> a really smart thief with enough money behind them might not even need to steal any Bitcoins. They could just destroy cold wallet keys in a very stealthy way

> a really smart thief with enough money behind them might not even need to steal any Bitcoins. They could just destroy cold wallet keys in a very stealthy way and profit from the appreciation of coins they hold elsewhere. This is a cool idea but I'm not sure it works (or I don't understand it correctly). In order to reduce the supply enough to appreciably increase the value of the remaining coins, you'd need to freeze/destroy a lot of keys, or keys to wallets with large holdings. If the owners of those keys start reporting their losses and the news spreads, people could start to lose confidence in bitcoin itself and move to other assets, reducing demand.