Bitcoin Forum

with all these huge bitcoin purchases by corporations, i was wondering how many bitcoin is left in ordinary ppl's hand and i made an assumption which ended up w/ this number:
7,137,213 bitcoins + 900 (newly mined per day)
is this method proper for a close guess?

bitcoin_in_circulation= 18,630,338

nakamotos= 1,100,000
#https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/satoshi-net-worth/

lost= 4,000,000
#https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoins-are-there/

whales= .4 * bitcoin_in_circulation = 7,452,135
#2231 people owning addresses with more than 1,000 btc which is 40% of the market
#https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-whales-the-key-facts-figures-you-need-to-know-2021-1?international=true&r=US&IR=T

in_corps_hand= 1,267,652 +  42,000 + 1000= 1,310,652
# https://bitcointreasuries.org/ + tesla estimation + assumption of small bizs

total= 13,862,787

total_bitcoin= 21,000,000

rest = 7,137,213


blocks_mined_per_day= 144
bitcoin_produced_per_day= 900


https://blog.jeeb.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/how-many-bitcoin.png

there are many early miners some of them are active today whom you are counting as "nakamotos" and consider lost.

you are probably counting mine (an ordinary person) and a lot of other bitcoiners coins in this too just because we haven't moved our coins you are calling them "lost"!

most of those addresses that you call "whales" belong to big exchanges and similar companies that are handling thousands of users bitcoins so they aren't whales themselves and they are indeed the very same "ordinary people" who your title mentions.

that is the only thing you can count because they make public claims about how much they own. of course some of these are going into the hands of their "ordinary" investors again but through that company.

First of all, the number of confirmed lost bitcoin is far lower than the amount we are estimating as lost. So, you don't know whether people are not touching their bitcoin for long time or they have lost the access.
And the result can not be correct because you don't know which coins belong to which person/institution exactly unless they publicly announced it.

Are you sure? It really is a hard metric to estimate, because any data that we collect would likely be self submitted, and therefore could be fake data. For example, I must come across at least one person a month claiming they have lost big amounts of Bitcoin, and have simply "forgotten" where it is, or forgot the credentials. Now, these people could in fact be lying, or they could be misremembering, or indeed actually lost the amount of coins they lost. Also, we have to consider what people mean by "lost", and whether they've actually be lost, or simply they got scammed etc.

Now, all of the above would support your argument that we are over estimating the amount of Bitcoin that has truly been "lost". However, there's also the flipside where people inflate, and deflate the amount that they actually lost. So, there could well be people out there that's lost thousands, and are too embarrassed, or some people don't want to paint a target on their back.

I'd probably agree we are overestimating the amount, but I can't explicitly state that because we'll never really have great data to work with. The only really useful data we have is the amount of Bitcoin that is in circulation. That's really the only metric that's going to be reliable.

Although it's not intuitive, big investment companies will put more bitcoin in ordinary people's hands.

Especially when we get more Bitcoin ETFs.

When we get ETFs, 100s of millions of people will suddenly be able to buy and sell real bitcoin without any friction.

Most likely they have lost access to their BTC because if they were holding it up to this point, you can see some of them have already sold some of their BTC in the market. As of today, their BTC is not moving and it has not been a move for the last 5 to 10 years. consider it to be lost or the owner might already pass away. What about those BTC that has moved suddenly after so many years from sleeping? This is what I'm talking about when I said if they still have access to their BTC, they could have sold a chunk of it to the market.

We can't exactly get a data so we use assumptions on that part because inactivity could mean anything. To me, it doesn't matter whether there are a lot or there are less bitcoin that ordinary people like me can get because getting even to 1 BTC is a difficult thing to do so we don't have to scramble over what to do with it because with the current numbers given by OP, I think that there is still a lot of bitcoin for every ordinary people.

Is it really worth the trouble to compute it all?
We buy what we can we hold what we can we don't need to point finger on others why we can't have more than we can afford,
The company and huge players are buying and driving the price up whether we like it or not what else could we do we are all free to do what we want in crypto.
And the number of lost or untouch Bitcoin is hard to determine what if those considered lost are just a long term holders who checks their wallet from time to time but doesn't create a transaction.

Like BrewMaster says, a lot of assumptions are probably wrong. I don't think there's 4 million lost Bitcoins. This can never really be proven. I'm sure a better estimate is 10% of that (again no I don't have math, just that 10 years of not moving coins means almost nothing).

And exchange wallets, I think you can safely say at least 90% of that belongs to retail traders (you and me).

The whale number is probably introducing the biggest inaccuracy to your calculations, because whale addresses often belong to exchanges or other services, as it's best practice to consolidate the coins and put them in cold storage. So the actual whale number is much lower, probably a million coins, depending on what you count as "whale". So, the overwhelming majority of coins is still being held by ordinary users, which is a good thing for the ecosystem.

Op, your guess is evidence-based, which is good, but as was already mentioned, it's not without its problems. The huge one is about the whales, of course. Some of these addresses don't have publicly known owners, but I remember when I looked into the biggest BTC hodlers, some of the biggest ones were very easy to google and see that it's a major exchange. BrewMaster already pointed it out, but perhaps you could try to go through the biggest addresses and exclude those bitcoins which turn out to be in exchange wallets. This can help to make your guess more accurate, I think.

This is going to most exciting in the next coming months, let's see what's going to exist until such time price correction takes place. Tesla is a huge company, so it's no wonder many investors also attracted with the good news. Take a deep breath and always expect good outcome after overall business would turn to be unstoppable.

I was one of the persons who thought for a while that we're underestimating the number of bitcoin costs as one person could render his wallet useless or wipe his HDD or have a disk/card failure even one day after he has bought his coins, especially since more and more people are venturing into crypto and the percentage of those who work with back-ups is rapidly decreasing.

But although I won't change my opinion about those new "lost" coins I also think I've too overestimated the amount of old "lost" coins and the recent events when coins mined in the first month and then the other 1000 mined in 2010 suddenly woke up makes me think a lot of those that were supposed to be satoshi coins are neither his nor lost.
One thing I was always wondering but I couldn't find a tool on it anywhere, are there any old coins that have moved on the forked chain, BCH, and not on BTC?
Although I suppose the amount would be minimal it would shed another tiny ray of light on this neverending debate.


Indeed that is the most inaccurate number of all, just a few tagged cold wallet we know for sure are holding around 700 000 coins, then we have a lot of more that are not tagged, Gox coins, Coinbase and other custodial service and not forgetting the fact that some of those in this category might also be part of the so-called "lost" coins. But I'm always puzzled why people are always bringing up the subject of how many coins are left or owned by the "ordinary" people., what's up with this, are we entering another collectivization era where everything must be distributed equally?

I did not count, but I think that it is enough not to create bitcoin monopolists.

In the near future more and more big companies will buy btc. And this mean that less and less btc will be avaliable for ordinary people

Well if you can remember a private key you are touch by the gods! jajjaja

That's funny though.  ;D ;D I have been seeing posts here asking for help how to recover their unforgotten wallets.
If you manage to recover your wallet and found out that you have lots of bitcoins, then you are one lucky person, winning like in a lottery.
But yes, we don't need to buy the whole bitcoin to be a crypto user, these days owning satoshis is more common to ordinary people.
Even long time crypto users here don't have 1 bitcoin in their account. Maybe in previous years, but I believe most of us don't have one.

An accurate number is impossible to be reached with so many variables and people deciding to sell their coins at anytime, but there will be always bitcoins left for any people, since they are disposed to pay the price for it. Big companies are buying btc nowadays, but they aren't supposed to hold it forever. Sooner or later they will have to move, invest, transact their coins, otherwise there is no point on these purchases.

Or is bitcoin going to become a collectible token?

maybe I thought the company's ownership could be bigger in bitcoin, but that's actually not accurate. I try to interpret if it is possible that the ownership of the company or the pope is one entity but only different names. So in fact, it is difficult for us to trace the bitcoin owned by anyone until now, we can only check through transaction history

it seems so, but we as ordinary people must be smart and wise to hold our bitcoins, if bitcoin reaches 50K $ or more and we feel enough profit from our initial capital, I personally let go of my bitcoin and I use it to open a business, maybe it's our share in bitcoin profits,

Ordinary people meaning not corporations?

It's a very strange indicator because at what point a normal person turns from being an ordinary investor into a whale. At which point does a company turn into an institutional investor?

In the first situation you have a rich guy who buys 100 bitcoins. Is he a whale investor? What if he has 500? Is he a whale or an ordinary investor?

In the second you have a company that pays wages in bitcoin. They own 500 btc but most of it is exchanged in the end of the month or paid out. Is the coins in the hands of an institution or its employees by your standard?

Yes, transaction history is the mere fact that we can use as proof that a certain person or company owns a cryptocurrency, Hence, it's not really accurate that a certain company would have more ownership than other pro-crypto traders. It's still pseudoanonymous for those bitcoin wallets who we all known as whales that holds the biggest amounts of bitcoins whether they're part of a company or not.

I don't know whether the data source in the opening post is accurate or not, but I believe that there are very few Bitcoin in ordinary people hand.
And this is what can lead to price manipulation by whales or companies that have large amounts of Bitcoin. I don't know whether to worry or not
to see the current Bitcoin circulation, but if whales and companies are not investing in Bitcoin. So the increase in the price of Bitcoin cannot be
as high as it is today. Therefore, while there is still Bitcoin that can be mined, better start collecting Bitcoin from now as much as possible.
Because in the future it is certain that the number of whales and companies that buy Bitcoin will increase too.

I have been concerned about this too but after some debate, does it really matter how much is with the people and how much is with the institutions? All that matters is that people know about it and can access it. Institutions are entities in themselves. They are investing as well as partaking in the belief and risks of the technology. Same for the individual although on a lower scale.

These statistics on distribution are essentially futile because Bitcoin is not a PoS system. That is why only a PoW network like Bitcoin can be money. If you try to hoard it, you pay for it. PoS systems would be a nightmare if it really were to capture this much value.

I own what we could call a "dead" wallet". Lat time I checked there were 6 BTC there dating back to 2014. Am I one of those who in statistics show as people who lost access to their wallets?
We've had hundreds of this threads where people were trying to estimate how many coins are lost and how many coins are owned by companies. It's impossible.