Topic: the fate of bitcoins (all will be lost - literally and eventually) (Read 1879 times)

You might want to look into using the Armory bitcoin client. It can handle of lot of tasks like making paper backups and backing up the keys of individual addresses you might have.

There is a tool that searches a disk device for strings that are bitcoin private keys.   So even if you can't access the filesystem, if the bits are on the drive they might yet be recoverable:

Bitcoin private key/wallet.dat data recovery tool!
 - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-private-keywalletdat-data-recovery-tool-25091

That's a good point.

That's not really how it works. You don't "decrypt the public key", you use the private keys to sign the transaction.  The miners then use the signature to confirm that you are the proper owner of the inputs you are using in your transaction.

You are correct though in your assumption that if your private key is safe, then you can still gain access to your bitcoins.

The private key is what is stored in the wallet.dat file, so as long as you have the wallet.dat backed up you still have access to your private keys.

You could also write your private keys down on a piece of paper (or print them) which would also be a form of backing up your wallet.

Note that you don't need to "attempt to decrypt every public key coin value".  The private key is mathematically linked to the bitcoin address.  If you know your private key, you can calculate exactly what the bitcoin address is and you can spend any value associated with that address.

I may be exposing my general ignorance here... but...  it seemed to me that if each bitcoin I held was encrypted with my private key when i took ownership of it, and that private key is used to validate my ownership... i.e. if I can decrypt the public key than ta-da... i own the coin.  therefore, if I loose my wallet, all I would need to do is attempt to decrypt every public key coin value, and the ones I can successfully decrypt are mine.  All I need to do is keep my private key safe... which could even be a sentence.


and yes, it would have to be a doozy of an EMP or electrical storm.. but it has happened before, and likely will happen again

 

I kinda disagree.

I have no problem with the mathematical concept of infinitely dividing the remining bitcoins, BUT the problem is that nobody knows that the lost bitcoins are lost or simply kept under someone's mattress

As a consequence, everyone can legitimely think that the total monetary mass of bitcoins stays at 21M

The market will then most probably evaluate the value of a bitcoin by balancing that monetary mass against something it thinks bitcoins (as a whole) is worth, thus impacting bitcoin's exchange value.

Or not : Maybe the market will stabilize to a price evaluated by balancing the bitcoins in movment during a certain timeframe ?

Little can be done about it tho. Maybe the founders could modify the clients so that a bitcoin needs to move from an address to another within a certain timeframe to stay valid ? (just trolling here, forget it)

Maybe this might help: http://www.grc.com/intro.htm


I personally believe that bitcoin should die after a period (10 years) of no usage
and be reborn through mining.

People seem to have such a hard time understanding this. Perhaps it is because you cant cut a penny into 10,000 pieces and call each piece a dollar. Which you could do with a bitcoin.

100% of remaining Bitcoins is 100% - we can call it anything. I personally like British imperial units. Let's call 223 bitcoins 5 shillings and 6 pence.

In 2006 I had Idea for internet currency with suply of only one and emission halving time to time. dividable for infinity small pieces. Unfortunetly I hadn't tech skills and motivation to create it. But I'm so glad that it is.
I can't understand why there is 21M rather than 1 single BTC with 16 places after dot.
As like degrees in circle why the hell 360? why not 1 or 2pi?

Sure, but where are you going to get your hands on a computer that hasn't been fried by this freakish event?  And will enough internet routers still be operational to maintain the blockchain and relay transactions?  Will the power grid still be operational?

Huh, thats why I keep my BTC with BlueDisc backup, storm wont destroy it so easy.
But I doubt that banks do that.

Even if you don't feel like saving them now keep the disk and pay to get them out when they are worth $1k, $10k or $100k.

Also, the sun is going to burn out eventually, literally.

You seem to be using the word loose incorrectly.   Your didn't loose your bitcoins in the sense they fell out of your pocket they lost in the sense they were destroyed (or more correctly access to them was permanently and irrevocably destroyed).

You have $1,000 in your pocket and it falls out of the street - money gets a new owner (if someone picks it up).
You have a 100 BTC in a wallet on a thumb drive and it falls out on the street - money gets a new owner (if someone picks it up).

You have $1,000 in your house when it catches fire and burns to the ground - money lost forever.
You have 100 BTC in a wallet in the same house - money lost forever.

Those would be the equal comparisons.  Note that there is nothing to recover destroyed physical currency (like in a house fire).  You can't "back it up", make a copy for safe storage, etc.  However you can do that with a Bitcoin wallet.

There isn't.  If you could recover your lost coins then anyone could "recover" anyone's "not so lost" coins.  The currency would have no tangibility, no value.  

The only way to recover the lost coins is to recover the destroyed private keys.  It may be possible if to recover them even from a failed disk.  There are low level tools which can recover raw data from drives even if the partition is corrupt.  Going even more extreme there are data recovery specialists who can recover data from drives which have physically failed although the cost is likely higher than the value of the lost private keys.

Not just the address, the private key.  You could dump the private key and address, and construct something nice for re-importing at a later date and then format and print the entire thing  or you could just go here:
https://www.bitaddress.org

(note all code is done client side, you can inspect the javascript and if ultra paranoid, save a copy of the page and use it offline)

I agree with the backup suggestions but am curious how you could do a paper backup?  I know this is something my wife would feel more comfortable with?  Are you saying that you simply print the addresses found in the wallet?

Forensically they are not gone - pay $600 (a guess) and they could be reclaimed. Keep the disk, wait a couple of years and it may well be worth the cost.

edit - try linux on a USB stick - it's rare for hardrives just to fail absolutely even if they are on their last legs - you should still be able to get something off it.

That sort of depends on what you mean by "easily".  The precision can be extended, but some people might not consider the necessary process to be "easy".

1. Backups, dude! I have backed up my private keys at multiple places, both online and offline (and on paper). I will most certainly not lose them. I never create new addresses before sending funds to them (not without first having backed up that as well). So even if I withdraw from an exchange or something, and my harddisk crashes that very same second, I still won't have lost a single satoshi.
 
2. It doesn't matter how many coins are lost. Infinite divisibility. The current smallest unit is 10^-8 BTC but this precision can easily be extended. So if at some point in history, there is only 1 million BTC in circulation and 20 million have been lost, everything will keep working just fine (except the BTC currency rate will be 20 times higher). This also means that the mining reward will never have to reach zero. Sure, it will become smaller and smaller over time (halved every 4 years) but new fractions of bitcoins will always be added, for as long as the universe will exist.

So, no. We will NEVER see a situation where literally ALL bitcoins are lost. And as long as there are at least some bitcoins in circulation, it's automatically enough for a global economy, because the actual number simply doesn't matter at all.

This is a mistake you see often: people thinking "21 million coins is not enough for a global economy". Forget about the 21 million. It's just an arbitrary number. It could have been 85×10¹⁹ trillion coins as well. Or just ONE. Essentially it makes no difference, everything would work the same except with larger or smaller numbers.

This is true.

That depends on how you loose it.  If your house burns down, and the cash that you had under your mattress burns up, how is anyone somewhere, someday going to spend that?

This is true.  It is part of the intentional design of bitcoin.

I hope that enough people will care enough about their money to have safe backups so that doesn't happen, but I suppose it could.  That would be one heck of an electrical storm or solar flare though to wipe out half of all bitcoins in existence. Wouldn't such an event wipe out other forms of electronic funds as well?  PayPal, bank accounts, credit card balances, etc. Something that can damage electronics in such a widespread way would destroy any non-hardened electronic devices, right?

Unfortunately for you, but fortunately for the viability of bitcoin as a currency, it is impossible without a backup.  Sorry.