Recovering Lost Bitcoins

[mcdouglasx]

So a lot of bitcoin has been lost due to incorrect wallet addresses and human errors..
     I however think that at this point of technological advancement, there should be a way to recover lost bitcoins. Not just bitcoins but other cryptocurrencies too. Now this may not be possibly done by the careless user, but it could be found by miners.
      Lost bitcoins should have a way to be mined back into the market and Recovered..
   Is there a project about this already?? What is your opinion and do you think it's is possible

I don't think it's advisable to make modifications to the blockchain to extract "lost" bitcoins. This would mean losing the essence of the immutability of the blockchain. What I would suggest is a type of transaction or redemption script that remains in the mempool, for example, 100 blocks, and that the recipient must respond to this transaction for redemption. Otherwise, if the recipient does not do so, it will not be included in a block; instead, once the period has elapsed, it will be removed from the mempool.

This would somehow prevent future bitcoins from being unintentionally burned.

[MusaPk]

If bitcoin is lost, the coin will become scarce. That will add up to the value of the remaining coins that are not lost.

Already we have limited supply of Bitcoins i.e. there will be 21 million bitcoin that will be ever generated. There is no clear figure that tells how many Bitcoins are there that can't be accessed since dormant wallets are getting active very often. There are many cases in early days of bitcoin, when people used to send bitcoins to each other for fun and for free. Lots of such coins can't be accessed now because the owner lost the seed due to his casual attitude towards bitcoin.   

[Solodoski]

There are many cases in early days of bitcoin, when people used to send bitcoins to each other for fun and for free. Lots of such coins can't be accessed now because the owner lost the seed due to his casual attitude towards bitcoin.   

even if such lost coin is recovered, the question is, of what use is it? certain constant like the irrecoverable nature of bitcoin was access to ones keys is lost is one way that helps strengthen the network and doesn't allow for what will look like an alteration or manipulation of any sort in a bid to recovering some lost coin. a further improvement that could be more useful would have been an inclusion of an alternative to the seed phrase such that even when you have lost it, there could be other ways of getting access to your coin so it does not remain lost forever.

[Cricktor]

~~~

That's one of the key points of Bitcoin, that it is limited with a deflationary emission characteristic. No arbitrary money printing like with fiat.

Why is it a problem for you that a certain amount of bitcoins are lost, in the sense they can't be moved anymore?

As Satoshi once said, all lost coins are a donation to all others because lost coins make those that aren't lost a little bit more scarce and more valuable. I have no problem with that.

And don't forget: any of the almost 21 million Bitcoins that will come into existence have been divisible into 100,000,000 Satoshis, so there's plenty of smallest coin chunks. And if need arises it would likely be possible to introduce Millisatoshi or Microsatoshi with a hard fork.

There is no trustless way to determine if some coins are only dormant or truely lost. Provably lost coins are non-zero outputs of OP_RETURN or other provably not satisfiable redeem scripts and not fully claimed coinbase amounts (I may have missed other truely provably burned coins).

Burn addresses with very likely unknown private keys are only lost in the sense that it's not likely anyone will ever find an appropriate private key to move them. Mathematically they're not truely lost, we only don't have enough energy and time to search for the private keys.

[MusaPk]

That's one of the key points of Bitcoin, that it is limited with a deflationary emission characteristic. No arbitrary money printing like with fiat.

Why is it a problem for you that a certain amount of bitcoins are lost, in the sense they can't be moved anymore?

As Satoshi once said, all lost coins are a donation to all others because lost coins make those that aren't lost a little bit more scarce and more valuable. I have no problem with that.

And don't forget: any of the almost 21 million Bitcoins that will come into existence have been divisible into 100,000,000 Satoshis, so there's plenty of smallest coin chunks. And if need arises it would likely be possible to introduce Millisatoshi or Microsatoshi with a hard fork.

There is no trustless way to determine if some coins are only dormant or truely lost. Provably lost coins are non-zero outputs of OP_RETURN or other provably not satisfiable redeem scripts and not fully claimed coinbase amounts (I may have missed other truely provably burned coins).

Burn addresses with very likely unknown private keys are only lost in the sense that it's not likely anyone will ever find an appropriate private key to move them. Mathematically they're not truely lost, we only don't have enough energy and time to search for the private keys.

+2

Satoshi was quite logical in his saying that lost coins are a sort of donations to all other coins in circulation. It's very much clear today. 

The way Bitcoin is progressing and more people are joining in, we defiantly will see a scarcity of Bitcoins in near future when there are more people chasing handful Bitcoins. May be the community moved towards the idea of breaking down Satoshis further through hard fork.

[hosemary]

Provably lost coins are non-zero outputs of OP_RETURN or other provably not satisfiable redeem scripts and not fully claimed coinbase amounts (I may have missed other truely provably burned coins).

There were also coins that were lost due to the coinbase transactions having the same hash.

The coins claimed by miners in blocks number 91722 and 91812 are unspendable.
The coinbase transaction in block number 91722 has the same hash as coinbase transaction in block number 91880 and the coinbase transaction in block number 91812 has the same hash as coinbase transaction in block number 91842.

[d5000]

I saw someone say on the forum (I'd say it was BlackHatCoiner but I'm not sure) that in the not too distant future with quantum computing they could be recovered, although in the same way that the lost ones could be recovered the rest could be stolen but first there would be a change to avoid this (maybe a fork?).

Yes, what you probably mean is that ECDSA (the elliptic curve public key mechanism used in Bitcoin) can be broken with Shor's algorithm on quantum computers. And this means that any Bitcoins which aren't transferred to a "quantum safe" address could be stolen. If quantum computers become capable enough, this is a realistic scenario. However it's quite far away still (a decade at least).

Indeed there were some proposals in the past (also in this forum) that this could be an opportunity to "return lost Bitcoins into circulation" -- i.e. set a deadline to transfer coins to a quantum-safe address, and all the coins which aren't transferred, are considered lost and locked to avoid theft. These coins, according to the proposal, could then be added to the miners' rewards from the next halvings on.

This is the theory. However, it would probably lead to a disruption in Bitcoin's price, this means probably a significant downtrend or crash. The reason is that people are already pricing in the "scarcity" generated by the "new supply reduction" after the next halvings, and while the 21 million BTC limit would not be changed, there would be more new Bitcoins on the market in the future. "Lost bitcoins" are currently "priced in" to be lost forever.

Thus, I don't consider this a good idea, and afaik the reaction of the Bitcointalk community to this proposal was universally negative.

[AndrewWeb]

So a lot of bitcoin has been lost due to incorrect wallet addresses and human errors..
     I however think that at this point of technological advancement, there should be a way to recover lost bitcoins. Not just bitcoins but other cryptocurrencies too. Now this may not be possibly done by the careless user, but it could be found by miners.
      Lost bitcoins should have a way to be mined back into the market and Recovered..
   Is there a project about this already?? What is your opinion and do you think it's is possible

If you try all possible privat keys, you will find all of them. The total number of different Bitcoin private keys is 115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494336 keys

If that is to many keys, you only try half of them. And you will find half of the lost bitcoins. Or you try on third of keys, and you will find on third of of the lost bitcoins. There is however no point in starting with the first keys, that has already successfully been done. You have to start somewhere in the middle.

[Soft Crem]

 But I think that at this point of technological advancement, there should be a way to recover lost bitcoins.
[/quote]

Bitcoin transactions are either peer to peer or customer to customer computer.  It does not pass through any central sewers nor is there any regulatory body to regulate it.  All Bitcoin processing is done online through an open source software.  Anyone can generate bitcoins with bitcoin miner.  The process of generating Bitcoin is always predictable and finite.  As Bitcoin is generated, it is stored in the customer's digital wallet.  If this stored Bitcoin is sent by the customer to someone else's account, a unique electronic signature is created for this transaction which is verified by other miners and stored secretly yet securely within the network.

[Forsyth Jones]

In the Bitcoin context and other coins based on the UTXO model, technically there are no lost coins; what exist are spendable addresses that have become inaccessible because the person who had possession of the private key controlling the funds no longer has it.

Therefore, unless a private key for the address is recovered, there is no way to create outputs from that address.

People lose private keys in various ways, such as failing to make backups, losing the encryption password for the wallet database (e.g., wallet.dat, default_wallet, etc), or losing the wallet backup (often when only one copy is available). That's why it's always important to make backups, replicate them, and store them in secure and distributed locations.

[Cricktor]

In the Bitcoin context and other coins based on the UTXO model, technically there are no lost coins; what exist are spendable addresses that have become inaccessible because the person who had possession of the private key controlling the funds no longer has it.

I object to your claim that there are technically no lost coins for an UTXO transaction model. Off the top of my head for Bitcoin you have lost and completely vanished coins when a miner doesn't claim the full block reward consisting of block subsidy and transaction fees of included transactions in a block. Those unclaimed coins are gone and nowhere visible on the blockchain anymore.

No sane miner would do that but it has rarely happened either deliberately or by bugs (because it happened very rarely I tend to assume it was in the majority of the rare cases a deliberate act to prove whatever point). One example is block 124,724 (claimed 1sat less than block subsidy of 50BTC and no transaction fees at all).

Then there are non-zero OP_RETURN outputs which coins are provably burned because they are not included in the UTXO set anymore. Burned and gone forever, I consider this as truely lost.

Something else are provably burned coins of transaction outputs which spending script provably can't evaluate to True. Those are highly likely non-standard depending on the individual spending script. I'm not entirely sure, but I think those show up in the UTXO set and will never leave it of course because those UTXOs are unspendable due to the unfulfillable spending script.


Technically in theory not lost are coins sent to public addresses with arbitrarily chosen public keys to which no matching private key is known (likely one exists we just don't have the time and energy to find it), like e.g. the uncompressed public address 1JHkucsiQt3WizTfd2r1b9sGeT6cUBXPii derived from the public key 0400...0001 (uncompressed).

Same applies for burner public addresses with arbitrarily chosen HASH160 value for which not even the public key is known, 2⁹⁶ must exist, or something silly like 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE (current unspendable balance 13.35895537BTC) where no public and private key are known for. It doesn't mean, none exists, we just can't find them.

[stwenhao]

the uncompressed public address 1JHkucsiQt3WizTfd2r1b9sGeT6cUBXPii derived from the public key 0400...0001

In your example, you have (x=0,y=1) point, which does not meet y^2=x^3+7 equation. You probably meant 1JRy3CrZciF42nqTJESVuqsBXU3z2p1mDJ.

Code:

04 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001   1JHkucsiQt3WizTfd2r1b9sGeT6cUBXPii
04 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 4218F20AE6C646B363DB68605822FB14264CA8D2587FDD6FBC750D587E76A7EE   1JRy3CrZciF42nqTJESVuqsBXU3z2p1mDJ

[Cricktor]

Looks like you're right. I likely didn't think too much about it when I used the conversion tool at https://iancoleman.io/bitcoin-key-compression/. Apparently you can enter invalid public keys that can't fulfill the equation in the first entry box. My bad and thanks for the correction. I need to learn more in this area...

So my incorrect example is even worse than having a valid public key for which the private key is unknown and which simply can't be found due to the restrictions of our solar system to not have enough time or energy to search for it.

A public address computed from an invalid public key is for sure a coin burner address and will leave unspendable UTXOs behind which stay and bloat the UTXO set forever.

[arabspaceship123]

Is AI going to oversee & manage your vision because it can't be managed as manual interface. In any case it won't be possible to put lost bitcoin's back to mine. If your lost crypto mining plan's to succeed who's going to decide which coins are classified lost or deserve to be mined again ?

So a lot of bitcoin has been lost due to incorrect wallet addresses and human errors..
     I however think that at this point of technological advancement, there should be a way to recover lost bitcoins. Not just bitcoins but other cryptocurrencies too. Now this may not be possibly done by the careless user, but it could be found by miners.
      Lost bitcoins should have a way to be mined back into the market and Recovered..
   Is there a project about this already?? What is your opinion and do you think it's is possible

[takuma sato]

Do you mean when a wallet address is wrong, it goes into another?? And then if the another can be accessed it can be recovered??

Yes whoever owns the address you wrongly sent the BTC to can access it. It is now THEIR BTC to do whatever they want with it.

As for getting it back - it all depends on:
a. if you know who owns the address you (wrongly) sent it to
b. can contact them and then
c. convince them to return the BTC.
Good luck with all that...

Recently, I saw a project that offers a recovering process...via discord ...
So they have a few hundreds of validators and if you write in discord and proof that you have 'good intentions', they'll roll TX back...

All of these "send us your wallet and we will bruteforce it for you" services are scam. Nobody is going to be going through the resources that you require to bruteforce a wallet, which most likely it's impossible unless you used a really weak password, and then send you back the coins. You are better off purchasing the most powerful computer you can afford, and running bruteforcing algos on the password yourself, so you don't have to send your wallet to some third party. I mean there may be some legit business that does this, but I wouldn't trust it.