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San Francisco man has 2 password guesses left to access $220 million in Bitcoin
(www.pressdemocrat.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2021
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You know, this brings up a really interesting point about bitcoin that I'd never thought of before. As far as I remember, the number of bitcoins that can be generated is finite, as the mining algorithm becomes more complex until it is impossible to solve. It makes sense in theory; you don't want bitcoins to be generated forever because they would constantly be depreciating in value.
But, on the other side of the coin (heh), bitcoins can be permanently lost. Again, as far as I know, once a Bitcoin has been lost on a physical drive, it can never be recovered. which would mean, that at some point not only will the number of bitcoins in the world stop increasing, it will actually begin to decrease, because there will always be accidents where people lose hard drives, forget passwords, etc.
So doesn't that mean that bitcoin won't exist forever? Unless they divide them into smaller and smaller pieces, which I think also has a limit, at some point the number of bitcoins will decrease until there aren't enough left.
It's estimated that ~20% of bitcoins are lost forever- worth around $140 billion at the current exchange rate. It's a brilliant lesson on artificially induced scarcity and its effect on market prices. I'm just blown away the more I think about it. Some anonymous programmer decided to code digital money that is inherently deflationary solely on the basis of the algorithm that it's built on- and the whole world decided these tokens have value! One of these days, we're gonna see this spill out into real world wars.
He didn't even code it. Dude just wrote a fucking white paper bad got a bunch of other people to help with the work
Yeah, and that makes it even more astounding. He published a paper about a theoretical currency and got thousands of computer scientists to dedicate their lives to it. Not even Jesus could attract such devoted followers.
CompSci is still in the humors phase of its development as a science or engineering discipline and I'm a software dev.