What happens to all the coins in lost wallets in the Bitcoin system? If there are only a finite number of coins, won't they become increasingly scarce as people lose them over time?
Sometimes I have thought of this and what can be a possible solution to it, but I can’t imagine any means that this can be solved. Except that we are just going to continue with what we have and not bother about whether there are coins getting missed. I think the only thing that’s going to do is that it is going to reduce the rate of supply, and by reducing the rate of supply available, we are going to see the price of bitcoin go higher since there wouldn’t be enough to fit the level of demand.
But in the past, we have seen issues where there are kind of errors (or maybe hacks) that caused the number of Bitcoins available to increase more than the twenty one million there is. So that shows that there is the possibility of increasing it in future if the developers wants to, but I am not certain that they will do that kind of thing.