5 ms·
It seems like you could solve the 'small bids' problem by having a minimum bid size. That bid size could be proportional to the value of the account. E.g. the m
by darawk 7y ago
It seems like you could solve the 'small bids' problem by having a minimum bid size. That bid size could be proportional to the value of the account. E.g. the minimum recovery bid for an account is 5% of it's value.
EDIT: In fact, why not make it a huge percentage of the account value. Even 100%. If you had to bid 100% of the account value to recover it, almost nobody who wasn't the real account owner would take that risk. And the real account holder, being that they knew for sure they would get it back, could presumably find a way to raise money from friends/family/loans to acquire enough capital to make the bid.
EDIT2: In second fact...why not make the lockup period adjustable based on the size of the bid relative to the account value (within limits)? If you bid 50% of the account value, you wait 2x the lockup period. If you bid 200%, you wait 1/2 of the lockup period. You'd need to have a hard minimum lockup of say, 1 month. But in this way, if you were the true account owner, you could bid way more than your account value to get it back pretty quickly, while also ensuring that people that couldn't raise as much capital could get their money back eventually.
- muzani 7y agoIt still doesn't solve the problem that you could presume Satoshi is dead, and bid a million dollars. Odds are better than the startup lottery. I guess there has to be a service that monitors if someone is brute forcing the system.
- fastball 7y agoIf someone is dead and no one else is going to get the coins otherwise, what exactly is the harm in that scenario?
- jon_richards 7y agoYou are putting a huge incentive on DOXing people. If you know when an account holder dies or goes on vacation and others don't, you can take all their money.
- Rebelgecko 7y agoI would hate to be in a situation where anyone could profit billions of dollars if I die or can't access a computer. People have certainly been murdered for less money than that.
- muzani 7y agoWith this in place, if you know someone has a dozen bitcoins, you can literally just kill them, claim their wallet, and retire with the money.
- muzani 7y agoI think it's the other way around. No harm happens if the coins are unclaimed. They're out of circulation, similar to what happens when countries destroy currency. Satoshi has effectively 380 tons of gold worth of btc. His wealth is about 1/10 the amount stored in Fort Knox. And that's just one guy. What of the criminal empires and corrupt politicians who have their wealth stashed away in wallets? There's easily hundreds of billions of dollars of lost money out there. All that money going back into the system destabilizes it. Imagine someone saves up all their lives for 10 btc, then some guy just drops 1000 btc on a house like it was nothing. Pretty soon, there's inflation, and the prices (vs other currencies) plummet. This is all theoretical, but the reality is that there's no harm if nobody gets the coins.