Topic: What happens to all the lost bitcoins (Read 1044 times)

Haha no wasnt going to do that - I dont have any bitcoins to speak of - just started the topic more to see what Id need to do to stop this from happening...

That's a pretty big "if".

I'll tell you what.  I propose that we use a term of 10 million years.  Any coin that remains unspent after 10 million years can be considered "lost" and we can look into methods of reclaiming it.  Will you agree with my proposal?  If not, then we have a situation where consensus will be impossible.  If consensus is impossible, then what is the benefit or purpose behind imagining what we might do with the consensus that will never happen?

If you do agree with my proposal, then my next proposal is that we wait for 9 million years before we start trying to figure out how to reclaim "lost" bitcoins, since the technology available to do so will be beyond our ability to comprehend it right now anyhow.

You can call them whatever you want, doesn't change the fact that your idea is theft
AFAIK if the coins don't move then there is no extra load (except maybe on a first download of the blockchain, or a rescan... but reclaiming the coins won't do anything for that)
there will never be an agreement on what a dead/stale/lost coin is, if you take it, it is theft Even after 5000 years
Even if there was a magic number that everyone agreed to, no one would agree to changing the rules of the network years after it was started.
We don't need to worry, transaction fees will be plenty to keep miners happy past 2140 and beyond, apart from that there will be businesses that mine themselves not for profit but to secure the profits they make off the blockchain.

I completely agree.

What other methods do you think will spring up for dead coins??

Unfortunately the mechanics of lost bit coins have been conflated with the inflationary / deflationary aspects of monetary supplies.

To be absolutely clear, I am NOT interested in that discussion.

I am interested in tracking "inactive", "stale", "lost" coins in the block chain.  For the sake of discussion, I will just call them "dead".

Over the _very_ long term, they are a problem.  Their existence in the block chain increases the computational cost without a commiserate increase in monetary supply.  Yes, BTC are divisible down to insanely small amounts now and that can be increased with future computational tweaks yet still, why have 10% of your computational load be supporting dead coins that are unusable?

The idea of declaring a coin "dead" is contentious.  My definition of a "dead" coin might be someone else's idea of multi-generational wealth transfer.  While I would consider 50+ years of inactivity to be sufficient to declare a coin dead, others might reasonably argue for 10 years or even 1000.

If we could agree on how long to wait before declaring a coin "dead", the next question is what, if anything, should be done about it.

Personally, I would support using them to continue to fund the block chain.  This keeps the miners working which supports the entire currency and it is a known, reasonable way of adding currency to the monetary system.

The challenge is reaching some agreement on what a dead coin looks like.

The good news is we don't need to worry about finding a way to keep the miners happy until 2140.  That makes a 100 year time limit for that dead coin seem pretty reasonable.

Just for the sake of education...

When most people talk about "lost" Bitcoins, they are talking about someone having lost their wallet and as such the private keys necessary to spend the bitcoins.  Those bitcoins can still be seen in the blockchain, and will remain unspent forever (unless either the private keys are found or a weakness is discovered in the future in  ECDSA, SHA-256, and RIPEMD-160).

However, there is another way that bitcoins can be "lost".  It isn't very likely to happen, but if a miner claims a smaller block reward than they are due (perhaps because of a bug in the mining software being used), then the unclaimed bitcoins simply vanish from existence.  They no longer exist in the blockchain, and can never be spent even if ECDSA, SHA-256, and RIPEMD-160 are broken in the future.  Poof. Vanish. All gone.

Consider your lost coins a donation to everyone else.

'lost' coins should stay lost.


it's impossible to tell if a coin just hasn't been used in a while or if it's been lost. Just make sure you have at least 3 or 4 back up's of your wallet. Right now I have 3 and one of those isn't at my house.

Of Course with any backup you'll need to encrypt that as well and make sure you have a backup of the encryption or remember the phrase REALLY well.

Thanks for the polite and responsive guidance.

Nothing prevents people/organisations from *manipulating* the market (it is a free market after all) - the price recently crashed from above 250 to around 50 but guess what - Bitcoin is still here.

What prevents a large entity or corporation from screwng with the market with huge amounts of coins? They buy 100000 then horde, and when the value rises because of the lack of supply they flood the market with their coins making a huge roller coaster bubble crash cycle to either profit or destroy the currency.

I've always wondered that myself

Exactly why I posted what I did.

Start here:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#But_if_no_more_coins_are_generated.2C_what_happens_when_Bitcoins_are_lost.3F_Won.27t_that_be_a_problem.3F

It won't take very long before your definition of "Active" runs afoul of someone else's definition of "Invested" and you're the thief when you "recover" them.

There's no way to contact the owner of the (seemingly) inactive wallet and ask.



Very against the whole principle of the thing, I think.

every 20th new user wants to solve the problem of lost coins, but there is no problem to solve
1) you cannot tell the difference between kept safely offline for 100 years and lost for 100 years
2) bitcoins are almost infinitely divisible, so even if there were less than 1 bitcoins, the whole system could work with it
3) its just theft, they are not your coins to take, lost or not.

LOL.  Ok, point me at the thread / white paper / that says why this would be bad and / or not work?

From what I have researched, once you loose the private key to that coin it is gone for good and you are unable to use it. Just make sure you keep good backups.

bad newbie, bad

If I understand the block chain concept, it should be possible to identify coins that are no longer active.  The definition of "active" is up to the viewer.

With the knowledge of what coins are no longer "active", why not recover those coins and reissue them for mining post 2140?

If the wallet (private keys) are lost then so effectively are the coins.

Although not making any assumptions *if* you were next thinking of starting a topic with a title like "How to fix the problem with lost coins" I would ask you to first *please* search the forum (that kind of thread has been done to death here).