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Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023

320 points · 277 comments · jakemanger

  1. seymon · · focus · HN ↗
    I hope they still have the private key.
    1. osigurdson · · focus · HN ↗
      It is an interesting fact about Bitcoin in general. There are 21M tokens in total AND some percentage are lost every year. Run this simulation long enough and there will be very few active Bitcoins remaining.
      1. Roark66 · · focus · HN ↗
        Seems pretty silly to build in deflation into a currency. It incentivises putting your money in a mattress for 100 years.
        1. benenrjdnz · · focus · HN ↗
          Deflation is a good thing, it rewards delayed gratification. Those evil Keynesians have convinced the world a little bit of inflation is good. It isn’t. Losing purchasing power on your money is a bug.

          Nothing wrong with putting money under a mattress for 100y if the value of money is not evaporating.

          For most of human history the money was stable. It’s the disasters of 20th century wars that eroded the value, and 21st century lack of monetary discipline that keeps driving it down now.

          1. IAmBroom · · focus · HN ↗
            > For most of human history the money was stable.

            Wildly inaccurate, thanks to forgery and coin shaving - sometimes even governments officially reduced the silver or gold content to make more money out of their coin reserves. Even when proto-banks began issuing letters of credit, the quasi-fiat letters were subject to loss of confidence.

            However, the availability and quasi-fungibility of other silver/gold currencies meant that if you didn't trust Edward's penny, you could use a Dutch penning instead. That provided an alternate path to dampen inflation, as long as the dominant currency was coinage.

            But it was equally hard to buy a pig or a new suit with silver pennies by the 20th century. Bank notes, even when theoretically backed by exchange for their value in precious metals (the Gold Standard), were even easier to forge, and suffered from "loss of faith" inflation (runs on banks meaning they couldn't practically be exchanged for 14 pounds of silver pennies).

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