Bitcoin Forum

so the Total Bitcoins to ever be produced : 21,000,000

and back in the day i had 27BTC back for a few jobs i did when they were worth next to nothing

that computer was long since gone, what happens to the 27 do they get found by some company or the miners or what?

They are effectively lost... Nobody will ever find them, they just make all other bitcoins worth a little bit more (since there are less circulating bitcoins on the markets, so the prices will be slightly higher)

so there is no market into breaking into these old wallets?

The amount of time/effort invested that would be required to do such a thing would be prohibitive.  The provider would have to essentially brute force a private key which would be damn near impossible if possible at all.

Not as far as i know.
There is a market to bruteforce old wallet.dat's, but that's only possible if you still have the wallet.dat, and used a very weak (or no) password, or if you still know parts of the password you used to secure your wallet.

If you don't have the wallet.dat, or used a strong (and completely forgotten) password, it's impossible to recover lost coins i'm afraid.

27 BTC is worth a lot today. And I'm sure you're not the only one who lost those old mined coins so there could be a lot more lost coins than we hear and it seems there's no way to retrieve them. Since bitcoin can't tell how many coins are lost, then it'll just stick to its code.

Personally, i know i've mined with my old desktop PC back when there were no ASIC's available... I had read about bitcoins on some forum and i just had to try out what all the fuss was about. I don't even know if i found a block back then, since bitcoins were worth almost nothing, and i didn't know any place to exchange them. The Hard disk with that wallet is long gone, maybe with some coins, maybe completely empty... I'll never know.
I don't even know if it was close to the beginning of bitcoin, or back when a lot of people were CPU mining.

i think it is safe to say that those coins are already lost but there is a very very small chance that someday someone can have the same private key as yours and he will be able to spend your lost coins but ill repeat there is only very very small chance of that

The chance of somebody finding the same private key are nonexistent.... They are SOOOOOOOO small that you can actually conclude there is a 0% chance
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=24268.msg304195#msg304195

If they're lost, they're lost. Private keys are about as safe as keeping your bitcoins on a computer on mars. Nobody can get to it, and it's essentially lost forever. It's quite a shame, but that's the result of any currency.

Yeah, they are frozen and lost forever if these old wallet owners will use it then it will come back again into the market and be in the cycle.

The lost bitcoins once found out after the production of the entire bitcoins will be considered to be fiat bitcoins. They may make certain regulations whether such bitcoins needs to be added or just rejected.

Lose access to your private key(s) or passwords to wallets etc & you lose your bitcoin's. It's harsh but it's why bitcoin is such an advanced & secure system.

I wouldn't even like to try & estimate the number of coins lost forever, it will be a lot.

There is, but not without having a wallet file or at least something similar. If you forgot your password to an old wallet file there is likely a way to open it. An attack just on an address is not feasible and would take several billion years.

As many stated, lost wallets are lost forever.

This is an added value of BTC: the more people lose BTC the more rare it becomes.
If a bank IRL would lose a TIR of Dollars, those DOllars would be stamped again, but with BTC is not possible...

I always suggest to set a backup of your wallet in a secure offline or cloud storage to avoid this kind of risks.

Lost coins are lost. It's like gold. If you destroy it, or if you lose your hard drive containing it, you'll have to regenerate the private key again. What are the chances of that?

The hard part about lost coins are determining what is really lost.  There has been talk about redistributing "lost coins" but the topic continuously comes back around to, how do you determine that the coins are lost?  Perhaps your 27 coins weren't lost, but instead you had them sitting in cold storage for a few years, its not fair to say that every 2 or 3 years you have to move those coins or they get put into the next block.  That would be a bad mark against bitcoin.  Also, there really is no way for you to prove that those coins are yours since you don't have the private key anymore.

So there really is no way to prove that coins are lost and are not just sitting in storage for someone.

like satoshi said, lost coins are a gift to the remaining coins, they will help them becoming more rare, and increase the overall value in the future, so not a bad thing

lost coins make sure that bitcoins are even more 'rare, and this can' be useful for people like me is hodling

Definitely there are many people/miners that have lost their bitcoins , since bitcoin price is unpredictable, they'd never knew that bitcoin will become this big. I am pretty sure a lot of them do have regrets for not securing their coins back then.


I've read that its just not hundred of years,  its even hundreds millions of year

I think your 27 bitcoins also gone with your computer. 27 bitcoins for now is a huge amount of bitcoins, do you ever try to find your old computer ? because i think it's really worth if you can found ur pc.

I think you can do nothing now , as you have lost the computer and you have loaded your bitcoins in desktop software so if you have the key of passphrase or wallet.dat file with out this you can do nothing . Just forget it , if you found the passphrase then you can recover it back.

Next time back up all you btc stuff in a back up drive. So if something like this happen you have a back up. I am sorry that you lost 27 Btc. I wish there was something that I can do to help.

But there is nothing to do to recover lost BTC.