Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin total supply is 21 million coins and there is less than 2,6 million left to be mined.
Almost 88% of all Bitcoins have been issued so far.

I like visual representations, and I found one for Bitcoin supply.
1 square equals 1000 BTC, and there are other categories like:
Lost Coins, Coins on exchanges, BTC/Year after halving, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, Plus Token Scam, Mt Gox Wallets, Winklevoss Twins, Bitfinex Hack, Roger Ver, Tim Draper, Bitcoin Pizza, Lightning Network and Rest.
Each category has it's own color and reference link.

You can see that nice chunk of coins is kept on exchanges (sadly)  :-\

https://i.imgur.com/WCLT95x.png
source: https://www.blockchaincenter.net/bitcoin-supply/

Ver seems to have a lot of bitcoin.

Anyway, this is scary that a lot of coins are in hold by the exchanges.
2.43 million is a lot of bitcoin.

And this calculation do not include the coins Satoshi has?

there is still no way to count how many coins are lost. so those black squares are (like always) coins that have not moved.

why sadly?
you could look at it as bitcoin trading volume being high as a lot of people trade bitcoin every second of every day that means a lot of liquidity on exchanges which translates into a large volume being in exchange wallets.

I just wonder how lost coins are being called lost coins if it is not really lost. How do we label the coins that is lost? there are differences between losing your softwallet and hardwallet, simply in softwallet there is way where you can at least recover it unlike in hardwallet, what you need to recover the bitcoins is you need to recover the hardwallet first but what if it fell into the ocean? that's lost bitcoins, maybe.

I also wonder where is the Satoshis's bitcoin? that's worth a trillion!

The term lost coins are just an assumption with the agenda behind and that is "scarcity" to give hype and at the same time reminders.  I still think, "idle coins " suited it than saying lost coins.


About the lost hardware wallet, I am sure you will have a back up of the private key safely keep on another hardware wallet just in case the said scenario happens, you can easily recover BTC on it.

the only way you can know if a coin is lost is if you were the person losing those coins. even if you publicly announce you have lost those coins we still have no way of knowing if those coins are actually lost.

so far every single stat that counts "lost coins" is simply calling any coin that has not moved a "lost coin". and that is not just wrong, it is stupid. a couple of weeks ago we saw how early miner(s) signed a message from many addresses that had coins from very early days. these coins are not moved and are being counted as "lost coins".

same with Satoshi coins. there are only 2 known Satoshi addresses as far as i know. the first one that has balance is the one from Genesis block which has unspendable 50BTC due to protocol design. the second address that has no balance is the one he sent bitcoin from to Hal. we don't even know if the change address belongs to Satoshi! so for all we know Satoshi has 0 bitcoins.

Yes, it's actually good that huge number is getting counted in exchanges. I think they are nothing but holdings and tradings in buy-sell orders by large number of crypto traders. It's fantastic portfolio that can be seen with this picturised presentation.

I think Op might be suggesting it's dangerous to hold your coins over an exchanger since it is prone to get hacked and with past experiences we know very well that is true case.

That affect the exchange owner and user but I believe this frame stays still. :)

How did they know those are the total amount of lost coin? I am pretty sure there are more and thousands of those lost coins aren't reported at all.
Yeah, they should be move to an exchange before trading. If no one moved the coins, then there wouldn't be any trades going on and the volumes would drop, affecting the price very badly. They are "kept" in the exchange. They aren't held over there forever.
Though I do like the visual representation. You get to know a lot buy just looking at the photo!

I see nothing to be sad about here. They too may also fall under the categories of users abandoned account. Or some are holding them on exchange and trading them. But I feel for those holding there coins on exchange wallet because of exchange hack.

That's a good point, is hard to know how many coins are already lost, i think some of the holders' coins could be considered as lost coins too.

Anyway, it's an awesome graph great job, it reminds me of the Windows Disck defrag. Thanks for sharing the source.

https://i.imgur.com/o6qd2cH.png

Based on the stats (by blockchaincenter.net) there is only around 2 380 000 Bitcoins on exchanges and that is showing us how huge potential Bitcoin is.
That is just a little more than all Bitcoins left to be mined! Thank about that.

https://i.imgur.com/Nx4CEFi.png

Let's compare that with 565 000 Bitcoins in Grayscale Bitcoin Trust

https://i.imgur.com/AgYs8hZ.png

As far as the amount of bitcoins actually minted in circulation, the Bitcoin network has recently passed over the 18.5 million level. However, while more than 18 million coins have been minted to date, there are a range of distinct elements that influence the distribution of all current coins. Large holders, missing coins, so-called sleeping coins, and coins kept in custody for multiple solutions are elements that influence bitcoin distribution.

The outstanding circulating BTC supply is about 18,508,600 BTC as of today, although several individuals have been debating the actual distribution of the circulating supply over the past 12 months. For instance, news.Bitcoin.com reported on an analyst in mid-September who said only 14 million out of the 21 million supply limit would ever circulate.

Coin Metrics also conducted an article last year, discussing a number of approaches to determine the true supply of Bitcoin. At that time, Coin Metric's estimate of the "liquid" availability of BTC was about 16.3 million as of block height 600,000.

The coins kept in crypto exchanges belong to the users,who deposited these coins in the exchanges.
I know that there's a risk of exit scams or hacks,but we will have to wait until the decentralized exchanges become a thing and "be your own bank" becomes a reality in the cryptocurrency world.
Maybe the governments won't allow decetralized exchanges,because of the lack of KYC policies.Who knows?
By the way,I'm waiting for Roger Ver to sell his BTC at 50K USD and crash the price back to 20K USD. ;D
Which means more BTC at an affordable price for us...