I agree that a lot of people lost access to their wallets or made an error which locked those coins forever, I however do not think it's much of an issue now as it was 6-12 years ago. People still make errors and use it the wrong way, but more people are getting sensitive to security especially as it's much more valuable now.

It would be difficult to decide on and probably, it would not become necessary to try and increase the supply, as I doubt we'll get to a critical supply level. But if a consensus is ever reached, it could be dependent on the number of years a wallet was inactive i.e, no sent or received transactions. A 30+ or 50+ years timeframe is possible.
I would like to know, if this was ever to happen and there was an error (the owner of the coins still had the private keys), could they be able to prove it and retrieve their coins and for this to happen would there need to get a central panel to decide on cases?

I agree that is not our business to decide what is old or lost. So as the user cr1776 said

Just remember that in a free world what someone else does with his bitcoins (money, life etc) really isn't your business and vice versa.

First of all, this is what makes bitcoin decentralized: nobody controls. There is no guy to decide what coins are lost and which are not.

the rules are set: private key, block subsidy, mining reward, etc. Those rules cannot change. This is what gives value to bitcoin.

Second, you can't know for sure if a coin is lost/inaccessible or the owner is just holding.

Let's suppose that someone decided to do as you said, and successfully deleted those coins to be mined again. But what if someone decided that YOUR coins are lost, because you didn't move them for the last 5 years?

There is no way for this idea to work.

Those are lost forever. Let them leave and stay at peace.
Maybe after not moving any single coin for a decade? but that still doesn't prove that those coins were lost forever. No need for forks, they're all just making those developers who want to fork rich. And even you'll make a fork, those lost coins won't be back from being lost forever.

That questions of "what happens when all the bitcoins are lost?" and "what happens when all the bitcoins have been mined?" have been answered thousands of times. The answer is nothing. Nothing is broken. Nobody needs to do anything.

This is commented many times in the past. It's not going to happen. You cannot tell what coins are 'lost' and what are just holding. That's the point of crypto - you are your bank. If you lose your coins, the only wrong-doing person is you.

How many times have I read this exact topic. And how many more times will I read it in the future.

This question has been answered again and again.

I'll throw in my 2 cents. Scarcity is good. We don't need lost or burnt bitcoins to be mined again. It's a slippery slope. If you're so fond of bringing back dead coins, why not create/print more out of thin air.

This isn't fiat. It's bitcoin.


There is a more mature discussion to be had, leaving ignorance behind. There is no critical amount of bitcoin that can be lost after all. Perhaps except for 100%.

The more mature discussion is about design.



When I die, if I haven't made arrangements for my bitcoin to move to somebody I see that as a donation to everyone here.

First of all just because someone guessed that X number of coins are "lost" that doesn't mean their guess was correct, it is still a guess.
Secondly just because some coins haven't moved for Y number of days, that doesn't mean they are "lost" or as OP likes to call it "dead"!!!
And finally just because some coins are burnt (provably lost) that doesn't mean we have to create a fork to "un-burn" them and enter them into circulation. Satoshi discussed this once if I'm not mistaken, unless a ridiculous number of coins are provably burnt (something like 18 million BTC send to OP_RETURN for example) and the lack of circulating supply is felt, there is no reason for any kind of action.

Introducing arbitrary rules such as this will do more harm than good. 10 years is simply not enough time in the grand scheme of things. Try 100 years and even that will not be enough time. There are many long term holders who have unspent UTXOs from years ago, in form of cold storage and more notably in form of physical collectibles such as Casascius coins. I would not consider those "dead" Bitcoins.

See, if something like this were to happen, it would have to be introduced in one of the first versions of Bitcoin and not 12 years after Bitcoin's inception. You just can't introduce these arbitrary rules like these and expect people to take you seriously.