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so this should lead to an even higher exchange rate since there's even less supply. any estimates how many bitcoins are lost in oblivion?

• yitchelle 13y ago
  Also brings in the question as to when bitcoin becomes useless as there are not enough bitcoin in the wild for useful trading.
  • antonios 13y ago
    This is pretty far away. Making some quick and dirty calculations: The lowest bitcoin denomination is one Satoshi, which is 0.00000001 BTC. If one Satoshi would equal one cent, this means that one US dollar would equal 0.000001 BTC. Given that the maximum number of Bitcoins is ~21 million, this amounts to a max capitalization of ~21 trillion USD.
    • danaw 13y ago
      That also assumes a nontrivial amount of lost wallets, which I have a feeling is not the case...
  • oleganza 13y ago
    Bitcoin will never become useless because of such stupid reason. If people need smaller divisions than 1 satoshi (10^-8 of BTC), the protocol will accommodate that easily with small extension. But most probably, smaller transactions will be carried outside the blockchain on a decentralised clearing networks (where debts are cleared with real BTC transactions every day to limit the risks).