That is commonly claimed, but lost coins isn't a reason to raise the cap. That is because there is no reason why 21 million coins has to indicate that there are

That is commonly claimed, but lost coins isn't a reason to raise the cap. That is because there is no reason why 21 million coins has to indicate that there are 21 million units of the currency. In fact, the present cap is 2,100,000,000,000,000 units of currency, easily enough to serve the Bitcoin community. By comparison, there are 231,100,000,000,000 cents in M1 (the narrow money supply of the US)--there's about 10 times as many units of Bitcoin as there are cents, and cents are already so small they're a burden on the economy. The point still stands, though, what happens when those 2.1 quadrillion units of currency get destroyed trillions at a time? Wont' we run out? Well, yes. However, when that happens we just slap another zero on the end. At present you can break a single Bitcoin into 100,000,000 pieces (known as Satoshis), but perhaps in the future we'll decide to add another 6 zeros on the end. Thus you could have 0.000 000 000 002 Bitcoins (we would almost certainly not speak of full Bitcoins by that point--there are already major movements wanting to use mBTC and uBTC as the standard units since 1 BTC is impractically large for most commerce). This maintains the scarcity model that Bitcoin enthusiasts are so enthused about while dealing with the money supply issue. Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rls76/official_eli5_bitcoin_thread_round_ii/cdon5jn http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rls76/of...