Quote from: TheUltraElite on Today at 09:32:21 AM

Quote from: hhatton93 on February 19, 2024, 04:05:15 PM

Yo,
So apparently there's like 4-6 million bitcoin that are lost and gone? Just curious if there was any ideas or plans to update the protocol to replace the lost bitcoins if there was a consensus, if that is even possible.

We already have a consensus for that, lost coins are lost forever.

No plans to update it from the core developers and I hope they keep it that way. Those who have lost their bitcoins will most likely want to get it back and sell it right on the market causing massive dumps.

Less coins in circulation means more demand and more price of a satoshi per fiat currency.

I am sensing that part of the difficulty comes from an inability to prove a negative, which contributes to the logic that non-ones coins are going to be replaced once they lose access to their private keys and/or are otherwise unable to figure out how to access their coins.

So ownership of BTC revolves around whether you have the private keys, and if you say that you don't have the private keys, there is no way to really verify that; however, we can verify that you have the private keys when you enter them and you access your BTC wallet.

In the end, it seems that the main solution would be making bitcoin more divisible, in the event that one satoshi starts to become too expensive and too impractical as the smallest unit, and so if a decent amount of private keys are lost and continue to get lost (which seems almost inevitable that keys are going to continue to get lost), then whichever coins are left might need to be subdivided further in the event that there are not enough coins to go around or their are not able to be used in the transaction of goods, services and/or other reasons for transacting value.