Author: Radoslaw Biernacki 2017-12-11 18:13:26
Published on: 2017-12-11T18:13:26+00:00
A proposal to implement a "dead man's switch" to Bitcoin addresses has been put forward, which would cause Bitcoins assigned to dormant addresses to automatically expire. This would solve the problem of lost Bitcoins, estimated to be around 4 million of the 16.4 million mined so far, due to people losing private keys for their addresses. The proposal suggests that after a fixed period of time, say ten years, if an address has not been used in transactions, the Bitcoins assigned to it would expire. However, altering the supply limit would require a hard fork and violate one of the basic rules of Bitcoin, ultimately resulting in it no longer being considered "Bitcoin". The miner's reward calculation would also take into account expired Bitcoins, which could potentially result in an increase in miner rewards if a sufficient number of Bitcoins expire.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T23:02:51.921322+00:00