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@JJG...sooner or later...developers would have to address concerns like mine.
Some others state that the loss rate is maybe even 4% a year now, which is kind of high (https://blog.trezor.io/what-happens-to-lost-bitcoin-71eb5a80cc74).
I think that it is inevitable that some solution would be advanced (once we find out the actual rate of loss).
Could some solutions cause a fork? Hopefully not, but we shall see.
However I see most of bitcoiners solidly supporting the idea of no more than 21 mil btc, but maybe not the idea of a constant decrease in that number (or what is actually available).
To me, personally, the idea of supply shriveling to a few bitcoins and then dealing with fractions of satoshi to buy houses sounds positively Kafkaesque.
EDIT: btw, that hisslyness post you fondly refer to does not 'work' if we lose a set number of bitcoins per year (around 286K or 1.36% of the whole supply). He actually made a distinction between 75 years (in his calculation) counting as a fixed number lost/year OR 1231 years if a fixed % of current supply is lost for a year. I was talking about the former, but it flew over your head somehow. Sometimes you just need to read stuff more carefully.
I doubt that the specifics of the calculation really matter very much, and you may well be correct that I did not get too much into the details of your bad maths and your bad sciences because even if hissleness might not have said it very well, if there is anything like a 1% to 4% per year shrinkage in the bitcoin supply, then that is going to cause upwards price pressures that are higher than what we might have already considered - absent some of the effects of the various paper bitcoin.. .. and surely in the end, he also made the point that if there is high loss of bitcoin, then likely people are going to become more inspired to take more careful precautions not to be losing their cornz. .since they are likely going to be going up in value at a higher rate based on the combination of lowering of the new issued supplies (with the reduction of the halvenings shrinking the new issuance to zero) combined with ongoing losses of coins that could be of varying rates, and even if we might get down to having ONLY 1 coin in a few hundred years, then the BTC price will likely adapt to such a shortage of the supply, and whether there are more actions needed beyond merely going down to lower and lower decimal places might be a question of conjecture.. because surely satoshis could end up getting divided into 8 digits or even an infinite number of digits -
to quote a famous government/banking official.
There are an infinite number of digits within a satoshi... problem solved, no?
You will (or you should) thank me later, once you go back and study your maths and your sciences.
Also Protip: make sure to guard your cornz because they are going to be worth more and more and more, and even more than you previously thought that they were going to be worth between 2014 and 2019 when you were whimpily stacking them (or failing/refusing to stack them - relatively speaking) ...
I consider myself open minded and always try to look at both sides of the argument. I spent most the day trying to agree with you, Biodom, and find reasons that may support your theory of the evaporation of all Bitcoins within 50 or so years.
I tried to imagine different scenarios of how this could play out, how we could lose 250k+ bitcoin every single year. Maybe all the heads of Binance takes a deep sea dive to look at the Mariana Trench and something catastrophic happens, without leaving their privkey behind. Maybe the Gemini Twins goes climbing Everest and don’t make it back down.
Maybe a hidden malware/bug in the Trezor hardware wallet locks all Trezor out after a certain date. Rendering all Trezor wallets inaccessible. Maybe Saylor decides to take control of his own keys and sends to an incorrect address.
Then I started to think, why am I talking about just these big names with big wallets? Am I just looking for scenarios to fit the narrative…
Then it clicked to me…. The one thing you have forgotten to take into consideration, the one most import aspect.
VALUE!
You’re looking at past historical numbers to derive an average of what you perceive to be a norm moving forward. However, you haven’t taken VALUE into consideration.
Losing 100k Bitcoins ($425K) in 2011 is different to losing 100k bitcoin ($3B) in 2023 and 100k Bitcoins in 2040 (~$35B). Market participants and adoption rates were different, the appreciation and valuation of Bitcoin was lower, hence minimal security and blasé in handling/storing and transmitting Bitcoin was all too common. How many times have we read about the guy who threw away a computer holding 8,000 Bitcoins or similar stories early on…
I am not saying access to bitcoins will never be lost. There always going to be errors made in handling/storing and transmitting Bitcoin, but with the VALUE of bitcoin appreciating everyday and more and more participants enter, better education, easier access, different custody options. You will not see the same number of losses we have seen in the past. The VALUE of the losses may well be same, year on year, but the amount of Bitcoin will not! Hence there will never be an evaporation of ALL Bitcoins.
