Now if I understand correctly, unless someone inherits a private key of his, his bitcoins are effectively dead now, right? I wonder how this will impact the economics of cryptocurrencies over time: I'm starting to see more and more reminders to congratulate dead people on work anniversaries on LinkedIn, and it feels quite morbid.
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.
Maybe I'm just not aware of all of the Opsec things that have been done to make Bitcoin transfer stupid simple, but I have instant goosebumps anytime someone claims they can do something in an operationally secure way, especially when 10 figures of currency are involved. At that point, you need to be training your protocol to be secure enough to survive the team from Ocean's 11 or the Russian government, not just script kiddies with too much time on their hands.
That's not a solution, that's another layer of abstraction to try to solve the problems of blockchain/decentralization for money with a new layer of issues.
Eg. The hashed list of emails. It's going to be a hard reality check if some of your "friends" don't have access to their emails anymore or just aren't friends anymore after x years. The amount he suggests is 7, which is insanely much. Even people have issues with their parents with money alone.
It's a nice fantasy though, but not workable in reality.
The currency is deflationary but you don't have any fundamental issues until you have issues subdividing the currency, but given that the protocol supports dividing down to 0.00000001 BTC that's not a significant issue (and I'm sure the community would patch that long before it became a problem).
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
The currency is digital. If the current smallest unit is worth too much, then we can just increase the decimal places.
Bitcoin is not like gold where its limited supply makes it infeasible as a currency for a large number of people because the size of the coins for everyday purchases would be too small to physically handle (hence the concurrent use of less value dense silver).
Why would anyone do that? The stolen coins would become worthless as the other 49% of the network flee to a platform that doesn't come with the risk of arbitrary theft.
If we know anything about Bitcoin is that hardforking it doesn't work and you end up with coins that are worth a couple percentage in value compared to the original chain.
Some libertarian crank (I forget who) said that the best charity a person could do is to cash out their fortune and burn the paper dollars. This is a deflationary event and does just what you mention--gives everybody a little gift. Somehow a cynical suggestion like that is considered serious now. Because it is high-tech I guess.
infact "we" can just seitch to any other infinite coins cause again, theres barely anything but grandfsther clauses tying bitcoin to any realworld value
Technically true, but the big difference is that if someone hard forks bitcoin to start printing more, holders will see their coins fork with the chains. You'll have both the old, hard money and the new diluted money, and the market will decide which one is more valuable. This doesn't happen with fiat.
It doesn't matter with any currency. You don't price things by how many dollars exist. You price things at what people will pay. If the billions weren't being spent, its about the same as if they're never spent.
Printing money and giving it away causes inflation because people can use it to buy things but having money printed but locked away does nothing. If this money was locked up then its not much of a change.
It does not give "everybody" a little gift, only people who already have money (since their existing money is now worth X% more). People with 0 still have 0, and people in debt have to work even harder to pay it off. Something that disproportionally helps rich people is the opposite of charity.
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.
I'm not saying it's not possible to back up the key, I'm saying if a billion dollars disappear overnight because one person was stupid, we don't know the way people would react to that. May be they would value Bitcoin more or maybe they would value it less. It's not apparent less supply equals more demand in this specific case.
You're presenting this like it's a secret thing that lost private keys are irrecoverable.
It's not a secret. Immutability is one of the key features and regularly advertised part of the system. So much so that when that irreconcilability is violated (e.g. rolling back the DAO hack in Ethereum) it's seen as a negative.
There might be some morons who didn't do any research before investing, but they won't be a huge loss if they sell out and stay out.
> or they rely on trusting some custodian to preserve your claim on that wealth.
Is this going to be one of this discussion where people try to pretend banks haven't existed for centuries and work very well for pretty much everyone?
This argument always baffled me as pro crypto person.
There is a subset of religious crypto zelots that see banks as evil incarnate.
Banks are example of what more-less people want from their currency. And crypto should be taking notes from CENTURIES of experiences. And not just shun it all and start from scratch.
Loosing keys to wallet is huge problem for ubiquity of crypto, and as a currency of the future it might be fatal flaw. If someone steals my IRL wallet, I call bank to cancel my cards and cry a bit about lost cash and hustle of getting all ID's etc back. If I loose crypto wallet, its gone all of it. Without proper precautions of multiple wallets and safeguards you risk loosing all your wealth in accident or robbery without much to do about it.
How so? Prices aren't set by the amount of BTC in the wild. A currency has no inherent demand. No btc holder can offer any more btc for goods than before.
Prices are set by the order books, including how many that are willing to sell and to what price. If a large amount of coins are removed from the market, and the buying pressure stays the same, that will lead to higher prices.
Apple is introducing a mechanism to allow access to certain data after passing: https://www.cultofmac.com/744814/apple-digital-legacy/. It would be great to see more tools and services provide ways to pass on digital information so we don’t have too many haunted digital graveyards not too much digital treasure lying in waste.
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.
You can just give private keys to a bunch of people, and give a cyphertext encrypted to all of them to your attorney, to be distributed upon your death.
I suppose. But that means I must find an attorney first. What do they cost, like $900 an hour? ... I think that's part of what I'm trying to replace by technical means.
> I think that's part of what I'm trying to replace by technical means.
Just use something like Dashlane. People can report you dead, and then you have up until your specified waiting period to mark yourself as not actually dead. If Dashlane goes out of business you'd need a new provider, but as long as you don't die within a month or so of your password manager then you're set. Much better than writing your own.
A week is a short amount of time if you ever take full blown technology holidays. Additionally, zero XXX could be easily broken by some arbitrary function (a Facebook app for instance).
I’d be careful to multi factor data decryption, the encrypted data must be released and some party you trust who isn’t likely to die with you holds a decryption code
Still seems kind of risky in a lot of ways. Like, you get in a car accident, and are out for some period of time. I don't want to publish my obituary too early.
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 conditions to be true before the trigger? I've seen services (and I've thought of setting up a simple self-hosted option) that simply email you a link on a predefined cadence and all you have to do is click the link. In order to protect against some weird spam filtering, I'm thinking a text message or Discord message could also be sent. The odds of both breaking for a month I think is rare. Why might I also want Github commits and phone calls to be checked?
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.
I've thought about this but I just don't trust myself enough to not mess it up and send an alarming and embarrassing email to my loved ones. I'm reminded of the accidental HBO email that got sent out a couple weeks ago.
Probably due to Google Suite -- perhaps they have something similar available at the administrator level -- but that link shows me: "The setting you are looking for is not available for your account."
I really like the idea of that upcoming service. But, not exactly where you want to store a piece of information worth $2B. A good old fashioned safety deposit box in a Swiss bank or something and several layers of trustees would be more applicable in this case.
so, people being fallible and all, are we going to end up in a situation where there is .05 bitcoin remaining in the world; and the government controls it, and backs its fiat with it, and we're right back where we started
Popescu, for those who knew him, was utter scum. A sociopathic narcissistic villain, it's hard to feel anything but relief that the world is now better with his passing. If you have doubts as to the validity of my characterization, a few minutes reading his blog (trilema) will prove enlightening.
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 anyone have info on this? Maybe the blog authors could even clear it up in this thread! But instead the thread gets buried because speaking of the dead (that did not lead a publicly known degenerate lifestyle apparently) is frowned upon.
News of death can be a good trigger to uncover knowledge. Choosing ignorance and shutting down speech because of cultural afterlife superstitions is not productive.
No, we will sweep it because insulting dead is not strictly within HN guidelines. There are better places if your aim is to just insult other people, alive or dead.
I won't challenge that assessment, but both of them seemed to favor a system of minimal government in which neither could bother you.
Compare that to the much more benign-sounding "community organizers" and various other busybodies working to get to a government position which would give them enough power to wreck your life. Even for me, it's hard to feel as strongly about them as about MP, but they are in fact worse.
The craziest thing about this is the beach he died at. Playa Hermosa is pretty well known for mad riptides and not being such a fun place to surf or swim as a result. What the hell was he doing there swimming around casually? There's warning flags everywhere... you can see them in the local news article regarding this
"Los hechos se dieron a eso de las 8:30 a.m. cuando Popescu ingresó al mar a nadar en el sector de Tramonto, fue arrastrado por la corriente y murió en el lugar.
Guardavidas de Playa Jacó le recuerdan a los turistas y bañistas que Paya Hermosa no es una zona para nadar.
Además, recomiendan nunca ingresar al mar solos, sin guardavidas, personas o surfistas cerca a quienes pedir ayuda en caso de emergencia. "
no es una zona para nadar... means it's not a swimming zone. Someone really should have told him harder. Completely avoidable tragedy.
If you read the link I've posted in another comment, along with anything else he's posted on his blog, you'll soon realize he quite literally thought he was a demigod reincarnated and that such mad riptides surely couldn't affect him due to all of the pure manliness he exuded.
Never heard of the guy even though I follow crypto closely . Back in 2010-2013 or so a lot of people quietly amassed a fortune. His death effectively reduces the supply by about .13%, which goes to show just how big bitcoin is.
Okay, I suppose I don't have that much crypto to worry about. I was thinking more along the lines of releasing controls to my websites I control, private repos, notebooks full of ideas, AWS keys, etc.
Straight from his typing fingers... "The ocean takes"
Fitting end for a narcissistic sociopathic rapist who is the embodiment of a hat tipping supreme gentleman who thinks he's quite swell at making fun of supreme gentlemen while somehow not having the slightest shred of self awareness to realize he is infact one of said supreme gentlemen.
idk about rapist, seems more like he was just really into bdsm and exhibitionism, but the nearest town from where he got taken by the ocean is pretty famous for prostitution.
REALLY weird seeing some of these posts where he has girls in the full nude with things up orfices in like the area I live in. It's all I'm going to be able to see walking past that corner now
114 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] thread[1] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html
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.
Eg. The hashed list of emails. It's going to be a hard reality check if some of your "friends" don't have access to their emails anymore or just aren't friends anymore after x years. The amount he suggests is 7, which is insanely much. Even people have issues with their parents with money alone.
It's a nice fantasy though, but not workable in reality.
That would mean putting themselves in great danger.
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
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.
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
The currency is digital. If the current smallest unit is worth too much, then we can just increase the decimal places.
Bitcoin is not like gold where its limited supply makes it infeasible as a currency for a large number of people because the size of the coins for everyday purchases would be too small to physically handle (hence the concurrent use of less value dense silver).
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.
You don't know what it takes to do a fork of bitcoin. Many have tried, none have succeeded.
It actually matters with bitcoin because of the hard supply cap. Every lost coin shrinks the pie.
Which one would you choose?
Printing money and giving it away causes inflation because people can use it to buy things but having money printed but locked away does nothing. If this money was locked up then its not much of a change.
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.
It's not a secret. Immutability is one of the key features and regularly advertised part of the system. So much so that when that irreconcilability is violated (e.g. rolling back the DAO hack in Ethereum) it's seen as a negative.
There might be some morons who didn't do any research before investing, but they won't be a huge loss if they sell out and stay out.
I think you're underestimating the size of this group.
Is this going to be one of this discussion where people try to pretend banks haven't existed for centuries and work very well for pretty much everyone?
Banks are example of what more-less people want from their currency. And crypto should be taking notes from CENTURIES of experiences. And not just shun it all and start from scratch.
Loosing keys to wallet is huge problem for ubiquity of crypto, and as a currency of the future it might be fatal flaw. If someone steals my IRL wallet, I call bank to cancel my cards and cry a bit about lost cash and hustle of getting all ID's etc back. If I loose crypto wallet, its gone all of it. Without proper precautions of multiple wallets and safeguards you risk loosing all your wealth in accident or robbery without much to do about it.
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 devices switched on/off in a week
* Zero outgoing phone calls in a week
etc
Then you don't need complex technical triggers.
Just use something like Dashlane. People can report you dead, and then you have up until your specified waiting period to mark yourself as not actually dead. If Dashlane goes out of business you'd need a new provider, but as long as you don't die within a month or so of your password manager then you're set. Much better than writing your own.
Also, you're almost certainly going to outlive Dashlane.
I’d be careful to multi factor data decryption, the encrypted data must be released and some party you trust who isn’t likely to die with you holds a decryption code
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 conditions to be true before the trigger? I've seen services (and I've thought of setting up a simple self-hosted option) that simply email you a link on a predefined cadence and all you have to do is click the link. In order to protect against some weird spam filtering, I'm thinking a text message or Discord message could also be sent. The odds of both breaking for a month I think is rare. Why might I also want Github commits and phone calls to be checked?
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.
That's an accident waiting to happen.
With that (very Romanian) name, unlikely.
- Chuck Conner in the Rifleman
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 anyone have info on this? Maybe the blog authors could even clear it up in this thread! But instead the thread gets buried because speaking of the dead (that did not lead a publicly known degenerate lifestyle apparently) is frowned upon.
News of death can be a good trigger to uncover knowledge. Choosing ignorance and shutting down speech because of cultural afterlife superstitions is not productive.
That's not "uncovering knowledge".
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
This dude was pure human scum. Straight up shit of the Earth.
McAfee was actually a pretty fun eccentric to watch & wasn't an utterly terrible person by any real measure of the meaning.
Compare that to the much more benign-sounding "community organizers" and various other busybodies working to get to a government position which would give them enough power to wreck your life. Even for me, it's hard to feel as strongly about them as about MP, but they are in fact worse.
https://www.teletica.com/sucesos/extranjero-de-41-anos-murio...
"Los hechos se dieron a eso de las 8:30 a.m. cuando Popescu ingresó al mar a nadar en el sector de Tramonto, fue arrastrado por la corriente y murió en el lugar.
Guardavidas de Playa Jacó le recuerdan a los turistas y bañistas que Paya Hermosa no es una zona para nadar.
Además, recomiendan nunca ingresar al mar solos, sin guardavidas, personas o surfistas cerca a quienes pedir ayuda en caso de emergencia. "
no es una zona para nadar... means it's not a swimming zone. Someone really should have told him harder. Completely avoidable tragedy.
That actually seems like rather a lot to me in a single blow (if the keys are actually lost forever of course).
Warning: NSFW/Nudity
https://web.archive.org/web/20210420205839/http://trilema.co...
Straight from his typing fingers... "The ocean takes"
Fitting end for a narcissistic sociopathic rapist who is the embodiment of a hat tipping supreme gentleman who thinks he's quite swell at making fun of supreme gentlemen while somehow not having the slightest shred of self awareness to realize he is infact one of said supreme gentlemen.
Man, what a weirdo.
REALLY weird seeing some of these posts where he has girls in the full nude with things up orfices in like the area I live in. It's all I'm going to be able to see walking past that corner now
https://web.archive.org/web/20210424030258/http://trilema.co...
If you're an incel, I wouldn't recommend going into it if you didn't already follow the guy. You may only become more radicalized, lol.