Potential attack against #Bitcoin (I think?): governments decide that the coins they confiscate will be sent to an address whose private key is deliberately lost. Then all #Bitcoin they confiscate will be lost.
Now, that could make everyone else's coins more valuable as there is less in the circulating supply now, but there is a chance that Governments are able to confiscate all 21 million (or close to it) and render #Bitcoin useless.
Maybe so… already lost all my keys tho.
This attack wouldn't work for many reasons.
Bitcoin is infinitely divisible. Suspend disbelief and let's say 20,999,999 bitcoin get confiscated and burnt. The one remaining Bitcoin can be divided and distributed. 1 BTC = $10trn in this case. In fiat terms, think reverse stock split. It's all relative.
And I say suspend disbelief because for this plan to [not] work, all the plebs have to give their bitcoin to the government. And we both know that's never going to happen.
The "physical bitcoin" itself is not the network and therefore does not define Bitcoin's existance. This is a fundamentally flawed understanding of what IS bitcoin. It is the distributed ledger ran by the nodes which is immutable. As long as a single node survives, Bitcoin survives. *cue laser eyes*
IMO, the number is not that important.
