Good Day Bitcoin faithful,



Part of the beauty of Bitcoin is the hard limit of twenty one (21) million Bitcoins created as dictated by the protocol. This inherently gives the cryptocurrency a level of scarcity in the event mass global adoption takes place. With over seven billion humans plus the advent of autonomous agents, there will be a select few individuals who will be able to own more than a single Bitcoin in the not-so-distant-future. Bear in mind that the following is written with the assumption Bitcoin will continue to grow in global adoption, giving impetus to the following question:


How many Bitcoins exist today?



The obvious, short answer is: "There is no way to know", which is correct. This is an exercise in speculation, however it is one that intrigues me and thus I will approach it by looking at the number of coins permanently lost. By 2025, there is a strong chance most countries will be involved in Bitcoin to some degree. As traditional fiat currency economists began to follow and dissect the currency as they would any other, developing a commonly agreed upon average # of Bitcoin lost and therefore not part of currency supply will be a reality. I can foresee Central Banks dedicating some attention to this in the future as it is a deflationary event. To this day, I still have friends and acquaintances that I will poke and prod to ensure they are using basic security standards, as anything more complex is out of their scope for the time being. One such acquaintance lost a modest sum of Bitcoin recently due to bypassing basic security measures such as backing up a wallet.dat file. While these occurrences are going to become less common due to the increase in value, awareness and availability to more robust solutions, it is clear we still have some time before this type of news becomes a rarity in itself.


Due to the higher volume of Bitcoin issued via the protocol in the early years coupled with a non-existent and eventually low value, it is logical to assume that the largest amounts of Bitcoin lost were done so in the first few years (2009-2011). Today we sit at roughly thirteen point eight two (13.82) million Bitcoin issued via the protocol, with a price of $235 USD/BTC. For sake of example, if we assume that one percent (1%) of all currently issued Bitcoin has been lost, we have a total of one hundred and thirty-eight thousand, two hundred Bitcoin (138.2 K) that are out of the currency supply forever. That equates to a USD total of $32,477,000.00m (32.47 million). That is a sizeable amount of purchasing power in today's terms. Some questions that come to mind:




At what price do you personally feel Bitcoin will hold enough value to society that the vast majoirty of Bitcoin private keys will be kept securely, making lost Bitcoin virtually a non-existent occurrence?



What percent of the current Bitcoin currency supply do you feel is permanently lost?  (a 1% figure was used above for illustration)



Are there any well known and publicized losses of Bitcoin from the past that can be used to build up and towards a generally accepted percentage?



If nothing else, this can provide some level of distraction and informative discussion whilst the now fourteen month long bear market roars on. Keep in mind that the average individual who has heard of Bitcoin is not likely to be aware that a meaningful # of Bitcoin have already been permanently lost, or that Bitcoin can be permanently lost to begin with. When viewing this through the lens of a hard cap of twenty-one million Bitcoin by roughly the year 2110-2140 range, the Bitcoin you hold today is an extremely valuable commodity indeed. Thanks for playing and here is to a lively Spring Bull Market Breakout!

Tons are lost. 7K lost today in the BTER incident alone... plus all the early adopters that lost their wallets with thousands of coins.

Correct CoinRocka, this is an exercise in speculation as to the total number of permanently lost Bitcoins. The amount of stolen Bitcoins would also not be possible to accurately gauge but would make for an interesting story as the percentage of coins stolen should theoretically go down over time as stricter security options become common place. This is very much still the 'Wild West' of the new paradigm with only six years into the experiment.

1. nothing will change, just smaller amounts will be lost with time. talking whole bitcoins now, was thousands earlier, will be thousands of bits later. personal computing security is, at this point, virtually non-existent. there is a long road ahead.

2. about 3-15% by different estimates and also if you consider satoshi's speculated million coins as "lost".

3. yeah, but keep in mind that it is theoretically impossible to prove coins lost in events such as "oh I lost HD with my keys" - owner very well may be just attempting to hide the truth from the IRS / mafia / whatever. The only provably lost bitcoins are the ones sent to addresses to which nobody knows or will ever know the keys to. Also called "bitcoin burning". Addresses like this one, where calculating matching private key would be practically impossible: https://blockchain.info/address/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr

Actually the hard limit should always be measured in satoshis, not bitcoin, because bitcoin is an arbitrary decimal place. You can move the decimal place at will and call the resulting value "bitcoin" if you will.

So, the hard limit is 21 million x 100 million satoshis

You're wrong. And you don't have to trust me, just ask anyone more experienced. We are in a forum, you can go and ask.

But first let me start by saying this: there's no such thing as floating point arithmetics, it's just as useless as saying "integer arithmetics";

Now to the important part. In the bitcoin code, there exists only one unit. And there exists 21 mil * 100 mil of these units. I called it satoshi because it's kind of a consensus but actually the name of this unit is unimportant in this context. The important thing is that there are 21 mil * 100 mil units in total and thats what we have to refer to when talking about total units. The bitcoin unit doesn't exist in the code.

I always wonder: do you think it would have any impact in price if the exact number of lost coins was known?