What if you just destroyed the hard drive or the wallet or whatever the bitcoins are stored on?
In first place, BTC are not stored anywhere. What is stored in a wallet (file) and thus in a hard drive is the private-keys which allows someone sign and validate the transference of BTC from one public-key to another public-key. In other words, the only thing stored in a hard drive is a pre-defined password which allows any user to send BTC to whatever Bitcoin address they want. With that in mind, I stated that there is not a system embed in the Bitcoin protocol which allows an user to delete the BTC already supplied. Anyone can just delete a private key in their possession, but no one can command the protocol to delete the BTC supplied.
But by proxy, if the medium for which the password is stored is destroyed, and the password gives access to the btc, then access to the coin must also be destroyed. The protocol may still contain the supplied btc, but access to that btc is void if the private key is deleted. Meaning the protocol would just retain the bitcoin mined and do....what with it? Would it then be distributed among the miners?
Not being pushy or anything, just legitimately curious is all
