2 questions about mining to the limit of 21 million btc

[ehmdjii]

hi, i have 2 questions about btc:

so there is a limit on the maximum number of btc available. that is 21 million, right?

so let's say one day that limit will be reached.

1. will mining be useless at that moment and therefore stopped?

2. what if someone looses a wallet? let's say someone has 1 million btc in his wallet and accidentally deletes his wallet.dat, which means that those btc are lost forever, right? will it be possible to start mining again to fill up the missing million?

[SomeoneWeird]

1) No, mining is used to confirm transactions, so it's still needed for bitcoin to work, the miners are then going to get paid in transaction fees.

2) If you lose your wallet.dat the coins are gone forever.

[Jack of Diamonds]

The coins aren't gone just because you delete a file on your harddrive.

They simply become inaccessible. There is a distinct possibility an adress collision in the future will reclaim those coins, but it's not likely to happen within the lifespan of the universe (see "1 million monkeys writing complete works of Shakespeare given infinite time" dilemma)

Other coins also become more valuable if the coins are dormant forever and can't be spent by anyone.

[Coolhwip]

There are experimental tools to recover deleted wallet.dat files so they can still be recovered with some luck. See here and here.