Bitcoin Forum

hi,

i am just collecting info about lost bitcoins.

i want addresses with lost private keys / no private keys / or any other addresses with unavailable bitcoins

is anybody can point me if such data set is already exist or just post such addresses here.

thank you

You can find it on the services section, often users used to post their bitcoin addresses from which they've lost bitcoin and the receiver end. The owner of the respective bitcoin address will provide with certain percentage of the lost funds if you were able to recover it. Till day no successful recover have got posted in the forum.

tanks for it. i will try this section.
i have no intention to recover lost bitcoins. i just want to calculate unavailable bitcoins and probably write public report about it.

I think there's a thread for that already, Where know lost/stolen bitcoins and an estimated value can be done, you can use the search option available here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=search

Edit: Here is the thread: Let's add up the KNOWN lost bitcoins (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7253.0)

no, in fact from some cases the exchanger who loses theft, cannot recover the lost bitcoin stolen.

This is a great post/topic, though this only covers losses that are known within this forum and does not cover those outside this hub, so in the end, OP will still have a hard time getting a repository of lost/inaccessible bitcoins forever.

@OP, there aren't any publicly known database for lost bitcoins anywhere in the web. Rough estimates point it @ 1-2 million bitcoins lost, though without any real and credible source backing the number up, it'll be hard to rely on the numbers you may produce on your research. Anyway, best of luck still on your work.

As dothebeats says,you will never know how much of bitcoins were actually lost,in this forum people may recorded their lost amount recently but in the year 2011 or before most of the people didn't care about their private keys and just got stored huge pile of bitcoin without much security on it and finally they became lost and inaccessible coins forever.

By the way can I know why you are collecting this info?

Collecting information on lost bitcoins isn't actually an easy task and it's almost impossible for it to be a large percent correct as not everyone actually records their bitcoins which got stolen,many bitcoin have been lost without any trace and so it's impossible to track.
This information to me isn't helpful,i wonder what you need them for

I think the idea will be just to get an estimate, a rough idea or at least something to begin with, Since there will be no way to tell even if some bit coin is lying in an address with lost keys/password.
I also think the mentioned thread is the best OP could get, since it is about "known" lost coins, he could well refer to the forum as his case study.

Like the other said you can't track all lost bitcoin and most of them they are totally forgotten and anonymous which never touch or spend from the beginning of bitcoin.

If you still planning to collect them there is a big list of bitcoin addresses with balances that never spend or touch which I think we can call them also lost bitcoin.

You can check this spreadsheet from here below and I got this from an old post in google and I think it might be useful to you or someone.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xTROekDerP1TPOB3SOD_1bbQr580BPqbhF3YHdO96pw/edit#gid=189298223

I don't think that this is possible to happen and collect all these data. There will be a huge variation in the results of your report.
Having said that, your report will not be trustworthy and give data that will assist users in taking any decisions on the network.

Thank you all.
I found a guy who is tracking burned bitcoins. Here is his statistic for 2018 https://bitcoinwhoswho.com/blog/2018/12/29/2-btc-burned-in-2018/

but this is just a one category of addresses i want to tracking.

others are
addresses with invalid private keys like 16QaFeudRUt8NYy2yzjm3BMvG4xBbAsBFM private key is 0

addresses like genesis block reward address which is known to be unspendable

addresses with lost priv keys. this is massive category and i don't know how to approach it yet. only idea i had is to list all bitcoins as lost at this particular moment and start delisting those who moved

Interesting idea to track burned bitcoins

As for lost bitcoins its trickier to calculate, for example it coins havent
moved for 5+ years are they deemed lost?

The owner of the wallet might well have full control of it.

Actually we just can't track it, Bitcoin addresses is only show you how much current balance on there and tx in/out. We don't know which one has lost its private key, because it could be tht balance that you think the last transaction is 2 years ago but the owner still HOLD it.

Exactly. Which is exactly why it is impossible to know how many bitcoin is lost or moved out of circulation. Some said 1 million, another said 3 million. It's not worth the effort to know it imo, let's just assume 21 million as the max circulating supply. It doesn't matter how many coins were lost because Bitcoin is still going to be valuable even if all 21 millions are in circulation.

Information for a research or a bruteforce attack? Must be for research purposes...

In case if you're wondering if these "Black Holes" will alarmingly deplete the maximum amount of BTC in circulation, it will not be a problem as long as it's within millions (even 100k's). Satoshi seemingly foresighted this, that's why Bitcoin has 8 decimals right from the start.

Here's some Addresses with huge balance as you requested:

• 1KYYVUwWSMrNkje41jzvubSRsjABu3EUt6 (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1KYYVUwWSMrNkje41jzvubSRsjABu3EUt6) - This was used to receive an average of 1BTC per transaction 'till it reached the current balance of 33BTC; interestingly, if you check all of its transactions, you will find more addresses with huge balance that weren't spent since 2011-2012.
• 1PP8m94LcTDpWXcx2T4niUcFsbf7BDw8Tk (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1PP8m94LcTDpWXcx2T4niUcFsbf7BDw8Tk) - Address used for mining that still has 37BTC balance.
• And the famous 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE) which up until now, has been receiving minimum (change) amounts from random transactions.

I think it is completely impossible to get back information on lost bitcoin. This is almost impossible.

I have read stories of people who have died with more than million dollars in their wallet and families find it so difficult to get it out. The last story of a man with more than 10million dollars in his wallet and he died without telling any of his family members his key. So I seriously think it’s impossible to do this.

it will be a most important topic for me because lots of people lost their private keys and they finding them very hard this situation came to lots of people who are invested in the previous and the beginning period of this cryptocurrency field I think you can work hard you will definitely can do it.

It was two years back. I checked my asset in my wallet but did log out. Just forgotten. Later i checked my wllet few hours back and found  my wallet being emty. Was reallly shocked, but did not understand how that disappeared. No transaction was seen. This was the lost. Around $100 was hacked. from then on, i am bit safe activating 2FA authentication

once you lost the private key that will be very hard to get back again but the possibilities are there to gain the wallet again if you do they prevent process in the beginning stage otherwise it will definitely very harder.

That might be a very good hacker.

And since the OP said that he has no intentions of recovering those lost bitcoins, I don't think it is smart move to calculate those number because his data will always be incomplete. Maybe he will get a portion of it but not really the entire picture.

I would imagine this being a very tedious task.
Thete are so many satoshis being sent around the clock. 
Would be tough to monitor all of these transactions. 

Wait, what? What client was it?
If there's no transaction listed in the history or from blockexplorers when you entered your address(es), there's a chance that you're not hacked. Could be another wallet file or something else.

Even today, you can double check if you're really hacked or not by checking that particular wallet's addresses in any blockexplorer website,
try it.

Difference between 1 and 3 million lost bitcoins is significant. Supply does have impact on value so when you try to evaluate how much one bitcoin should be worth, you shoud take supply into account. And 3 million lost coins reduces available supply by 17% of what is official supply (17.5M).

and why the heck would you do that ? you are not being paid tracking lost bitcoins  .  you will only track bitcoins if its lost in your own account because you are concern if who really done to you but its impossible to unmask its identity by only basing on its wallet addresses  . in the online world anyone can pretend to be someone else  . hacker will just use different names and profiles  but most of all you cannot recover your coins anymore no matter how you investigate  because btc transactions are i reversible  .

Well, you can track some of the coins that was "burned" on purpose. Those Burn addresses are public knowledge, so you can have a centralized website with links to all the burn addresses. Here are one article that dealt with "lost" bitcoins.  :P http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/

These are just a small fraction of the known losses and I think there are a lot more that was simply not reported. <People who are too ashamed to admit it>  ::)

indeed this is as if the deed is in vain, after the account is hacked, of course the fate is over. I think their identity is indeed not genuine, if we do not have the authority like the police, it certainly will not produce results

I think many are doing the same work. But should you do it as well then it is most appreciated. I know how hard it is to make a good list of all lost bitcoins but I think you can do good on this. Just keep the research going and don't worry about the same threads. Your work will serve as a confirmation or an additional information to the previous works about lost bitcoin keys.

Try to check the MarketPlace section and Web wallets (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=222.0), they actually post their wallet with a number of lost bitcoins. But usually, lost bitcoin will not be able to be retrieved and usually been stolen by someone. But as the Bitcoin had a very volatile market, it is nearly impossible to know how much people have lost in their wallets and that is very obvious.

Technically speaking, bitcoin's price was very small and the market skyrocketed so that is the reason why it is hard to know how much a person lost.

Writing public report about lost bitcoin is it for research purpose because no one have been able to recovered lost bitcoin in history so venting into that may be an efforts in futility. You can visit the service section some users use to post they wallet with lost found in there looking for help. Good luck

absolutely right and there has been a lot of loss of bitcoin but it can't be found anymore because every day the transaction is so many that it makes it difficult for us to track

People talking about how it is impossible to hack a wallet probably don't know the power some hackers have that does such things. Of course it doesn't worth it to hack someones account if it is protected by double or even triple layers or even if it moves so having a ledger nano prevents almost all hackers unless its a social hack where they learn many things about it and hack it easily instead of the brute hacking.

Moreover, if a wallet is out there and not touched and not moved and not looking like it will be moved and the control is on no one (lost) than a hacker can try it and I know it would require too much computation but have seen people hack places like pentagon and fbi so I doubt it would be any harder than that, it will of course take too much time and effort but it is not "impossible", it may take maybe 19 months (number is made up) but still can be doable.

Services that use blockchain technology are all anonymous. When we lose bitcoin, maybe we can trace the recipient's bitcoin address, but we can't know the owner of the address because of the anonymous nature. It's hard for us to track the owner of a bitcoin wallet address if we don't know the private key of the owner of the wallet and we can't report the loss because none of the authorities investigated and supervised the transaction of cryptocurrency.

I keeps track of my bitcoins which weren't useful anymore. It got caught in a wallet that was taken control by a scammer who cheated me getting the recovery phrase. Whenever I go to the wallet I used to track the funds that I missed, but now it has crossed several wallets. We can have an eye, but missing the recovery phrase lets the wallet go under someone's control.

What are you gonna do? You will breach the account to have an access to it?

It's theoretically can do/possible to have an access to a lost address but it's hard to encrypt this address and it may take more brute force action. Technically there's called bit in each addresses; 256, 160, 32 and the difficulty of encryption it depends on the passphrase. According to some records, 256bit is more easier to be encrypted and it's very vulnerable.

yes a lots of previous investors especially when Bitcoin has invented to this world at that time so many Bitcoins will not be valued and then they are not care about them but still now it's being developed a huge so many people searching for their wallets and private keys so definitely it needed to make some changes about finding them easily.

There is nothing you can do about lost bitcoins and I don’t think there is anything you can do about them. There is no services or such that tracks lost bitcoins and you can’t know it’s lost until the owner of the address admits that it is lost and they no longer have access to it, and even after that, there is no way to recover those lost bitcoins as long as the owner cannot remember the key they used to lock it.

The funniest thing is that there is no way to tell if the Bitcoin in an address is lost or being saved for a rainy day. The only way you can know they are lost is that the users comes open about it. Just like that of James Howells of Wales that lost about 7,500 bitcoins (damn!)and there was no way for him to recover it. That would he worth a lot of money by now. I also see a lot of people at the services section of the forum that post their addresses with lost bitcoins in it and there haven’t been any success in recovering those coins till date.

There is the guy that lost millions of dollars worth by throwing his computer in the trash. The dead guy owner of an exchange lost a lot, and a million locked in satoshi's wallet. I think only satoshi's wallet is being monitored so see if it really is inactive

yes you are right and lots of it kind where to be in this world without any support because they are lost by someone so finding all of them will be very difficult and making it again as a new currency will not be possible in many times.

ouch that was sad but thats a cool story at the same time  . the guy might be rich enough because his been able to throw away his computer on the trash but the worst part is he forgot that he store his bitcoin on it  but that can still be recoverable if he will only trace up the garbage collector and claim his computer's hardware atleast .



the wallet will be inactive if the guy is already dead but if he share's his wallet to someone ( ex. his family ) then its possible for it to become active as they will open and make a transaction with it .

Anyone could have to pay attention and monitor for BTC transactions if they paid for it. Actually all BTC transactions were recorded in the blockchain but it is difficult to trace the numbers of BTC were loss and really a tough job for anyone. I don't think if there is someone who can challenge to check that.

No, I have never been tracking the lost Bitcoin. Because I know that I will never be able to get back my lost bits. So I think that it is not possible to get back to it. And the lost bitcoin can never be found back. I have not seen anyone yet that lost bitcoin has got back. It is not possible to get lost Bitcoin with private key. Some of my Bitcoin have been lost long ago. I tried a few days to rescue the bitcoin. But at the end of the day I could not be successful. So I think missing Bitcoin is nothing but stupid running.

Thank you

For example, once a mining site called Nicehash was hacked and all the miners' balances were lost. from the DEV Nicehash team, itself traced the lost bitcoin but only could trace the wallet address while the name of the owner of the wallet could not be known. This is the risk of the anonymous nature of blockchain technology. I think a party that is really special needs to be established to deal with problems like this and that party can be trusted to be able to access all the security of users of blockchain technology. Why should parties like this be established? So that if a theft occurs we can report the incident and they can follow up on the report received.

It is very difficult if not impossible to track lost coins, coins that have not moved for a long time could be lost but those coins could also be held by long term holders that are not interested in moving their coins, and even if someone claims that the coins in a particular address are lost it is impossible to verify it, and if the person could sign a message with that address then such a thing could prove that the address was his but will also prove the coins are not lost.

Once lost I think it’s gone forever, and there’s no way to retrieving back that is why it is always to to keep pass keys very safe. I have read a story somewhere of a man who had over $100,000 in his wallet and then misplaced or rather forgot his pass key and there was no mean to get it back. I advise people to always guide their wallets and keys very jealously.

I almost lost some fractions of my coins too because I didn't know the exact place I wrote my seed. It took me like 6 months before I stumbled on it somewhere in between a pocket jotter note. I was very glad as I was able to open and saw my coins. ;D

did you lose the private key? if it is lost or has been stolen then it is total and 100% of your bitcoin cannot be returned, unless you save it in exchange and you lose the private key then you can request a private key in exchange

You obviously did not read the OP, I think this is a very well known fact,,, certainly OP knows it. He is just asking for a list of known lost addresses, that is all.

And very bad advice, to save your money in an exchange. You think an exchange will give you the private key for your address, in a wallet shared by 1000s  of other people? You really need to understand how crypto and centralized exchanges and private keys and having your own wallets work. You do not seem to have it down.

It would be very great if you will be able to bring back those bitcoins from the void to your wallet. Lost bitcoins is just there, it will not be returned again that is why we should really be careful in transacting our bitcoins to other wallets. We all know that the transactions here are irreversible, once the mistake is done, you can't turn it around.

true and that is one of the weaknesses of crypto currency because there is no legal force or institution that protects what we have in crypto currencies

Why crypto need protection? It can stand itself because that is decentralized. Loses bitcoin is the fault on the holder because of he/she dumb and lazy not to keep the private key which is very important. Lost bitcoin is probably useful to those miners, as far as in know, overall stock amount of bitcoin is 21 million and the lost is 4 million.

Lets think of it in another way. The wallets whose private key are lost, the bitcoin store in them are also of no use and cannot ever be sold. So this means that actual supply of bitcoin is less than theoretical supply. As the time passes on more bitcoins private keys will be lost etc and therefore the bitcoin will become more and more expensive.

We cannot collect such data because we never know that the owners of the bitcoin present in wallets. If we see a address where no transaction is made for a long time, it does not mean that those bitcoin are not useable. It maybe the case that the owner of the wallet does not want to sell the bitcoins and want to keep it for very long time. So in reality there is no possibility to track the lost bitcoins.

How do you know the amount of bitcoin that is lost? Is there a place to know that? Everyone really hates a loss or even loses something very valuable like bitcoin. We can't blame anyone for losing bitcoin as a pure mistake from the holder.

that's one of the disadvantages of investing with our crypto currencies as investors must be more careful about what we have in crypto currencies and no one is responsible than ourselves

I don't think that, in fact Finding information on lost bitcoin is not an easy task. Actually I can take it almost impossible to do, Bitcoin of many people lost without any kind of responsiveness. So it's kind of an impossible practical step to put in the truck.

it is one of the weaknesses and shortcomings of investment by using crypto money if we lose what we have we cannot do anything because we do not have the power of law

theft occurs because of our own mistakes usually and cannot be returned because they do not have legal ties to anyone and whatever and the responsibility is entirely with the investor itself

If we were going to put our crypto on any exchanges be wiser enough to think that our crypto is not safe anymore if you let the other person handle your crypto. That why it is better we do it on ourselves instead of handling it to the other because you can't blame if your funds are gone due to trusting them.

until now there is still no technology that can track lost bitcoin. but I believe that someday there must be a way to track lost bitcoin. because technology is very fast moving forward, especially the trading system that cannot be dammed up.

Maybe if you lost your data you have forgot how much asset do you have and lost your coin, you have keep other way how to save your data in your computer or other device when you lost your data you can track on other your source data.

right, by holding it alone it will be safer, at least if something bad happens, it means it's a personal mistake, not because of another party's fault such as placing him in a hunt. therefore you must always concentrate when accessing

Everything that has a disadvantage also has an advantage. Using an exchange to store your coins, a lot of people will tell you that is a bad idea. But it is more easier to recover your coins if it's stores on an exchange than when it is stored in another kind of wallet. Buh… whatever, the main important thing is that everyone should be very careful when making use of this cryptocurrency.

No one has time for such and by the way there is no way for you recover any coin that is already lost. It's only the owners that. An get to it and that'd if they, themselves, has the key to it. If they don't have access to it then no other Person an have access to it too. If we all can have easy access to coins like that then where's the safety in this then?? That means you will also have easy access to the ones that are not lost too