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One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held over 1B dead at 41

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Re: One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held over 1B dead at 41

#81

Post by anonporridge »

enkid wrote: post #70
anonporridge wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he didn't have a backup plan in place to be accessible by his estate, then yes, the coins are dead. The coins dying with him are actually the best case scenario for all other holders. "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone." - Satoshi Nakamoto

Unless this alerts people to the risk of losing a private key and they decide owning Bitcoin isn't a great place to store wealth.

Unless they then do the most minimal amount of research and realize that unlike any other store of wealth, they can redundantly back it up in multiple locations.

You can even split up your key in an M of N format so that a) no single compromised location causes loss, and b) some number of storage locations can be lost without losing your key.

Can you do that with gold? Land? Art? Cash? Bonds? Stocks? All of these rely on either securing a single location where the wealth is stored and moving to another place is either expensive, risky, or necessarily impossible (land/buildings), and/or they rely on trusting some custodian to preserve your claim on that wealth.

Re: One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held over 1B dead at 41

#82

Post by thatsabadidea »

dheera wrote: post #21
anonporridge wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he didn't have a backup plan in place to be accessible by his estate, then yes, the coins are dead. The coins dying with him are actually the best case scenario for all other holders. "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone." - Satoshi Nakamoto

Even if they didn't, the rest of the world could probably peacefully agree to a hard fork in which those coins stop existing. One of the disadvantages of crypto, I suppose, is that people could gang up and hard fork against any arbitrary billionaire even if they were alive.

If I say hard-fork enough, maybe I sound like I know about crypto things.

You don't know what it takes to do a fork of bitcoin. Many have tried, none have succeeded.

Re: One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held over 1B dead at 41

#83

Post by dheera »

xkjkls wrote: post #56
dheera wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I hope nothing happens to me, I've always thought about writing a "dead man switch" piece of code that sends all my keys and passwords to a couple of trusted people if multiple signals all suggest that the unfortunate has happened. For example, all of the following must be true: * Zero Github commits in a week * Zero Facebook or Instagram posts in a week * Zero e-mail outbox messages in a week * Zero smart…

What if you go on vacation for a week and your email server goes down?

okay well s/week/month/ or s/week/quarter/ Adjust it to something reasonable.

Re: One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held over 1B dead at 41

#84

Post by cyanydeez »

bradleyjg wrote: post #75
anonporridge wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Na, that's stupid with cash because we can arbitrarily print more of it. Any cash burning event would be of marginal collective contribution. It actually matters with bitcoin because of the hard supply cap. Every lost coin shrinks the pie.

“We” can arbitrarily print more Bitcoin or dollars. In either case you just need consensus among the correct group of people.

infact "we" can just seitch to any other infinite coins cause again, theres barely anything but grandfsther clauses tying bitcoin to any realworld value

Re: One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held over 1B dead at 41

#85

Post by DennisP »

xkjkls wrote: post #71
DennisP wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin has had multisig wallets for a long time: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multi-signature So it's not that hard to distribute several keys of the multisig to various heirs, who would have to agree on any transfers of funds. Another option is to keep each key in a different safe deposit box, with a will stating who gets access to the boxes.

Even with that, who do you trust to actually do any real transfer of your bitcoin in a fully secure way? Certainly not your lawyer, legal offices carry so many security problems. With a total of $1 billion at stake, there are some very real risks of attack.

I'd educate the people who will get the money. They get access to the safe deposits, and issue the transactions. With a multisig, there's no single point of failure, and with hardware wallets there's little risk of getting hacked.

Re: One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held over 1B dead at 41

#86

Post by dheera »

gurchik wrote: post #79
dheera wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I hope nothing happens to me, I've always thought about writing a "dead man switch" piece of code that sends all my keys and passwords to a couple of trusted people if multiple signals all suggest that the unfortunate has happened. For example, all of the following must be true: * Zero Github commits in a week * Zero Facebook or Instagram posts in a week * Zero e-mail outbox messages in a week * Zero smart…

I've thought about dead man's switches as well, but with two differences: One, I think a week is too short, as another person has already said. I'm planning a week vacation soon and want to be unplugged the entire time. Also, while rare, I can imagine a natural disaster could last longer than a week and the last thing I want to worry about is making sure I send a few emails. Second, I'm curious why you want so many c…

I might forget to click a link periodically, especially if I get busy, or take a vacation. But it's highly unlikely that I will be absent from an entire set of services like the above.

If I would forget to click a link, it's either because I'm super busy with work, in which there will be multiple Github commits per day, OR it's because I'm enjoying a vacation, in which my social media might be more active.

I have been away from technology but not for more than 2 weeks at a time. I suppose just s/week/month/ or whatever.

Re: One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held over 1B dead at 41

#87

Post by pennaMan »

lmilcin wrote: post #68
pennaMan wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange, on the McAfee thread people where bathing in hate for the guy and I kinda respected his crazy life. This guy, being my conational that I never heard of, I got into a bit of digging and discovered a really creepy couple of blogs of women with CS PhDs that talk about him like some kind of cult leader and at the same time apparently the man regularly had 4chan level public discourse. What's up with that? Does a…

Somebody went to the trouble of creating a completely new throwaway account just to drop a bunch of insults. That's not "uncovering knowledge".

so we'll just sweep the CS PhDs sex(?)(sex prose?) cult under the rug because grandparent wanted anonymity and was a bit harsh in expressing reality?

What should be brought up is why does GP have such strong feelings towards the guy? And why does he have this strange following?

http://web.archive.org/web/20200922180636if_/http://trilema....

http://ossasepia.com/2021/06/24/severed

Re: One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held over 1B dead at 41

#89

Post by anonporridge »

lostmsu wrote: post #73
meowkit wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoins can be split down to 8 decimal places. Given the current loss/mining rate its totally possible for BTC to become difficult to operate, but its also possible for the mining cap to be removed or for coins to be split further.

8 decimal places are already bordering insufficient: there are real world currencies whose unit costs less than 1 satoshi. See https://www.fiatmarketcap.com/

Yeah, but in how many of those currencies are people actually using base units for transactions? I'd wager they're all trading notes denominated with thousands or millions of units for a loaf of bread, like the Zimbabwe trillion dollar note, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7832601.stm

Also, there is already a trick on the lightning network to trade sub satoshis without requiring a hardfork, probabilistic payments, https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2017/project/7.pdf

Re: One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held over 1B dead at 41

#90

Post by tolbish »

sneak wrote: post #31
elondaits wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LastPass has a “dead man switch” where my wife (authorized by me) can request access to my account and if I don’t respond for a month she gets it.

That means that LastPass themselves can access your account contents at any time, too. That's an accident waiting to happen.

Not really. LastPass doesn't need a copy of the key for this to be secure. Only the person you have authorized needs a copy.
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