This won't happen before at least 500 years even if we loose 3% of the supply every year.
I think by then, there will be a consensus on : if there is unmoved coins for more than 200 years, then the coins becomes block reward.
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Haha.. I wonder, anybody want to do the calculations on the total market cap of Bitcoin if one satoshi is worth 1 dollar? :)
And I am not so sure about that consensus for recycling pre-owned bitcoins in the future! It seems to go against the spirit of the system.. immutability.
But I do think that one day people will be sifting through garbage heaps in the hopes of finding an old harddrive which they can try to find an old, unused wallet on. Similar to how people move tons of earth to find a tiny bit of gold now. Imagine if you knew that somewhere, someplace there would be a harddrive with 10000 bitcoins on it while the price of one satoshi is already high. This would be a whole new kind of archeology and treasure seeking!!
There is more satoshi than atoms on earth. :)
The system is immutable. No one can steal your coins... In your lifetime.
But the goal of a currency is to be usable. If the currency's supply goes below 1 BTC, this will be a concern because this means that there is 21 bits (zeros) in every BTC price that are wasted. Pure storage space and bandwidth wasted. I don't think asking for a single transaction in a lifetime for the every coins is a concern.
So in 500 years we will have another forkening, between the believers of the classic Bitcoin chain and those who believe the old bitcoins should be recycled by forking. Oh god.. will this never end?!