Coin Recycling Stealing
FTFY
Useful input - surely if the coins haven't been touched in 100 years it can't be counted as stealing - the way I look at it is that at the beginning, before most people here had even heard of bitcoin, people tried it for a while didn't really see it going anywhere and subsequently deleted/lost/no longer have access to wallet.dat with potentially 100's/1000's of coins.
That would no longer happen today, as the idea of bitcoin is publicised more, and people know its got worth. Look for example at the story of the harddrive in the landfill with ~6K (if i remember right) bitcoins in.
There is some level of psychological attractiveness to making sure that all coins remain in circulation.
It's certainly possible to implement this: there would need to be consensus to ignore all blocks older than a certain number of blocks, as well as add unspent outputs in those blocks to the miner reward.
But it would create a very weird and irregular incentive for miners around the 100-year mark as some early blocks may cause thousands of coins to re-enter circulation. Even by today's standards these are enormous amounts.
So it may be preferable to simply consider them dead.
Okay point taken - but this irregular incentive would die down, as I believe, although people will always still lose coins there will be nothing like the amount that was lost at the beginning. Also could this be controlled by adding an artificial maximum added to the miners reward? so only x coins per block can be claimed from coins older that 100 years?