On the bright side, if the wallet has truly been lost and not stolen, everybody else's BTC got just a bit more valuable.
In other news, funneling thousands of trades through one wallet.dat... how on earth do you successfully back that up when it has new data every minute? If exchanges are going to become a "thing", I'd think you'd want something like multiple redundant networked databases storing the BTC.
The individual trades in exchanges don't hit the wallet. Only deposits and withdrawal's do. The trades themselves are handled by the exchanges database.
You can pre-generate addresses in a wallet and then do a backup. This backup is valid and can be used to recover funds as long as that pre-generated pool doesn't run out.
There's also a 'backupwallet' RPC command that the bitcoin daemon provides to safely copy/backup the wallet. So lots of options available.
The hit to confidence in bitcoin might decrease the value of the remaining bitcoins more than the loss of these bitcoins increased it. I suppose we'll have to look at the exchanges...
In other news, funneling thousands of trades through one wallet.dat... how on earth do you successfully back that up when it has new data every minute? If exchanges are going to become a "thing", I'd think you'd want something like multiple redundant networked databases storing the BTC.