what happens to the BITC when you loose a wallat.dat

Meni Rosenfeld

donator

Activity: 2058

Merit: 1054

Quote from: compro01 on August 03, 2011, 10:46:03 AM

depends on your definition of "forever".

we may end up with an collision (someone creates a public/private keypair that was previously created and gets control of the previously lost bitcoins) sometime around when the last white dwarf in the universe goes cold and dark.

That's more or less the correct timeline for randomly stumbling upon a collision.

But, the currently used level of ECDSA being broken and someone being able to compute a private key for a given address, could be much sooner.

gls90a

newbie

Activity: 10

Merit: 0

Quote from: hmblm1245 on August 03, 2011, 10:54:02 AM

With majors wallets (10,000s or even 100,000btc) getting deleted would that have an effect on the value? there are less btcs around so the still existing ones are more valuable.

I would say that it has the potential to slightly affect the value. Losing 100,000 would reduce the current amount of available bitcoins by about 1.5%.

But on the other hand, it could also have a detrimental effect on the economy also. I'm going to assume some of the users who lose their coins in this type of event will get frustrated with the system and as a result stop using bitcoins. An even worse scenario would be that they stop using bitcoins, and they also tell all of their friends not to use bitcoins because of how they lost their coins.

In the business world there is a saying that goes somewhat like this. "One happy customer may refer a friend, but one unhappy customer is bound to tell many."

hmblm1245

hero member

Activity: 628

Merit: 500

With majors wallets (10,000s or even 100,000btc) getting deleted would that have an effect on the value? there are less btcs around so the still existing ones are more valuable.

compro01

hero member

Activity: 590

Merit: 500

depends on your definition of "forever".

we may end up with an collision (someone creates a public/private keypair that was previously created and gets control of the previously lost bitcoins) sometime around when the last white dwarf in the universe goes cold and dark.

CydeWeys

full member

Activity: 154

Merit: 100

Yes, they are gone forever.

hmblm1245

hero member

Activity: 628

Merit: 500

What happens to the BTC in the wallet when a wallet.dat file gets lost or deleted? for example in Poland the an exchange had its 17000 btc deleted. does that mean those coins are gone forever?

Topic: what happens to the BITC when you loose a wallat.dat (Read 963 times)