Hi,

1. If there are 16.4 million mined and 4 million are lost, that results in 12.4 million in circulation vs 14.4 million.

2. Satoshi addressed this as have numerous other people (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=198.msg1647#msg1647 ) - lost coins decrease supply, increasing value of the remaining coins.

3. This assumes this is a problem. Bitcoin is divisible, 100 million, potentially more if necessary. (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Help:FAQ#How_divisible_are_bitcoins.3F)

4. Why is it okay to steal bitcoins from people who's bitcoins have been "dormant" for a fixed period, 10 years in your example?

5. What happens to bitcoins that, say, Hal Finney still had (if any) and he put in cold storage while he is in ultimate cold storage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist)#Death) ? Ditto for someone, say, in a coma for 11 years, in jail for 11 years or any other similar event? Or a 20 year old sets aside coins for retirement. The following year, the system is changed, and when he looks again after not paying attention for a decade or two, they are gone.

6. This encourages censorship by miners for people attempting to move coins.

7. This has been discussed many times before and everyone is welcome to fork bitcoin code and the block chain and convince people to follow this chain and code. Then you can see if you can get many people to agree that this is a good idea.

On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 12:30 PM, Teweldemedhin Aberra via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

It is estimated that about 4 million of the about 16.4 Bitcoins ever mined are lost forever because no one knows the private keys of some Bitcoin addresses. This effectively mean there are actually only 14.4 million Bitcoins in circulation even though 16.4 million are mined. There is no way of eliminating the human errors that cause these losses of Bitcoin from circulation, while the number of Bitcoin that will ever be mined is capped at 21 million. This means the total number of Bitcoins that are in circulation will eventually become zero, bringing the network to an end.
The solution this BIP proposes is to implementing a dead man's switch to Bitcoin addresses. The dead man's switch causes the Bitcoins assigned to dormant addresses to automatically expire. A Bitcoin address is deemed dormant if it is not used in transactions for some fixed length of time, say ten years.
The calculation of the miner's reward should take into account the Bitcoins that has expired. This means there is a possibility that miner's reward can increase if sufficient number of Bitcoins expire.

Ref:
http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/

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