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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. jackb4040 · · focus · HN ↗
        Worth pointing out that the monetary policy of bitcoin is not written in stone; all you need to change it is a majority of hashpower. The current chain of bitcoin mainnet includes hard forks, like this one due to miners&#x27; manual intervention over a software bug that was exploited: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.bitcoin.it&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures#CVE-2010-5139" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.bitcoin.it&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...
        1. notpushkin · · focus · HN ↗
          &gt; all you need to change it is a majority of hashpower

          Or rather the majority of actual users. Hard forks occur because people install and use the updated clients. If 90% of the miners decide to mine on the “bad” chain, but 90% of users switch to the “good” one instead, the “good” would likely still win out in terms of market cap and recognition (and the miners would naturally have to follow).

          1. andrewla · · focus · HN ↗
            Because difficulty does not adapt dynamically, if the miners do not move then the fork will be defunct because it will take literally days to weeks to mine a block, and to mine the 216 blocks that would trigger a difficulty adjustment would also take proportionately longer. So transactions would sit in the mempool and the currency would be mostly useless.
            1. notpushkin · · focus · HN ↗
              Fair point. Maybe you could hardcode a lower difficulty in the fork for the next couple dozen blocks, and schedule an adjustment after that?
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