It is my understanding that lost wallets which are not recoverable result in lost Bitcoins. That is, the coins are gone forever. If that's the case, then it seems theoretically possible, though impractical, that a person could destroy all existing wallets and all existing coins would essentially be lost forever.
How does the system protect against such?
since all bitcoins are technically stored in the cloud - couldn't the destroyed bitcoins simply be reintroduced into unminted blocks?
or we could start mining 64bit blocks for many many more (albiet alot harder difficulty) coin?