Bitcoin and a few other early cryptocurrencies are unique in the fact that many people mining them and involved in the system early on thought they would never take off and didn’t bother to keep the wallets or the keys. Before silk road or mainstream exchanges like Mt. Gox, there wasn’t even really a price point or price discovery on a mass scale so to many they weren’t worth anything. There are handfuls of cases of people who mined or were given hundreds or thousands of coins and simply reformatted the hard drive the wallet was on, or threw out the wallet all together.
Other than the super early people, you had a long period of time where there were medium amounts of coins in the 1-10 bitcoin range that also suffered the same fate of being destroyed or just forgot about. I know personally that I lost about 2-3 bitcoin on a hard drive that I accidentally broke. There were also so many cases of people either sending to the wrong address or abandoning small amounts on addresses once they had made a transaction. So how many coins do we think are lost forever?
Satoshi’s coins are sort of up in the air, they haven’t been touched for close to 9 years at this point but they could still be accessible , we just don’t know. They would be about a million coins straight off the bat. From what we know, Satoshi only really ever spent about 50 btc and mostly just as a way to bring people in and show them the protocol. Even if we say Satoshi’s coins aren’t lost but simply just sitting on a hard drive somewhere, there are still a substantial amount unaccounted for.
If you simply google “lost bitcoins” you can see hundreds of stories of people losing coins that would be valued in the millions of dollars today. However because the bitcoin blockchain is available to see, we can see how many coins haven’t moved for x period of time. While there is no website that is openly putting block analysis stats for coins that haven’t moved for a period of time and are probably lost (that I know of), some people who work for analysis companies have said there is a good chance 10%-20% of all bitcoins are lost forever. This number I believe does count Satoshi’s coins, but even without, that number is substantial.
Im not a coder, but if I was I would love to see a website that looks at all the addresses and shows how many coins haven’t moved in x amount of years and put a likelihood of them being lost forever. Especially with the bitcoin cash fork, many addresses that did have access and simply just weren’t being touched, came forward to claim the new coins. This means that more than ever we are getting a clearer view of the amount that are lost. Bitcoin already has such a limited supply so the fact that many of them are lost and the fact that more are being lost every day through accidents, death, ect. means that they are getting rarer by the day.
Thanks to @Elyaque for the badges
No bitcoins are lost forever. They are just incredibly hard to find. Eventually computer power will allow people to find them. By then bitcoin will have changed to a more secure algorithm that can resist those advanced computers though (assumes core devs are long gone). Old wallets would still be vulnerable to being broken.
Hacking old wallets will be a profession then. lol
Like panning for gold in a river.
Yeah, or like those deep sea exploration companies that collects treasures from old ship wrecks.
Very interesting topic. The number is unrecoverable bitcoins can only rise in the future I would think.
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My goodness, 10-20%... that's a lot of money!
I might have to go to the dump and search out old hard drives. YUK haha
Yeah you better believe it, imagine if you were the one who lost 7000 btc because you didnt bother keeping the hard drive ?
I wouldn't take it easy on myself for losing it. Thanks for adding to my knowledge bank.
Losing Bitcoin is never fun..
Eventually, there could be less than 1 Bitcoin in circulation...
I had some early on. Possibly about 20 still on an old hard drive that crashed. The pictures on the drive at the time were worth more than BTC but I didn't bother with either. Now I which I had. Today that would be almost $84,000.00.
SMH.
Just my two STEEMS Worth.
Yeah its crazy, I have been lucky and only probably lot 1-2, still thats a ton now for many people.
This was an interesting read into bitcoin. i knew the number was high but didn't know it was this high and also didnt know about satoshi coins
yeah its a lot more than people think especially because bitcoin was the first. It was (and still is in many ways) an experiment so people didnt bother keeping anything.
That was a nice read! What if it was much more thatn 20% lost coins, I think its possible. I had a friend with hundres of btc ltc and eth on his laptop.. then it got stolen. Also heard a prominient btc evangelist in NYC talk about how he has hundreds of laptops that may have had 1000s of btc for an live exchange in 2013 he was holding but he lost the passwords for them. I kick myself for not getting in on it in 2011 when i first heard of bitcoin.
it could be, we dont really know for sure. I think the hard forks have definitely revealed a bunch of people who have been laying low until now. I would love to see a chain analysis site release some data.
I think this is an interesting story of lost bitcoins ...
Almost everyone who is interested in Bitcoin has seen this video ...
First published in 2011, and since updated, it has become a classic.
But did you know that the makers of the video raised 6,500 BTC to pay for its production and then lost the private key to the address where the funds were sent?
Since then, a few people have sent small amounts of bitcoins to the address. And if you want to check it out for yourself, here is the address...
https://blockchain.info/address/1AYLzYN7SGu5FQLBTADBzqKm4b6Udt6Bw6
Yeah every time I see this video I remember this story. It really sucks :/
I almost lost few bitcoins the few weeks ago because the wallet on my laptop became corrupted. I learned my lesson and made a backup of all the key words now.
Damn, if that Satoshi still has access to its account he is already a multi-biljonair xD
Satoshi Nakamoto is estimated to possess 1 million BTC. He'd be valued at $4.275 billion using today's BTC/USD rate.
But if he sold them he probably wouldnt get half of it. Its a problem for crypto, early addopters who got insanely rich could easily crash a currency, even by mistake.
Interesting article to read!!!
As there is increasing awareness about bitcoin nowadays
Wonderfull post , I can say that bitcoin wallet password recovery is not possible and all those accounts will lose bitcoin.
Even I once davo mynil, then there was a lot of things to do and I stopped minny - abandoned. And I also just lost a few bitcoins
I think it's pretty safe to say with the price of Bitcoin now most transactions going forward will probably not go lost.
thanks you frend information...
Thanks for the insight but I think the stats can't be exact but the loss is always expected.
I wonder what the longterm impact on this issue is. Afaik it is not possible to divide BTC any further than down to 1 Satoshi. So what happens if it needs to be broken down further when large amounts should get lost?
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https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@muhammadazam/generating-the-sense-of-bitcoin-cryptocurrency-and-blockchain
The amount of bitcoin that is inactive, which is stored in personal wallet, is high. Some are being used for speculation.
I know a guy who wanted to time lock his Bitcoin using python script. The bonehead locked $300k in bitcoins. Sad thing USB he wanted to lock until year 2025 but mistakenly entered the year 2,550!! Yep, those are lost!
Testing, I don't need no stinking testing. My code's gold. 🤔
LOL!
As amazing as Bitcoin is, it' amazing to think that we're still early days. I've heard folks say it's like the Internet in 1992. It's still really easy to accidentally lose bitcoin, especially if you're not really careful about securing keys, seed phrases, etc... Many folks could be a hard drive crash away from losing everything.
Just imagine what things will be like in 10 years...Bitcoin (and cryptos) are developing faster than the Internet.
oh.. it is a lot of loss! 😱
There was an article before, telling about a guy that threw away his old hard drive with about 100 bitcoins on it. And also there is a funny story that looks as a fake these days, telling us about some guys that bought pizza for 10k bitcoins back in 2010.