We know it's not a large fraction, or anyway wasn't a large fraction a year ago, because the fraction of all mined Bitcoin that hasn't moved in the last year is only about 25%.
Edit: If I understand correctly around 15% of coins has not moved in even ten years. So more than 20% of all the mined coins up to mid 2015 have not moved since.
Maybe I remembered it wrong, or maybe I was just out of date. Thanks for the correction! Still, that's basically pointing at key attrition being a fairly minor phenomenon.
Yes; we're talking about 20% or so over 16 years, which is 1.25% per year, four times lower than the 5% per year inflation you're saying people complain about. And the anecdotal data suggests that that key attrition was concentrated in the early years, not just before there were Bitcoin ETFs, not just before there were exchanges, but before even the Bitcoin pizza.
But the big issue from my point of view is not the actual key attrition rate but the uncertainty of the money supply, because from my point of view, these are the important questions about key attrition:
- If Bitcoin goes to zero, what order of magnitude of money will the investor class lose? 200 trillion dollars, 20 trillion, 2 trillion, 200 billion, 20 billion, or 2 billion?
- How much money and power has Bitcoin transferred to its early adopters: 2 trillion, 200 billion, 20 billion, 2 billion, or 200 million?
- How much impact could awakening dormant coins have on the market? If Satoshi, or for that matter Hal Finney's heir or another early participant, started liquidating his early coins, would that be a tenth of the usual daily trading volume? Ten times? A hundred times?
Questions like these are why lolc brought up key attrition in response to ducksinhats saying, "It offers stability and a mathematical escape from very fallible humans controlling monetary systems."
A key attrition rate of 99% or 90% to date would result in very different answers to these questions. But 20% or 50% to date is fairly minor in this context.
Even if it was known and it did tend to zero I don't see the issue, Bitcoin is divisible, almost infinitely if you count L2s system (e.g. Lightning Network operates on a millistaoshi base unit instead of satoshi). Inaccessible bitcoins mean that the accessible ones are more rare so in a way it benefits other holders this way.
They also serve the network as a form of security bounty, let's say tomorrow we discover a way to break encryption "soon" pepople will be provided with a path to safer addresses but these old addresses, the ones for which a public key is known, act as an incentive to look for such security flaws.
Nobody prevents you from spending and replacing bitcoins, besides maybe the governments that insist on taxing smaller transactions as if it wasn't a currency.
You should ask them why they've generated about 58 million millionaires and 2,700 billionaires worldwide. That's some actual "hoarding" you should be concerned about, instead of concern trolling about Bitcoin.
If you own a deflationary asset/currency which is guaranteed to appreciate as long as the economy is growing (well it wouldn’t if btc became a global currency but that’s another matter) there is no reason for you to invest into anything unless it offers a disproportionately high return (or buy goods/services now if you can delay buying them)
It would just reduce risk tolerance for investors and increase the real cost of borrowing significantly. That’s how deflationary currencies work (we know that based on several hundreds years worth of empirical evidence).
Not to mention you can't have a robust credit market built on top of a deflationary currency.
Imagine you take out a 30 year mortgage in 2025 with 12 periodic payments of .01 BTC a year.
Imagine offering a 10 year bond that will make quarterly payments of .01 BTC. What is the price of this bond? It is just a meaningless question practically.
