Dead wallets

[sparomba]

I just had to use a virtual prepaid credit card to buy something. it now has 23cent left on it and i'm not intending to charge it back to my bank account(payout fee is $1)...not worth it! so i'm going to count these 23cent as lost. that made think....how does bitcoin deal with dead wallets?
If someone for examples creates a bitcoin account, buys some coins for real money and spends these coins...but not all of them. later john doe decides "fuck that 0.01BTC left in the wallet, re-exchange to real money isn't worth it" and doesn't use bitcoin again. these coins will not only be lost for him/her but also they would be lost for the whole network. the more popular bitcoin gets, the more dead wallets there will be. there 1btc, here 0.00023btc, fuck that 0.0000001btc ...each of them lost forever
this situation can't be compared to real money, where you could simply "print" new money, since amount of bitcoins is limited to 21mio. i know that each bitcoin can be splitted by 10^8 but it still is a fixed number.
this sure doesn't matter at all in the near future...but if bitcoins gets a mayor break through and runs for years, this at some point, somewhen, could matter

so is there a way out of this? is there something implemented to raise the total amount of bitcoins or the splitting limit?
if yes.....well that could be just another problem...who would decide to raise the amount/split limit? the programers? too much power in too few hands

[AnonymousBat]

I just had to use a virtual prepaid credit card to buy something. it now has 23cent left on it and i'm not intending to charge it back to my bank account(payout fee is $1)...not worth it! so i'm going to count these 23cent as lost. that made think....how does bitcoin deal with dead wallets?
If someone for examples creates a bitcoin account, buys some coins for real money and spends these coins...but not all of them. later john doe decides "fuck that 0.01BTC left in the wallet, re-exchange to real money isn't worth it" and doesn't use bitcoin again. these coins will not only be lost for him/her but also they would be lost for the whole network. the more popular bitcoin gets, the more dead wallets there will be. there 1btc, here 0.00023btc, fuck that 0.0000001btc ...each of them lost forever
this situation can't be compared to real money, where you could simply "print" new money, since amount of bitcoins is limited to 21mio. i know that each bitcoin can be splitted by 10^8 but it still is a fixed number.
this sure doesn't matter at all in the near future...but if bitcoins gets a mayor break through and runs for years, this at some point, somewhen, could matter

so is there a way out of this? is there something implemented to raise the total amount of bitcoins or the splitting limit?
if yes.....well that could be just another problem...who would decide to raise the amount/split limit? the programers? too much power in too few hands

Technically that purchasing power is transfered over to the rest of the active bitcoins.

[NO_SLAVE]

I would call this Erosion. yet another entrophic phenomenon that was probably not factored into development.
So I wonder what this erosion rate might be over say 50 years.  Will 20-40% be lost to erosion or misplacement?
This phenomenon will of course make the original and remaining series of BTC more valuable.

[dayfall]

this situation can't be compared to real money, where you could simply "print" new money, since amount of bitcoins is limited to 21mio.

Well, technically, we could just reinstate the 50BTC per block (or some very small amount).  As long as it wasn't done impulsively nor excessively.  The advantages of doing so would likely be minimal, and generally viewed as an attempt to cause inflation.

[kwukduck]

We can't just reinstate the 50 BTC per new block, the blocks would be refused by the network.

I don't see the problem of coins getting lost, the others will just be worth more, i think 2,1*10¹⁵ unit's is enough for everybody.

[BotherMeNot]

That's like saying what happens to money that is burnt?  The bitcoins will sit in that wallet indefinitely and the public will be burdened to always keep that record for the lifetime of the currency, but the benefit is that all of our coins are worth more.

I feel that bitcoins should have an expiration date imposed on them to encourage usage and discourage hording.

[Ramokk]

I feel that bitcoins should have an expiration date imposed on them to encourage usage and discourage hording.

You wouldn't like it if your cash had an expiration date. 
Anyway, that couldn't work, you could just make a new wallet and send the coins there to "renew" them.  No way to tell if they're being passed to a new person/business when they're used in a transaction.