2 ms·
So what about my second question? If I bought all the Bitcoins and deleted them, does that destroy the currency entirely?
by rcthompson 13y ago
So what about my second question? If I bought all the Bitcoins and deleted them, does that destroy the currency entirely?
- olalonde 13y agoIn practice, no because 1) New Bitcoins are created every 10 minutes until we reach ~21M bitcoins. 2) Some people will refuse to sell their Bitcoin to you. In theory, if you can wait until year ~2140, send all the Bitcoins in the world to your address and delete the private key from your hard drive (and brain), then yes. But then, maybe someone could get really lucky and guess your private key. But both those scenarios are uninteresting because they are impossible in practice (they are about as likely as the Flying Spaghetti Monster being real). https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#What_if_someone_bought_up_all_the_existing_Bitcoins.3F https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#What_if_someone_bought_up_all...
- rcthompson 13y agoActually, the question immediately above that one, "Won't loss of wallets and the finite amount of Bitcoins create excessive deflation, destroying Bitcoin?", really gets to the heart of what I really wanted to understand. My phrasing was really meant as a "reduction to absurdity" kind of formulation, as in "what if all the Bitcoins were lost?"
- speeder 13y agoYour question is MU, ie: the question itself is wrong, because doing what you propose is so hard you can consider it impossible