The mining difficulty was much lower at the beginning. Satoshi, the creator, has about 1 million bitcoins from this early mining. [0]
Speaking for myself only, some of us just lost or discarded them because they had no value, and mining them was more of an act of altruism, so while it was fun seeing the numbers go up, it was easy to lose track of a wallet. I don't think electrum seed phrases were around yet at that time, either, or I had no knowledge of them if they were.
At the current bitcoin price of $14591, a satoshi is worth $0.0001459190.
The maximimum amount of minable bitcoins is 21 million.
Current global gold supply is ~ $7 trillion
If bitcoin completely replaces gold, bitcoins will be trading for about $333,333.33, so a satoshi would be worth ~$0.0033.
People use quarters for mostly everything now, so this is again quite reasonable.
[0] https://www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/research/research...
But that's not necessarily impossible to attain. If BTC wins and the world switches, the resulting bubble might be that big.
But to think this through, maybe there would be three components to the dynamics of such a theory.
1) Bitcoin will continue to vanish as holders die, forget about their bitcoin, or lose access to their wallets.
2) Up until a certain point, this will cause the value of Bitcoin to increase, as reduction of the Bitcoin supply is deflationary. Those who recognize that this deflation is occurring will hang on to their Bitcoin, because of the expectation that their holdings will appreciate in value.
3) After a certain point, people will realize that much of the total Bitcoin capitalization has been lost/forgotten, and they will be in a hurry to use Bitcoin (sell it for goods) before their holdings become too large in proportion to the total non-lost capitalization still in circulation. Proportionally large holdings are worthless if they cannot be liquidated or used. (Similarly, imagine a currency with two holders, half each; neither is incentivized to accept large transactions because if one sells out, the other is left owning the entire currency by himself.)
I predict that people will realize that Bitcoin is incapable of robustly facilitating a global amount of transactions without centralization in banks/hubs/wallets/exchanges, thus defeating its stated advantage of immediacy and anonymity, far faster than individual coins fall out of use.
The value of BTC is part scarcity and part network effect. In a rational world (what we usually get in the long term) disappearing BTC would have an impact on the network effect. Interestingly, Gresham's Law suggests it would be a positive effect. A likelihood that wealth will be destroyed at death-- I would think that would deter adoption.
The psychology of loss is powerful indeed
Banks/(3rd party) Wallets/(3rd party) exchanges is centralisation.
Lightning network hubs for example are not -and could scale much better, with less friction, than any transaction systems that we currently have. But plenty of things are going on, if it's not that it will be something else, it's only a matter of time.