Are lost bitcoins lost for ever? Really?

[nwbitcoin]

Being new to this, I may have misunderstood an element of the infrastructure of bitcoins, so with that disclaimer, here is my query.

I assume that all coins appear on the blockchain at least once when they have been mined, so, would it be possible to highlight coins which have not been used for a long time or even more than once?

Is this possible?

If not, I would love someone to link me to a tutorial explaining the blockchain in a way that I may understand!

Thanks

[mccorvic]

Being new to this, I may have misunderstood an element of the infrastructure of bitcoins, so with that disclaimer, here is my query.

I assume that all coins appear on the blockchain at least once when they have been mined, so, would it be possible to highlight coins which have not been used for a long time or even more than once?

Is this possible?

If not, I would love someone to link me to a tutorial explaining the blockchain in a way that I may understand!

Thanks

Quick answer before everyone flips out:

No, they are not forever lost. They still live where ever they were sent and it is "theoretically" possible to retrieve them but borders impossible.

No, there will never be a way to force move "inactive" coins as they maybe stored there on purpose as savings, ect Plus, do you really want people to have to power to forcibly steal your bitcoins? This has been discussed ad nauseum, so if you'd like to know more about this do a few searches on this forum.

[nwbitcoin]

Thank you!

Maybe I should have pressed the search button - I will do next time!

[Elwar]

Forever is a long time. You can grab the private key for any of the addresses before then.

[remotemass]

Coins that are not circulating - either because they are lost/inaccessible or because the owner doesn't spend them and holds to them - drive the bitcoin price up. Basically, the law of 'demand and supply' at work.
If too much bitcoins were lost it would urge the protocol adapted to have more than eight decimals, because the price could become too high.

It is certainly possible to find out how many coins have not been used during a certain time, and sort out information from the blockchain in all sorts of ways and with all sorts of parameters in analysis.

[FTWbitcoinFTW]

Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more.  Think of it as a donation to everyone

[hazek]

Here's a graph that shows this: http://statistics.ecdsa.org/

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be current.