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Comment by mbrock | Hacker News Reader

It seems that in any real world blockchain, the space growth from actual transactions will be much larger than the space wasted on inactive wallets.

And the notion of a secure financial system where if you don't move your money for a year your whole account is confiscated seems rather unappealing!

One thing I really want to be able to do with a blockchain system is to put my wallet in cold storage—like, in a safe. I don't want some arbitrary rule that I need to mark my calendar every year to retrieve all my keys from cold storage and do a meaningless transaction!

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> my calendar every year to retrieve all my keys from cold storage and do a meaningless transaction

No, you don't need to retrieve your keys each year. Before storage, create N transactions moving all your coins to the next derived address. Sign all your transactions at once. Then put it in the safe.

Store the transactions unencrypted on your computer. Send one each year. An attacker can't do anything with them except send them early (and force you to open your safe "sometime within the next year".)

That's a good point, I didn't think about that. It does add some extra complexity though—like, if I do want to make a real transaction, I have to re-make the subsequent "keep-alive" transactions.

> One thing I really want to be able to do with a blockchain system is to put my wallet in cold storage—like, in a safe

AFAIK, you can generate a paper wallet with any blockchain system. You're keys are rendered as a QR code and/or series of words (there is a name for this protocol that hopefully someone else can remember!), and you can then print and store it.

Hardware wallets are also a thing for some systems, such as Bitcoin.

Yeah, exactly. BIP39 is a common protocol for mnemonic keys also supporting subkeys. Hardware wallets like the Ledger Nano S have support for Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum, and they let you sign transactions without ever exposing your private keys to a general purpose computer. And yeah, you can always just keep your private key in any way you want—it's just an n-bit number.

> And the notion of a secure financial system where if you don't move your money for a year your whole account is confiscated seems rather unappealing!

This is why conventional money has a low amount of inflation. It incentives you to invest your money instead of putting it under a mattress.

That is indeed a more conventionally appealing way to encourage circulation—a gradual inflation in prices rather than sudden account confiscation!

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