Bitcoin Forum

Im pretty sure everone heard about the missing bitcoins and unaccessible wallets which has huge amount of bitcoins.There is a theory that the supply of bitcoin is not real(because of unaccsesible wallets)  and when the real amount of bitcoins revealed that is the time the real price of bitcoins will be there.What do you guys think about it or is it possible to detect unaccessible amount of bitcoin.I thought that maybe a fork would be useful to do that.

Everything is open source, you can look through the code and the explorer if you want to dig through things.

OK but what do you think about this issue should it be taken care of or you are just fine with this

It's impossible to know which coins are lost. The only ones we can be 100% sure about are coins sent to known burn addresses. That only amounts to a few thousand. Everything else could be in deep storage.

I see plenty of people awfully keen to fork and help themselves to coins that haven't moved for a while. Their owners may take umbrage.

Also the price would fall a lot if all the coins are back in circulation.

I think fork is not the way to know the amount of bitcoin supply, because it's just for fixing the system, and if you want to know the bitcoin supply, you can dig it with algorithm code and you'll find out.

I dont think it will fall it changes nothing unless the people who found the coins wants to sell those bitcoins

The whole thing is a complete mystery to me.  I think I am giving up on Bitcoin.  It's too confusing.  And when I read topics like this it really does my brain.  That is why people are losing trust in Bitcoin.  Two many secretive things.

yes we all heard and knew about unaccessible/lost wallets
but apart from those that who asked for recovering and declared lost, how can you detect them?
dormant addresses may be cold storage for some users that intentionally left it idle for years in there
and presumably lost coins today was simply misplaced private keys until the owner found it tucked away somewhere
there is no feasible way to detect or confirm lost bitcoin, how would a fork solve this?

I am not sure what you are referring to about the missing bitcoins ,missing from whom  ::) but when it comes to unaccessible wallets there is nothing you can do about it,the coins are gone forever and it is not able to detect which accounts are not accessible as most of the early miners are storing their coins in their cold wallet and there is no way you can recover those coins even with a fork because you need the private key for that wallet to get those coins. :P

Indeed a lot of bitcoin is missing, it's probably because those who have not so much care for their bitcoin at that time that the price is still cheap that ignore bitcoin, but now the regret is sure to come deep

Around 4 millions of all BTC is lost on old hard drives, people forgot password, dead computers, ignorance etc... but also those coins are calculated in coinmarketcap. so you need to make real calculation

"According to new research from Chainalysis, a digital forensics firm that studies the bitcoin blockchain, 3.79 million bitcoins are already gone for good based on a high estimate—and 2.78 million based on a low one."

Now, how accurate was their analysis? I can't answer that.  But this will give you an idea of what the possible number of "lost" coins might truly be.  At least 2 million might be a safe guess.  

Yes it is true, even though bitcoin all amounts to 21 million when it's all done in the mine, but on the market there will be no 21 million, because I think some bitcoin may have gone missing because many lost bitcoin purses too, and this can affect expensive yes bitcoin later sometime

It is so impossible to access all the missing coin and wallet its been an issue ever since.

I don't know how you came to an idea that forking would help in this issue? It is not possible to detect which one is unaccessible.
But if given the ability to know the real circulating supply of bitcoin, I am expecting a certain price rise.

Im not saying fork will solve it i just said it may be helpfull somehow.Im just asking you guys if you know anything

Thats possible if those 2million bitcoins aare excluded that will cause a major coinburn which will lead to an increase to bitcoin

Also I have an idea.Fork happens with a condition like you will get 1:1 the new coin only if your bitcoins are in a whole new wallet system.So anyone who sends the bitcoins to the new wallet they can have the new bitcoin but if you cant they would be old trash bitcoin

This will somehow help but there are also people holding bitcoins that are not aware of this fork. I mean, we are not sure that all holders will get this information. Also, there are those who just don't care if a fork like this occurs. I think that's the reality. But still, you have a good point. As of now, all we can do is believe on the estimates from, say, Chainalysis.

I got something about it.I dont know if it is possible but it should be like this when ever you send your old btc you recieve new bitcoins and the old ones are burned after the change.But im tellin again I dont know if it is possible.Also I want to mention that I enjoyed the conversation with you.Thank you

i dont think missing is the right word.
I think it is frozen. If you loss your p.key, it cannot be accessed.
Same with other crypto

I hope you got the real point

Remain the "Lost" coins lost, because   it is the game how it works.

Personally, I think the amount of the lost coins would keep growing.

There is no reason not to grow also people love losing some as the people are sending bitcoins to genesis of bitcoin which is satoshi's wallet.They wont be recovered
https://blockchain.info/tr/address/1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa There are 66.75 bitcoins I wish I had them all

I don't think the missing bitcoins are a super big issue beyond making calculated market caps inaccurate. I suppose what I'm saying is the real issue is that we don't know how many coins are actually missing. If we knew for sure, it wouldn't be a big issue.

First thing is, how can you say that a wallet is inaccessible? Even if it's sitting there for 5 years, you can't just say that it is inaccessible since the owner might just be holding on to it or has forgotten about it but still has the passphrase. You cannot deny them fork coins just because they forgot and their coins became inactive. Per study, the "lost" coins are just estimated based on activity. So i'm not so sure we can rely on these 100%.

Bitcoin's final outcome may be completely disappear, or will become a collection of souvenirs in the hands of some people.

Lost coins are lost coins and nothing more, this diminishes the supply of bitcoin but at the same time increases the value of the rest of the coins this is what satoshi thought about those coins and I do not see any reason to change this since there is not a difference between lost coins and coins that are not moving because their owners have them in cold storage.

Im not sure if it is possible but it should be like you can fork your bitcoin whenever you want.I mean they can fork their coin when they want to so they can do it whenever they are aware of the fork

alhamdulillah until now i have not lost BITCOIN, maybe if i lost my bitcoin very very sad. It is also because of the person's own fault due to carelessness, personal keys in theft and so on.

No doubt!
Btc is on the way to gain the real value, people now are so FOMO, they afraid they miss everything! That's why btc go up so far!

The price is real, there is only a small portion of people that want Bitcoin to get a higher price. That's why they are holding it.

There's actually no way to tell.The reason is that there's no marker to differentiate between coin to which the private keys are lost or missing or coin that are in someone's long term storage.

Yup..that true. Because the result will not really sure if depend on fork. I think we should not panic if there is missing coins. We can dig it deeply without feeling worry because I think they are not missing but just inactive.