Topic: Will occasional losses of bitcoin wallets limit available maximum bitcoins? - page 2. (Read 26881 times)

What? Don't they work for you? If you don't get service that you like stop paying, they aren't going to force you to keep paying, they aren't the criminals.

/sarcasm

Damn, i really hate this as it is very common in my country.
You come to them asking for help, and you get your ass kicked instead.

Ain't that the truth.

The police here couldn't find their ass with both hands. They'd likely just have glazed-over eyes if you tried to report a stolen wallet.dat file.

If you were really lucky they'd find something to charge you with. Perhaps a burnt out tail light on your car?

 


 

I would imagine that the end results would be the same as when I reported my stolen bicycle as a child.  Too many adults still have a childlike faith in the abilities of the police.

Can you imagine going to the police today to report the theft of your wallet.dat 

what's your coin recovery mechanism when someone breaks into your house and steals your stash of cash and valuables?

the 'stolen bitcoin' recovery mechanism is exactly the same.

Some will, certianly.  Those people can stick to paypal, or buy insurance.  Not that a sum as large as what Bill Gates could hold in bitcoin is insurable, but it might for others.  I expect that, eventually, bitcoin banks and similar institutions a la Mybitcoin will have to be insured against liability losses in order to attract and keep customers, but the fees that they charge will have to be low enough to compete with the cost of regular bitcoin transactions, as a well managed personal client with encrypted backups is as good a form of prevention of loss as can be insured against for most people with the good sense to accumulate any notable sum.

Sorry about the long sentence, btw.  That's just how long it needed to be.

Such a mechanism would make bitcoin network unnecessary more complex.

that should be fine if it's a result of the owner's fault, under other circumstances, if he's a victim of a crime (theft, sabotage, etc), most people will probably think not having a lost-coin recovery mechanism is a flaw.

To add what kiba is saying, I would also suggest that (out of fear of assassination) Bill could encrypt his wallet with multiple keys such that his backed-up wallet could be decrypting with the combined requirements of (1) a cryptographic confirmation code for Bill's death certificate issued by his specified hospital/DRO/court/insurance provider, (2) one or more keys (depending on the specific terms of his particular will) of Bill's heirs, (3) Bill's lawyer.

Or for this case described above, I would think Bill's 10 million donation would be put in some sortof escrow, whereby there would be specific mechanisms (think *smart contracts*) where the money could be dispersed automatically in monthly .1 million increments.  No need to keep a human around, right?  Cut out the points of failure from dumb human operators.


Sorry, but a dumb government operator just pressed the red 'nuke' button accidentally.

Sorry, but a dumb government person just lost the physical key to the US Bullion Depository.

Ok, but seriously, we can do a thought experiment.  If some rich dude's gold stock pile suddenly disappears from the face of this earth (by some black hole or anti-matter), then what happens?  Well...obviously that rich dude wouldn't be able to spend as much, so the overall aggregate demand curve for society would likely decrease by a small amount.  This would cause the equilibrium supply-demand price point to drop a very small amount for all goods in society that that rich dude would have demanded.

Bill Gates would no longer be in the top ten most rich people list.

sorry but the dumb operator has been backing up the wrong file ... a low probability event,  just wondering what if it really happens.

It's called backing up and encrypting it.

or like the movie Gold Finger, some organized crime purposely steals and destroys (loses) all the bitcoin stored in Fort Knox; all the sudden, their stash of bitcoins becomes much more valuable. This will be much more feasible than the plot in the movie.

Let's say bitcoin has been widely adopted, the wallet.dat containing Bill Gate's net worth crashed (because his misplaced faith in Windows) and there's no way to recover the file; his foundation need this money to pay 10 million children's medical bill -- in another word, there's catastrophic/extraordinary consequence if the money cannot be recovered -- should there be a mechanism to deal with this kind of situations?

Yup.

Do you really believe this?


Bitcoin is a medium of exchange first, but if some among us choose to save in it, that is their business.  There is no conflict there.


Relative to what?  The value of the US dollar floats also, and is quite volatile considering it's base economic size.  Bitcoin's relative value will settle down once the inflation rate and adoption rate mature in a few more years.


There is more than one way to accomplish this end.


Don't use it.

The bitcoin is divisible, easily to 8 places and it is possible to patch it to do more later on. You don't need higher and higher amounts, but you may need more and more units, we have that.

FOFOA is great, I wonder when he'll write about bitcoin.

The U.S. does not care about lost coins because it introduces new coins at a rate sufficient to compensate.

The actual quantity of paper bills and metal coins in circulation is market driven.

If all of us decide to cut up our credit cards, withdraw our savings from the banks in cash, and pay cash for everything, then they just print more bills and mint more coins.

If a month later, we reverse our decision and return a huge mountain of paper and coin to banks for deposit, they burn the bills and melt down the coins or put them aside out of circulation.

Bitcoin needs to decide whether it is an alternative medium of exchange, or an alternative long term store of wealth.

It is way too young and fragile to provide a reliable long term store of wealth; so it necessarily will raise and fall on its suitability as a medium of exchange.

A suitable medium of exchange needs to hold its value relatively stable over the short term.  If the market price of some good or service, specified in some currency unit, rises or falls noticeably, it should mostly be because of something to do with that good or service, not with a recent surplus or shortage of the currency unit, relative to the demand for that currency by the current economic activity.

As FOFOA notes in http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2010/12/windmills-paper-tigers-straw-men-and.html :

One of the essential and defining properties of bitcoin is that it not so react.  After an initial buildup, its supply is permanently capped and in the long run, declining at a gradual and slow rate, regardless of overall economic activity.  This is a property perhaps suitable to a long term store of wealth, not a medium of exchange.

I don't think this works.