Millions of bitcoins are considered lost. Who will find them?
Brute forcing private keys is hopeless. What might be possible is recovering bitcoin from wallets whose passwords have been lost if the wallet file is retained, if the passwords are not too difficult to crack. And there might be bitcoins considered "lost" because the original owner has died, and whomever inherited their equipment has not noticed/found/deciphered their bitcoin wallet setup (or paper wallet tucked away somewhere). There are varying degrees of "lostness" to bitcoins that are considered lost.
Well that the caveat 'brute force' which is called DUMB, there are many ways to MINE bitcoin's, and they don't have to be a linear search;
The search space can be reduced to 2**40, from 2**128 ( 2**256 birthday )
DUMB 2**256, linear search, like Large Bitcoin collider, just DUMB search
Birth-day drop's search space to 2**128,
Smart baby-step/giant-step algo's can drop search space to 2**64
When searching your not looking for ONE,your looking for 500 million collisions with value, there are probably say 10k 'lost pristine coin' ( addresses ), finding one of them not much easier than finding just one, ...
But when you tie it all together, cultivate 200 million addresses with a balance, that drop 2**32 from the 2**64 space, once your down to millions just a very good computer can be used to collect 'lost coin'
The above said is HODL mean "LOST"? If I HODL for 10+ years are my COIN? lost? I think not
But its important to go over the reality of the thing, too often I see DUMB shit on GITHUB, or even what LBC is doing, just DUMB, but people who are serious about this shit are doing it.