Theoretically there will be exactly no bitcoins in the future. - page 3.

seedtrue

legendary

Activity: 963

Merit: 1002

Quote from: Lauda on February 25, 2016, 11:19:25 AM

Quote from: BadGhost on February 25, 2016, 11:15:44 AM

One day it might be a problem, but probably not the problem of our generation. Still statistically that says bitcoin cannot survive.

Here we go again. I don't understand why people worry about potential problems that won't happen in their lifetime. Bitcoin has many other problems that need addressing right now and in the foreseeable future. This is not something that we should be worried about right now, especially not when the reward per block is still high. Technically even if only 1 Bitcoin existed it could be users by millions of people due to it being very divisible.

I think in this worst case scenario, even that one last Bitcoin could be hard-forked to make more than 8 places after decimal right? If I remember correct what I read about the early days of Bitcoin there were not even 8 decimal places?

Edit:

I dug this up from old post. It seems that it was always 8 decimal places, but the client only showed/registered 2.

Quote from: nelisky on September 23, 2010, 12:35:35 PM

Hey,

So there is another thread asking about bc and decimal places. It is stated that the client(s) only show 2 decimal places, but there are 8 in total. Now, working on stuff, I find that it would be nice if I could transfer at least 4 decimals precision, but the full 8 would be great.

Looking at the code it seems simple enough to remove the rounding from bitcoind, but what about the receiving side? If it's a non UI client, then it will show everything, but would I be making things overly confusing for GUI clients?

Is there any shortcoming in me patching my client to handle full precision?

pedrog

legendary

Activity: 2786

Merit: 1031

Quoting Satoshi on this one:

Quote from: satoshi on June 21, 2010, 12:48:26 PM

Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.

Amph

legendary

Activity: 3248

Merit: 1070

lets assume that all bitcoin minus 0.21 are lost, now you will simply have that 1 satoshi = to one bitcoin

create another 100M divisors of one satoshi with an hard fork and you're good to go again

Bitware

hero member

Activity: 926

Merit: 1001

weaving spiders come not here

The real question is, how do you prove that their bitcoins were in fact lost?

How do they prove beyond all contestation that they haven't lied about it and still secretly control the wallet addresses the allegedly "lost" bitcoins are stored in?

After all, the best of people will lie, cheat, and steal every moment of every day if they can gain from it.

That said, in the short term any "lost" bitcoins will simply make the rest of the bitcoins in circulation more valuable, and in the long term the precision can be lengthened to add more spendable units to the current supply.

21 million bitcoins equals 2,100,000,000,000,000 (21 quadrillion) spendable units of value.

Increasing the amount that can be mined higher than 21 quadrillion units of value should never be necessary, unless it's better than changing the precision... and even that should never be needed, but it's possible.

BARR_Official

hero member

Activity: 686

Merit: 500

Even if 10% of all usable bitcoins were lost every year, the number of usable bitcoins would never reach 0.

Or, if 100% of all bitcoins were lost every day for the next 100 years, the number of bitcoins would still remain above 0.

And yes, it's been discussed many times.

OmegaStarScream

staff

Activity: 3500

Merit: 6152

Losing coins shouldn't be an issue if people use their brains honestly , the only situation where it's not the holder fault is probably when he gets hacked .
Mt-gox , Cryptsy , other exchanges = Users fault because they should never store their coins in an online exchange , you trade ,then you withdraw , It's that simple .
Computer failure , Lost passwords , forgetting wallets and all that stuff = You always recover your wallet if you are using Electrum or Multibit HD for example . (even if you don't you could take other precaution so none of that happens to you) .

After saying that , I should remind you of what Satoshi said : "Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone." .
People will learn the lesson with time , and people will be losing coins less then they did on the past .

Yakamoto

legendary

Activity: 1218

Merit: 1007

Well that's the point of a limited supply currency, there is a limited supply and it will keep being used/spent/lost until people give up on it or nothing is left.

This goes for gold and silver too, they keep wearing about and they slowly decrease, but there is a large enough supply that the impact is negligible. This is equally represented in Bitcoin. With the potential for 21m coins, at a predictable and limited rate, any losses that don't take out >50% of the current supply likely do not mean much.

Lauda

legendary

Activity: 2674

Merit: 3000

Terminated.

Quote from: BadGhost on February 25, 2016, 11:15:44 AM

One day it might be a problem, but probably not the problem of our generation. Still statistically that says bitcoin cannot survive.

Here we go again. I don't understand why people worry about potential problems that won't happen in their lifetime. Bitcoin has many other problems that need addressing right now and in the foreseeable future. This is not something that we should be worried about right now, especially not when the reward per block is still high. Technically even if only 1 Bitcoin existed it could be users by millions of people due to it being very divisible.

BadGhost

newbie

Activity: 39

Merit: 0

One thing that probably has not been thought of, during the creation of BTC, is that the number of Bitcoins will be slowly reducing to zero. There will be, in some time, 21KK BTC, but what about bitcoin that get lost? I mean hardware malfunctions. Wrong address transfers. Lost passwords. Forgotten wallets etc.

Do we know, how many of all Bitcoins is in circulations at this moment? I mean we can count the number that indicates how many it should be. We however do not know how many of them is inaccessible.

One day it might be a problem, but probably not the problem of our generation. Still statistically that says bitcoin cannot survive.

Topic: Theoretically there will be exactly no bitcoins in the future. - page 3. (Read 2387 times)