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Comment by repler | Hacker News Reader

It is not "lost forever": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15644454

They can do a hard fork and this money will re-appear.

Could we also say that Bitcoin doesn't really have a limit on the number of coins to be mined?

It's built into the agreed upon protocol. Votes in the future may change this, but that would compromise the value proposition. I don't think we can say that until over a hundred years from now in 2140-2150 when the last block is mined and people scramble for alternate ways.

It's lost unless we change the rules of the game. If we change the rules, we can of course do anything.

Rules were changed once already, why not again? Just because core developers are not involved? I really wonder what Vitalik is going to say on the topic.

I wish code was the law, but apparently, it's not. Same rules for everybody, please.

> Rules were changed once already

For the record, I did (do) not support that either.

I am not sure how your link disputes the title. A hard fork to a new currency still means that the past currency is unusable forever, and in the world of crypto, that means lost forever.

The title makes it sound like people lost their money.

didn't they? People invest in hardware, pay electric bills, even purchase coins from stock exchanges to have them and suddenly - fork? of course they lost money.

The point stands that it is not "lost forever".

When you invest in the stock market, and the market crashes, THAT money is lost forever. This is not that.

> THAT money is lost forever

No, it isn't, because the price can go back up in the future. In this case, there is no hope of recovery unless you count the entire network pretending this never happened as recovery. Ironically, the real stock market is more immutable in practice than Eth.

I think it's difficult for some people to truly understand the concept of currently. They don't realize that it's a fictitious thing that gets is value solely from others trusting it. So to them, a fork is just a fork. Ya know, some money here and some money there. What's the big deal right? What they don't seem to grasp is that this action kills the trust of the old currency. It has no value moving forward. It's dead and will quickly become useless.

People have developed this expectation for currency (a dollar being this thing that you can hold which always equals this amount printed on this price tag) without having any real understanding of what currency is really. This leads to odd assumptions.

Under the current implementation and rules of the Etherium system, they have lost their money. It may be possible for them to get it back, if they are lucky.

The funds may be locked away forever unless the Ethereum network "hard forks" by adding a consensus rule exception that specifically releases these funds.

so ... not "lost forever", then?

That’s true, but it’s hard to fit “would be lost forever if this stuff actually worked how its proponents claim it works” in a headline.

Hey - thanks! Kind of amazed to watch all my karma evaporate for pointing it out. :/

No karma is better than good karma om.

Happens to me all the time. Especially in threads about crypto currency! Imagine that.

Forget it, Jake. It’s just fake internet points.

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