The amount of coins lost is completely meaningless. I cannot make this any clearer.
The amount of coins lost per year matters, that's a net gain for every other holder.
Nobody was talking about some noob question of "oh no, we will run out of bitcoins if people lose them because we only have eight 0's".
I was talking about applying the average estimated coins lost per year towards a minimum block reward instead of only transaction fees for block rewards in the future.
It's a matter of security vs "oh no! we have to make the currency as hyper deflationary as possible!".
As an example, a coin like Whitecoin was mined in only 7 days distribution, yet during those days, some guy managed to lose 2% of the entire monetary supply by having a laptop stolen out of a car by people who most likely don't use digital currency.
Why do I think altcoins are valid? Because the financial industry wants to hedge security, and one, single block chain does not give them that. What if Gavin or some other guy issued an update that imploded the BTC network? They're just supposed to accept 100% loss? No, they're not going to do that.
This argument is part of the Alt-coin Narrative Cycle. It is only considered valid by people who don't fully understand how bitcoin works. As people learn more about bitcoin, they will learn that it is not possible to "implode" bitcoin by an "update." Even a network split event due to a poorly-excuted forking change wouldn't result in anywhere near a 100% loss. It would be annoying, some double spends would occur, speculators would no doubt dump coins, but things would return to normal.
Is this a joke? I don't think you really understand how cryptocurrency works, the entire thing is a confidence game. Since you can't hold it in your hand, that's what it's backed by. Walk around in the altcoin world for a while and you'll see that when coins encounter major security issues like forking, double spends, whatever, most do implode and don't recover. Bitcoin won't be exempt from that in the future.