Quote from: george51 on December 23, 2013, 01:29:40 PM

Quote from: Abdussamad on December 23, 2013, 12:44:57 PM

Quote from: george51 on December 23, 2013, 12:09:54 PM

Coin ~~Recycling~~ Stealing

FTFY

Useful input - surely if the coins haven't been touched in 100 years it can't be counted as stealing - the way I look at it is that at the beginning, before most people here had even heard of bitcoin, people tried it for a while didn't really see it going anywhere and subsequently deleted/lost/no longer have access to wallet.dat with potentially 100's/1000's of coins.

That would no longer happen today, as the idea of bitcoin is publicised more, and people know its got worth. Look for example at the story of the harddrive in the landfill with ~6K (if i remember right) bitcoins in.

Quote from: wumpus on December 23, 2013, 12:38:56 PM

There is some level of psychological attractiveness to making sure that all coins remain in circulation.

It's certainly possible to implement this: there would need to be consensus to ignore all blocks older than a certain number of blocks, as well as add unspent outputs in those blocks to the miner reward.

But it would create a very weird and irregular incentive for miners around the 100-year mark as some early blocks may cause thousands of coins to re-enter circulation. Even by today's standards these are enormous amounts.

So it may be preferable to simply consider them dead.

Okay point taken - but this irregular incentive would die down, as I believe, although people will always still lose coins there will be nothing like the amount that was lost at the beginning. Also could this be controlled by adding an artificial maximum added to the miners reward? so only x coins per block can be claimed from coins older that 100 years?

I think it would be better to continue with the current mining reward at the time the unused coins are released and round it up to the next integer (1, in case the reward is 0). This shouldn't attract miners more than it does already.
I think it's a strong psychological point and the community should come up with a solution as the existence of 21 millions coins is one the selling point here