Author: Ilan Oh 2017-12-11 18:37:06
Published on: 2017-12-11T18:37:06+00:00
The topic of Dead Man's Switch in Bitcoin has been discussed in the developer community. Some people suggest implementing a dead man's switch for dormant Bitcoin addresses, which will cause the Bitcoins assigned to them to automatically expire if not used in transactions for some fixed length of time, say ten years. However, others argue that it would force people to move funds around to avoid nullification and create multiple opportunities for errors. Cold storage should be able to stay cold, and miners could choose to censor transactions that move funds close to their expiration time to increase their own future rewards. Furthermore, changing the supply limit would require a hard fork, and it violates one of the basic rules of Bitcoin. It assumes that lost coins are a problem, but lost coins decrease supply, increasing the value of remaining coins. Also, stealing bitcoins from people whose bitcoins have been dormant for a fixed period is not justified. The discussion suggests that trying to take ahead of every possible future human error from the protocol perspective looks more like French socialism than bitcoinism.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T04:32:23.975640+00:00