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Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2B

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191 points aorloff | 1 comments | 04 Jul 25 18:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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throw0101d ◴[04 Jul 25 19:49 UTC] No.44467342[source]▶
Personally I think that this can be considered on the "bug" side of Bitcoin's finite number coins: if, over time, they are lost, then there's a smaller quantity† of currency that is useable to actually do stuff with.

This can make the 'rate of deflation' that occurs worse:

* https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral

* https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-of-bitcoi...

* https://crypto.bi/deflationary/

† I am aware of satoshis.

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Gigachad ◴[05 Jul 25 02:50 UTC] No.44469776[source]▶
I don’t think that’s much of an issue for usage. Since a bitcoin can be divided in to 100,000,000 satoshis. There would only need to be a handful of coins left accessible for the system to be usable.

Being deflationary I agree is a problem, but not the idea that there aren’t enough usable coins left.

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globular-toast ◴[05 Jul 25 09:01 UTC] No.44471229[source]▶
Everyone always repeats the "deflationary bad" mantra, but I wonder if it really would be. Is the world really going to come crashing down if people only spend on things they need rather than endlessly cycling through shit they don't?
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1. jMyles ◴[05 Jul 25 14:19 UTC] No.44472981[source]▶
> Is the world really going to come crashing down if people only spend on things they need rather than endlessly cycling through shit they don't?

In broad strokes, this is perhaps the most important question of environmental sustainability which stems from monetary policy.

Second most important is the matter of how much energy is spent on security (eg, in the case of bitcoin, the horrifying amounts of power spent on SHA256 hashing, and in the case of USD, the perhaps even more horrifying energy consumption of the global petrodollar empire).

We spend so much deliberation on this second question that we often ignore the first: what monetary policies will make us chill out on the whole importing-plastic-shit-we-don't-need-from-the-other-side-of-the-earth thing?