Epic Problem: What happens to lost wallets?

[MR2]

Has anyone ever thought of what happens to lost wallets? I mean, really lost. Just deleted. Those coins are actually lost FOREVER. So as a mathematical equation that means, in a distinct amount of time, the amount of available BitCoins will shrink.

And it is not possible, to determine (out of the blockchain) if there are any coins lost, so there cannot be counter reacted.

I believe this could be a real problem for a currency. If you lose money, it may happen, that someone will someday find it again. This is not true for bitcoins. If you delete your wallet, your coins are gone. Forever, they are just eliminated.

So what if someone is hoarding LTC and to make them more worthy (in 10 yrs or whatever) the also wealthy man decides to just buy lots of BTC and just delete them. This will cost a lot of money, sure, but it's a way to destroy BTC.

Funny and Scary :-)

[Gator-hex]

If you try to buy up all the bitcoins it just pushes up the price,

and if you destroy them, well it just makes mine worth more!

Did you never see James Bond Goldfinger? 

There's 8 decimal places behind each bitcoin that's a lot spare capacity.

[kingofsnake]

And it is not possible, to determine (out of the blockchain) if there are any coins lost, so there cannot be counter reacted.

How do you suppose it should be counter reacted?

As I see it: if you keep the coins and never use them, from the market point of view this is as good as loosing them. Creates a shortage and deflation and the price crawls up.

Also, I want to see the evil wealthy man that can buy all the BTC and destroy them

[MR2]

True. Some could decide to just burn millions of dollar - that would be the same. But with fiat money there is value behind that money (gold). So someone has to burn dollars AND vaporize gold or spread it into the galaxy. Which is much harder than just deleting a file which noone gets notice about. There is just liquidation problems.

[freakying99]

And it is not possible, to determine (out of the blockchain) if there are any coins lost, so there cannot be counter reacted.

It is possible to determine coins are lost only from few addresses like:

1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE

[Gator-hex]

Some could decide to just burn millions of dollar - that would be the same. But with fiat money there is value behind that money (gold)

Holy crap Batman the dollar has not been backed by gold since the USA defaulted on the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and Nixon closed the gold window!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

Fiat dollars are backed by debt! (Someone with a debt is desperate to earn a debt note back from you to extinguish their debt!)

Debt as Money - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqvKjsIxT_8

[MR2]

1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE

This was actually valid and there where 221.34765 BTC inside .. WOW!

[RW02]

it might also result in a recovery business for people like me who can recover even hard to retrieve data. a harddrive has to be rewriten more than 6 times for data to be hard to retrive