Bitcoin Forum

The reason for this post is to know all the were about of the bitcoin in circulation. I read a story of a man threw away is hard drive with almost 7,500 bitcoin on it, then later realised that it worth huge amount of money which he is trying to get back the drive which he found difficult. Now my question is that does it mean all this 7,500 bitcoin are gone completely?

Can it be possible to know the people the are in position of all the bitcoin in circulation or know the number of units in total circulation?

Yes it has gone completely forever if no one can access the private key, but its value would be distributed to those that are having bitcoin.

You can not know the people that are responsible for the whole bitcoin in total circulation.

Bitcoin circulating supply and other information: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin

You can not identify what Bitcoin addresses belong to a person and one person can store bitcoins in different wallets and different addresses.

https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html

Above link is helpful if you want to see bitcoin distribution in addresses but it can not and no tool can help you to count number of people who own bitcoins.

None say how many people have bitcoin, and none say how much bitcoin was lost. (Lost in the sense that the owners lost the access key to them.)

What we can know is that more than 19,348,612 bitcoins have already been issued. And what we also know is that a percentage of that value will most likely never circulate (for the reasons given above).

If the hard drive can't be recovered, yes, the entire Bitcoin is forever lost. Unless the owner finds a way to go get those hard drives back or possibly remembers if there were any means of backups, which I doubt. 


You don't, because there are no name tags on addresses. All you can see if you track down the circulating supply are addresses holding huge and small amounts of bitcoin, which have been moving from one place to another. But to know the people in possession of those assets in circulation, it's not entirely possible. 

Yeah they are gone, even though James Howells hasn't given up and is still trying to search for his lost hard drive, but i don't know how fruitful his search for it is going to be, considering the fact he lost it a long time ago (in 2013). Your questions shows you don't quite understand how Bitcoin works, so mind you that this scenario isn't peculiar to only James Howells, the only way to spend Bitcoins is if you have the key, anybody who loses their key, has lost their Bitcoin.
No you cannot know that, blockchain analysis companies help the government to link addresses to identities, but it is not possible to know who owns all the Bitcoins in circulation, some coins have never moved from the address they are in, some addresses have no connection with centralized exchanges, etc.

Hmmm, you can't actually tell if the key of a wallet has been misplaced or not sometimes we just assume that an account has been abandoned or the owner no longer has access to it anymore based on the inactivity of the wallet but most times it turns out to be false it might just be that the owner is a holder and it's not planning on selling anytime soon so instead he abandoned the wallet and all its holdings.

You can't actually tell the number of people that own/have Bitcoin because it's possible for a single person to have up to 30 wallet addresses so if you're to count based on a wallet with balance you'll only end up with the wrong data. And that the beauty of Bitcoin is to keep the government guessing.

How can the value be distributed? Will this happen when they are high in demand of bitcoin that is the buyer are more than the total supply. Please put me through.

Straight from the horse's mouth:
Lost Bitcoin basically reduces the coins that are and would be in circulation (when all has been mined), and if there are fewer Bitcoins in circulation, it somewhat increases the value of the Bitcoins that are in circulation, it is all basic supply and demand.

Yes, all his bitcoin is gone.

You can go to coinmarketcap and see how many bitcoins are in circulation, in the "Circulating Supply" column.
But if your question is about lost bitcoins, we don't know the exact number. Estimating varying from 3-4 million have said to be lost.

The lost Bitcoin is gone forever and not coming back, but why are you this interested in knowing how many people are holding Bitcoin or how many coins are in circulation? Coinmarketcap says that over 19.3 million Bitcoin are in circulation already, you can find this information here

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/

Still, this shouldn't make you decide whether to buy Bitcoin right now or not, the time is running out and sooner all new investors will have to buy at a higher price, it's better to make a move before it's too late.

Bitcoin are stored in wallets that can only be accessed with private keys, without private keys, wallets can never be opened. meaning that around 7,500 bitcoins on the hard drive will be frozen as long as no private key is found.

Bitcoin circulation will continue to change hands with no one to guess with certainty the total that is still in circulation. Since Bitcoin was created by Satoshi in 2009, Bitcoin is designed to be very limited, there are only 21 million Bitcoins loaded in the blockchain system. This number will continue to decrease if some Bitcoin wallets are no longer accessible.

Bitcoin will not be lost, but the asset will not move before he unlocks his private key, but with that lost, the bitcoin will remain in the wallet that the bitcoin left behind.
But I think that if the private key is lost, of course bitcoin is also considered lost because we cannot exercise any control.

We can see on Coinmarketcap the current total circulation is 19,348,737 BTC but it is not certain with the number of units per wallet as this would be difficult to identify, and we can only see what is shown in the @dzungmobile link and here we can see the wallets that have bitcoin but we can't look more broadly with a wallet that has a tiny bit of bitcoin in it.

The answer to your question is both YES and NO, because  I will say Yes that the bitcoin is gone completely, only if the user never stored the seed phrase of the hardware wallet in which those 7500 Bitcoin was stored in, because as long as the seed phrase is available, all he needs to do is just buy a new hardware wallet and input the seed phrase to recover his funds.

No. Its not possible to know the number of persons who owns the total Bitcoin in circulation, but it's possible to know the total number of Bitcoin in circulation (i.e 19 million), the total market supply (i.e 21 million BTC) and the total number of Bitcoin transactions done per day (i.e 287,921).

It is a famous story, the owner of that disk is James howlls and had a solid disk containing 7500 bitcoin before getting rid of it in the landfill. Story drills are here: https://news.bitcoin.com/man-accidentally-threw-away-7500-bitcoins-hard-drive-new-plan-retrieve-btc/

The search will be expensive and incapable and no one knows what this disk would have been returning, but with the development of ways to restore files, we may be able to do so.






All will be speculation, only bitcoin that is sent to the burning addresses can be considered as safe and irreversible.
There are several Bitcoin that cannot be spent due to the error of early bitcoin blocks.

Burn add: 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr

Your question is a technical one and I can see that the above answers are making confusion already but I will chip in my own answer to the best knowledge of how I understood your question. When you lost access to your seed phrase or private key, consider that you have lost all the bitcoin in that wallet, even if the owner of that hard disk later finds it, it is impossible to access the bitcoin inside it, I'm very sure that if the owner of that hard disk has the back up like the private keys or wallet.dat, there wouldn't be the need to search for the hard disk, so to answer your question, the bitcoin in that wallet is gone for life.


Bitcoin is Pseudonymous, which means that you can access wallets that have bitcoin but the identity of the person behind the wallet will remain hidden except for Bitcoin that is coming from an exchange that has been kyc, you will never know the real owner of bitcoin in a wallet.
You can know the units of bitcoin in circulation from https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin, the total supply, and the maximum supply.

I believe everyone here cane as a reason of search on how to use bitcoin, adopt bitcoin or ask questions about bitcoin in one aspect or the other, you could get nore information if you compare the numbers of already mined block and equate it with the numbers left unmined, know that bitcoin holders in small distributional quantities are larger than the whales, miners exist everywhere and the bitcoin reward only goes to the first miner who solved the complex mathematical equations.

The case of losing 7,500 Bitcoins stored on the hard drive is an important lesson for you and also other users who are still starting their adventures in the crypto world. As long as the private key is not found, the 7,500 Bitcoins will remain safe there without anyone ever touching them.

You cannot count one by one the people who are responsible for their bitcoin assets. You may be on a list of people holding bitcoins, but you can't cover all the other people who are still actively holding Bitcoin.

Of course, it's gone if someone lost the private key. There is no other way of recovering this.


Your question is quite difficult to understand, If you are looking for the total circulating supply of Bitcoin, you can find it easily. So it is 19,348,918 BTC according to coinmarketcap (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/) which is around 92.14% of the total supply.

If you are looking for the count of people holding/using BTC, it's impossible to say the exact amount.

If you are looking for the count of the people who lost BTC or how much BTC is lost is also impossible to say. But we can say those are not moved for a long period to other wallets are lost BTC. I have found an article here  (https://beincrypto.com/10-year-dormant-bitcoins-outpace-btc-crypto-exchanges/#:~:text=Around%202.6%20million%20BTC%20haven,'lost'%20according%20to%20Chainalysis.)about around 2.6 millions bitcoin are not moved in 10 years.
 

You can, look here: https://blockchain.info/q/totalbc

The total supply or maximum supply will remain the same at 21,000,000 btc, but the lost bitcoin will not be come in circulation. There is data showing some wallets not moving for more than 10 years, I think one of them is satoshi wallet.

Bitcoin circulation will continue to change or will not stable for one to know, always guess or unpredictable some person's can abandoned a wallet address, because him don't want to sell it in short-term, he want to hold it for long-term, maybe the owner no longer has access to it anymore based on the inactivity of the wallet but most times it turns out to be false it might just be that the owner is a holder and it's not planning on selling anytime soon so instead he abandoned the wallet and all its holdings. And You cannot count the people who are responsible for their bitcoin assets.

If the Hard drive cannot be recovered, the Bitcoin is lost forever.

But is the man uninformed about Bitcoin? or he is unaware of the Bitcoin on the hard drive?

If he actually buys the Bitcoin, I believe he should be able to tell that it is still there, and he should be checking the Bitcoin Market since he has invested in Bitcoin.

Yes, you can check Coingecko (https://www.coingecko.com/)

Oh, I think I know what the OP is talking about! It's that crazy story about the guy who threw out some old hard drives, and they ended up in a dump. But then he wanted to dig them up again, so he asked the government for permission. Apparently, he was one of the bitcoin miners from the old days, and those hard drives had a whole bunch of them on there.


OP, we can't really tell if some bitcoins are lost forever or not. Even if they don't move from a particular address for ten or more years, that still doesn't mean those bitcoins will never be in circulation again.

Yes, if there's no way for him to retrieve the wallet that contains the Bitcoin private information.

There are some sites that focus on this information but it is impossible to know the actual number of people in possession of all the BTC in circulation because 4 wallets may belong to a single person. However, the information provided by this site (https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoin-users/) says there are 106 million Bitcoin Owners while there are 200 million Bitcoin wallets.

I don't think you're familiar with the story of James Howells, well it isn't a recent story, it dates back to 2013, and Howells prolly mined those coins and it wasn't worth too much in 2013, maybe that's why he was careless with it and mistakenly put the hard drive containing his keys to 7,500 Bitcoin's in the garbage, which eventually was disposed in a landfill. James Howells hasn't given up hope on finding his lost hard drive and by extension his lost Bitcoin (if the hard drive is still in good working condition), but his local authorities have refused him digging up the landfill for various reasons. You can surf the internet for this story, it's an interesting one.