Imagine if you had a bunch of gold, and you wanted to make sure no one got it when you died. So you just hide it somewhere that no one will ever find it. If you really wanted someone to receive the gold after your death (which is YOUR choice since it's YOUR gold) then you would make some kind of dead man's switch that revealed the location to your heir in the event of your death.
Presumably this guy could have done the same thing with his Bitcoin. The fact that he chose not to, means that he deliberately intended that no one should receive his Bitcoin after his death.
In other words, this is true of any valuables, and is not specific to Bitcoin.
I should add that it doesn't really matter if Bitcoin is "lost" because all that does is increase the value of all the remaining coins that all the other people hold. It's only good for them.
It's not like we're ever going to run out of units because each Bitcoin is evenly divisible down to 8 decimal places. So we can access units that are as small as we want, and if we had to, we could subdivide them further in the future if/when necessary.
Imagine if you had a bunch of gold, and you wanted to make sure no one got it when you died. So you just hide it somewhere that no one will ever find it. If you really wanted someone to receive the gold after your death (which is YOUR choice since it's YOUR gold) then you would make some kind of dead man's switch that revealed the location to your heir in the event of your death.
Presumably this guy could have done the same thing with his Bitcoin. The fact that he chose not to, means that he deliberately intended that no one should receive his Bitcoin after his death.
In other words, this is true of any valuables, and is not specific to Bitcoin.
I should add that it doesn't really matter if Bitcoin is "lost" because all that does is increase the value of all the remaining coins that all the other people hold. It's only good for them.
It's not like we're ever going to run out of units because each Bitcoin is evenly divisible down to 8 decimal places. So we can access units that are as small as we want, and if we had to, we could subdivide them further in the future if/when necessary.