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Maybe Satoshi should have built in such a feature into bitcoin (you don’t use it you lose it). That would have been a much more interesting dynamic (maybe) ins
by will_brown 7y ago
Maybe Satoshi should have built in such a feature into bitcoin (you don’t use it you lose it). That would have been a much more interesting dynamic (maybe) insofar as the original concept of P2P cash which morphed into digital gold/store of value (ie no incentive to spend, create a market/economy).
- chipperyman573 7y agoBecause bitcoin is inherently anonymous, it'd be very difficult (impossible?) to prevent someone from making a new address and just bouncing the coins around. It's an interesting idea, though.
- will_brown 7y agoI thought about that, and it’s just spit balling something off the cuff, but address to address self-spending may have positive impacts on the network vis-a-vis additional transaction fees for miners.
- petronio 7y agoI think that's fine, because then you know that at least the wallets still exist. I wonder how many bitcoins are forever gone from the early days when they were literally cheaper than dirt. I know I had some and failed to backup the wallet properly.
- mhh__ 7y agoThere's several million £s worth in a landfill site in England somewhere
- siavosh 7y agoThe built in mechanism for this incentive is inflation, but bitcoin is deflationary as you observe.
- pigeons 7y agoThis is the demurrage dynamic in freicoin (now tradecraft - https://github.com/tradecraftio/tradecraft https://github.com/tradecraftio/tradecraft) from bitcoin core developers Mark Friedenbach and Jorge Timon.
- londons_explore 7y agoIt would be interesting to see a histogram of the number of days since each bitcoin was last transacted. Should be easy enough for someone who has all the data, but I don't want to download hundreds of gigabytes just to plot a chart...