So, a ton of bitcoin has gone missing because of stuff like wrong wallet addresses and just plain human mistakes.
I really think that with how far technology has come, there should be a way to get those lost bitcoins back. Not just bitcoin, but other cryptos too. Sure, it might not be the careless user who can recover them, but maybe miners could do something about it.
Lost bitcoins should be able to be mined back into circulation and recovered.
Is there already a project working on this? What do you all think? Is it even possible?
No Bitcoin is lost on the network, only people lost the way to access due to many reasons.
Bitcoin was made in a way of trustless working model so how can you verify as a miner that this TX is due to human errors. And miners can't access the Bitcoin sent/received they only receive the block rewards and TX fee.
Let's put this in a way, you lost your physical wallet that has dollars now you want the exact amount of dollars to be printed again by the central bank for your carelessness.
What if the coin is not lost but the address is dormant? Bitcoin transaction should not be reversible. It is just like if gold is lost. Protect your coins and protect your seed phrase.
If bitcoin is lost, the coin will become scarce. That will add up to the value of the remaining coins that are not lost.
Assume that some fund hasn't been moved for years. How can you know that whether the owner has lost access to the fund or the owner has decided to hodl the fund?
Here is Bitcoin creator's opinion about lost bitcoins.
I don't agree with OP, but there are coins that have been provably lost.
Some coins have been lost by creating OP-return outputs. Some coins were lost due to miners not claiming the block reward and there were also coins that were lost due to the coinbase transactions having the same hashes.
One simple question. Why?
No. I dont think that will ever be possible. Technically, there are no "lost coins", there are only unspendable coins, but that is also debatable in most cases.
Lost bitcoins even as odd as it may sound are actually beneficial to the bitcoin network. The Bitcoin network has a supply cap of 21 million and what that basically means is the total or rather maximum number of bitcoins that can ever be mined is 21 million now lost bitcoins reduce the circulating amount but doesn't affect the supply cap.
Is basically just the simple economics of demand and supply lesser coins means they will have more value add more value means each coin is what more than if they were excess.
How do miners know a bitcoin is lost? Only the owner really knows, since they made the transactions. If every inactive wallet were marked as lost, that would be a mistake as many people just hold their bitcoins for the long term, and they're not lost at all.
So while your idea sounds cool, it just won't work in practice. Keep that imagination wide, though, maybe one day you'll come up with something that actually does the trick.
It seems you don't know what exactly miners do?
Miners don't have tools or features just to simply mine those BTC back and recover.
What they do is verify transactions and mine blocks that contain rewards, meaning what they mine are new Bitcoins plus transaction fees, not from other users' wallets.
So, there's no way to recover lost BTC if you accidentally sent it to the wrong address.
You might have a chance to recover your BTC if you accidentally sent it to an exchange or if the scammer or hacker sent them to a centralized exchange.
Lost bitcoins are gone forever. Miners cant recover them because their job is just to add and verify transactions on the blockchain. The only way to recover lost bitcoins is if someone still holds the private key to the wallet address where the bitcoins were sent, and miners have no way of doing that.
So, the idea of recovering lost bitcoins just isnt practical. In fact, many lost bitcoins, mostly due to human error, are predicted to keep accumulating. And as more coins vanish, the supply shrinks while demand stays strong, which could drive up the price. It's basic supply and demand at work.
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...
Only IF the address you entered is a valid address created by someone.
AFAIK it is possible to send to an entirely random address that no one owns in which case the coins are gone forever aka, being 'burned'. Well, not literally gone - they will still exist in the blockchain but no one can ever use them. All the chain logic does is verify that the address format is correct - it does not and cannot check if it is a 'real' address owned by someone.
How did you come up with that considering there is no way to count the coins that are actually lost?
If it were "technically" possible to recover a private key from any address, then Bitcoin would be considered broken and it will cease to exist unless the algorithms are replaced before it becomes possible!
As someone else asked too: WHY?
No and there should never be because we have no way of knowing if a coin that hasn't moved for a long time is actually lost. For example I have some dust I received back in 2014 that I have never moved. That is 11 years but you cannot call it lost since I do have the key of it and can move it any time I wish to.
Addresses, as in the string you enter in the wallet UI, have a checksum which means if you enter random characters into that textbox or have an address and change some of its characters, the chances of it being valid is low. Meaning the wallet software would reject it and not be able to create the transaction in first place.
I don't know how often such a nonsense of recovery of (assumed or proven, doesn't matter) lost Bitcoins or reverse Bitcoin transactions has been posted somewhere in this forum. The OP could've easily found numerous past threads but apparently didn't care at all.
Taking just one design principle of Bitcoin into account, namely to be trustless (in my opinion this also implies decentralization), it should be clear that there can't be a sensible reversability, nor any sensible return into circulation of dormant (for whatever reason) coins when that weren't implemented and accepted from the beginning.
Consider reading in the Bitcoin whitepaper something like: 10 years dormant UTXOs are flagged for one year to go into a "recycling fund"; after 11 years of dormancy such UTXOs are moved irreversibly into such a "recycling fund"; coins in this "recycling fund" are cleverly brought back into circulation by adding a small portion to ongoing block rewards (already kind of unfair) or some sort of tail emission.
(I can't make up all clever details here, nor do I want to. Assume the proposed mechanics sound good enough.)
What would you think, if you had read something like this? I can only speak for myself and same as now, I would've thought: why? WHY is this necessary?
From other questions the OP stated, I can only deduce that OP doesn't understand some basic principles and inner mechanics of Bitcoin. Well, you can still make any proposals you want, but accept to be dismissed for many good reasons.
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...
This is 100% scam. You cannot revert a confirmed TX on bitcoin network. Well, you can in theory, but it costs more than you could imagine (plus: if a crypto coin's transactions can be reverted so easily, then that coin is worthless).
So please learn more and don't spread scams and misinformation in here.
Plus, there are no such things as validators in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
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?). I don't have the technical knowledge to confirm the veracity of the statement but I wanted to bring it to the debate.
While some may disagree, it's true that there are lost coins caused by human mistakes, burn addresses (which I believe are completely insane), errors, experiments, etc. We have a point here about how to adjust the supply of minted coins due to these losses as these coins are minted and counted in the total supply yet remain inaccessible?
Miners cannot verify whether a coin was sent to the correct address or not that responsibility lies with the sender, since ownership is tied to the private keys if a transaction is sent to an incorrect address the coins remain inaccessible as long as no one else can find the key somehow However in this case they are not truly lost
Don't forget we are in a decentralized system and the rule is simply not your keys, not your coin which simply means everyone on the blockchain is responsible for the safety of their coin. But let's assume a mechanism was derived such that coins lost due to human errors as stated don't you think the Bitcoin network will be prone to brute-force where some one will try to recover a Bitcoin that is not lost and the will keep trying different methods and I bet you there will more than 70% chance they will succeed. Except another protocol will set or established to ensure the coin being recovered belongs to the original owner and we know that will cost more than even mining the coin in the first place.
So hell no decentralization will never support recovery of lost Bitcoin. Once it is lost, it is lost forever.