How many coins will be lost due to people dying?

[gollum]

This scenario would be tragic: A widow inherits his dead husbands house mortgage and credit card debts and his offline brain wallet, she is aware that he was a bitcoin geek that invested all their savings in bitcoins now worth millions of dollars - but he died in an accident and the wallet died with him.
An account at mtgox validated by ID or passport would have a much lesser risk in this case and the widow would have been a millionaire instead of a poor indebted woman on the street.

[Dabs]

The husband, being a bitcoin geek, should have had a backup. Or at least trusts the wife enough to have the paper backup. As soon as I have at least 100 bitcoins (actually, maybe even less than that) I will have regular backups of the private keys on paper, in a place only my wife would have access to, like in her document vault or something like that.