I wonder how may bitcoins have been misplaced or lost and will not be used again. Or if bitcoin users get locked away for crimes or die - what does that do to the theoretical growth of the bitcoins money supply?
Only 21 million bitcoins will be mined. Certainly a number have been lost. For crimes, the feds have seized them, in the past and later auction them off.
The pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, has about one million bitcoins under his control, coins that he mined early on, when bitcoins were worth only fractions of a penny, but he hasn’t spent even one coin, as far as I understand it.
According to the bitcoin software, each bitcoin can be divided up into 100 million pieces, with one one-hundred-millionth of a bitcoin being called a “Satoshi”. This is the smallest unit of bitcoin, kind of like a penny is for the dollar.
So, there will be a total of 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis mined - a lot. What each Satoshi will be worth, ultimately, is anyone’s guess.
Most seem to think that in the long term, a bitcoin will be worth either zero (failure of btc) or something huuuge.