If Satoshi is dead or not an individual person, then who owns his bitcoin? If Satoshi is dead, then his property would be subject to the probate laws of his home country. Can the bitcoin of a dead person be recovered if they don't make arrangements for it in their will? Or will blocks of bitcoin become inactive over time as their owners die?
These are some great questions. Given a long enough timeline, it's possible (probable?) that nearly all private keys will be lost. It's funny that Bitcoin seems to have built into it its own demise: mortal people.
I think, its more like version 0.1 of what's possible. I can foresee the existence of wills on the blockchain. e.g. 'move my coins to my inheritors public key, in 10 years, unless I overwrite this will, with something else'
In fact bitcoin's cousin, Ethereum, is all about digital contracts.
But there could be cases, where people lose their keys or die, without making a will. We can easily foresee, that in this case software could accommodate cases, as exceptions, where identity is otherwise attached to the public key.
Smart contracts may sound cool at first but like many things with bitcoin they are mostly a solution in search of a problem. In the case of wills, the blockchain doesn't address any of the real-world problems typically surrounding them. In most legal cases the problems are not the actual terms or recordation of the contract but in interpreting and executing the contract. Real world events are very rarely dictated by the types of simple binary conditions that can be represented in a smart contract, and the gap between the real world and the blockchain is wide enough to fit a skyscraper through.
I agree with you that there is a wide gap between Bitcoin/Blockchain tech and real world. Won't contest that.
But a will contract can be put on the blockchain, and its a step forward, IMHO. Just today I learnt about OverStock's t0[1] trading on the Blockchain using colored coins (which is supposed to bring down the settlement of stocks to T+0 from T+3. Just stating this example as a case of progress enabled (or made possible) by the blockchain.
Likewise, Blockchain will make wills better i.e. enforceable and crisp via a program hence more specific. But as of now, its not a replacement for judiciary definitely. That's why I said its like version 0.1 of what's possible.
Bitcoins can only be distributed if you have the private key for it. If satoshi dies and leaves the keys for his heirs, then its just a normal asset. If the keys are gone, then that money is unrecoverable, just like burning cash.
So Bitcoin could conceivably be 'burned' faster than new bitcoin can be made. That might be great for a collector's market, but sounds like a bad plan for a useful currency.
It is? I thought there was a minimum usable denomination, called a "satoshi", that was something like 0.0000001 BTC (I don't know the actual value). Or is this really just a convention enforced by the current clients that can be easily changed in the future?
It would require a hard fork to increase the data storage for the number field from an int64 to an int128, but doing so would be uncontroversial (way more so than the current debate over the block size). It could be programmed to take effect at a certain block # from several years out, by which point almost everyone would be using a version of the software that would support it.
We're not anywhere close to it mattering yet, though; it's several decades out.
You are absolutely correct. One bitcoin is 100,000,000 satoshis. Transactions are denominated in integer values of satoshis, so it's not possible to subdivide a satoshi.
One satoshi is currently worth about $0.0000045, though, so there's still plenty of room left for inflation.
