Bitcoin Forum

Another tale of woe:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site?CMP=twt_gu (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site?CMP=twt_gu)

outch but: thanks for making all others richer  :P

seriously: how can you store all your coins on ONE hd ? stupid.

ouch girlfriends that cost guys millions  ;)

time to go dumpster diving

Out of all the bitcoins out there...i wonder how much has been thrown away, or lost in wallets.  Hundreds of thousands?

I've lost around 700$ between Bitcoin and Litecoin at this point, both when they were around 4$. I'm tempted to think people are either in my category, tossing out a bit early on, or they tossed out alot, really early on. God help them.

Definetley hundred of thousands worth of bitcoins. The stories I've hear about stolen laptops, forgotten passwords, formatted computers, hundreds of thousands definitely.

We should keep track of these kind of stories.

That's kind of sad.  He didn't have a backup - and wow, a week of mining in 2009 got him 7500 bitcoins?   Damn.

See, if I was him, I would have temporarily gone insane.

By the time all 21 Million BTC are mined, I can imagine a few million might be lost.

I guess there is no way for them to be recovered anyway?

any finder reward fee?

Please edit title to include date format as outlined in sticky at top of thread.  Helps when we search archive.  Thanks

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=246823.0

But really what is the backup plan for BTC, sure there is more than just 7500 btc lost or missing and The total quantity of bitcoins is capped at 21 million, with about 12 million currently in circulation.!! what will be the final real number?
$'s can reprint damaged bills or even new print. :-\

    Topic: Estimating the rate of coin loss.  (Read 887 times)
diogenes
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Estimating the rate of coin loss.
April 29, 2011, 11:16:51 PM
   
Reply with quote  #1
I have been wondering what the annual rate of bitcoin loss would be assuming that bitcoin was the world's currency.

I'm guessing that the largest contributing factor to the number of coins lost each year will be the loss due to people dying and leaving them behind their computers never to be used again.

So I've internet searched and discovered that in the European Union the crude date rate is 10 per 1000 (ie: 1% of the population die each year), the USA is 8.2 per 1000 (0.82%),  China is 7.1 per 1000 (0.71%), Japan is 9.0 per 1000 (0.90%), India is 8.2 per 1000 (0.82%) and Russia is 16 per 1000 (1.6%)- my calculations give about 8.4 per 1000 (0.84%) as the date rate of the combined population of the world's largest economies.


The question that arises is after 50 yrs will half the bitcoins be lost? and after 100?

~4.6 million GBP

I'd probably shut down the landfill and hire excavators to get this HD back. How much does the landfill make per day anyway?

holy shit, i wonder if there will be bitfiends running around trash digging for MILLIONS.

damn, i should make my username bitfiend.. too late to change the name though huh?

Utter noob question, but am I right in thinking that if I physically write down the incoming transaction addresses from my wallet and keep it somewhere safe, I am creating a genuine safeguard for my coinage in case of digital wipeout/theft of computer/throwing in trash etc?

NB Date sorted

The fella behind this story will be speaking to Jeremy Vine about his Bitcoin nightmare on BBC Radio 2 this afternoon. Should be fun.

The Guardian also featured the story on the front page of their newspaper today. I wonder if he's feeling like he should have kept the story to himself.

Well, treasure hunters do crazier things for a couple million bucks, so yes, someone will hire excavators sooner or later, almost no doubt about that.

SS Gairsoppa - shipwreck - £137 million in silver recovered (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Gairsoppa)

Pretty tragic story actually

Impossible to imagine what that feels like!

Well , silver doesn't get damaged by water. Data on hdd does.

True. One might have to estimate the probability of recovering the data and only get at it if there's a reasonable risk/opportunity ratio :)

Actually , isn't this the biggest prank one can think about it?
BTC to 10k , and have a earlier adopter , known for his bitcoin stash claiming he lost his usb drive with an unecrypted wallet in a garbage dump.
10's and 1000's of people foraging there ....

I've just listened to him on the radio and he sounds understandably depressed. Really feel for him. He's an IT engineer and had loads of old drives hanging about and just threw a load of old crap out. Jeremy Vine apologised to the audience for not alerting them to Bitcoin earlier. 'We missed it. We just missed it!'

BBC tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones was also on there telling his tale of losing the coins in his mobile wallet.

I thought is was a shame no-one contemplated that it's still relatively early days in the evolution of bitcoin and there's still potential for growth.

Well i guess it was about time for some bad news after all those success stories of ppl realizing that they are millionairs because they remembered their lost forgotten wallet  8)

oops didnt see this post.bleah

If this ever becomes a possibility because of rising value, such an enterprise would try and get him on board.

I seriously think this could become interesting in a few years ;D

There needs to be a waste company doing Bitcoin salvage. He should find, or found, such a company, and go halfsies on the proceeds of the recovery.

I have tweeted Jeremy Vine Show with such.

The hard disk, if it is still readable, belongs to the council (or waste company) now. It's not like salvage where who-ever recovers it owns it.

I'm amazed that a week or two of mining produced 7,500 BTC back in 2009. I know a guy that was mining back then and, come to think of it, I haven't seen him around work for months - I bet he owns a Caribbean island now.

I would assume that it can't be decrypted without the cooperation of the original miner :)

Encryption was not built into the bitcoin client back then.
And if he didn't even think of making a backup, why bother with encryption?

So, most likely, it's unencrypted ;D

You need to have the private key for each address. Electrum (electrum.org) makes it easier because it allows you to restore a wallet from 12 words (the seed). Besides securing the 12 words, make sure to either encrypt the wallet if you want to store it on your hard drive, or cut and paste it after every use to a more secure place such as an external drive. Personally, I just delete the wallet after every use because I know I can restore it from the seed. But you should only do this after making sure you can restore the wallet from the seed.

Can't stop laughing  ;D

Thanks for this. I've been hearing good things about the electrum wallets.

that's definitely not a good prediction for the future of BTC as a currency, right?
any wise man insights or thoughts?

I imagine lost coins can only push up the value of the remaining coins.

Any Bitcoin lost increase the value of all others. As long as I have my Bitcoin, it is a good thing.

In my opinion, most people that lost Bitcoin don't know yet that they lost it. They are mostly the very early adopters, they mined incredible amount of Bitcoin when it had no value and forgot about it. I think that 1/3 of Bitcoin are already lost.

This may be the most stupidest thing to hear. May make the market good as At last, there may be only 13Mil available in the mid 21st century as some of them are lost forever.

I hope the team can find the disk.

P.S Media usually labels stupid things.

Marvellous, thanks. I found instructions to display the private keys for each address using the debug window and have made a physical copy which will be hidden away. Feeling a lot more confident about safeguarding my wallet (even though there's not a lot in it!). Will check out Electrum.

This will be the method of "bitcoin mining"

I estimate lost coins to be between 300k & 500k bitcoins.

Gives Auction Kings a whole new twist
At the same time I imagine all the return your computers to be recycled campaigns
One day a computer with 100 BTC in it gets compacted and turned into digital dust!

You think I'll get lucky grabbing a few computers from Goodwill? They usually still have the hard disks ;D

Hell, I've always found something interesting on secondhand drives... usually financial information.

I doubt that it is a fake story with the intention to draw donation bitcoins

With such large amount of coins, even when the price rose to $30 during the 2011 rally, he already hold a significant amount of purchasing power, it is impossible to still ignore them without taking extreme cautions like making multiple backups and move to cold storage and paper wallet

Do you believe all the people begging for coins on here saying their computer died or whatever? I'm not saying it is fake, but I have no reason to believe him. Some people are just attention whores and want their 5 minutes of fame. He's only going to make a bit of cash out of this, because people have donated him coins already. Fair play to him either way.

video:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25138627


goodbye BTC

Auch, that must be sore!

I'm just trying to work this out ....

He's supposed to have had 7500 coins and he mined them in a week on his laptop back in 2009.  At one block every 10 minutes each generating 50 coins that's 300 coins an hour, 7200 coins a day and 50400 per week. 7500 of 50400 is 14.88%.  Now maybe I'm being dumb and I've made some stupid mistake but if I haven't it does not seem credible to me that he had about 15% of the hashing power mining bitcoins back in 2009.

M

Was it only from mining?  Maybe he sold some pizzas back in the day?? lol

A friend of mine heard his first ever news for bitcoin from a mainstream news source.
Guess what the news was  ::)

he said a week , maybe to dramatize , could have been 10-12 days,  and at that time you couldn't say that there was hashing "power" , the few who tried this weren't keeping their computer on 24 hours except for a few.
Still , it is possible.

Let's call two weeks. That would still mean he produced 7.44% of all the bitcoins produced in that time. That means that he would likely been  among the first dozen or so early adopters. Let's say that he was among the first 100 adopters. It's not impossible, but I do not find it credible.

M

Well , I don't either but it is possible.
The easy way to find out the truth is to find the drive or to have him under the polygraph.

The polygraph doesn't work - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Polygraph. How hard would it be to find the unspent coins on the blockchain?

Not hard , we have the time frame and you just have to go through the blocks in that period. But most of them haven't move so they could be his or Satoshis ones.

Yeah, you not seen Homeland? ;)

Maybe he had 8,000 not 7,500

http://bitcoinrichlist.com/top500

118    $ 9,040,000.00    8,000.00000000    198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5qkfy4g3Hi    Apr 26, 2009 9:18:39 PM -0800
119    $ 8,973,397.80    7,941.06000000    15Z5YJaaNSxeynvr6uW6jQZLwq3n1Hu6RX    May 4, 2010 11:37:07 PM -0800
120    $ 8,939,554.30    7,911.11000000    13uraL1Maba7obbhkdB4pjsqMyvqrcTeeD    Feb 26, 2011 11:19:06 PM -0800
121    $ 8,845,840.11    7,828.17708947    1KZuArAUDvjgywt127dPKMdJzzA8bSkGrq    Aug 13, 2013 4:14:50 AM -0800
122    $ 8,829,006.40    7,813.28000000    14WTJwqfcSHKiswb49ytQktWKbx1bqTXLR    Aug 25, 2013 3:41:10 AM -0800
123    $ 8,788,888.89    7,777.77777778    13Mu4HhLD4YWPbji62HPLj3p1S54ZVzkvT    Aug 20, 2013 6:12:55 AM -0800
124    $ 8,701,000.00    7,700.00000000    1FLFnbN7m5psLfvLEwYfRUUjJ34YkmV3dM    Oct 9, 2013 10:21:53 AM -0800
125    $ 8,654,783.00    7,659.10000000    1e6AzmPF35S3JTE8QMXD3k7oczJ7QgCSa    Jun 19, 2011 9:01:48 PM -0800
126    $ 8,524,380.21    7,543.69930000    154Fc9uwKrpNjqdv413En9cK1VN8PwUqfW    Nov 28, 2013 12:34:50 AM -0800
127    $ 8,476,255.32    7,501.11090000    1LDipoYVWA7UsFzWrrcXUGLnsXWuYaJB9f    Nov 8, 2013 12:44:27 PM -0800
128    $ 8,475,000.00    7,500.00000000    189ivm7yVJrktRWE7KwcxrU27U3SMCh6mp    Nov 23, 2013 6:19:43 AM -0800
129    $ 8,045,600.00    7,120.00000001    1AJFV9jkMZNfv1YMLhWKAFpHDxjaskgaYK    Nov 8, 2013 1:56:05 AM -0800
130    $ 8,032,556.91    7,108.45744205    1FfdcppWbJ7FeQFznsjdLYNXdwMdoiTGSA    Oct 3, 2013 3:33:10 AM -0800

Using the address, if he can remember where his wallet was held , e.g bolckchain/ coinbase etc. he may be able to start an action to prove that it was his and recover them. Is that possible?

That address mined for about 2 months, not a week. See http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5qkfy4g3Hi?charttype=balance It is possible that as he is trying to recall events from four years ago that he has simply forgotten how long he mined for and the exact number of coins. I think that's quite possible and so either this is him or perhaps he had something nearer 750 and not 7500 coins, and has misreported it, or of course he could just be a publicity seeker and the whole story is a hoax.

M