Quote from: Fivestar4everMVP on Today at 04:17:49 AM

Quote from: roller33 on February 12, 2024, 12:07:20 PM

I was reading about some cases of people who had many BTC at a time when it has low or no value at all, and didn't care about it, so they eventually lost their security phrases, or hard wallets and now it is lost probably forever.

I've read that the amount that is considered lost can be up to 5 million BTC. That is about 1/4 of the total amount available.

Knowing that BTC has a limit, and we're getting there soon, isn't it possible to have some compensation for those lost BTC?

Something like adding more BTC in an equivalent amount for those lost BTC, or something similar.

Would it be positive for the currency or could bring some caos?

Even if the bitcoin community wanted this, it's absolutely not possible to do, without a fork, bitcoin code is designed in a way that there is no way to mint more bitcoins, like it is with some shitcoins, what ever amount of bitcoin that is lost is lost forever unfortunately, there is no way to recover them, or compensate those who lost it.

If the supply of bitcoin was to be increased so as to replace the lost bitcoin, this can only happen through a bitcoin fork, and like you know, we've had a lot of forks in the past, all those bitcoin forks have turned shitcoins today, bitcoin it self still stand as the original and only true bitcoin.

Bitcoin is open source and managed by the community, so I think that if there is consensus from developers, miners... then printing more bitcoins is possible. I think we can theoretically change the supply of bitcoin but doing so is very difficult and almost impossible. If someone makes a proposal about it, it will definitely cause fierce debate in the community, it is no different from an impossible task. If I remember correctly, we also had a discussion thread about this issue right on our forum.