> you can only deliberately lose the domain

Or your can be me. For some convoluted reasons I had the contract email set to my company mail and the domain was paid for 10 years. I left the company in May and in September the registrar started to send reminders which were of course bounced.

Then around Christmas I realized something is wrong, tried to get the domain back but it was too late.

This was an unfortunate set of circumstances, all my fault, but "deliberate" is a bit too masochist :)