Topic: Restoring Lost Bitcoins (Read 2656 times)

not underestimate the urge to cash out. The bitcoins will eventually be in the hands of the people who possess the wealth these days anyway...

Somewhat offtopic: I don't think we're going there. Bitcoin may be one of those kind of inventions where the underlying concept is revolutionary, but the first actual implementation has disadvantages over newer ones. Let's assume we have 2022 now, Bitcoin price has risen by two to three orders of magnitude and there's a Newcoin with stable hashrate in existance. I'd probably prefer the Newcoin because at the point of time where 5% has been mined it's going to have a fairer distribution of wealth. There are no early adopters that were able to buy/mine substantial percentages of coins almost for free. Also, there will be less volatility because no one can drop huge early adopter holdings into the market.

Besides more objective concerns the Bitcoin legacy may have a psychological impact: Once a Newcoin has "arrived" - will people buy a Bitcent for 1000$ if they know that quite a few people own quite a few Bitcents they bought for a Dollar or less? I don't see Altcoins becoming worthwhile in the next few years, but as Bitcoin becomes more widely adopted and the price rises, as the concept of cryptocurrency becomes general knowledge, people will be more and more concerned about the infancy period of Bitcoin and eventually create a successor. My guess is it will happen within 5-10 years from now. This doesn't mean Bitcoin will become worthless, it won't. But it will neither fulfill the prophecies of becoming the one major worldwide cryptocurrency. All it takes is the well-coordinated and widely supported creation of Newcoin once the time is ripe.

(EDIT: Clarification on my implication of Bitcoin wealth distribution being "unfair": I do not think it's unfair at all. Early adopters played a vital role in establishing Bitcoin. They will be rewarded for thinking ahead an risking money in a revolutionary project. Above I'm referring to the fairness *perceived* by the general public in 2022 after a major increase in price.)

Yup, i remember seeing some of them

I bet you there are at least 10 threads saying the same and started on 2012
Fast forward to 2020 and you'll still see someone trying to find a solution for lost coins.
And yes, the coin expiration always makes it to those threads. lol

Guys, it's a 2011 thread

expiration is not a feasible option.

The short answer is that expiration is meaningless when you can just create transactions a priori which move any bitcoins within your wallet indefinitely. Then the only thing you need is to have some kind of service which sends these transactions within the right time window. Of course there might be compatibility issues, where an "old" transaction may become invalid at some time in the future and I may also have missed some aspect of the transaction design which creates a burden for creating automized transactions, but that's not the point, which is: any strategy to enforce expiration usually can be circumvented somehow.

Thus to pass back the question to you: How do you uniquely identify a "lost" address?

Create a fork.

Of course it will work.  Bitcoin has 1E14 discrete units called a satoshi worth 1E-8 BTC each.  Say hypothetically decades from now Bitcoin has a value such that 1 satoshi (1E-8) is worth > $0.10 (2012 dollars) and it starts to disrupt commerce (can't trade in values less than $0.10 equivelent).  We can add more digits by modifying the protocol.  We can make the smallest unit in Bitcoin 1E-12 or 1E-16 and gain a million fold increase in the number of discrete units.

If you are saying it wouldn't work because trading in 0.0000001 BTC increments is confusing well that is just silly.  If Bitcoin apreciated to the point that most commerce was done in small units people would use mBTC or uBTC or simply satoshis in daily vocabulary.

Dude I lost 130 mBTC (maybe informally called millibits) on that game last night.
...
So you ordered a #1 combo with large fries that will be 138 satoshis.
...

There is no possible scenario where confiscation of wealth is either necessary or desired.  Even if every single Bitcoin except 1 satoshi was lost the network would continue by adding more digits.  

It's very easy, just take .00000001 and start calling it 1. The client already support different visualization, go in options and you will find the option to have the client show your amount in BTC or mbTC or uBTC. Problem already solved 

I think mirelo's argumentis absolutely right - bitcoins will be lost; people die and don't pass on their wallets, move on to other monetary systems, etc. If I walk away now, .018ish bitcoins will be lost from the system forever. Laugh now, but if 20 years from now that is the equivalent of $100000, not so funny.

A lot of people on these forums like to dismiss arguments like these because they are "so far in the future that it will never impact us" rather than evaluating them for the long-term viability of Bitcoin. It's somewhat disappointing, especially when at some point in the future, it will become a real problem. Having a billion people trying to trade in Bitcoin at 8 decimal places .000000010 won't work.

not the block format the tx format. and no two formats are just wrong, but it may be necessary in the FAR FAR future. and its only passibol after a long long time with the two formats running in parallel

Anyways, it seems to me that increasing precision, if possible, is a better approach than creating an expiration period, so I am definitely dropping that one. I did a little research and there was an incident regarding the CTxOut member structure, which created a value of 92233720368.54275808 bitcoins by sum overflow (see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Incidents#Value_overflow). It is obvious to me that the block format would have to change to accommodate more than 8 decimal places, but the fact that the network remained operating with this absurd value indicates that it would not be that difficult for it to accommodate two different formats. Is that impression correct?

they are wrong, the 8 decimal point, is a hard limit. of cource we could get hackie, and make a new transaction structure.
and all (new) clients would have to support both formats for a long long time, for backwards.

but currently its a hard limit, because the coin base tx are of are 5000000000 satoshi/units(is the "0"'s right?).

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/eight-decimal-places-isnt-enough-8657

After all, is it possible to change the number of decimal places just changing the client or not? If it is, then the loss of bitcoins indeed represents no problem...

WRONG!

You can have infinite decimals if you want.

Or change name, for example use 1 bitcent instead of 0.01 bitcoins. As you wish, just easy changes in the client

Great! I didn't go that far into Bitcoin's implementation, but if you assure me that we can easily change its decimal precision, then I will drop all my concerns and stop bothering you. Do you?

What about nothing happens? The impact is on who lost the wallet, but that's their problem. Same when a ship full of gold sink. Other bitcoins will slightly increase in value. That's all.
And definitely do NOT justify deleting bitcoins cause...uhm... cause you want it.

And bitcoin are divisible as much as you wish. This 8 decimal thing is just a thing of the client, you can change it to how many decimal you want.

If I backup my wallet before generating a new private key, then receive a new amount of bitcoins under that new private key and restore my backup, then I have lost the new amount, since my backup didn't contain my new private key.

As for online wallets, I agree that we are not sure that, say, MyBitcoin didn't stole that wallet, but this does not make us sure they did.

Likewise, we are not sure that bitcoin losses will have no impact whatsoever on the money supply, so we'd better counteract it, especially because bitcoin is already deflationary by design.