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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Then Bitcoin increases in value, and you keep dividing a Bitcoin more. Nothing really changes.

Does it really matter if you have 20 million Bitcoins that are worth $1 trillion or if you have 10 million Bitcoins that are worth as much? No, it doesn't. The 21 million number was pretty arbitrarily chosen to begin with.

This would be a problem if say half of available Bitcoins would be wiped out overnight - somehow. But the chances of that happening as getting lower and lower as more people start using Bitcoins, and the value gets spread out across many more people.

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I agree that it's not a 'currency killer' in the short run BUT if we speculate that BTC reaches mainstream popularity and a total market value in the 100-1000s of BILLION USD the fact that an 'unknown' amount is in circulation makes for a very strange variable.

All of a sudden my old 1BTC wallet on my crashed laptop hard drive may be worth 100s of days of mining network wide, and even the speculation that a 'previously unknown' wallet containing 100BTC (there are a LOT of those sitting on old phones and hard drives already I promise) would have possibly disastrous effect on currency value etc.

All I am saying is that there are a LOT of factors to consider and BTC loss over time is a major one.

My argument being: A finite supply of a currency is one of the factors people REALLY need to think about when it comes to BTC. And I guess I am saying that it's a real problem vs. a currency with increasing difficulty and a non-finite supply.

But isn't even knowing some constraints about the money supply better than not knowing anything at all?

For instance, the M3 supply of USD isn't even tracked by central banks (not since 2006).

That works for long as you keep more than you lose. If we get down to 1000000 btc at a reasonable value, what happens when I find my old thumb drive from 2011 that has 100k btc on it? That will be quite a shock to the btc economy.

I don't think this kills bitcoin, but this is part of the "lost coin" problem.

What happens if I find an old chest with a 100kg in gold/diamonds/unobtainium? I think this situation is quite a good analogy to your question, the consequences of which are readily known.

I think the 'point' here is that as opposed to chests with 100.000.000KG of gold there are actually 'lost' wallet files with enough BTC that it would 'rock' an economy with a currency cap in the future.

I am pretty sure if someone found a stash of gold worth $400.000.000.000 that WOULD actually effect gold prices. Also: Gold has 'real life' uses (production of components etc) and real world costs etc. attached to handling (weight, transport costs etc). None of which BTC has.

So I don't know how much gold it would take to rock the price, but I'm guessing it's enough as to be non-trivially "lost" however, any random flashdrive could contain any number of btc.

The analogy to gold isn't gold that was once possessed that has been lost, it is gold that is newly discovered. A new find of a big gold vein, gold on an asteroid, etc. would be a similar shock to the system.

> I am pretty sure if someone found a stash of gold worth $400.000.000.000 that WOULD actually effect gold prices.

Yes, it would. Spain essentially demonstrated this in the 16th Century, with the New World as the "stash".

I think that was precisely the point: coin loss is yet another deflationary pressure.

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