The reintroduction of coins from dead wallets would occur gradually through new mining cycles. Please note that the reintroduction of coin quantities would be asynchronous, as each wallet would have its relative clock.
Yet you're thinking of this over a 100 years period when it's obvious the bulk happened in the first years.
So just as we lived till now like this and we're going to do so over decades from now on till your "clock" starts ticking.
Just as an example, if we assume there are 1 million lost coins only in Satoshi's case then you have half of the next century's future supply just there.
The primary benefit of recycling would be reducing the need for future maintenance and hard forks aimed at lowering satoshis. Without recycling, these hard forks would become inevitable.
Future maintenance? Lowering satoshi?
You do realize that even if half of the coins would be actually lost, it would mean only an increase in the price of 100%, the last bull run made a 6x, there is no need for that and won't be anytime soon, for one satoshi to reach 1 cent you need first Bitcoin at 1 million and even in that case, you still have milisatoshi on LN.
When humans pass away, they cannot take their money with them.
I can still burn all my banknotes before I die, take that from me!
The way to determine if a wallet is unowned is through the expiration of a set period of zero active transactions.
No, it's not!
I have wallets I haven't touched in years and there is no way you're going to make me go through some centralized bullshit of proving I own this or force me to change my address every year to show the world my wallet is active.
Just deal with it, nobody likes your idea, it will never be implemented as it goes against the main principles in BTC and that's it!
@stompix don't be so hard on @HandcraftedBreads!
I think it is worth having that discussion and I must say that I also had these thought experiments on my mind years ago. What if this or that happens and can the supply ever become too scarce to keep up with the economic requirements of (monetary) policy and society. I think it is nice to have these discussions and see what everybody has to say. It is not that there is no point thinking about it, but as has been said before here Bitcoin will always have a sufficient number of satoshis to keep functioning properly. @stompix even though I concur with you that taking away coins from dormant addresses and reintroducing them into the system goes against my expectations and understanding of how Bitcoin is supposed to work (and will hopefully always do), the signaling to the network whether or not a wallet is still active would not necessarily have to be done using a centralized service right? Couldn't it just be a signed message to the network and the protocol would do the work? No centralized entity needed.
@HandcraftedBreads, you should also take into consideration that the incentive for the vast majority of those who have a say about protocol changes is essentially zero regarding your proposal. Unless the economic viability of the protocol is so badly threatened that the wealth contained by the network is seriously at risk, you won't ever convince the majority of voting power to vote in favor of that protocol change. A fork is a possibility and you could decide to shift your wealth from Bitcoin to the new fork operating on your newly proposed rules. Speaking of which, this is what you could actually do. Introduce the new rule into the protocol, get a fork going and see how people react to it.