Hello,

if somebody’s loosing his wallet (e.g. due to disk crash) he’s not able to get back his coins, is he?
So every time a person looses coins, they’re lost forever? So the bitcoin network will slowly shrink over time? (Because there will always be people who loose wallets!)

TIA
virtualcoin

edit: Forgot to mention the coins of users that are try out bitcoin and then never use it again.

Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more.  Think of it as a donation to everyone.

Quote from: laszlo on June 21, 2010, 13:54:29
I wonder though, is there a point where the difficulty of generating a new coinbase is so high that it would make more sense to try to recover keys for lost coins or steal other people’s coins instead? The difficulty of that is really high so for now it makes a lot more sense to generate but I just wonder what the real figures are.. would that ever become more productive? Maybe Satoshi can address this..

Computers have to get about 2^200 times faster before that starts to be a problem.  Someone with lots of compute power could make more money by generating than by trying to steal.

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