I've thought it is just a much simpler solution to give Bitcoin wallets an "expiration date" of sorts. You must make a transaction using each of your wallets every year (or some other arbitrary value) to keep your wallet "renewed" so you keep your coins. If a wallet is lost, no transactions are made and the wallet "expires", "invalidating" those coins in the block chain and adding them back to the mining reward
NO
Go elsewhere to try to steal other people saving.
Just NO.
However, the idea of a default future transaction is a good one, as follows: Imagine I can sign a 'transaction' that says essentially that another wallet can spend my coins after a certain date. Now, I can 'opt-in' to a system where I sign my coins to a 'back-up' service effective one year from now if I haven't spent them. Per our contractual agreement, if I lose my keys for whatever reason, they will sign my coins over to a new wallet once the time limit expires and they have access. This allows me to never give them access to my coins as long as I have my key, because before the period is over, I can send my coins to a new wallet and make a future-transaction from that wallet.
Obviously the period would be customizable, and there's trust being placed in the backup service, but its a way of distributing loss-risk around, and if you only 'banked' with local people, I'm sure local contract law would give you good recourse in case of theft.
NO
You have any actual reasoning other than just saying "NO" and pointlessly stomping around?
The whole point of this is that the current solution is not elegant and self-regulating like the rest of bitcoin. My idea is just an example with arbitrary values. And it doesn't have to be a transaction made from the wallet either, but say send one bitcent or smaller fraction to all of your accounts every few years or so. That way the block chain knows these wallets are still active. This means those with offline paper wallets don't need to dig anything up, they just need to have a copy of the public addresses for all of their offline wallets.
And to those yelling crap about 21 million, it was a rounded figure. Going to four significant digits serves no purpose for this discussion.
Divisibility adds supply? It reduces it..
Also, how do you prove that a coin is lost? What if some early investor comes back to find that his coins have been invalidated?
Right, I meant adding supply of transferable units not the total coin supply.
He's not a very good investor if he doesn't keep tabs on his investments now is he? Besides, if something this big were actually implemented announcements can be sent to the clients like has been done with the recently found vulnerabilities.
