Bitcoin Forum

Just came across this article today says that 4 million out of the total supply of 21 million have already been lost due to various reasons. The most popular reason are the HODLers who are holding it for quite long. These people have reduced the supply of bitcoins in market which has upsurged the price of bitcoin so much. Satoshi surely is the biggest HODLer himself.

Here is the article : http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/

But holding bitcoin doesn't mean they are lost forever or out of circulation?

Wow, but the current supply is in there, maybe those miners or whatever they are still have their bitcoins on their wallet, so it is not making any difference because their balance is still going up day by day.

The max supply would be at 21million forever, and it would not change. When someone die, the balance will be in there forever, there is no way to change that, and it does not affect the market.

Maybe there are less bitcoins moving around, but they are still holding them in there, but nobody knows what really happened to those wallets, maybe they are locked

It is hard to tell, maybe they are from true hardcore hodlers or are just gathering virtual dust in old computers, waiting to be discovered by someone.
Also many bitcoins will never go to market because many early investors have more bitcoins than they could justify to IRS, so they will never spend everything they have. The out of market bitcoins surely are more than 4 millions

And the article is wrong, the last bitcoin will be mined by 2140, not 2040

Exactly. They are there, people just wait for Bitcoin to be widely adopted so they can use it at it's intended price and in everyday life.
But some are probably lost, but there is no complication due to that, so we can just ignore it.

Being out of circulation and lost forever are two very different things - the first means that the coins simply hadn't been moved, while the latter means that they will never be moved and can be removed from total supply. But the fact that some coins haven't been moved for many years doesn't necessary mean that it was lost, and there's no way to tell for sure, unless the owner will somehow confirm it, which is not as easy as it seem, because to prove that you own coins you must own private keys - otherwise anyone can claim that they owned 8,000 Bitcoins but then thrown their hard drive away.
The number 30-50% from the article seems like a random guess not backed by anything. And the certainty that Satoshi lost his coins is also strange - I don't remember him reaching out to the community and saying that his lost his keys - so for now it's just pure speculation.

So it means we only have 17 million circulating in the market or holding? But anyway I find it advantage because it means it will never be back in zero value because we have some lost of btc and will gonna remain with the value.

So doing the math we actually have somewhat about 11-12 million BTC which are being HODL!

How can they know how many holder addresses are lost? I mean it's a rough estimation, a very rough. They're saying that it's between 30% and 50% which is huge! They have no certainty that this bracket is even close to being correct. It might as well be 20%, the numbers are completely made up. They're estimating it based on no research just a feeling that a holder would move the coins from time to time if he had the access, which is stupid.

I think this story is a bit sensational. There is no way to know for sure how many bitcoins are lost forever. You can't automatically assume that bitcoins which haven't moved for a long time have simply been lost and forgotten, rather than belonging to extreme hodlers.

Many early holders may forget their private keys

Umm...As others have said just because someone is holding it doesn't mean that they are lost forever.  Lost forever would be you had a paper wallet and the wallet got lost/destroyed or something along those lines.

Not only four million are lost, but micro calculations satoshi on wasted btc wallets have high price-fixing factors.

This is just pure speculation, and at least it is admitted in the article that they don't know for sure if these coins are lost or not. Sure, some of those coins that have been inactive are probably lost, but some users might just be holding them because there is no point in spending them right now. These big holders probably can't even cash out their coins because the marketcap is still to low. If they wanted to cash out their entire holdings, they would probably just create major panic in the market and the price would crash.

My understanding is 16 million plus but not yet 17 million Bitcoins... The rest will be mined during next several decades i.e. Proof of Work!

My immediate thought, they are not lost, they are just simply not in circulation at the moment. Lost would be those coins that can no longer be accessed by anyone. I would expect that to be a much much smaller number, probably around 1% of the 21m coins at most.

things like this are very hard to believe. because btc is very advanced and successful. why should be lost to reach 4 million. so here we need a fairly accurate certainty about this article. if not accurate this is called hoax.

Actually there are some unknown numbers lost forever. As you could loose all your BTC holdings by forgetting password to your BTC wallet, and those coins are not be recovered... therefore there never are as many BTC out there as they are accounted as mined. One of disadvantages of decentralized aspect of all Cryptocurrencies.

Not a hoax, its merely side effect of decentralized currency, no actual office to find your account or recover your lost coins!

Bitcoin and other Cryptos will teach our society sense of responsibility, since there is no lost and found program.  :-*
I know I am getting more careful with it all.

Sick to known I never holded more than 20 bitcoins in my life and these millions lost wtf..

I know and I referenced that in my response, I just do not feel that this number will be anywhere close to 4 million bitcoin. It would be interesting if we could one day find out definitively how many are lost but I don't think we will ever be able to do this.

First of all, I was under the impression that the last Bitcoin will be mined in 2140 not 2040. Also, just because people hold on to the coins doesn't mean that the coins are out of circulation. Whenever a whale decides to dump his/her coins, then the price will go down drastically. Also, Satoshi Nakamoto is rumored to be dead, so whatever bitcoins he had is now forever in some wallet that won't ever be moved.

Very nice article. Those bitcoins are good as junk. One must not overhold too long just to get immense amount of profit.

Though they doesn't get into the circulation, they get added to the entire count of mined coins. This will add value based on the total coin supply to the market demand at present. If you look at the fork coins of bitcoin too, we've got similar volume of total supply of coins.

Definitely, I just read this story from that other guy that signed up to the forum just to ask if he made the biggest mistake of his life when he declined the offer to buy Bitcoins in 2010. He came to ask if these were the same Bitcoins that are now worth so much. Feelsbadman.

I believe some of the coins are missing as junk. However most of them are holding by only a few hardcore holders to wait for the day when BTC hit USD100,000. And what is the value? It is still have to hook up with fiat?

Could you write a program to look at how many address have had no activity in X amount of time. Or only had 1 deposit no withdrawals, That would give you a rough idea of how many are lost without counting holders, who tend to stockpile.

If a wallet has only 1 deposit and no other transactions it doesn't mean the bitcoins are lost either. I personally have wallets with only deposit transaction. Also, the article says "likely to be lost", they're really just sort of frozen bitcoin, but not necessarily lost. The article title is just pure clickbait. https://i.gyazo.com/d3cbfeb54e3cbf9551f43953dc6fefe5.png

We're not really sure if they're lost or not, as there really is no way to know.

Then if they are just hodling it is not lost forever. It is just not included on today's circulation but will be in the future. There are really some lost bitcoins mostly lost because of owners unable to open their wallet and owner who died without them passing the password to their relatives.

Yes, I think so.
Holding does not mean getting out of circulation.
it is only temporary and at times can re-enter the circulation of transactions.

A few years ago, it was easy to get a lot of bitcoins, and then many people forgot about it, lost their private keys and lost a great fortune.

it is purely speculation, there are actually a topic in this board with a better speculation about this.

that is not called "lost forever" as your title suggests. that is always accessible and ready to be used with just one click. if so these holders choose.

just holding does not increase the price. the increasing demand is increasing the price. more people buy, more money comes in, price goes higher.

if it was just because of holding, all the altcoins would have been worth millions of dollars because they have too many bag holders.

Thos being held long term does mean there are less being traded, which means the whole "supply Vs demand" argument rings true with current price surge.
If these held coins came on the market, price would almost certainly react accordingly. However its very unlikely they are all coning out for use and trade any time soon, nor at once.

That's quiet stupid.

Why couldn't I cash out my BTC? Just because it's worth too much and I made huge gains?  ::)

Is Bill Gates making $80,000 per year. Because he wouldn't be able to justify to IRS higher salary?

Can't really say that they are lost for ever. Not even Satoshi's coins. What if Satoshi is alive and he is just waiting for prices of $100,000 per coin? Also, if coins haven't moved for 6-7 years, that doesn't mean that they are lost. It can also mean that these coins are in cold storage.

Even if the 4 million or more coins haven't been moved for a long time, it cannot be excluded from the circulating supply. This is mainly because even if holders lose their private keys for unknown reasons, we might have technological developments in the future which could brute force or crack the private keys and regain access to those coins which could've been deemed 'out of circulation'.

That's a silly conclusion. Clearly, people are hoarding bitcoins. "HODL" is the mantra of bitcoin investors, so it should be no surprise that a good deal of coins never move.

I'm sure there are many lost coins, and there could even be millions (Satoshi's coins obviously factor into this). But "4 Million Bitcoins Gone Forever" seems like a clickbait title with no basis in reality. If Satoshi reckoned that one BTC would be worth millions someday, I'm sure others do too. Those people are treating their private keys like their firstborn -- the coins aren't lost. :P

Man, feel bad for the British man who threw away the hard drive with 7.5M of bitcoins in there.

4 million Bitcoin is a huge amount, I think these Bitcoins will not be able to join the network anymore, this is actually a matter with good sides and bad sides, I think the lost Bitcoins should be included in the network after a while, thus ensuring a constant Bitcoin traffic . This period can be quite long, maybe 25 or maybe 50 years.

the 4 million must be quiet only and only the whale can control the price of the bitcoin.

That's insane. I didn't think the problem was that bad. I honestly didn't expect the lost coins to even reach a million, besides Satoshi's presumed lost coins. The owners in the early days must be hitting themselves in the head right about now.

Still though, maybe we should take this news with a grain of salt? Chainanalysis' methodology is apparently confidential, so there's no way to gauge how accurate their data is. I guess it doesn't matter at the end of the day though, and the less supply in circulation, the better off we are.

How about 10000 BTC for twp Pizzas? The first BTC transaction known, Yummy Pizzas

The problem with this is that there is no way to determine how many have been lost. We could count how many claim to have lost coins. We could count coins that have not moved in years. But no matter what data you are looking it it will not result in much of an answer.

I don't think that very likely actually, if coins haven't moved since 2011 or 2012, it's hard to believe that someone still has control over the wallet in question.
In the early days of Bitcoin, people didn't mind too much if they lost access to a wallet containing hundreds or thousands of Bitcoins.

You wouldn't mind either if you just lost the equivalent of 10 or 20 dollars.

It's just so unlikely that someone would have been able to hold onto all the coins they had if the price suddenly went up 1000% or more.

Indeed. Its the same with many altcoins today. Maybe we can see a huge rise in their value too in the coming years, but for now, its not such a big loss if you loose access to an alt wallet with some dollars worth of coins on it. I recently for example lost access to my iota wallet, there were around 30 bucks on it, so I didnt care too much. Still bothers me though, imagine that being worth $3000 in some years.

There are a lot of bitcoin holders and we will not really determine whether if they are just holding it for a several years or maybe they lost it but I am thinking where is the bitcoins of some criminals that is handed to police? Can we consider it part of the bitcoin that is lost forever or other people are using it now?

It may be that its hold / stock has to be kept. And the amount of day's increase will increase. So it has to be seen for more days.

Yes, but I think they are taking an assumption that out of all such coins which have been held for long term around 20-30% are lost because some people have not been able to recover their private keys or maybe would have lost it. One could really see many such stories on the forum itself. But I still feel 20-30% is too much even for an assumption too.

Yes you are right even I tried to made such a assumption that let's assume a certain percent of satoshis are going to miners for every certain transaction. They are HODLing such satoshis for a long term to gain huge profits. So at last aren't these satoshis just flowing out of the total market supply? If this continues like for next many years the supply is actually decreasing because what determines price is the circulating supply not the actual total supply.

Decentralized meaning we will never know to a single Satoshi

OMG! Thanks for sharing the article. There should some way to delete bitcoin from accounts that are not being used and be put again in circulation.

Absolutely,bitcoins which were being held could not be termed as lost coins.Long time holders could suddenly change their decision and may sell their bitcoins which would bring back the bitcoins in to circulation.The only thing that we would have to worry is about the one million coins which satoshi has since we actually don't know whether satoshi is still alive or not.If those coins comes in to circulation suddenly,that would make a big difference.

What if someone had enough bitcoin to send a large amount of bitcoin with a low enough miners fee that would take years to confirm naturally making the value of bitcoin higher for a higher demand then selling. The ultimate pump and dump.

Tough to say how many are actually "Lost", but maybe someday I will find some in my wallet that someone generously left me.

At the end of the day they will be in the circulation, I belive that they wont be become lost it should be holding by someone

They are not really lost they are just locked away in the wallets for which they had the private keys. I believe that it will not impact the bitcoin market in negative terms because the math is straight here, as we are short on 4 million bitcoin it is clear that we will have increased demand of the bitcoin and we won’t be fulfilling the place of those 4 million in short terms and thus it will force the market to put more value on the bitcoin and thus it will get more and more expensive. The end result? Well, the big investors will have million of worth bitcoin in to their wallet and they will rich already. People who held bitcoin since very long will be in the category of billionaire club now and the middle investors like you and me can now move forward to invest into bigger projects, different ideas or may be businesses in real world because we will be having great profits due to the aftermath.  So thank to those 4 million bitcoin and once agin they will be over the blockchain forever. They are not lost.

About 4 million bitcoins are lost forever, which is a pretty big number when I hear this information
It is very true that those who do not lose sight of the value and interest in bitcoin >:( >:( >:(

Really they are only lost until they move I'm sure at some point in the future someone will find a way to access these coins but for now they are lost

If bitcoins are hold by few people and they dont use them and keep them in their wallet, then it does not mean they are lost. They are just stored in the wallet and they can be used by the holder any time. This is just like we hold money on the bank and keep it in the bank for years until we need it.
So  4 million bitcoins are not lost. :)

There are lost Bitcoins and then there are Bitcoins that are being held but not lost. To me these are separate things. I consider Bitcoins to be lost if they can’t be recovered due to a lost private key, death of owner of coins (with no one having the private keys), sending Bitcoins to the wrong unused address, forgetting the Bitcoins, or abandoning dust in a wallet. In those situations, you will most likely never be able to recover the Bitcoins.

Someone can hold Bitcoins for a long period of time like 30 years for retirement and to me they are not lost. These are just not actively in circulation, but they are eventually going to go into circulation.

They might forgotten to check that Bitcoin amount, since most of them here are inactive in forums and most accounts got hacked because of inactivity. I think they will spend when they want to use in real world, currently a lot of people uses for holding, but that is short time.

It seems the price of bitcoin will go up always. Some portion of the total number of bitcoins are not presented on exchanges, this will make the value go up more and more as the time goes by.

I still have 0.00000099BTC lost for ever, I lost those 99 Satoshis 1.8 years ago, I can not stand the sadness it has brought upon me, don't blame me, I'm just a beggar and for beggars even 1 Sat is like a world. we still don't know if Satoshi was really jumped-killed by crypto jumper-killer Gavin and friends. Satoshi is waiting for $50,000 to dump every coin he has, when you see that happens, keep calm and don't panic. lol in magnitude of 3.

I do not think that those bitkoyny, access to which for various reasons lost, that is, lost the digital keys to the purses, where they are, are lost to us forever. Technologies are now developing at a very high rate, and the lost bitcoins remain encrypted in the blockchein block chain and may someday be decrypted and returned for future use. So, many people are already talking about the possibility of quantum computers to decipher such large digital codes and that they will appear in a few years. True, such opportunities pose a serious threat to the security of all the crypto currency.

How do they tell long term holders from people who have lost their wallets/passwords?  I know some people are saying Satoshi is sitting on 1 million BTC, and if he is dead and didn't share his keys, then those are out of circulation ... but no one can say for sure the status of those BTC.

Quantum processing isn't really good for breaking sha256. Maybe they will figure out another way to do it, but it will always be way easier for the good guys to change the algo than for a malicious entity to crack it.

Are you asking to centralize bitcoin which means no BTC value... unless they wright a code if an account is untouched for so many years for that wallet empty out in a given wallet. Can you guess who or which country would want control of that? Most likely world war 3 be on the way.

It's impossible to tell. They dumbly assume that if a coin hasn't moved for a certain period of time, that it is lost, which is something even noobs here seem to disagree with. Large holders nowadays are sitting on a decent chunk of BCC, which they very likely have claimed, or plan to claim. In order to do so, they first send their Bitcoins to a new address, and this means that these coins have been moved. In their eyes it means that they are back into circulation again, while these coins will probably keep sitting in their wallets for plenty of more years. These articles are rubbish.

People blindly assume that Satoshi was the only entity minting back in the days, but there might have been several people having done so. The only way to almost accurately claim that these coins belong to Satoshi, is that he first signs from the address the genesis block reward was sent to, and then do so with every address (thousands and thousands of addresses) each containing 50BTC block rewards.

If they are lost that means a less volume wich result a higher price.

It is difficult to say they are lost just because they havent been moved for a long time. They could be in cold storage that can be transferred anytime.
On the other hand, it is certain many bitcoin in the early days are lost forever, so maybe a wild guess is 1/2 of the four million is lost.

And no one knows if Satoshi is made up by actual creator, or who is he? I guess he/she like to avoid assassination...

I don't know whether your provided information is true or not. But if bitcoin is out of circulation, it does not mean that it has lost forever.

Good argument mate, if that million of coins who allegedly holds by satoshi is no where to find since its claimed that he's already dead
that numbers will no longer exist in any circulation but who knows the truth behind that, if this coins still exist it can  be a big threat
to this current value since it can affect the price if this coins will be dumped.

Ok, let's start with your bitcoin. I don't think you are spending them fast enough.  I'll just take them so I can circulate them.
 :D This is Taboo. There is a 0% chance of this happening.



So even though you have never met either of these guys you know their most guarded secrets? How?

Amazing Fact to know. Estimate BTC mined till now is about 16.5Milliion that means 25% of the current supply is dead and only 12.5M is in circulation. I think this is the further increase BTC value as demand keeps on increasing and actual supply is less than we estimate to have.

I don't think this article has any authentication with its facts.
Its true that some people has lost their private key at very early stage but 4 million is hard to believe. I feel that maximum BTC that could be lost till now would be around 1.5million. $4k is very big amount to amount which is hard to believe.

BTC will only go up in value the the less bitcoin is out there on the market.

IF you ask me I hope more btc gets lost :D

Those bitcoins are not lost, just not accessible. They are in the blockchain and anybody check the balance and the transactions related to them, just nobody can spend them. The number will probably slowly grow over the time for a various reasons like various mistakes. And forever part is probably true.

I saw this article yesterday and what I figured out is I think now most people just hold a little bitcoin due to its scarcity. So for my opinion, whoever hold the bitcoin not to sell them easily. Btc is just like gold in real world. Hold is the most safe way to make your monry.

this goes back to bitcoin holders, because that is their principle. we can not force them to sell bitcoin today, but maybe they have their own calculations. I do not know how long they hold, but they definitely want to make a big bang for their wallets.

In order not to lose the passwords for the wallets I keep bitcoins in online wallets. I am sure that it is more secure than storing your coins on a computer or on paper. I think that people themselves come up with challenges and then courageously overcome them. It seems to me that these 4 million coins is the money of those who do not believe in bitcoin and brought him back in 2010.

I think the number of lost bitcoins is more than 4 million. And as you said these lost coins are affecting the market but are they lost forever!!

Maybe someday someone will figure out a way to restore bitcoins that remain in wallets for a long time and reinsert them in the market again.
After all, 4 million is 1/5 the total supply which is not a negligible amount.

That can be considered as one of bitcoin disadvantages. After all, being anonymous is not always an advantage.

I wondering if there is a research about those "dust" satoshis lost here and there ...  ???

Interesting.Satoshi is the biggest holder for various reasons.The day his bitcoins are moved will pave the way for the useless critics to sink bitcoin or claim they'e satoshi.He definitely can't move the bitcoins on an exchange for privac .4 millions are still less in what is being lost in the addresses used solely for the lost bitcoins.Forgetting the keys and losing access to own bitcoins should count to another 4 million I guess.