Topic: Recovering Lost Bitcoins (Read 337 times)

Yes, what you probably mean is that ECDSA (the elliptic curve public key mechanism used in Bitcoin) can be broken with Shor's algorithm on quantum computers. And this means that any Bitcoins which aren't transferred to a "quantum safe" address could be stolen. If quantum computers become capable enough, this is a realistic scenario. However it's quite far away still (a decade at least).

Indeed there were some proposals in the past (also in this forum) that this could be an opportunity to "return lost Bitcoins into circulation" -- i.e. set a deadline to transfer coins to a quantum-safe address, and all the coins which aren't transferred, are considered lost and locked to avoid theft. These coins, according to the proposal, could then be added to the miners' rewards from the next halvings on.

This is the theory. However, it would probably lead to a disruption in Bitcoin's price, this means probably a significant downtrend or crash. The reason is that people are already pricing in the "scarcity" generated by the "new supply reduction" after the next halvings, and while the 21 million BTC limit would not be changed, there would be more new Bitcoins on the market in the future. "Lost bitcoins" are currently "priced in" to be lost forever.

Thus, I don't consider this a good idea, and afaik the reaction of the Bitcointalk community to this proposal was universally negative.

There were also coins that were lost due to the coinbase transactions having the same hash.

The coins claimed by miners in blocks number 91722 and 91812 are unspendable.
The coinbase transaction in block number 91722 has the same hash as coinbase transaction in block number 91880 and the coinbase transaction in block number 91812 has the same hash as coinbase transaction in block number 91842.

+2

Satoshi was quite logical in his saying that lost coins are a sort of donations to all other coins in circulation. It's very much clear today. 

The way Bitcoin is progressing and more people are joining in, we defiantly will see a scarcity of Bitcoins in near future when there are more people chasing handful Bitcoins. May be the community moved towards the idea of breaking down Satoshis further through hard fork.

That's one of the key points of Bitcoin, that it is limited with a deflationary emission characteristic. No arbitrary money printing like with fiat.

Why is it a problem for you that a certain amount of bitcoins are lost, in the sense they can't be moved anymore?

As Satoshi once said, all lost coins are a donation to all others because lost coins make those that aren't lost a little bit more scarce and more valuable. I have no problem with that.

And don't forget: any of the almost 21 million Bitcoins that will come into existence have been divisible into 100,000,000 Satoshis, so there's plenty of smallest coin chunks. And if need arises it would likely be possible to introduce Millisatoshi or Microsatoshi with a hard fork.

There is no trustless way to determine if some coins are only dormant or truely lost. Provably lost coins are non-zero outputs of OP_RETURN or other provably not satisfiable redeem scripts and not fully claimed coinbase amounts (I may have missed other truely provably burned coins).

Burn addresses with very likely unknown private keys are only lost in the sense that it's not likely anyone will ever find an appropriate private key to move them. Mathematically they're not truely lost, we only don't have enough energy and time to search for the private keys.

even if such lost coin is recovered, the question is, of what use is it? certain constant like the irrecoverable nature of bitcoin was access to ones keys is lost is one way that helps strengthen the network and doesn't allow for what will look like an alteration or manipulation of any sort in a bid to recovering some lost coin. a further improvement that could be more useful would have been an inclusion of an alternative to the seed phrase such that even when you have lost it, there could be other ways of getting access to your coin so it does not remain lost forever.

Already we have limited supply of Bitcoins i.e. there will be 21 million bitcoin that will be ever generated. There is no clear figure that tells how many Bitcoins are there that can't be accessed since dormant wallets are getting active very often. There are many cases in early days of bitcoin, when people used to send bitcoins to each other for fun and for free. Lots of such coins can't be accessed now because the owner lost the seed due to his casual attitude towards bitcoin.   

I don't think it's advisable to make modifications to the blockchain to extract "lost" bitcoins. This would mean losing the essence of the immutability of the blockchain. What I would suggest is a type of transaction or redemption script that remains in the mempool, for example, 100 blocks, and that the recipient must respond to this transaction for redemption. Otherwise, if the recipient does not do so, it will not be included in a block; instead, once the period has elapsed, it will be removed from the mempool.

This would somehow prevent future bitcoins from being unintentionally burned.

Don't forget we are in a decentralized system and the rule is simply not your keys, not your coin which simply means everyone on the blockchain is responsible for the safety of their coin. But let's assume a mechanism was derived such that coins lost due to human errors as stated don't you think the Bitcoin network will be prone to brute-force where some one will try to recover a Bitcoin that is not lost and the will keep trying different methods and I bet you there will more than 70% chance they will succeed. Except another protocol will set or established to ensure the coin being recovered belongs to the original owner and we know that will cost more than even mining the coin in the first place.

So hell no decentralization will never support recovery of lost Bitcoin. Once it is lost, it is lost forever.

While some may disagree, it's true that there are lost coins caused by human mistakes, burn addresses (which I believe are completely insane), errors, experiments, etc. We have a point here about how to adjust the supply of minted coins due to these losses as these coins are minted and counted in the total supply yet remain inaccessible?


Miners cannot verify whether a coin was sent to the correct address or not that responsibility lies with the sender, since ownership is tied to the private keys if a transaction is sent to an incorrect address the coins remain inaccessible as long as no one else can find the key somehow  However in this case they are not truly lost

I saw someone say on the forum (I'd say it was BlackHatCoiner but I'm not sure) that in the not too distant future with quantum computing they could be recovered, although in the same way that the lost ones could be recovered the rest could be stolen but first there would be a change to avoid this (maybe a fork?). I don't have the technical knowledge to confirm the veracity of the statement but I wanted to bring it to the debate.

This is 100% scam. You cannot revert a confirmed TX on bitcoin network. Well, you can in theory, but it costs more than you could imagine (plus: if a crypto coin's transactions can be reverted so easily, then that coin is worthless).

So please learn more and don't spread scams and misinformation in here.
Plus, there are no such things as validators in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Recently, I saw a project that offers a recovering process...via discord ...
So they have a few hundreds of validators and if you write in discord and proof that you have 'good intentions', they'll roll TX back...

I don't know how often such a nonsense of recovery of (assumed or proven, doesn't matter) lost Bitcoins or reverse Bitcoin transactions has been posted somewhere in this forum. The OP could've easily found numerous past threads but apparently didn't care at all.

Taking just one design principle of Bitcoin into account, namely to be trustless (in my opinion this also implies decentralization), it should be clear that there can't be a sensible reversability, nor any sensible return into circulation of dormant (for whatever reason) coins when that weren't implemented and accepted from the beginning.

Consider reading in the Bitcoin whitepaper something like: 10 years dormant UTXOs are flagged for one year to go into a "recycling fund"; after 11 years of dormancy such UTXOs are moved irreversibly into such a "recycling fund"; coins in this "recycling fund" are cleverly brought back into circulation by adding a small portion to ongoing block rewards (already kind of unfair) or some sort of tail emission.
(I can't make up all clever details here, nor do I want to. Assume the proposed mechanics sound good enough.)

What would you think, if you had read something like this? I can only speak for myself and same as now, I would've thought: why? WHY is this necessary?


From other questions the OP stated, I can only deduce that OP doesn't understand some basic principles and inner mechanics of Bitcoin. Well, you can still make any proposals you want, but accept to be dismissed for many good reasons.

How did you come up with that considering there is no way to count the coins that are actually lost?

Addresses, as in the string you enter in the wallet UI, have a checksum which means if you enter random characters into that textbox or have an address and change some of its characters, the chances of it being valid is low. Meaning the wallet software would reject it and not be able to create the transaction in first place.

Only IF the address you entered is a valid address created by someone.

AFAIK it is possible to send to an entirely random address that no one owns in which case the coins are gone forever aka, being 'burned'. Well, not literally gone - they will still exist in the blockchain but no one can ever use them. All the chain logic does is verify that the address format is correct - it does not and cannot check if it is a 'real' address owned by someone.

But does all wrong addresses actually exist... Like does it always go to another account when you make errors???

Yes whoever owns the address you wrongly sent the BTC to can access it. It is now THEIR BTC to do whatever they want with it.

As for getting it back - it all depends on:
a. if you know who owns the address you (wrongly) sent it to
b. can contact them and then
c. convince them to return the BTC.
Good luck with all that...

Do you mean when a wallet address is wrong, it goes into another?? And then if the another can be accessed it can be recovered??

Lost bitcoins are gone forever. Miners can’t recover them because their job is just to add and verify transactions on the blockchain. The only way to recover lost bitcoins is if someone still holds the private key to the wallet address where the bitcoins were sent, and miners have no way of doing that.

So, the idea of recovering lost bitcoins just isn’t practical. In fact, many lost bitcoins, mostly due to human error, are predicted to keep accumulating. And as more coins vanish, the supply shrinks while demand stays strong, which could drive up the price. It's basic supply and demand at work.

It seems you don't know what exactly miners do?
Miners don't have tools or features just to simply mine those BTC back and recover.
What they do is verify transactions and mine blocks that contain rewards, meaning what they mine are new Bitcoins plus transaction fees, not from other users' wallets.

So, there's no way to recover lost BTC if you accidentally sent it to the wrong address.
You might have a chance to recover your BTC if you accidentally sent it to an exchange or if the scammer or hacker sent them to a centralized exchange.