the coins are fairly considered to be lost, because there are real lost coins out there which need to be found. If you happen to get caught up in that process it's you're own fault for not taking action to secure ownership of the coins within a reasonable time frame.

I have already explained throughout this thread why a stable money supply is more economically sound than infinite deflation. Infinite anything is absurd. Of course it's not necessarily an absolute necessity, but it is more economically sound and therefore superior and more desirable.

Name a single example of a broken public-key algorithm previously in wide use in the first place. Frankly we just don't know because we've yet to see a public-key algorithm broken in recent history.

FWIW MD5 collisions can be generated in 2^20 time right now, trivial. More importantly though look at Bitcoin difficulty, which is of course a partial pre-image: the security of the network is just a matter of a few "bits" of difficulty, yet even just a single paper in crptography is likely to remove at least a bit or two of security from an algorithm. It's easy to see why an algorithm can go from secure to insecure overnight if that last step happens at the wrong place, while at the same time having warning is likely.

Lets suppose for instance RIPEMD160 pre-image collisions went from 2^160 difficulty to 2^120: it'd be worrying, but still Bitcoin would be ok. Now another paper or six are published, and you're down to 2^70: rather worrying, but Bitcoin is still ok for now, if just barely. (the whole Bitcoin network has done about 2^66 SHA256's in total remember) One more paper though, another 10 bits, and suddenly stealing funds sent to address hashes is quite practical with just a few ten thousand in equipment, and each additional bit of security lost halves that difficulty.

There's a reason the difficulty target is a number, rather than just a number of bits.

It already is a scarce commodity because the supply is limited. I'm suggesting that we make it a stable scarce commodity, a bit like how gold doesn't just disappear into thin air, the supply on Earth remains consistently stable.

I am not missing that point, I am well aware of it and well aware that the chance of this change ever being implemented is extremely remote. But I am still going to discuss my reasoning and opinion for why it does need to be changed.

You are proposing stealing from my pocket, or my childrens, or my grandchildrens, or...

It DOES NOT MATTER WHEN IT HAPPENS this is still theft, destabilization, and a very, very bad idea.

Please explain, as you have been asked multiple times, why a STABLE NUMBER OF COINS is required in any way at all. Your root premise is flawed as multiple people have pointed out.

Please explain why Bitcoin must continue indefinitely and never become a scarce commodity? Are you implying that there will never be another successful innovation in payments or money, or at the very least a BitCoin2100 with a fresh blockchain? Your insistence on the immortality of bitcoin is a fundamental logic error. At some point it will be as useless as US Confederate money, and possibly FAR more valuable as a museum piece at some point after that. I certainly don't expect 2012 USD paper bills to be traded at face value in 2265, assuming that USD means anything then. Assume that history will continue to march on and try your reasoning again.

There is also the point that you appear to be willfully missing. BitCoin was created with a fixed set of rules that a lot of folks are vested in, changing those requires a consensus, so your proposal is unlikely to ever get acceptance for "BitCoin." Some other crypto-currency might like the idea though, but if you are not interested in finding some developers to work with on that, how do you expect us to take your development proposals for mainline Bitcoin seriously?

You might as well give this one up, you are obviously going against consensus rather than establishing one.