So I was reading a story about how the government had all this Bitcoin they had seized in drug raids...And they want to cash it out.

But the bigger part of the story is that there is all this crypto sitting out of circulation.

This brings up a valid concern. Over time, the amount of lost wallet keys that will lead to worthless crypto coins floating in the cloud that can never be used will/could become rather high over time.

What if there was a mechanism that flagged any addresses that have been idle for x amount of years, lets say 7, and then put that address on a probation list. Basically give it 3 more years to do something. so ten idle years total...

After that time the address would be flagged in the block chain as not valid anymore, and the system would add the value of that address to the amount of coins it can still distribute in total.

So say bitcoin. When it reaches it's limit of coins that it will ever distribute could in theory keep distributing coins to miners using a mechanism like this.

It would mean that you better not let your crypto sit idle forever.... on the down side, but would reclaim any and all lost or forgotten currency that was clogging up the system...

This would have advantages and disadvantages.

But I think you could easily add a second mechanism that allowed an address to pay for a dormant mode that opted the address out of this mechanism. Say you wanted to put 100 bitcoin away in an address to give to your great grand kids some day when you were dead... You could pay a fee out of the address itself to keep it in a dormant non flag-gable mode... like retiring an address for x amount of time.

Even if people abused the retire system, the fees off everyone abusing it would add up to allowing more coins to be put back in the system...

I'm thinking about enabling such a feature in the Nanocoin or at least in the subchains for sure...

![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmcviLAwEWF9PXrykmumGyKTxL23KWBxt2vjF8tZVMoaat/image.png)