[will_brown]

Maybe Satoshi should have built in such a feature into bitcoin (you don’t use it you lose it). That would have been a much more interesting dynamic (maybe) insofar as the original concept of P2P cash which morphed into digital gold/store of value (ie no incentive to spend, create a market/economy).

[chipperyman573]

Because bitcoin is inherently anonymous, it'd be very difficult (impossible?) to prevent someone from making a new address and just bouncing the coins around. It's an interesting idea, though.

[petronio]

I think that's fine, because then you know that at least the wallets still exist. I wonder how many bitcoins are forever gone from the early days when they were literally cheaper than dirt. I know I had some and failed to backup the wallet properly.

[mhh__]

There's several million £s worth in a landfill site in England somewhere

[will_brown]

I thought about that, and it’s just spit balling something off the cuff, but address to address self-spending may have positive impacts on the network vis-a-vis additional transaction fees for miners.

[pigeons]

This is the demurrage dynamic in freicoin (now tradecraft - https://github.com/tradecraftio/tradecraft) from bitcoin core developers Mark Friedenbach and Jorge Timon.

[londons_explore]

It would be interesting to see a histogram of the number of days since each bitcoin was last transacted.

Should be easy enough for someone who has all the data, but I don't want to download hundreds of gigabytes just to plot a chart...

[siavosh]

The built in mechanism for this incentive is inflation, but bitcoin is deflationary as you observe.