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Most times when one person "loses" cash another person "finds" it, leaving the money supply unchanged. When a private key is lost all the coins in that wallet a
by Phlarp 13y ago
Most times when one person "loses" cash another person "finds" it, leaving the money supply unchanged. When a private key is lost all the coins in that wallet are lost effectively forever. If this happens with large accounts the potential for it to effect the overall economy cannot be ignored.
- saym 13y agoWhat would the effect be?
- kalleth 13y agoAt a guess, the opposite of Quantitative Easing -- deflation and increasing a bitcoins buying power. Oh, but if it happens to a large enough account, a hit to the confidence of people in bitcoins.
- sktrdie 13y agoWell with my paper wallet analogy, if you lose your private key, someone else will find it as well. But anyway, there are enough divisible Bitcoin units that this doesn't pose itself as being a huge issue. When the network will be hit hard by large amounts of bitcoins trapped behind lost private keys, I'm sure there will be some implementation changes to the Bitcoin software in order to free up the coins and make them go into circulation (to be mined). For example if an address hasn't been touched for 20 years (death? lost key?).