Bitcoin Forum

Everyday people lose access to their wallets, send Bitcoins to wrong addresses. It results in Bitcoins being lost forever. In the meantime, there is no way to prevent it.

So, let’s suppose that Bitcoin would exist forever. It means that at some point there won’t be any coin left in the network…

I know there are other implications/discussions about Bitcoin supply. But I’d like to limit this topic to this concern (Bitcoins lost).

Is  the 21M BTC supply promise realistic? 

i do not understand your question, it is not realistic, it is real and immutable fact, so yes that is the final number, which cannot be changed...
if all of us loose their access to respective wallets, there will be few BTC left, but supply will not grow, that is for sure

One bitcoin is divisible by many decimal points so there will always be enough to go around. Most people in the world will never own a full bitcoin especially as time goes on & it gets more expensive.

The satoshi represents one hundred millionths of a bitcoin. Small denominations make bitcoin transactions easier to conduct and makes extremely fine transactions readable. The general unit structure of bitcoins has 1 bitcoin (BTC) equivalent to 1,000 millibitcoins (mBTC), 1,000,000 microbitcoins (μBTC), or 100,000,000 satoshis. While the exact figure is unknown, it is estimated that Satoshi Nakamoto may possess 1 million bitcoins, equivalent to 100,000,000,000,000 satoshis.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/satoshi.asp

It's true that everyday we are losing BTC from the circulation. But the ratio has decreased a lot I guess; back in the day, people wouldn't care much and left their BTC wallet without any safety. As a result, they lost the BTC but these days, it's not happening much because BTC has a lot of value and people do care. I guess this will increase much and at some point if BTC gets the acceptance as day to day currency, no one will ever lose.
To be vanished like "No BTC left", it will take a lot of times and I am damn pretty sure something else will take the place and BTC will not be anymore valuable.

Just would like to share Satoshi's great quotation on these, "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more.  Think of it as a donation to everyone."

Are you trying to say would there ever come a point where everybody has lost all of their money, and so there will be no circulating Bitcoin left?

If that's the case, then I'd say technically yes, there likely will come a point where that will happen, but Bitcoin would probably need to exist for tens of thousands of years for that to occur.

Firstly, Bitcoin will still be inflated by newly minted bitcoins for around a century, after that there will still be fractions of bitcoins left, and the value would be so high that only tiny fractions of a BTC are traded in everyday circumstances.

In any case, even if 100% of the supply was minted and lost, a blockchain reorg could see some the most recent transactions reversed to spread more BTC.

Forever is a very long time. No currency has ever lasted forever. If a 2100000000000000 supply of satoshis is not realistic, what do you think a better number might be?

It's not immutable. Bitcoin is a technology under development.....

Alright. Technically it really isn't 100% impossible to change the supply limit, because it could be done through a hard fork(though it really wouldn't be BTC). But good luck trying to convince people to follow a chain with a higher total supply. Bitcoin being scarce and slowly dis-inflationary are very very important characteristics of bitcoin both as an investment and as a store-of-value.

Didn't some forks like Bitcoin Diamond already do that? They're shitcoins (most are even scams), but they do exist. In fact, I believe one of the main reasons Bitcoin Diamond has been forked off the Bitcoin chain was because they considered it's harder for newcomers to accumulate an entire Bitcoin, hence the 10x increase in the supply.

I think you're mistaking 1 BTC for 1 satoshi. Do you also think $1 is $100 because the lowest denomination is 0.01? The fact that a Bitcoin can be split into 100 million different pieces doesn't make its supply endless.

.00000001 cand do the same thing as 10 x .0000001 can and nothing more.
You can buy 1 ton of gas with one BTC here, you can buy only 1 liter with 1 mbtc and you can only buy droplets with satoshis.
If one satoshi will ever buy you a tank of gas one BTC will buy you a hundred million of it.

There is no endless supply from a value point of view.
It would be like your gas tank is also never completely empty because at any time you still have one molecule in it so there will be no end to oil ever.
But just as 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 is worthless so it is your molecule of gas.

The 10k price is really hurting you, isn't it Mr. Teddybear? Your attacks on bitcoin are getting really lame lately!

Anything below the 8 decimal places won't be "on-chain" it will stay on the channel as defined in dust_limit_satoshis.
until enough transactions are made to make it up to the 1 Satoshi value it would not be accepted on the main chain even thought lightning can support below main net dust limit.

Nothing ever gets lost. People are even talking that quantum computers will hack bitcoin network and who cares about lost bitcoins, they should be easy to restore. I wouldn't say that it's something to laugh on because for example in past first hard drive had size of 3.75 megabyte while nowadays the max size went up to 16 terabyte. Can you see how dramatically it increased? So who knows how soon we will be able to crack some things in near future. Bitcoin won't remain the same, it will have a need of security development, adding of some new features and some modification in overall. Maybe we will get all lost bitcoins but who will own them?
Nothing is impossible, even reviving of lost bitcoins. It's just a matter of time.

There would be no issues when it comes or on talks with the supply yet even mining the whole or entire supply would take hundred years before it would be completed.
Come to think or recognized to those coins which are forever lost? Think to those who held more than 1 BTC into their wallet.If we do talk about on 1BTC denomination then
it  wont really be enough to circulate on the entire popular incase if its been totally adopted but as mentioned above we can deal with fractionally and not necessarily
counting on whole bitcoin everytime.

And at some point the Sun will stop burning and maybe even explode, but for us, our children and thousand more generations it won't be a problem, it's just a trivia fact. It's much more likely that in thousands of years Bitcoin will stop existing than that all coins will be lost. And if supply will ever be a problem, it's possible to split coins further - create fractions of satoshis, so that there's enough units for every need. Lightning Network allows it even today.

I don't think your premise makes sense. Other Bitcoin users who haven't lost their bitcoins have a strong financial incentive against diluting the money supply. As a matter of fact, the supply cap is probably considered the most sacred of all Bitcoin consensus rules.

Now that bitcoins are so valuable, we can also assume they are being lost at a significantly lower rate than years ago. I don't expect every bitcoin to be lost; not even close. So, I doubt this scenario will ever come to pass.

It's for real and it's even recorded and programmed to have that supply limit. Reaching that max limit will take around a century or more until there's no more bitcoins left to mine but it's all going to be in the circulation.

Miners will continue to mine for the same thing and that's for the confirmation of our transactions. I'm also confused what you're bringing up here or what bothers you about the supply limit.

one day miners will be difficult to produce bitcoin because as I know when bitcoin is getting closer to supply then the level of difficulty to break blocks that can produce bitcoin will increase even the result of miners will be drastically reduced, so the supply limit of bitcoin will have an impact on price and life bitcoin in the future.

because when bitcoin becomes more difficult to obtain there are 2 choices, humans can still use bitcoin but with very high transaction costs or humans don't use it anymore because bitcoin prices are too high only that is likely to happen in the future when bitcoin has reached the maximum supply limit .

What do you mean with too high? Please provide a more detail explanation about this.

Because we are still able to scale down BTC until 0.00000001 BTC a.k.a 1 satoshi.

Already been thought through way way way before :).
Bitcoin can be divided endlessly. I mean there is limitations currently, but it can be expanded to divide further and further if necessary.
So even if there will be only 1 bitcoin "not lost" it can supply whole world.

sorry the question seems to be very complicated to understand but i will answer upon how i get the idea.
Bitcoin maybe lost in the air as i have did this in past when i sent in wrong address but that is commonly happens.
what you are pointing if time comes that all of the 21million bitcoin lost like that right?or some of them are owned by death person that no one knows the key of their wallets.
exaggerating obviously but even there is only 1 bitcoin remains still it can be divided into how many Satoshi?meaning there are  still in circulation.
that is what we are all pointing because it is impossible for Bitcoin to  just vanished like that.

The 21M BTC supply is realistic but the scenario you are saying is not. There's no way that every piece of Bitcoin would be lost forever even in 100000 years. You are right about Bitcoin getting lost but as time goes by, it is getting lesser and lesser. Let's just say in 100000 years it did got lost, the last Satoshi got mishandled and got lost in an unknown wallet, then something will replace Bitcoin and that's reality. Now let's just say that 1M that Satoshi is hiding got distributed somehow to the public, then that's another thousands of years of supply of Bitcoin because we can just move denominator and use Satoshi instead and by that time I think, there's already a huge technological advancement to the point where there's already a better option.

Well it's realistic because it's based on math afterall, people lose access to wallet and they used to do it more in the early days but nowadays no one would just lose access to it as it's like burning cash and if people wanna burn their cash, the supply would still be the same and more importantly it would create further demand for the coin.

The one confused is you
By your logic
190 040 at 1 ton = 190 040 tonnes
190 040 at one kilo = 190 040 000  tonnes
190 040 at one gram = 190 040 000 000 tonnes


Then you should start eating one molecule of caviar a day, one gram it will last your till Andromeda rams the MilkyWay


Yeah, yeah, it hurts right? Have  one 1/10000000 of a cookie

When you start throwing those words it's a clear sign you have no arguments left.
So, have 1/1000 of a cookie.


Good, then let's deal with this entirely virtual!!!
Send me 10 BTC I will send you 10 satoshi,  because you claim it's the same thing!

I also doesn't understand OP's point here but you already explained it well .
No matter how many wallets would be lost forever the maximum supply would always be 21M BTC the lost Bitcoin would still be there but it would lessen the circulating supply.
And we don't have to worry about a thing because 1BTC could still be divided into 100 Million Sats and every Sats have its value.

Kingcolex explained well it to you mate, g+.

I also think that he has no idea what he's saying about block rewards and he's only talking about the increase in difficulty. The adjustment of rewards is there and even the price will adjust too because of the cost of mining.

The production let's say that you have understood it as the miners reward will be lessen but the value of it will increase due to several factors that we're talking and one of it is the halving.

21M supply is same with the current supply even though some of them are lost in the wild. Logically this is a broad discussion.
Its actually lost. How can you say it can be restored if that's easy to retrieved many already try out to recover those who sent on a wrong address. That will defied transparency if this can be work out.

I dont think those wronfully sent will affect its value rather it could boost is demand. Those are still part of circulation that laid waste but still it just dormant.

Even if more persons should misplace their private keys, send their bitcoin to wrong addresses or even pass on without reveling their keys to their loved ones, Bitcoin as far as I aam concerned will continue to exist even if only 1 BTC is left in the world. I based my opinion on the fact that Bitcoin comes with 8 decimals. So if only 1 bitcoin is left in the entire world, it will still be enough to be used for p2p transactions and as a store of value .

When there is 1 BTC left, next step is 0.1BTC left, and then 0.01BTC left... But yes, Sun will stop shinning at some point.

I agree with Satoshi) Each lost BTC unit only makes this coin more expensive. And we must take a more responsible approach to the safety of our BTC. This also applies to accessing your wallet and sending BTC to the correct addresses, since it will not be possible to return an incorrect transfer.

Both of you make sense but I don't want to side.

First, Physical world and Virtual world is different in a way. Let me give you an example.

A 0.00001 Cookie is basically nothing, you wouldn't even be able to tell or see it unless you use a microscope. It won't even be enough to be considered a food for a body but A 0.00001 of Bitcoin might be enough to buy you a house in the future because the use of cookie is to be food and there's a minimum amount that we should consider before it is even considered as such. One molecule of Cavier is the same, it is food.

Bitcoin's use is to transact which as of now, 0.00001 is alright to do that.

Let's set aside value for now and discuss the use of Bitcoin. Technically, 0.0001 Bitcoin have the same purpose as 1 Bitcoin. You can send, receive, sign, and pretty much do everything with it without having to compromise its real purpose. Now let's talk about cookie and cavier. 0.0001 of them won't have the nutritional value or satisfaction of eating it compared to a whole which defeats the purpose of it being food. You see now? Different things have different use and different limitations. Though we can't say that we can use 0.0000000000001 BTC because that is super absurd.

Let me explain even further.
In Khaos77 argument, there's truth to that but there's a limit. 1 Bitcoin now might have the same price as 0.001 Bitcoin in the future but that doesn't mean we could move decimals so much because let us consider the technicalities of Bitcoin. Sending too little will be considered a dust for example. Dust is a miniscule amount of Bitcoin that miners won't even consider taking which results into transfer not getting confirmed, unless you use LN or built your own mining farm for that purpose which is unrealistic for now (maybe in the future when Bitcoin is $1,000,000,000?) then we have to consider the mining fees and such.

Though we can move denominator in the future due to price influx, moving it too much will have some problems. But let's be open and consider the future.

We have to consider that Bitcoin's price is getting higher. I don't know, maybe in the future we start using Satoshi instead of Bitcoin because of price? Only time will tell. Bitcoin can change.

No, it isn't possible to have the 21million total supply in circulation. I wrote on this sometime last year and I included those whales who might have died and their families don't have access to their largess. Whatever happens to Satoshi's share, even? In life's principle nothing leaves whole and comes back whole after a while.