Thanks for a sensible reply.

Since the issue as mentioned has been discussed several times before it's probably better to end it here and revisit in a few years.

People are regularly forced to convert paper money to new notes or lose the value. It is the exact same principle.

Most countries also have principles to apply to abandon properties and accumulated wealth with no inheritor that in the end returns it to the state.

Are these also unfair practices?

Ok, thanks for the reply.

That's the point. Forcing them to move them would produce proof that the coins are active. And I would argue that to make supply and demand work (correctly) you need to know the supply.

But I guess taking the chance in losing at least ten percent (at least, probably a lot more due to the uncertainty) of the total value of the rest of the coins when the Satoshi coins move are the preferred sentiment on this forum.

I suppose your analogy is suitable if there is one entity in the world that has been known to disappear with ten percent of the worlds collected wealth, never to be heard of again.

This issue has probably been discussed before but I've been thinking about it for the last few weeks so I'll give it a go anyway.

There may be an issue with not knowing the total bitcoin supply that is currently available due to lost keys and from other factors. Would a solution to this issue be to destroy, or rather make coins that hasn't moved in a certain time period locked from further usage?

Since there are no way to tell the difference between coins that are locked due to lost keys and coins that hasn't moved for a time period, there are uncertainty to the total bitcoin supply that currently exists. This could be a potential problem if big amounts of coins are put back into circulation after being stale for a longer period.

Take for example the Satoshi addresses, which, afaik, are assumed to contain some 500 000 to one million coins. We will never be able to tell if these are taken out of circulation or just kept for usage further down the road, unless they start to move. This creates a big uncertainty and could potentially cause major effects if they start to be used after ten years or more. The same can of course be said about any of the top 100 addresses or any addresses with "stale" coins. If they where to be remained untouched for say 50 or 100 years and then suddenly start to move, the perceived available bitcoin supply would suddenly grow, potentially causing instability within the system.

Would a solution be to build into the protocol that coins that haven't moved for a given period, for example 20 years, become locked and thereby taken out of circulation? This would make it much easier to estimate the current coin supply and thereby making it easier to valuate a single bitcoin. This would also force entities to reveal their plan for addresses with large balances, point in case are the Satoshi addresses just mentioned.

Is this a problem or should we just always assume that there are (will be) 21 million coins available, disregarding how long coins have been sitting on a specific address?

One interesting aspect that seems to be large unnoticed is that the (estimated) hash rate is currently growing exponentially without any direct connection to price. Just this day we passed 10 million gigahashes. https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

Since the inflation of bitcoin until the next reward halving is approximately 10 percent per year the amount of money spent on mining infrastructure and electricity per year should roughly equal 10 percent of the market capitalization. This direct correlation between price and hashing capacity does not seem to exist for the moment.

I would argue that this indicates that we can expect more upwards price movements in the mid term. It is of course the hashing capacity that is following the price, not the other way around, BUT if the hashing capacity continues to rise exponentially it will indicate that miners are prepared to add more rigs despite the fact that it for the moment would be better to buy coins instead of mining them. This may indicate that everybody in the game are preparing for a price rise.

Another interesting related thing is that the hashing capacity has risen ten to fifteen times since september 2013, whereas the price only has risen by about five to six times, nine at its peak. This probably indicates that the price for the moment is at a sustainable level and that further price rises can be expected.

Thoughts?