Quote from: sparomba on June 10, 2011, 04:45:02 PM

I just had to use a virtual prepaid credit card to buy something. it now has 23cent left on it and i'm not intending to charge it back to my bank account(payout fee is $1)...not worth it! so i'm going to count these 23cent as lost. that made think....how does bitcoin deal with dead wallets?
If someone for examples creates a bitcoin account, buys some coins for real money and spends these coins...but not all of them. later john doe decides "fuck that 0.01BTC left in the wallet, re-exchange to real money isn't worth it" and doesn't use bitcoin again. these coins will not only be lost for him/her but also they would be lost for the whole network. the more popular bitcoin gets, the more dead wallets there will be. there 1btc, here 0.00023btc, fuck that 0.0000001btc ...each of them lost forever
this situation can't be compared to real money, where you could simply "print" new money, since amount of bitcoins is limited to 21mio. i know that each bitcoin can be splitted by 10^8 but it still is a fixed number.
this sure doesn't matter at all in the near future...but if bitcoins gets a mayor break through and runs for years, this at some point, somewhen, could matter

so is there a way out of this? is there something implemented to raise the total amount of bitcoins or the splitting limit?
if yes.....well that could be just another problem...who would decide to raise the amount/split limit? the programers? too much power in too few hands

Technically that purchasing power is transfered over to the rest of the active bitcoins.