Topic: Removing old coin uncertainty - page 2. (Read 5022 times)

So, let me get this straight.

You're basically attempting to start some sort  of bizarre "movement" to try randomly get everybody to agree to not accept early adopter's coins? WTF? That's supposed to instill certainty? This has got to be the single dumbest thing I've heard on this forum ever. Period.

Yes, the cut-off date is somewhat arbitrary.  Once you have a script that can produce the graph you can try different cut-off dates easily enough.  Also, it's probably better to describe this as a search for dead wallets, not so much dead coins.  How many coins are in all of those wallets that have had zero transactions for a very, very, long time? Inquiring minds want to know.  The 'days destroyed' graph on blockchain really doesn't do much for me.

I just want to know how many dead wallets (and their sum-total coins) are still out there month to month and day to day.  That's a graph blockchain should have.

John

Only when coins were *sent* from an address would that prove it was alive.  If significant amounts of coins were still being added to an address, that would suggest it was alive, and perhaps such variables could be included in the model.

John's idea is something I've had in mind as well.  The 10x increase is nothing though, we are already at 140,000x valuation increase from the penny days.

Yes, a statistical analisys could probably give some insight.


A lot of the bigger wallet addresses receive small amounts from other people (often with messages), guess you should try to filter that out.

I am of the opinion that a lot of the uncertainty can be resolved with statistical analysis of the blockchain.

It's a personal project I hope to spend more time on whenever I have some free time.

Here is what I would like to see.

A graph of stale coins that starts at 100% of all outstanding coins in January 1, 2013.  Then, each time coins associated with a particular address has any kind of a transaction then it is considered essentially 'alive' (no longer a zombie coin).  This graph would go down to land wherever we are at today (coins which haven't changed hands since prior to January 13, 2013).  It's important to note that if, say, a wallet address has a 1,000 coins in it then someone spends so much as 0.000001btc out of that wallet, it marks all 1,000 of those coins as 'alive'.  We are looking for wallet addresses which have been completely untouched since prior to January of this year.

You should then be able to do some statistics showing how many zombie wallets come to life over time and make some reasonable predictions about how many are likely to remain forever lost.

Are there lost/zombie coins after January 1 of this year?  Sure, some, but they are probably statistically insignificant compared to all of the lost coins back when they were essentially worthless and people didn't even bother keeping track of wallets.

My argument is this.  Any coins which existed prior to January 13, 2013 are potential zombie coins because they represent a massive multiplier value factor.  Most anyone who owned coins prior that date would have either sold them (to make a 10x profit) or possibly moved them to a newer wallet as a lot of wallet technology and discussion has evolved over this time period.

It would take an enormous amount of willpower not to sell coins which have become worth 10x or more what you originally paid for them or, at least, move them to a more secure wallet technology.

Realize too that I am not simply talking about coins which have been 'cashed out' for fiat; the simple act of moving coins from one wallet to another alone (even if it's a wallet owned by the same person) still shows that these coins are 'alive and well'.

Will we ever guess accurately what percentage of zombie coins are truly dead and which are just in deep storage waiting to come to life again?  I think using some statistical models showing how many come to life over time should allow us to make some informed speculation at least.  My personal guess is that majority of coins that have not changed wallets since prior to January 1, 2013 are likely completely dead/gone/lost destined never to come back to life.  By studying how many of them do rise from the dead, month to month, should give us a reasonable estimate of the rate at which zombie coins rise from the dead.

John

@gmaxwell: another +1, well written
Reflex-screaming "thief!!" isn't a healthy discussion. There may be times when an intervention would be better than doing nothing. But it's not now.

I agree that supply uncertainty is a concern and a mistake in the original system. It isn't clear to me that it can be resolved without causing greater damage, since the inviolability of our promises is even more important— if Bitcoin operates on mere popular whim it offers little more than the official currency of a democratic country.

What concerns me most in this space is the cryptographic break concern:  Lets imagine that at some point 90% of the coins are lost... no biggie, we just trade in smaller units. One small country costs 10 BTC, etc.  And then someone comes up with a way of breaking ECDSA and can suddenly recover hundreds of thousands of long lost coins and introduce them into circulation at will... perhaps many someones.

No cryptographer will claim that our current signature algorithm will be secure forever.  Bitcoin is forward adaptive and can gain new signature algorithims without a hard fork.  Non-lost coins should be migrated to new, more secure, signatures long before it's an issue.  But no one can move the lost coins so their reintroduction into circulation via cryptographic compromise could be uncontrolled and devastating to the Bitcoin economy.

The obvious fix for this is that any crypto upgrade would require coins to be moved after some suitable period... but as you've seen here, people are _very_ hostile to the idea.

I guess my thinking on this is that the idea that a system can be free from human intervention is a bit of an unrealistic fantasy, though one I frequently enjoy. A failure to intervene when doing so would be rational and necessary is also a kind of intervention, and the Bitcoin system may someday die from it. What does it matter if your coins are not "stolen" from you in the broadest possible sense if dogmatic adherence to that principle ultimately results in the coins being worthless?  Time will tell.

If you are using the current version of bitcoin, you can keep using it.  It wouldn't matter if 99% of people decided to use a different version, no one could or would steal your coins, no matter what changes the different version contained.

Now, if you are complaining because 99% of people decide they don't want your coins, and hence, they become almost worthless, well I'm *not* going to let that bother me.

Stealing is one thing, and it is foul; accusing people of stealing (or wanting to steal) just for valuing an asset differently than you might is another, and, also foul.

*edited because I forgot the word *not*

Stealing is stealing, even if it is by 'majority vote.' Hence why the Bitcoin protocol should never be changed to modify the owner/value of coins.

If 60% of the population voted to forcibly confiscate & redistribute the wealth of the other 40% of the population, you think that wouldn't be theft?

Do you all realize this idea would need a hard fork to implement?  Do realize that participation on a new fork is voluntary?  Do you therefore understand that no one can or will steal your bitcoins?  If you don't like a new fork (call it an alt-coin if you will), don't participate.

The wanna-be thieves will never give up.

This topic comes up about every six months, as soon as they think there are enough newbies around who they might fool this time around.

I think it would be better to leave Bitcoin just as it is and stop trying to come up with ways to steal from others.

Damn I can call this shit

That would be okay if we started with this rule at the very beginning. You may start an alt-coin with this feature but that won't be bitcoin. We had rule changes in bitcoin, but only technical, not economical.

@Op,

Looks like a job for timetostartyetanotherretardedaltcoin man!

No. Didn't your mom tell you stealing is wrong?

What part of don't violate the social contract is hard to understand?

If people like the OP had their way this would be a future ad for Bitcoin.


Maybe the "new-Bitcoin" slogan can be "Bitcoin because its worse than a bank".

Do you own my bitcoins or do I? What I do with my bitcoins is none of your business. If I want to have them sit untouched in a cold wallet for 40 years until my grandkids are old enough to manage them theirselves, then that's what I'll do and I'll fight you trying to steal them from me till the day I die.

Well, copyright laws for example deal with the idea that there is wealth in something immaterial that needs to be saved + preserved and can be inherited.

If you want a time frame after which it would be OK to either redistribute or invalidate coins, I'd recommend looking at the time frames a book is still protected under copyright, even if the author used a pseudonym or is otherwise unknown. This is not in the range of months or years, rather in decades!

Something like reclaiming coins after 100 years (or 25 block reward changes...) after their last move might be an option - you would not live to see it in action though. Anything below that is VERY short sighted and again there are alternative coins out there that do this and that you can use right now instead of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin's rule have changed and will change again.  The only question is, what kind of client do YOU run?  Yep, it doesn't even take a majority, it just takes two computers to fork.  Even considering mainstream bitcoin and the supermajority of users, there have been and will be hard forks.

I don't know why you think this would be a change to 'suit those in power'.  Do you think I am in power?  But a rule change to suit the majority or super majority or bitcoin users?  Of course!  This is open software.

And, where did you see that I was interested in targeting early adopters?  The dates I gave were hypothetical.  My only target is coins that have been lost forever.  How can you steal something that belongs to no one?


Several of you have asked this, or suggested that it is not my business. My answer is that the size of the money supply is everyones business.  There have been many threads on these forums that have touted bitcoins ability to survive deflation by pointing out that even just one coin would be sufficient to run the world economy thanks to the magic of moving the decimal place to the right.  Lets say in the future this is the case, that between the years 2140 and 2150, only one bitcoin in total is in active circulation.  It seems that the other 20,999,999 BTC have been lost.  Then all of a sudden, Satoshi's addresses become active, showing that the usable monetary base is 1,000,000x larger than people thought.


I think that people will always need to stay on the ball and keep up with the world if they want to preserve there wealth.  This includes knowing about laws, finance, wars, culture, technology, etc.  What if the cryptography gets broken?  Of course we can agree to add new encryption to bitcoin so that it remains usable, but what about the previously lost coins?  Will they just be open to plunder and reintroduced into the supply?  Or will the community make a decision to block all of the coins that have not migrated to the new crypto by a certain date?


I am very sympathetic to idea that this may do more harm than good at the moment.  And yes, it could still be done at any point in the future.  Bitcoin can die either because it is not managed at all, or because it is managed poorly.  Some people think Bitcoin should never be managed and just left alone.  I can certainly see the appeal in this.  Good for those folks that they can keep running bitcoind 8.5 forever and it will never change.

The rest of the community will adopt sensible innovations and management as they see fit.  Bitcoin is powerful not because it will never change, but because the ability to make changes rest in the hands of its users.

What does this have to do with anything?

If BTC goes up in value and old coins are removed from circulation then BTC goes up more. Problem? Not really.