Will Satoshis coins ever move or be accessed in any way ever again???
Discussion
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or maybe by the time they move, it wonāt matter much anymore
I think about Satoshi quite a bit.
Why? He's not thinking about you at all. I imagine.
What a weird question.
True. Somehow I found it funny in the moment. But also, he's not relevant to bitcoin anymore. Which was his gift to the world. He needs no more involvement. I just imagine him out there somewhere, living a peaceful life, never even thinking about bitcoin. Or watching in wonder.
Agree 100% but what human being could ever do that? None that I know. None in the history of the entire world.
Satoshi isnāt human. Canāt be. His actions go against every law of the universe. Jesus didnāt just preach. He let everyone know what he was doing & why. As an example.
Satoshiās coins represent the biggest bounty for quantum piratesāresearchers using advances in quantum cryptography to crack ECDSA keys.
Satoshiās coins moving would mean that itās time to upgrade your UTXOs to a quantum-resistant signature scheme.
Will this happen? Itās hard to put a probability number on it. My current estimate would be maybe 3% chance of it happening within the next 10 years and 70% chance of it happening sometime in the next 100 years.
Or when quantum computers get close we give Satoshi a year to move his coins then make his wallets inaccessible.
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Iāve given this some thought. It could be done with a soft fork.
A fair way to do it would be to have a rolling block-height before which UTXOs become unspendable. A simple implementation would be something like MAX_BLOCK_AGE=900000, which would mean that any UTXO from more than 900000 blocks ago would be invalid. This implementation would move the wall forward at a rate of 1 block per block mined. That is, a window of 900000 blocks would always be valid.
But you could have the wall move forward more slowly, like at a rate of one block per every X blocks mined. This would create a lengthening window.
In any case, such a soft fork would be incredibly contentions because it violates the your-keys-your-coins doctrine. It may be more popular with the community to simply have old abandoned coins act as bounty for quantum pirates.
I agree that the coins should be left as a bounty. Also, that soft fork would undermine the use of bitcoin for very long term store of value. You could always move your multi-generational savings every 80000 blocks, but why force the extra transaction volume, and why would we want money to expire?
Seems like it's actually a good thing to have the bounty, so that white hat hackers have an incentive to find any possible way to break the signature scheme without actually stealing anyone's coins. They could steal, but world probably be worse of, because it would undermine trust in the asset they just acquired. If they find a security flaw, and help patch it, they have earned the bounty.
Iām also generally of the opinion that insecure coins should remain as a bounty. For the rest of us, itās a tripwire that signals when itās time to upgrade security.
