Bitcoin Forum

What happens to all the coins in lost wallets in the Bitcoin system? If there are only a finite number of coins, won't they become increasingly scarce as people lose them over time?

it just means less coin in active circulation..

bitcoin should do anything about it.
the point of bitcoin is no one can just steal someones coins for any greedy reason of thinking coins need to be redistributed if not moved after 10 years.

no one should dare declare coins dead and remove them from that address

if they are lost then they are lost. that is it.

bitcoin needs to do nothing.. PEOPLE need to actually take care of their assets and prevent forgetton/losing their keys.

The lost coins are.. well.. lost. Forever.
And indeed, the remaining ones will become increasingly scarce. Which is a good thing, since this makes them increasingly more valuable.
And you should not be too much worried about this, since bitcoin works with 8 digits after the decimal point, so the real total amount of coins is 2 100 000 000 000 000 (satoshi).

People lost bitcoin more in the past because they did not believe the price can increase as it increased abruptly and significantly. Any bitcoin user should make sure he does all possibilities to make sure he protect his/her seed phrase or private key which is the most important as backup. But even if 20 million of bitcoin supply is lost, that will make even 1 sat to become more valuable. But, the bad side of lost bitcoin is that people that lost it lost it forever unless they later see the backup like seed phrase or private key, but the good side of it is that the scarcity it will create will later make people hodling bitcoin before it happens to have more money as the price of bitcoin will increase.

We cannot even give the exact number of lost wallets. Some wallets have not been active since 2013, and it is difficult to even call them lost, as people can just keep them in storage. And of course, because the amount of bitcoins is limited to 21 million coins, its value will increase. Today there are many hunters to recover lost bitcoin treasures, and people go to various tricks, including even hypnosis, to remember their private keys, but there are very few lucky ones who could recover the lost ones.

..which is actually kinda a good thing. While the 21 million supply cap is really really attractive, the supply cap is somewhat actually smaller because of all those lost coins (though I totally feel bad for those who lost their coins early on).

This coins are lost and nothing will happen with them.
Bitcoin total supply is fixed at 21 million coins, circulating supply is around 18,684,000 but some research with FreeFloat supply is showing that 4 million bitcoins may be gone forever, and this can only be good for overall value and Bitcoin price.
Note that we can't know exact number of lost coins and some of them may be recovered and found in future, but people will probably lose more coins in future and bitcoin will be more scarce.

Yeah, it should become more and more scarce to get more value. The crypto coins which are limited, in our discussion the BTC, is taking whole lot of energy to produce (mining) and it is costing more and more day by day. The coins which are lost forever are the security of bitcoin’s stagnant economy. Whether you call it indirect effect or direct contribution, it’s anyway healthy for us.

 I don’t think developers would do anything about it and also they won’t break the laws of blockchain by breaking into it. So yeah even best for that matter.  :D

The Bitcoin lost cannot be recovered at all if you don't have access to your wallets or say you lost private keys for your coins. It's not that someone else will find them and take advantage of your funds unlike fiat btc lost simply reduce the total supply of 21 million coins.We have list of dormant bitcoin address with thousands of Bitcoin in them but we can't say they are lost or not because they are not active from past few years.Some people like German programmer who lost his 7002 bitcoins which are worth more than $220 million.Many in the past also has done the same mistake as they were not aware that btc will cross high level prices soon.


This is indeed making Bitcoin really scare and if people keep losing their private keys we might see actual suplly to be around 15-16 million only instead of 21 million.This will push the prices further high as demand will surpass supply with huge numbers as nobody will be willing to sell at that time.So if you are holding Bitcoins at this time keep your keys safe in cold storage and funds in hardware wallets to safeguard your future.

Yes, you are right about that. 21 million coins is not the real amount of coins which can truly be used as many coins were lost and probably won't ever be a part of the ecosystem anymore. However, there's nothing that can be done with it, we'll just have to live with whichever is still accessible. And it's not necessarily a big problem because we can just switch from thinking in Bitcoins to talking about mBTC or Satoshis more as the price grows. However, the fees will become very challenging as more people own smaller bits of BTC and the price gets higher.

Yeah! things are not how you see it because the more it lost the more the value of each satoshi will increase and you cannot doubt that because a lightning network is developed for that kind of features. When people only sending satoshis in the future instead of the full amount of one bitcoin, you will realize that nothing has gone wrong. everything seems going to the right courses since it will give us good news and the price is our main concern here because the more we lost those total supplies, the more the price will reach its another all-time high.

Bitcoin does not deal with lost tokens. What is lost is lost forever until it is recovered by the owner or whoever gets hold of the private keys. Apart from that, lost Bitcoins will remain outside the access of anybody. Bitcoin is not an exchange or a central authority which could do something about them.

Bitcoin will remain to grow scarcer and scarcer each day not only because the demand is rising but also because the circulating supply is decreasing partly because of lost coins.

Bitcoins are not lost, they just sleep in the system. The total supply of Bitcoin has always been 21 million coins. Fewer Bitcoins in circulation means an increased scarcity of Bitcoin. In my opinion, many Bitcoins have been sleeping in wallets in the past because users forgot the security phrase, wallet password ...
Bitcoin is more scarce after each halving.
Thus, it can be seen that there are fewer Bitcoins while the demand for Bitcoin increases over time, which drives the value of Bitcoin to increase. We can be confident that Bitcoin will be worth $ 1 million in the future.

Just think of it as a burn token like most of the new alt-coin does.
But for me it is better that way since it would still be the max supply but lesser circulating coin that would fetch a higher price in the future.
No need to worry about those coins since we couldn't do anything about it.

I said earlier that there is no way to know how many bitcoins are lost.  Anything else is pure speculation.

Why was this post deleted verses other replies here?

Bitcoin has been created so that you can manage your own funds without any intersection from others. So, if you lose control of your funds for any reason, it is completely unreasonable to expect someone else to control it. The coin you have lost control of is completely out of control, and will remain useless in the blockchain network for life. No one is able to recover the coin from your lost wallet if there is no private key / seeds backup.

If the coins will never be accessed or moved again, that lessens the number of bitcoins that will ever be in circulation , increases scarcity and price (assuming  demand for the coin outweighs supply).

Because the main question in the OP was specifically concerning what will happen with the lost coins, not how many are lost. Whereas the latter(your response) was kinda unrelated to the main question.

I remember a thread here before asking how would one recover Bitcoins from a deceased person.
Thing is unless one is holding it from like a web or online wallet that offers it, there could still be a chance but good luck complying with requirements to prove relations and connections.
Well if it is something held wherein the owner himself holds the private key then there's no hope unless s/he left a private key somewhere written.

Yes, they will!

Part of this brilliant creation is that the coins become scarcer over time. I remember reading a study saying that the daily burned bitcoins are more than the freshly mined ones. This means that every single minute passing on average, bitcoins become slightly scarcer.  :D

Despite the ones that lost their old wallet.dat files and the purposely burned coins, you should consider the future losses from those who will pass out. If they haven't planned to inherit them, they're also gone forever.

Also, bitcoins are not tokens! They're coins!

Consider it as burning of bitcoins for free  ;D Yes, it does make bitcoin scarce since the number of bitcoins in circulation gets reduced.
Since the supply is now decreased this increases the price of bitcoin in the long term.
Since no particular entity controls bitcoin the lost bitcoins are forever lost and cannot be accessed anymore.

The coins on the wallets are lost forever and there is no way to retrieve it unless someone recovers the private keys, which is almost impossible to do so. As more coins are lost, bitcoin becomes more scarce as the number of bitcoins that can be mined is capped to 21 million. Which means, bitcoin will become more valuable as more people loses their coins. Imagine how many coins are lost every day. If you combine wallets that had few satoshis and the owner didn't care about it since it was worthless back then, we probably might have thousands of bitcoin in total.

Woah, this is my first time learning that bitcoin has that much amount. I'm kinda wondering about that too actually, like what if more and more people lose their bitcoin, won't bitcoin become even more scarce? but after knowing that we have that many amount of bitcoin, i guess there's no need to worry. And what you stated is right, this is what will make bitcoin even more valuable, since it's limited, and become even more limited by the time people keep losing the coin, since there's no way we can get back bitcoin that we've lost already, gone forever.

This is not completely accurate, technically speaking no coins are completely lost forever, there is always the possibility that someone else at random generates the same address than the one that some other people generated and that has a lot of coins, this is incredibly unlikely, so unlikely that if you're waiting for something like this to happen it is better that you just play the lottery, but it can happen, which is why there is nothing to be done about it because even if some coins are lost by their owners there is always a small chance that someone else will eventually get them in the future.

if bitcoin is lost due to forgetting the password or private key then the right way is to surrender and hope for a miracle to come to us, because we know how bitcoin works is not the same as conventional currencies which can reset passwords whenever we want.
As for the reduced supply, bitcoin prices will continue to set new records when there is a lot of demand.

There are a total of 18,684,393 bitcoin currently circulating in the market [data (https://www.coingecko.com/id/koin_koin/bitcoin)]which means there are 2,315,607 bitcoin locked in the wallet. Some bitcoins that are currently locked can still be activated if the owner manages to recover his lost wallet phrase, or it is possible that the number will continue to grow due to user error. If the wallet owner never inherit his bitcoin ownership, the bitcoin will remain locked and can no longer be transferred. That means the same as lost bitcoin.

Nothing happens to them. Once they have gone, they will go away forever. That makes bitcoin more precious overtime because less bitcoin appears for the circulation

However, if quantum computer is created, perhaps they will easily decode those missing bitcoin wallet and that does cause a huge impact on bitcoin. Moreover, those quantum machines probably gain a huge hash rate from mining which strongly affects the POW system.

In my opinion, everything is simple and elementary - less bitcoins - less supply - higher price. And the value will grow as more and more bitcoins are mined. In addition, the digital economy does not stand still and more and more tools are gradually being introduced where you can use cryptocurrency as a means of payment. The loss of bitcoins is the private stories of individual holders, most often those people who at the beginning of this process did not attach much importance to the value of bitcoin before the price became high enough. You can recall the example of those very two pizzas sold for 10 thousand bitcoins.

Yes, but that's where the fun is, right? With people losing their Bitcoins the market will actually, in a way, become more stable, because those people, who were holding them could've succumbed to panic selling, for instance. Now, we can be sure that at least some holders will remain forever :D
While I actually feel sorry for people, who lost their wallets, generally and pragmatically speaking it's good.

Nothing will happen to the coin, they will be among the total 21 million coins that will be ever mine but they will lose forever inside the wallet where they were sent to if the owner of the coin can't access the wallet.


That's a finite number of coins in the Bitcoin ecosystem already and the lose coins will help the pump in price of Bitcoin market.
This is the reason why some people believe if Satoshi accesses the Bitcoin in the genesis wallet it may affect the price of the Bitcoin market.

This is essentially a serious deflationary aspect of Bitcoin. Not a nice one for those who lose access to their wallets but it is basically true. Every now and then somebody will definitely lose access or die and not leave the keys in an appropriate place for others to access the wallets afterwards.

There will never be a way to recover them. If there was a way I think that would simultaneously man Bitcoin has a problem.

If someone is keeping their coins in their wallet and forgets the necessary info to get access, there is no way back from it. Those coins will be lost forever, mate.  ;D  There is no recovery option and that's why it's very important to keep private keys etc. in a safe and unforgettable place.

I suggest lost bitcoins to be allocated proportionally among all who hold bitcoins now  ;D

It is never going to happen, to begin with what are lost coins? Coins that have not moved in a long time? That just means their owners probably did not saw any need to move those coins, we cannot distinguish between coins that have not moved and coins that are legitimately lost, also we cannot take the word of those that claim to have lost thousands of coins as the only way to confirm ownership of an address is by having access to the private keys and sign a message which is precisely what those that have lost their keys cannot do.

There was a report about lost coins a while ago. It is quite a significant amount of coins that is not accessible anymore, but as you say they don't know exactly how many coins are permanently lost and how many coins are just sleepers.

is that means less bitcoin which people will sell and then more demands cause bitcoin price increased? but about the coin, i think it will remain there same with other coins too. Because no one can access it means no one can't do anything with that lose coin.

What is lost is lost and gone forever except the owners are about to recover the wallet, otherwise they are now "audio" money, you may be able to see it but can't use it again.

BIS-IMF created bitcoin, make no mistake they want to implement same system in crypto, all over the world, if you don't 'touch' your bank account yearly, the gov gets to steal your money, why not with bitcoin they ask?


Well today there are 10^3 coin-addresses with serious value

[ later we deal with the issue of how many satoshis could create how many unique addresses in theory ]

There are 10^77 private-keys possible, that is more than the number of electrons in the known universe, trust me its a big number.

Ergo 10^74 btc 'keys' are lost already, or maybe you can say they just haven't been found.

Then there are 300M, or 3*10^9 'used' addresses containing little value ( < 0.05 btc )

So in reality there are 10^68 lost keys; So lets say people forget their seed, or wallet-password say 1,000's a year, its still a drop in the bucket compared to the astronomic orhpan keys out there without any love

Seems to be a continuous scam that constantly comes up "Something ought to be done about 'lost coin'"; Of course the solution is have the GOV force all high-values addresses to be come public, and then black-list all addresses that don't have 100% KYC in a database on all high-value coins.

Then when somebody wants to spend their 'tainted' address they must plea to the IMF to release their address from the "no fly list"

The lost addresses the OP speaks of course, you or the GOV can't steal it, even if you declare it on your 'black-list', cuz you ain't got the private-key.

On the subject of scarcity, there is no scarcity of 'coins', each bitcoin is 100M satoshis, and there are 21M satoshis for now ( I think they'll bump the number later, why not? Its source code easy to modify all you need is +51% of the block-chain miners to run your software, China already has +67% )

So there are 100M satoshi per bitcoin, 21M bitcoin for now that be 10^8 * 21*10^6, so +2 Quadrillions satoshi

So 210*10^14 sats, now there are 300M coins ( addresses ) in use, this means you have 2.1*10^16 less 300M  = 2.09999997e+16

1.4285714285714286e-08, a less than a billionth of the available 'coins' have been used so far,

...

Of course in time, lots of these addresses/coins are unused and carry zero-balance.

Given that 99% of all BTC is held in 10K addresses, that's sort of where you look. From a GOV point of view, you focus on who holds +99% of the wealth, and of course we know its just a few people

IMHO the way GOV will handle this problem, is have a moratorium and force these 10k addresses to come forward and sign them with their KYC info, failure to, would then result in that address being black-listed.

For a privacy person, the only escape would be to sell that coin on the black market in China, for pennys on the dollar.

Of course some will say, then people will just 'mix', not true the exchanges have already been told to 'black-list' tainted or mixed coins.

...

How will bitcoin deal with lost 'tokens'? First of all there is NO such thing as token in BTC, that's an ethereum bullshit moniker. Even 'coin' in bitcoin doesn't mean anything, there are only addresses, that are hashed public-keys. Behind every public-key there is a secret private-key. If you know the private key, then you own the public-key, and its hashed address.

Bitcoin doesn't care. Its job is add transactions to the block-chain, if the transactions is approved then its posted. If the person making the transaction has the private-key, he can sign the transaction to prove to bitcoin that he is the owner. Bitcoin is only tasked with the tasks at hand. To build block-chains every ten minutes.

Now humans, they'er quite concerned with lost and/or orphan bitcoins ( addresses with value ), but likes been said above unless you have the private-key don't lose any sleep.

Certain criminals have proposed 'marking' unused say a year addresses as abandoned, then when the owner try's to do a transaction, he would have to pay to have it released, and this is where the criminal exchange loves this concept essentially its a tax for not spending your bitcoin. This is exactly what the new CBDC in CHina does, spend it or lose it.

I dont believe any thing could be done about it. Those are already lost as the way the system is designed, once you dont have access by way of whatever form you login then they are lost and I believe investors are more careful now with safety of login details however those will just contribute to reducing the actual number of active circulating supply of Bitcoin which is kinda good but in a sad way because those where peoples funds.  :'(

Well that's a possibility mate because all the coins that lost in tin air are gone forever as Blockchain wallet cannot be retrieved by any individuals.
So if we are a Noob and careless in handling all our coins and in future will Lose everything in accessing our wallets? then Yeah Bitcoin will totally Gone and maybe Altcoin will start to become the king and queen.
hard but true..

If we know how to recover it then probably it will be a thing but no it isn't the thing. Lost coins are coins that can't be recovered, spent or transferred. Lost coins are also responsible for the permanent increase of the prices since they are part of the limited supply.

If we lose the wallet's private key and can't access it anymore, the bitcoins will remain in the wallet and won't move places. that's the uniqueness of bitcoin. a limited supply will increase the value of bitcoins, plus when someone loses their private key, they can no longer access their bitcoins. it will hold back the decline in value. the rarer bitcoins are, the more expensive they are.

Therefore. Take good care of your private keys so that your bitcoin is not lost. because if you lose your private key then you will lose money.

Well, it's like the natural burn experienced by such tokens, let alone bitcoin. We know that the bitcoin team no longer exists or is not shown. Now who's in control? yes I think those who go into it should be prepared to lose if they are careless about wallet keys.

it keeps increasing of course.. Indeed i have lost wallet as well and it actually makes me feel sick when i always trying check it using explorer in the internet.. The amount is ridiculous that's why it hurt me so bad and now it increase more because of the uptrend in the market.. how sad. Lol

but despite i realise that probably its not fot me that's why i lost it.. Wherein maybe there's a big opportunity to come in the future where i can regain it or much more than that..

You understand the reason they are considered lost is because the owners could have misplaced their login details or dead, so, If this could be done by any body be it the team or whoever that also means any other Bitcoin wallet could also be logged into and assets reallocated to other wallets  ;D which shouldn't be the case unless you have the login details. 

Bitcoin is stored in wallets and it is always in wallets. If you forget your password or recovery phrase, they'll still be there. No one can take the Bitcoins from the old wallets so the forgotten Bitcoin just doesn't circulate. In the past there were hundreds of Bitcoin wallets that were inactive. No one can touch these wallets.

AFAIK lost bitcoin actually contribute to bitcoins value addition as they are pulled out of circulation to avoid say inflation, and what remains people have to compete for and its price goes up.

If I can make reference to how the fiat system works, if a central bank is in a habit of printing money, what happens next is inflation and loss of buying power which is a similar thing that happens with btc except you can't print /create new coins as the total supply is capped.

Bitcoin deals with lost tokens by making the price of itself go up and never go any lower than that because there is no way to recover them with our current keycracking technology, lost coins will forever be lost, frozen in these inaccessible addresses. To everyone, if you don't want to contribute to lost tokens then you should take care of your important information to access your wallets, never lose them.

If you were able to recover lost coins because a private key is lost, it would be the end of Bitcoin because that means you could solve the one way encryption technology for a two way one. That'd be bad as you can imagine because that means someone could derive the private key from your public key.

These will just be lost coins. They'd still account for the circulating BTC coins but they won't be actively circulating.

This is why its so important to keep your private key safe and secure, because once it's gone it is gone forever.

Well they are gone forever and there is no way to recover them. Most of coins were abandon by their owners in early days of bitcoin when price was almost zero. Also if you lose key of your coin they are gone forever. Thats what decentralization is about, there is no central authority.

What would happen? That would be considered lost forever and there's nothing we can do about it because it isnt possible to access those coins back and would be redistributed because that will totally break the true essence of decentralisation of bitcoin and for sure lots eill really not be happy with that in case. Just let it be and that means total coins overall would be less in circulation which means the higher value it could possibly reached. Yes its just wasteful to think off but lets move on and forget those lost coin issues.

Satoshi nakamoto already answered this question more than 10 years ago...


And you can find that quote in a lot of sites right now... is one of the most famous quotes.

The only ones who will be sad about the lost coins would be the guys who lost them. But for the market is something good.

It won't be that long before we can see a technology that will be able to do that but I am pretty sure that it will be for a long time and by that time it arrives, I am sure that bitcoin security is going to improve too since there is a lot of threats that bitcoin faces.

which is good because the circulation of coins is decreasing and it will make the coins rarer and the price will increase. We also know that the supply of bitcoin is only 21 million and if there are some people who lose the keys to their wallets with a large amount of BTC, it will certainly reduce the supply in circulation. The wallet cannot be opened by anyone and becomes the grave of the coin.

There are also a lot of crazy stories about lost coins already. Just google it. There is a guy from New York who lost a password for a wallet with BTC that holds close to $100 million. He had 10 tries to type it in and now has only two tries left. That gives you the real sweat.  8)

That should be negligence for losing BTC, you need to keep a private key safely and that is only way to gain access to BTC. Nobody will joke with this anymore when the price is skyrocketing and getting massive adoption.

If there was a technology that is able to recover lost coins then that technology can also "recover" coins that are in reality not lost, aka theft!
If ever there is a technology that can recover private keys for BTC, it is game over for all of us. Let's pray that lost coins will be lost forever!

Those coins remain usable to anyone who is able to obtain the private keys to that wallet. If they are not found ever, then the coins are considered as good as lost and nothing happens to them.

Yes. This in turn makes every bitcoin owner more and more cautious about the number of coins that they own and secure their own assets. Lost coins end up raising the value of the coins that other people own and that is why one must guard their coins with proper measures or end up like the people who talk in chatboxes about their old hard disks with password of lost wallets.

No matter how much you wish it, there will be someone that is going to create that technology and the only way to combat is to innovate the security, why are you scared of breaching when I have said that when that happens, there is going to be an improvement in security.

It will lost forever. But I think the value wil not lost. The value or price of bitcoin is depend on supply and demand so when there is less supply then the valueor price will be increase. It's very different with fiat, although you still hold the money you will still lost a percentage of the value because of inflation.

Let me tell what happens. They are all gone forever.  ;D  Because there is no way to recover the necessary information to get access if one forgets where he/she keeps it. However, they will still maintain their existence as they won't be destroyed automatically. Because they aren't burned or so in the end.

Sometimes I have thought of this and what can be a possible solution to it, but I can’t imagine any means that this can be solved. Except that we are just going to continue with what we have and not bother about whether there are coins getting missed. I think the only thing that’s going to do is that it is going to reduce the rate of supply, and by reducing the rate of supply available, we are going to see the price of bitcoin go higher since there wouldn’t be enough to fit the level of demand.

But in the past, we have seen issues where there are kind of errors (or maybe hacks) that caused the number of Bitcoins available to increase more than the twenty one million there is. So that shows that there is the possibility of increasing it in future if the developers wants to, but I am not certain that they will do that kind of thing.

You can't know whether there is an improvement in security. Do you know what the most problematic issue in security information and technology is? That in almost any case you find out about fatal weaknesses when that fatal weakness has been or is being exploited. How do you know how much your supervision camera on your front door is worth? How do you know that? Is it worth $100? Or the $500 you paid? Nobody ever breaks in because you have that camera, or someone easily shuts it down and still breaks in. Security is difficult because the attacker has the advantage of 360 attack angles. The defender doesn't know where the attack will come from and what it will be like.

Think about the following scenario: Satoshis wallet possesses a million Bitcoins, roughly, we agree on that. Satoshi is dead, we assume that. An attacker develops a technology to reverse engineer the private key. What would the attacker do? He would pretend to be Satoshi. Maybe he would move small amounts from those wallets. We all would get excited, oh my god Satoshi moves his coins! But it's an attacker who succeeded. We wouldn't even realize what's going on.

They are lost forever in thin air. I think there happened a time where a lot of people lost their coins and wallets? I don't know, maybe bad luck just turned on others and have them unlucky to lose their currencies.

That's what's going to make bitcoin prices go up much higher and never go low at a certain point because the limited supply is reduced because of lost coins. I don't think that there's no way to recover those coins but it's not a thing to worry because it will make you coins much more valuable.