Bitcoin Forum

What do you think about lost btcs?.. James Howells's story is very heart breaking. (He lost 7500 BTC with his harddisk 2 years ago :()

Lost btcs in harddisks or hard wallets increase btc price eventually.

yes they could increase the price of bitcoins, but I dont think there will be many lost these days because people will safe their private keys.

Even after a lot of events like Mt.gox etc ... It seems like people still don't give a shit about where they store their bitcoins , so I personally think they won't learn the lesson until something bad happens to them .
Now speaking about how those "losses" affect bitcoin ? then it's simply like Satoshi said :

     Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.

I don't know if I buy the lost coins making other ones worth more. There's only ever a few for sale at any one time and most of the time we don't know about lost coins. They would only effect stuff if all coins were up for sale all at once.

+1
all 15million coins are not on exchanges
only 30,000 are and most get swapped atleast 3 times to show maximum trade volumes of 90,000.

so of the 30,000 coins or less active on exchanges.. the other 14,970,000 dont really affect the supply or demand.
so it doesnt matter if they are hoarded. or lost in a garbage site or forgotten private keys by satoshi, hal finney, sirius and the other original crew

It was a similar thread here, but as far as i know more lost coins the other coins worth more because there are less coins in the market available, if James lost 7500BTC then it is really bad feeling.

of course will be very bad and unpleasant if we lose bitcoin, let alone losing 7,500 worth of bitcoin, maybe I've stopped playing and adopt bitcoin. i ever lost my bitcoin just little amount,maybe this is not a dream.

Lost bitcoins are bad for the user who lost them ( I suppose that were bitcoins minded years ago with low price, not a lot of money when they lost it, but at todays price, a very nice amount of dollars ) , but it increase the price for the other bitcoins that remain to spend. With less coins on market the price could be higher.

What I think about that? Well, I feel sorry to him. There is something that we should learn from this, keep your Bitcoin safe!

the price back then doesn't matter. right now the people that have lost access to their wallets could have had a great retirement bonus for later. especially when the price went over $1000 in 2013. current value is the only thing that matters.

But thanks to his donation the price of Bitcoin could increase further more ;)
But honestly, i feel really bad for him :(
Think the money he could made by using that Bitcoin :P

7500BTC is worth at the moment $3,375,675 and that is really huge, everyone can retire with these money, maybe there is more than 7.5k bitcoins lost and we don't know it

It is quite unfortunate that lost bitcoins can never be recovered therefore all care should be taken to store them safely as lost bitcoin is not just individual loss but a loss of entire bitcoin community because there is a limited supply of bitcoin.But yes it has one good side also that it increases bitcoin price

I feel really sorry for that guy. That would of being a massive loss to anyone. That is one of the downsides of bitcoin once it's lost its gone forever. It would be interesting to know the total amount of lost coins is? I do feel that with lost coins at some point that has to help increase the price tho.

Very san story indeed. If we accept satoshi's words as true, that means a good value distributed to the rest of us. Who knows how many BTC from the 15 million we have are lost forever... perhaps 1 million lost?

In the first times of Bitcoin loses should be higher than now.

Such a crazy sad story, not sure how I would deal with it.  Does anyone have an estimated guess on the amount of lost coins total and is it possible to ever know?

It's impossible to know how many coins have ever been lost in total, a lot of the addresses that show tons of Bitcoins might as well be coins from early adopters that have been lost forever because since Bitcoin was 0 dollars back then, they didn't gave a fuck about properly storing them, and then years later they find out they deleted/lost password/whatnot, and tons of BTC get lost, shrinking the supply, and making everyone else holding wealthier.

If you can't recover it ,as the good lord Satoshi said
"Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone".

Keep that in mind and move on!!

Thanks, I did not know he said that.  I need to read more about him.

It is possible that these coins are recovered. I don't think that hard disk is going to show up again though.
I think Mt Gox also 'rediscovered' a few bitcoins after they got hacked.

Who knows whether or not these coins are ever seen again. What is known is if you have some bitcoins in your possession, you should do the best you can do to keep them safe.

I think according to BTC security policy there is no come back for lost coins. This rule also important for money's first rule: "scarcity". Scarcity makes btc valuable like real gold.

If you have access to the private key, either through writing, memorization, or otherwise, it is possible to recover Bitcoin. it is even possible to recover a private key with the last 2 missing digits, as long as you aim to brute force your way into the wallet. Past that, it is either luck or a lot of computing power.

I can put 100 BTC on an HDD and smash it over and over again, I can just pull up my account on another computer as long as I have the private key.

Oh the wonders of blockchain technology.

It hearts, I lost a few to terabox but how about 7500 , that hearts

Holy shit, 7500 bitcoin....

He could buy a mansion and a mercedez and retire in peace.

Well, that's good for us since the price of btc will rise. :(

Poor James :(

they will help the other have more value, so see them as a donation, it's also what satoshi said at the time


there is a difference between scarcity and limited, gold is not limited, it's only harder to mine, but it can be possible infinite if we consider other planet....

I have never experienced a loss of BTC.
I don't know, it seems like if I imagine it feels sad, bitcoin that you have gathered quite a long time and BOOM! lost in just 1 day.  :'(

Well cases like this one have happened a lot in the early days I get. People who were curious mined some coins,, or bought them very cheap and forget about them over the years. Then one day the read about Bitcoin again in the news and if they still had their hd drive with the wallets, they mostly lost the passwords and private keys.
To have an effect on the price there have to be more than just 7500 lost coins. Ans there are more coins lost. I'd say, including satoshi's coins, maybe around 1,5 to 2  million coins could have been lost.

A lot of people probably still lose BTC this way (By buying new pc/smartphone, whatever).

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