Bitcoin Forum

And I mean really, really lost.
A lot of people can't remember their passwords after 4 minutes since they set it up.
But apart this, there's several ways bitcoins can get lost, like in example if you have a wallet on a USB key and this breaks and you have no cold backup.

This will inevitably bring, in the future, to less than those 21 million cap.
And they WILL keep going down.

Is there a plan to reintegrate them?

No reason to do it.
But majority can change consensus rules any time.

Lost coins reduce supply of bitcoins. Supply goes down, price goes up. You can divide Bitcoin however you want, so unless I'm missing something, it shouldn't be a problem.

if there was a way to regenerate lost coins ,people would also want a way to regenerate stolen coins and it would leave a huge hole in the system
of who decides when and if a coin is truely lost forever ........

some coins may appear lost and are in someones inheritance who is still a baby etc

satoshis coins may well be unretrievable ,but whos to say he wont come back and retrieve them ? the core principals of bitcoin
were a finite money supply without any manipulation possible ,i would like it to stay that way

There is no way to prove that a coin is lost, unless it was send to a burn address.. Most coins that are lost therefore, are not really lost, only forgotten. Reclaiming those would be like creating double coins.

you need not worry about the future when the 21 million cap is reached because it is far far away.

also the price of bitcoin will determine whether the amount of available bitcoin is enough or not, besides there is not just 21 mil BTC there is much more because you have to consider every digit after the point too. i mean 1 satoshi (1e-8BTC) is usable and have value.

additionally 1 satoshi can be broken down into smaller units if needs be, with a simple change in the code.

Lost Bitcoins is a good thing actually. They make your unlost bitcoins more valuable. (As long as the lost ones aren't yours of course)

OK I'll try to be more clear.

Case: 10 years from now, developers uncover that 5% of BTC are unused, since 10 years.
Those wallets are much probably lost. Users don't use those coins for the simple reason they have lost their keys.
Hypothesis: reintegrate those coins by mining them back.

Another case: coins WILL keep being lost as time goes, this happens with fiat money, and WILL happen with Bitcoin.
For a long time now there won't be any problem of course, but IF Bitcoin will become a hugely widespread currency, as we all hope, then this WILL be a problem.

I don't think so: nobody knows anybody has lost his coins, there's no way to know it, apart the case I exposed in the previous post, or by admission of the user himself, which can be fraudulent.
AT THE MOMENT the value of your coins is UNAFFECTED by lost coins.
In the future, when we'll hit the wall, THEN this may affect it, as less and less coins will be in circulation.

I agree with this: it's not an actual problem. It may become a problem in the future.
But if what you say is true, that also Satoshis can be divided, then there is no problem at all, I guess.
But I've never read anything about this, are you sure this can be done?

i presume that the impact would be very low on the market, do not expect an huge rise in demand only because 30% of coins are lost, people simply will buy less one whole btc and more satoshi or bits

Lost coins are actually good for the bitcoin in general. Satoshi once said that lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.
So this is not a problem, there is no need for 'recreate' initiatives, because it would not be wise imo.

A good question OP i have thought about this before.
Interesting answers so far but 2 questions of my own

1) Who would sign off on the coins actually being lost and would we ever trust any 1 person to do this?
2) I know there is a blockchain.info address that you can send coins to that can never be recovered, do these coins get replaced? Can anyone supply that address for me please?

Not like that.
In a possible future that we all are hoping, Bitcoins will be a used everywhere by everyone.
There will actually be scarcity of them.
People won't BUY bitcoins: they will USE them and EARN them with their work (until AI and robotics will take all of that...).

"Lost" coins are gone forever until/unless the private key is later found.

Hopefully the first time someone loses their private key it is for a small amount of BTC so that they can learn a lesson without a major loss.

Some people have lost a lot (such as throwing away computers by accident before BTC was worth anything) without ever creating a backup.

I think a few major exchanges have lost coins by accidentally wiping keys during server updates

Around one year ago, I made a quick count and found that 21 million BTC, if they would be distributed to cover ALL the Earth wealth (241 trillions), they would be not granular enough to be used as currency.
To say it another way: a single Satoshi would be valued something like 50 or 100 $, and couldn't be used for shopping in a comfortable way.

Now, of course this is an utopian scenario, but it still is a POSSIBLE scenario, and one that we all hope will be one day reached.
Sure there's alternatives out there: Litecoin could come into play as THE alternative for everyday transactions, it also has a much higher cap, it would be the silver of cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin could be the gold.
But still: each Bitcoin or Satoshi lost, in a scenario where all Bitcoins are used, would represent a failure when granularity is not enough.

I presented a way to "spot" lost coins: they would be out of use since years and years.

i was talking about the impact that lost coins may have, and it isn't so great as a many think, let's say that 10.5M are lost, this would bring (by logic) the price to x2 at best

there is no other reason why it should go to x100 or whatever crazy value, because we have only lost 50% of total supply

Bitcoins has not been around since years and years but last year 5,5 million bitcoin was untouched for more than 2 years.

So what? When Bitcoin becomes widely used, that is going to change.
It's normal that at the moment, when Bitcoin is mostly used as an investment asset, there is a huge number of them sitting unused.
I have less than 1 BTC, and you bet it: it's sitting warmly in my wallet.

This will not have a bad influence on the overall community. At the moment Bitcoin is devisable to 0.0000001 ... If a shortage of Bitcoins occur, they can just add a few zero's. {Extreme scenario}

Coins are also added daily through mining, for many years to come... and would not run out in our life time.  ;)

Nobody will ever really know, how many coins are lost... I have coins in cold storage, that has been there for years. It's out of circulation, but it's not lost.

Most people would bring these coins back in circulation, before a scenario like this occur... because they would be more valueble anyway.  ;) It's really a non-issue.

I hope I explained it, better than I understand it.  ;)  

 

Indeed we can divide Bitcoin as to where we want.
However, I doubt that the coins lost due to the reasons mentioned above can affect the price of Bitcoin simply because there is no way the other Bitcoiners can know that another lost their wallet (hardware failure) or forgot their password. And even if they have heard about it, there is no way to prove that it is true.
So, unless people intentionally sent coins to 1DontSentHereCoz1tsGone4Ever they cannot prove that they are telling the truth or don't have any backups.

I guess it will lost forever. it can't effect bitcoin. We still have enough bitcoins.
           

Can you tell me where to find information about Bitcoin division?
I follow it since a couple years, never read about that possibility to divide Bitcoins in smaller parts than Satoshis.

Do you know what circulation means?  If coins are lost, they are immediately out of circulation.  Therefore, there are less of them.  

Since you don't know anything about how anything works, I'll explain it to you:

The supply and the demand determine the price.  Every lost coin decreases the supply, which increases the price.  Every coin in cold storage has the same affect.

So at the moment, the value of your coins is affected by lost coins.



We can only hope that would happen.  If "neutralize" means "make it worth $10,000", then please go ahead.



Do you know what a 2% difference in supply does to the price of pork, or wheat, or corn?  No, of course you don't know.  Hint:  It can change it a lot more than 2%.

Did you know that the price of corn was $7.00 a bushel in 2012, and $3.50 in 2014?  I'll save you the trouble of doing the math: that's half the price.

Just go to an exchange and pay attention.  When one person puts in a big order, it can influence everyone else to change their orders because they're afraid their orders won't get filled.  



Satoshi did the same calculation, and he determined that all the money in the world could be replaced with Bitcoin and a Satoshi could still be worth much less than 1 dollar.  

Of course, he was using the M1 money supply.  I'm sure you know what that is, so I won't explain it.

But I will point out that 1 bitcoin is 100 Million satoshis.  According to my math, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that would make 10 bitcoins approximately 1 Billion satoshis (give or take a few satoshis, of course, it's impossible to be accurate with such big numbers).  And then 10,000 bitcoins would be 1 trillion satoshis.  Are we on the same page so far?

So, if you are correct, and I'm sure you are, then we need 241 trillion dollars...So let's see...10,000 bitcoins is a trillion satoshis...so we need 2,410,000 BTC...and we're going to have about 21,000,000...so if 88% of all bitcoins are lost, then we won't be able to send an amount less than 1 dollar.  Is that about right?  

Hopefully by the time 88% of all bitcoins are lost, someone will make another coin that can be used for smaller transactions.  Kind of a "lite" version of bitcoin, maybe.  Do you think it will happen in time to avoid a global crisis?

Suppose the FBI started burning bitcoins. Let's assume they were wildly and unrealistically successful and managed to burn 18.9 million bitcoins (90% of the total supply ever). The result would be that there would "only" be 2.1 million bitcoins. That's only a difference of 1 decimal place, so it's clear that this would be a very unsuccessful way to attack the network.

By the way, I'm sure I've seen this topic discussed on the board before. If someone wanted to read more responses to this concern, they could search the board.

Could someone please explain how this address works?
I imagine that it's just a btc address that is guaranteed some how that the private keys have been distroyed, but are the coins still sitting in that wallet/address and could anyone ever hack it to steal the coins?

i think it's a joke man, that address does not exist lol, but i guess someone could customize it with some tools


it will but as a many believe, it will affect bitcoin exactly by the % of the coins that are lost nothing more or less, simple math

so if we lose 33% we might end with a 50% gain, if we lose 50% we might end with 100% gain and so on

This is it. You don't know if the coins are truly lost as they are sitting in an address to which someone may or may not have access. Down the road in many years it may lead to more valuable remaining coins.

Yeah thought that, i did try check it on blockchain but it says not recognised.
I still think i do remember reading about an addresd where you can send coins to and they will be lost or destroyed forever, maybe it was something to do with testing transactions.
I will edit post if i can find anything about this, or if someone else can help.

It should hypothetically make the remaining coins more valuable.  But it seems like as long as you can continue the digits past the decimal point (ie 0.00000000000000008879) I think a prefix or scientific notation can be used to show the value.  This may not bee needed for a LONG time, we'll see if btc is still around by that time.

With that said I think the bigger issue is the frustration at losing coins.  I have lost small amounts, and I think I have some "stuck" under the minimum withdrawal amounts from some sites.  This is more of an issue I htink than the coins reducing the number in circulation

It'll just be lost forever. Doesn't matter really if btc can be broken down to satoshi's.

yes i am sure about this.
you can read the bitcoin wiki page for more information on bitcoin divisibility .

in short, bitcoin is has infinite divisibility, which means even if because of massive loss of bitcoin private keys (wallets or whatever) only one bitcoin is left it can be divided into enough parts so that everyone can use it without anything happening to bitcoin

actually your question is answered in much details on bitcoin wiki you can read it there!
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Won.27t_loss_of_wallets_and_the_finite_amount_of_Bitcoins_create_excessive_deflation.2C_destroying_Bitcoin.3F

the keyword to search is

I myself am responsible for atleast 5-10BTC out floating in wallets that are basically unrecoverable, some was just deleting the wallet or throwing out the old computer with BTC wallet that still had some on it (at the time a couple BTC was basically worthless and i didnt see any reason to keep it) another way i lost lil over 2BTC was when i bought some from ATM and had them sent to my phone wallet (which was not backed up) then the phone got left on side of highway while changing a tire since i used my phone for flashlight (those were actually worth keeping) but ya if just me 1 user of BTC has contributed that amount im sure the combined amounts of "lost" BTC will be high and are unrecoverable...

Perfect example of why lost btc should never be replaced, although JLynn171 has unfortunally lost his phone with 2btc on it nobody can prove that someone else didn't pick up the phone and swipe the btc to there own cold wallet.
Sure the coins could be marked but they could move.

i don't know if this is what he meant or even this was in his mind when he posted the top comment but there is an address that only eats bitcoins and in fact destroys them:
https://blockchain.info/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE

this address is without private keys so if you send to that address the coins will be lost forever!

and how pissed off would the guy who bought coins 2 years ago and is waiting for 3-4 years before cashing out his investment and just letting them sit there if they were "declared lost" then put back into circulation through act of mining... they would be stealing... once a coin is mined it is sent out to anonymousville to live forever and to be passed around or sit in a wallet or just thrown away...

i didn't know that this was possible, you always learn something new each day, i've read online that you can do it with electrum seedless wallets or electrum pos system

or they just have hidden the private key in some way?

Remember that 21 million is a completely arbitrary number. Bitcoin would work as designed even if there were only 1 bitcoin. Right now we can divide BTC out to 8 decimal places. If we moved to 9 we move an order of magnitude. This is easy to do and solves any shortage of bitcoin supply.
As mentioned above by several posters, any attempt to "re-mine" those coins should be outright rejected. Who will determine what a "lost" coin is? How would you know if my coins are lost or in cold storage? After you re-mine coins then someone shows up and says "I found my coins!", who's coins are now the real coins? Are you going to replace the found coins, and with what coins are you replacing them? And under what authority can you render some coins unusable?
If the 21M cap is ever lifted I would divest at least 50% of my BTC and I would assume the project is now dead. A strict, unchangeable cap is one of the most powerful features of BTC. Without it you basically own benie babies or tulips.  

And this is why prices that now are considered ridiculous like 1 million per BTC are completely possible and reasonable to happen in the future. The system CAN handle it.

Exactly the address i was thinking about, thank you Herbert2020  :)
Now when you say this address has no private keys what do you mean.
Was this address created without private keys? (If even possible)
Or were the private keys just destroyed to this address, if so who did and or approved this?

Yeah but it will take time for the scarcity as the majority of the population is not aware about the bitcoins but in future when bitcoin gets into the mainstream people would not be able to buy them but those who will be holding great number of bitcoins can earn a good profit by selling it.

Someone is probably watching his BTC wallet right infront of him and he does not know the password.

For sure, a fully minted bitcoin will not consist of 21 mil but has anyone done some serious calculation and estimation on how many bitcoins is accessible out there of those mined? I regularly get rid of wallets with just a few satoshi's to keep the Multibit neat. Then we have Gox - and Mr. Nakamoto's premine which probably never will be used.

gox ? stolen coins are not lost ,theyre just no longer property of their original owner
i dont see any reason to believe the gox fortune has been burned forever and will never be cashed /traded /spent

http://www.coinbuzz.com/2015/03/31/23-bitcoins-mined-13-may-lost/ (http://www.coinbuzz.com/2015/03/31/23-bitcoins-mined-13-may-lost/)
"Bitcoins can be lost due to irrecoverable passwords, forgotten wallets from when Bitcoin was worth little, from hardware failure or because of the death of the bitcoin owner. It’s extremely improbable and effectively impossible to recover lost coins. At press times the total value of lost bitcoins is roughly $1.23 billion USD.  :o

creating an address with that many custom characters (BitcoinEaterAddressDontSend) is impossible.
check out vanity address for more info. it is proximately like this :
creating with 3 custom characters take less than a minute and 4 takes half an hour and more becomes exponentially harder until impossible.

so that address 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE is impossible to have private keys.
but creating such address is very well possible:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=973998.0
but it is useless since you can never spend the coins!!

Dang. If that were to come to pass, we would all be multi-millionaires.

All you do is send it to a random public key hash. As long as the bitcoin network accepts it as a valid address, the transaction will go through and no one will ever be able to guess the private key.

There is a private key, it's just the same as with any other address... nobody is ever going to be able to guess it. The fact that the address is so specific and not random numbers and letters means that no one actually generated that address from a private key.

The question I have is if it is completely reasonable for BTC to reach $1 million (and I believe it is), why is the price so low? Banks, institutions, investors, hedge funds, venture capital, etc. should be buying up BTC like there's no tomorrow. I guess they just think it's still too risky? But plenty of businesses are already accepting and using BTC. We are long past proof of concept. The only possible tweaks that still need to occur are in security (exchanges & business, not the network itself) and ease of use.

If it doesn't already exist, someone needs to invent an easy way to top up smartphone wallets directly from your back account. It seems to me that if this were as easy as putting in the amount you wanted to transfer to your wallet, adoption would happen quickly.

My guess would be that your theory is spot on. We talk about super high values for bitcoin, but banks and hedge funds are very rational actors and are far more interested in a sure fire 2% bond than an extremely risky unknown currency asset. As much as I believe in bitcoin I would not vote to include it in a managed portfolio if I were on the board. Perhaps I could be convinced to go 0.1%, but anything else could be argued to be a failure of fiduciary responsibility. If it tanks, the whole board could be sued for this.

Maybe OP would be interested in this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1097562.0;topicseen

the bitcoin lost forever do nothing but increase the rarity 'of those remaining, since you can use the satoshi, do not see why should be reinstated

At the moment, not. but It's just a consensus thing, and could "easily " be changed.

The divisibility of Bitcoins is how the lost coins problem is handled.
In short the money supply can be expanded by having the value of Bitcoin increase such that people will be urged to spend/sell to those the increasing demand.

I would NEVER agree to the 21M cap being raised and neither would anyone else who currently owns any btc
as it would signifigantlly devalue any benefits of being an early adopter and believer in this technology

To raise the cap to something like 21Billion for the saker of argument  would make every coin worth 10 times less
how would the winklevoss twins and other large holders feel about that ? consensus lol ......i doubt it

people have also invested x amount  because there will be a signifigant reward  halving  in 2016 and and the next one after that
when a steep  rise in value is predicted ,to start monkeying arounnd with the coin supply now would just cause people to lose faith all together
since thats equivalent to irresponsible  governments printing cash from fresh air  now  etc etc

It could also happen just with a general consensus democratically, but that is also unlikely since the 21M limit is held as a pretty core belief by most Bitcoin users currently.

unlikely for whom?
for you or for majority?

Hmm... you'd think though that some of the less risk averse guys like VCs or say a Donald Trump would see an obvious opportunity here. Buy  up a substantial amount of bitcoins - say 4 million, which is a fifth of the total. It would cost Trump $1 billion out of his $10 billion. As long as bitcoin continues to be adopted, this will eventually be worth an astronomical amount. Huge risk, huge reward, but you'd think there would be some bored billionaires out there who would be VERY interested.

If 1 satoshi can be broke  down, my question is how many the maximum it can be broken, what i mean is how many the maximum digit of the point behind 1 satoshi if we really need to do that ( adding digit point)

it seems to be a very difficult thing to verify/determine with certainty. Because Bitcoin is divisible into much smaller units, I don't think that "lost Bitcoin" will really be at the forefront of Bitcoin-related issues any time soon.

Only way to determine it,it's by means of news or reports from people who lost it

When I found out about BTC a few years ago I started buying Because I knew the potential as soon as I saw it

I told a few friends about it and a couple of them bought a few, they lost Interst in it and didn't bother to keep their wallets safe or backed up

They didn't have much but those few  BTC are surely lost because there is no copy of the wallet file and they don't know the password either so even if they had it they couldn't use the coins - double fucked for lack of a better word

They had to watch the epic rise to $1200+ knowing they had coins that cost between $6-10.....im sure there have been much larger losses and thefts but these are just a couple I know personally

your question is so technical and i am not exactly an expert in computer language or programming but i think it depends on the variable that you are using , for example decimal can hold 28-29 significant digits with range of (-7.9 x 10^28 to 7.9 x 10^28) / (10^0 to ^28) in c#
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/364x0z75.aspx

but i guess you can deal with any number that requires more digits in a different way like breaking it down into smaller parts and then deal with it.

Not true at all.  That address is almost certain, like any address, to have quadrillions upon quadrillions of private keys that can spend from it.

Your problem is to find just one.  Go!

So I'm imagining the existence of that address?  Please don't pontificate on things you don't understand.

If we lost the private key it is near to impossible to bet that will find it in future to try changing the letters.

Yes. It's possible for people to find a private key that is associate with the Bitcoin address (1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE).

Let me try to brute-force the private key using Vanitygen on my ~350 Kkey/s computer..

http://imgs.us/image/sj

Alright. More than ... Human lifetime to get it.

Define "really lost".

Prove they are "really lost" coins.

If you can do that, then we can talk about regenerating them.

HINT: No one can prove coins are lost or stolen. All they can do is claim they are lost or stolen.

This is the real world where even the best people lie, cheat and steal.

Forget about the alleged "lost" coins. Worst case scenario is they make the rest of the coins worth more.

Yes, lost coins are lost coins. Nothing you can do about it. Bitcoin is divisible to 8 places so there is plenty for everyone. Why we wouldn't be talking in satoshis term one day, not in Bitcoin terms. 1 satoshi can be worth $1 and everybody would be happy. :)

Because of this above, I don't think there will be consensus rules about changing the final supply. I wouldn't like that the total supply changes.

Now what will future bring us, that nobody knows!

What about if in the future somebody will make a service that will couple up a ledger with the Bitcoin ledger, and in the first ledger an IDENTITY is stored: name, sirname, born date, etc, and ONE Bitcoin address, that certifies that THAT PERSON is owner of THAT BITCOIN ADDRESS?
This WILL probably built up on the infrastructure by somebody, I am sure :)

I don't think so, and that's exactly why I opened the thread.
If the whole world will ideally begin to use Bitcoins, there won't be enough for everyday use.
1 satoshi will end up worth 100$ or so, and you can't really go shopping with that smallest coin.
I repeat: it's NOT an actual problem, but it MAY become in the future, even more when we consider that with time, Bitcoins are lost inevitably in different ways.
So the count is not even on 21 millions, but less.

It's interesting... having the chance to add granularity by one zero or two will surely come in handy in the future.

My friend, let's just hope that we will encounter a problem like this in the future, that's all I can say! :)

Ye let's hope this and then just add 3 zero at the end, game done! :D

how can a bitcoin address have many private keys :O
every bitcoin address has just one private key!!!


you either didn't even read what i wrote higher or don't have any understanding of how bitcoin addresses and private keys are related and how you an create a custom address.

here are some good references to read:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Private_key
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vanitygen

Not outside the capabilities, but the majority of users would never agree to do it, and in order to change the bitcoin protocals, the majority of users (miners actually) have to agree to do it. They would not agree to this.

No. There are 2²⁵⁶ private keys
And 2¹⁶⁰ addresses (hashes of compressed and uncompressed public keys)
So, there are ~2⁹⁶ private keys for each address

We can always use an alternate currency for small transactions and use Bitcoins to Store wealth in that case ;)

But i don't think a satoshi will ever touch $100.. lol :p

Is that to say it's better to use a online wallet?

I personally don't trust much online wallets: seen too much crap happened in the past.

we will see it will happen later

This is correct. Anyone surprised by this should read about the Pigeonhole Principle.

Could that lead into situation in a distant future where there is too few bitcoins to supply and maintain desirable number of transactions? Let's say that even the smallest amount of bitcoin will be more expensive than the smallest amount of any currency. That could be a problem.

Holy shit have you told anyone about this yet?

i believe that its nearly impossible, people wont loose that much money, also i think that its possible to let people mine more bitcoins than the current limit though its just my guess

If that was the case everyone participating in the network could agree that dividing a bitcoin into 8 decimal places isn't enough and up that amount to 16 or some other number, that wouldn't be a very controversial change to the protocol.

Relax, those are mine...
I'll move them when I'm good and ready ;)

They will never come back and they will rip.
If the developers try to get back them then it will be violation of the user's privacy and bitcoin will not remain secured.

it's not an actual problem the divisibility of Bitcoins is how the lost coins problem is handled and the increasing demand.