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Comment by Patient0 | Hacker News Reader

"This is why the bitcoins sent in this special transaction are unspendable, as the addresses are being generated from the document's hash fragments instead of from a private ECDSA key."

I hadn't realised before that this means that you can provably "destroy" bitcoins. That is, you can "prove" that a certain bitcoin amount will never be spent again by anyone including yourself...

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Yeah, the fact that bitcoins can be permanently destroyed is a little bit worrying, one of BTC's benefits is it's cap. What's the economical consequences of these coins being destroyed?

Nothing. Since BTC is deflationary by design you just increase it a little bit. Since modern economics really dislikes deflation at any rate it does not matter how much deflationary it is.

Increased value for the existing coins I would assume. There are plenty of cases of people "losing" or effectively destroying large amounts of bitcoins. BTC is designed to support smaller and smaller portions of a coin to handle the scarcity iirc.

Deflation. The value of the rest of the existing stock of BitCoins goes up slightly, assuming no net change in the demand for them.

Are you trolling? What the actual fuck are people thinking when they post comments like this? Disregarding that you can spend small fractions of bitcoins, what happens when you lose a dollar bill? inb4 "Oh don't worry about it because the bank just makes money out of thin air"

It's not hard to create a new coin as well. For example Litecoins are divisible a hundred more times than Bitcoins with a cap four times larger. If we need more, make more.

You can burn fiat cash, and fire gold bars into space. What are the consequences of those actions? Other coins are presumably worth more because there are now fewer of them.

I would think in a 'tulip bulb' bubble supply is not entirely the important variable. Growing demand would be the driving force behind valuation. Losing a few coins would matter not at all. Maybe even a lot of coins.

Sure, you can just print more cash. With gold bars the gold would become (I assume) more valuable. But at what point does it seesaw and there isn't enough of it to be of any value? I guess with BTC there are satoshi's.

Could you please elaborate on this? I understand neither your comment, nor the part that you quoted from the site.

To spend coins from given address, you need its corresponding private key. They can demonstrate that, the way they generate these addresses, they can't know the private keys. Or possibly matching private keys might not exist at all. In that case, as an analogy, think of unix account with disabled password, the password hash in /etc/shadow is "!". There is no password which has a hash "!". So effectively it is impossible to log in with password.

The transaction in question sends some fraction of BTC to an address which is not the hash of an extant BTC wallet.

Thus no one can ever spend those BTC ever again, they exist in BTC limbo, attached to a notional wallet that (probably) exists but can never be found.

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