Quote from: Cricktor on February 04, 2025, 09:14:34 PM

That's one of the key points of Bitcoin, that it is limited with a deflationary emission characteristic. No arbitrary money printing like with fiat.

Why is it a problem for you that a certain amount of bitcoins are lost, in the sense they can't be moved anymore?

As Satoshi once said, all lost coins are a donation to all others because lost coins make those that aren't lost a little bit more scarce and more valuable. I have no problem with that.

And don't forget: any of the almost 21 million Bitcoins that will come into existence have been divisible into 100,000,000 Satoshis, so there's plenty of smallest coin chunks. And if need arises it would likely be possible to introduce Millisatoshi or Microsatoshi with a hard fork.

There is no trustless way to determine if some coins are only dormant or truely lost. Provably lost coins are non-zero outputs of OP_RETURN or other provably not satisfiable redeem scripts and not fully claimed coinbase amounts (I may have missed other truely provably burned coins).

Burn addresses with very likely unknown private keys are only lost in the sense that it's not likely anyone will ever find an appropriate private key to move them. Mathematically they're not truely lost, we only don't have enough energy and time to search for the private keys.

+2

Satoshi was quite logical in his saying that lost coins are a sort of donations to all other coins in circulation. It's very much clear today.

The way Bitcoin is progressing and more people are joining in, we defiantly will see a scarcity of Bitcoins in near future when there are more people chasing handful Bitcoins. May be the community moved towards the idea of breaking down Satoshis further through hard fork.