Bitcoin Forum

As the topic's subject says my question is what happens to the bitcoins that were in deleted wallets? If they just dissapear what will happen when all the bitcoins will be mined? Bitcoins can't be printed out like banknotes isn't it?:))

http://en.bitcoinwiki.org/Bitcoin_Myths#Lost_coins_can.27t_be_replaced_and_this_is_bad

They're gone.

We can always increase how much you can divide bitcoins by quite easily, though, and it's quite possible wallets including Bitcoin Core could change to have a smaller unit like mBTC or satoshi become the main unit if we ever go that far.

That could be the answer. I haven't thought about this,but using smaller units involves price grow isn't it?

There are lots of threads about how many Bitcoins are lost forever. These are two of the more recent ones. The last one tries to estimate the quantity of Bitcoins lost forever, but even if coins haven't moved since 2009 someone might have the key. Lost Bitcoins make the others more valuable

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1097562.0

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7253.0

Imagine this: if you damage, delete or lost your wallet/private key it is the same as you would burn your FIAT paper money. There is no going back.
The only way is to copy your wallet.dat or use wallet with some safety option - for example Electrum with its pass phrase functionality.

No. Using a smaller unit does not affect the price at all as it does not change the scarcity, it just makes it more divisible. It shouldn't have any major effect on the price other than increasing adoption slightly more possibly in a world where Bitcoin has become pretty big.

The chance of lost bitcoins to be found is zero, but who knows maybe there is one day someone is so so so lucky to generate the same private key? Then the bitcoin will become a hidden treasure!

The chance of generating such address is the same as generating any other one, which is practically zero, otherwise noone would even use bitcoin out of fear someone will claim their coins.
You have much bigger chances of mining a block with your CPU than to generate an existing address.

i guess the more people loose bitcoins the more their value increase

Yes it increases because the bitcoin max. of coins gets lower. The rarer the coin, the higher the price.
I guess you can consider people who lost their wallets/coins as eternal hodler's  ;D

Actually, if they're damaged but identifiable you can get your bank notes replaced. If you actually lose them then that's that indeed.

There's a finite amount of Bitcoin and an "infinite" amount of fiat that can be printed.

If you think about it this way, then there is not going to be 21 million in circulation. Most people have lost their coins in this fashion, so essentially they are out of circulation.

Indeed. Many people believe that millions of Bitcoins have already been lost, for instance when the price was much lower and people forgot about them. If Bitcoin does become large then it is extremely likely we will see the main unit of Bitcoin shift to either the mBTC or satoshi, or possibly even lower with the amount that BTC is divisible by being increased.

If you delete an account, it is gone for ever. A Bitcoin wallet is just like a bank account, except you can't delete a bank account. It will take an extremely long time to mine every single Bitcoin. We will talk about that problem when it comes.                                 

if in the future thi will be a problem, i'm sure something can be done about it, like an hard fork, they want to hard fork to increase the 21M cap, they should instead think, first, about resurrecting those lost coins....

the bitcoins themselves wont dissapear,if some extremely lucky soul manages to find the private key then they get the bitcoins. when all the bitcoins are mined i expect miners to run profitting on transaction fees.

For pools to solely mine and get rewarded with just transaction fees the price has to be much and much higher. At least a few $K per coin. Glad we don't have to worry about that right now.

Satoshi has said never delete a wallet .dat

Hi ChrisPop,

It is a common misconception that Bitcoins actually are stored in your wallet. The coins themselves are actually stored on the blockchain, and each wallet is the key to unlocking your personal stash of wealth. A perfect analogy is that we all belong to the first national bank of blockchain, and each one of us can get a safe deposit box (the wallet). If we want to get inside one of these safe deposit boxes, our wallets needs to generate a key (private key) in order to gain access.

If you delete your key (which is a part of the wallet) the coins are still located at the first national bank of blockchain. But its near impossible to get back into the safe deposit box.




The whole "everyone's coins goes up in value" argument is silly and at this point a fallacy. In order for this to happen certain criteria need to be met (which non have). And even if these were to happen that doesnt mean everyone's coins naturally increase in value.

1. All Bitcoins needs to be mined
2. All bitcoins need to be actively traded (last I saw, only %30 of coins ever mined are actively traded and are just being recirculated)

Without either or both of these happening, there is near zero effect of Bitcoins value and someone burning their coins. If I had 500,000 Bitcoins today in cold storage, and I secretly burned them, no one would be the wiser therefore price still says the same. That section needs to be removed from myths because it is a myth itself.

Actually finding the lost bitcoin is pretty easy , you just need some dedication to found it
The hard part is actually finding or generating the private keys, which is zero chances you will do that
I mean, if you have a chance to generate the same private keys as the others, nobody want to use bitcoins
We use them for the anonymity and security ::)

The lost bitcoin is a hidden treasure that won't be found forever ::)

yeah because someone accidentally can send you bitcoin, and you will not be able to retrieve them

or maybe the only collision that will ever happen will happen with one of your address in a deleted wallet, would be hilarious

About the first question depends what kind of wallet you are talking about. If it is a bitcoin core wallet installed in your compute and you have saved your .dat file you can download a new wallet bitcoin core and replace the .dat file of the last one with the save from you. In this you will have all your bitcoins.

If the bitcoins will in an hard disk and you will destroy it without having any copy your bitcoins are gone forever. If the bitcoins are in a cold storage or in a deep cold storage or any other offline storage and you destroy physically those your bitcoins are again gone forever.

If your bitcoins are in an online wallet that depends from the option offered by every online wallet. I have bitcoin at coinbase for example. This online wallet offer protection from hacking (storing more than 97% of bitcoin offline) or even other protections. I have no knowledge about the other online wallets.

If there are bitcoin destroyed the overall number of those will be less. And yes bitcoin cannot be printed like the banknotes.

the wallet will floating around and no one can own it
1 year ago i just suddenly deleted my wallet (containt 0.01 BTC +) and i'm already trying any way to get it back, but nothing as a result

It would be interested to know how many bitcoins exactly are lost. I know this is impossible to know, but I bet there was quite a few. It's rather easy to delete a simple file like wallet.dat if you are not careful enough.

Couldn't Satoshi think of some system to report for coins that haven't moved more than a certain amount of time so they get flagged by completely inactive and lost? Just talking from the top of my head here.

Some coins are burnt deliberately, example: https://blockchain.info/address/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr

I highly doubt it would be accurate. Afterall, those coins rightfully belongs to the owner of the BTC address. It isn't right to reclaim it. Moreover, people can easily use those address as cold storage and not have any transactions with it for extended period of time.

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If those wallets are deleted and coins are sent to it, the coins will be gone forever. They can't be reclaimed without a fork but majority of the community probably wouldn't agree to this. To spend those coins, you definitely need the private key. Without it, the nodes would consider it as invalid unless the transactions are signed with an ECDSA signature of the private key.