Anyone here familiar with them? I have a couple questions.

If a person stores their bitcoins on a thumb drive and the thumb drive fails, is damaged, or otherwise no longer readable will the person lose those bitcoins?

I've read that the maximum number of bitcoins that can be produced is something like 21 million. Whatever the number, if it is indeed fixed, won't "lost" bitcoins in my first question mean that number of bitcoins will gradually decline, ultimately reaching near zero at some point?

I don't know about your questions, but I do know that they are pretty much useless unless you use them illegally.

I googled the question and it seemed that you can lose them if the file gets damaged and then too bad for you because it cannot be determined if it is actually lost or just unused. Then everyone elses bitcoins raise in value a little bit.

Each bitcoin can also be divided by 10^8. So if they do ever end up making 21 million bitcoins there will end up being milli-bitcoins and so on.

Pretty sure that if you don't have them backed up, they are gone forever in that scenario, and they can't be removed from circulation to replenish the cap. However, probably not that many are lost in such a way compared to the 21 million cap.

That improves the numbers a lot. Enough for a billion entities to each possess 2,100,000 parts. Or 2.1 quadrillion total parts.