Topic: Lost Bitcoins - page 4. (Read 14211 times)

Miners can do whatever they want, assign 200 per block, play WOW, move to Antarctica. But if they make changes they aren't mining Bitcoin and people who wan't bitcoins just ignore them. The only thing that matters is what people are accepting for goods and services and right now the only crypto-currency anyone is accepting at all is 100% durable.

Thank you for teaching and correcting me. 

256 bits is the sweet spot where it would take every joule of the sun's energy produced in an entire year just to COUNT from zero to 256 bits given the completely impractical idea that moving a bit would require the smallest unit of energy possible. Now consider that SHA256 is an algorithm that involves many operations with many rounds (way harder than just counting). As long as a significant weakness is not discovered in SHA256 (there have been some very minor ones), it will likely be forever impossible to break. The SHA3 competition from NIST though looks to address some of the shortcomings of SHA256 and make an even more secure hashing algorithm with less potential weaknesses. But 256 bits will still always be more than enough bits except in the case of quantum computing which could effectively render SHA's 256 bit protection to 128 bits. The counter to that is using a 512 bit algorithm, but that is the end of the road.

But SHA256 is not used for storing your bitcoins, that is done by a digital signature algorithm and those have significantly more weaknesses and few if any are rated as "rock solid, can't be broken" secure by cryptanalysists. Certain properties can be proven secure, but not the algorithm as a whole because they are making use of NP hard type math problems that might have solutions that we just don't know about yet. QC will also make finding solutions significantly easier for things like RSA and ECDSA (what bitcoin uses).

As I understand it, what will happen far in the future is SHA-256 will be broken (Computing power keeps increasing) and bitcoin will have moved onto a better encryption method. If you don't move to the new encryption method with everyone else, then you will have people "mining" for your bitcoins.

Is this accurate at all? I know my terms may be off.

It wont happen, and here's why:
there is no way to tell if coins are actually lost, or not, there is no difference between lost and not-lost coins.
To tell people to send their coins to a new address after X days/months/years/decades would also make all physical bitcoins (like cascasius, paper-wallets and the likes) worthless after that date, you would force everyone to destroy those and create new ones. That's a pretty bad idea.

If some miners decide to mine any already mined coins, they decide to fork/create a new currency,
they are free todo so, but people probably wont use that new currency.

it could be that in the future everyone ( and by everyone i mean the miners, since they have asb authority over the bitcoin protocol ) will decide to mine the lost coins.
they will do this by sending out a new version of bitcoin client and ask everyone to send their coins to this new wallet.
any coins left behind during the move will be made available for mining.

this idea has been thrown around, and I'm 99.9% sure it will happen, after all its up to the miners, and what kind of miner would say no to MINE MORE COINS!?

I tried searching around, but it was too cluttered with the "I lost my bitcoins what do I do?! threads."  Thanks for the answer though.

:sigh: Search around man, check the wiki. This question has been asked and answered hundreds of times.

Yes they are lost for good. The currency is divisible to 8 decimal places and potentially further if there is a significant need and a code change. So the currency can adapt in its silly way.

Bitcoins are not "infinitely divisible" as a lot of people will say though. A hard fork of the code is required to add additional decimal places. This is not a simple matter in the least.

Sending to the wrong address is unlikely if you are just using a standard client to create transactions as each Bitcoin address has a checksum that ensures there is a 1 in 4.3 billion chance of a typo providing a correct address (actually probably even less likely because if characters are added or subtracted it will likely never be valid).

Yes, the amount of accessible bitcoins will continue to decrease as bitcoins are "lost".  It doesn't matter for the usability of bitcoin in a technical sense because they are infinitely divisible.  Lost bitcoins probably help push the price up if anything.

Yes the coins are lost forever. No amount of hash-power that we could reasonably posses will ever find all or even a few of the priv keys.

The decreasing number of coins is an issue, and could become a more serious one if a large batch of coins is abruptly (and inevitability) lost.

The fact that bitcoins are divisible will help mitigate the coin destruction. Others will comment further on this.

So, I've been curious about what happens to those "lost" bitcoins that are out there.  Whether they were sent to the wrong address or sitting in someone's locked wallet with no way of recovering; are they lost for good?  If so, would it be accurate to say that since there are a set amount of bitcoins out there, the amount of "accessible" bitcoins would continue to decrease as these mistakes happen?  How does that affect the viability of the currency as a whole?