I've been kicking myself lately. I toyed with Bitcoin pretty early on and had a wallet containing roughly 200 BTC. I'm pretty sure that wallet was wiped just before turning in the work owned machine it sat on.
Bitcoin is gambling to me, it is pure speculation. Don't drop a tear for that. In general society would be better without such schemes.
This is still Hacker news right?
crypto currency could be one of the most exciting things to come out of this decade.
The idea is that there can only be 21 million Bitcoins, or something like that, but in the end there could be a lot less because they are lost.
* may not be precisely true, but it's something along those lines.
1BTC = 10M satoshi.
2012 US Penny Production = ~6B
6bn/10M = 600
Total number of us pennies made in the last 10 years tops 43B which pushes the difference from 600x to 4300x
The important part of that is "currently possible". The protocol allows for us to divide down as far as we want. All we need is a software update.
Even if there were an upper limit of 21 trillion bitcoins, people would still be worring about them being lost, even though it makes no difference.
Shish2k's point stands, only with "430 BTC is as many satoshis as there are US pennies".
But this is irrelevant anyway. If 1 satoshi ever becomes too coarse-grained, the whole Bitcoin community would obviously agree to revise the protocol to further subdivide satoshis...