On: Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 A Day In Power Consumption

[shawabawa3]

It's impossible to reclaim coins. You would have to guess the private key that secures them, and if that was possible bitcoin would be useless.

However, I guess it's possible for the network to agree to mine some new coins at some point in the future.

[pbhjpbhj → shawabawa3]

So not impossible, you _just_ have to guess the owners private key?

Presumably you could in theory brute force that in a million years or whatever. Also if there were an example of data encrypted with that key (is there in the block chain by virtue of the protocol?) then if the private key system were broken - eg by advance in quantum computing or a weakness found in the crypto used - then perhaps it would then be feasible.

The corollary of this appears to be that you'd then be able to take anyone's bitcoins?

[shawabawa3 → pbhjpbhj]

> So not impossible, you _just_ have to guess the owners private key?

Yes, by impossible I meant computationally infeasible (at the moment)

> The corollary of this appears to be that you'd then be able to take anyone's bitcoins?

Yes, there's no way of recovering long abandoned coins (e.g. the genesis block coins) that couldn't be used to steal newly minted coins