The blockade analysis company, Chainanalysis, published a new survey, according to which 23% of bitcoins are lost forever. This result is because of the loss of personal keys by users.
In reality, it is impossible to determine how many users just stored bitcoins and are not using them. Because of this, Chainanalysis offers the average number of lost bitcoins that varies from 17 to 23%. Of course, most of them were lost until Bitcoin still cost cents.
Methods of analysis of the company are confidential, they simply offer results. They divided coins into five parts: coins obtained after 2017, one million coins of Satoshi, active coins, and coins in strategic investments that have not been used for 2 to 7 years.
According to the Chainanalysis estimates, the bitcoins invested in the strategic investments generated after 2017 have not been lost (due to quite obvious reasons), only 4% of the active coins and 30-50% of the real bitcoins have been lost. It is interesting that the analysis company thinks that Satoshi's one million bitcoins are lost.
It is quite difficult to determine who actually lost the coins and who keeps them for future use, but the fork made in August has solved this problem more or less. Most of them, who had their personal keys, moved coins from one place to another to get the same number of Bitcoin Cash, which showed a large number of active owners.
The value of the lost coins is quite high, given that Bitcoin is worth more than 16,000 on the market today and, since the number of bitcoins in circulation, the value of the lost coins is between 3.7 to 5 billion US dollars.
Everybody knows that the number of bitcoins is limited and should not exceed 21 million. Due to the interest of the people, it is a great chance that when the threshold is reached, the price of bitcoin will increase tremendously. Considering the number of already lost coins, the result may be astonishing than it seems at first glance.
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