Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin is a decentralized network and also a digital currency that uses a peer-to-peer system to process and verify transactions. These transactions are recorded on a public ledger, also called the Blockchain.

The standard for owning Bitcoin is by having a wallet (ideally a non-custodial wallet), which contains: a private key that gives full control of the coins, and also a public address (wallet address) that allows individuals to receive and verify transactions on the Blockchain.

As designed in the Bitcoin protocol, there can be only 21 million BTC in circulation, even though other enthusiasts might think otherwise due to proven calculations and reasons not to estimate.

The concept of Bitcoin scarcity is strongly tied to halving events where rewards of miners are reduced, thereby decreasing the amount of Bitcoin entering circulation. In more detail, the total supply (21 million) remains constant, while circulating supply keeps increasing as long as mining continues, but the amount entering circulation is reduced by halving, thereby leading to more demand.

In addition to scarcity, Lost Bitcoins happens to be a significant contributor. Dormant wallets, also known as hibernated wallets, are considered to house lost Bitcoins. Identifying the total number of lost bitcoins can be very challenging or even impossible due to the fact that there are several inactive wallets connected to the Blockchain, making it impossible to tell who is holding and who has lost.

For example, Satoshi Nakamoto happens to mine the first block. The Genesis address created holds about 99.85 BTC and is currently a dormant wallet. There are also speculations that Satoshi might have thousands of dormant wallets as they were used to receive block rewards. By subtracting the amount of Lost Bitcoin from 21 million, it is likely that we are left with an amount lesser than the total supply when unlocked.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of dormant wallets that house Bitcoin of different amounts. When we calculate all together, we realize that we are short of the total supply, which I think would trigger scarcity as more people would want to hold the ones available.

Discussion Questions

• Do you think all dormant wallet (long inactive wallets) are gone forever?
• As we are not certain of Satoshi's return, should we be bothered about his dormant wallets?
• do you think lost Bitcoin can cause Bitcoin scarcity in the future?
• From a total of 21million total supply, can you attempt a prediction guess of the total number of Bitcoin that would be in active wallets after all Bitcoin has been mined?

In addition, here are ...
Possible Causes of Lost Bitcoin

• Death of the holder
• Transferring to the wrong network or address (though some wallet software can detect this and notify the sender before the button is hit)
• Inability to remember memorized or find written seed phrases
• Wallet compromise such as phishing hacks, etc.

Preventive Measures

• The use of private hardware wallets (cold wallets) is strongly encouraged.
• Seed phrases should never be memorized, nor written on a mobile device or computer. They can be written on paper or in a book that shouldn't be visible to external members and should be strongly protected.
• Having a backup of your documented seed phrase is crucial in case of unplanned circumstances like a fire outbreak.

Genesis block - https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa

Yup, that's the whole idea and the appeal of Bitcoin, lost coins are lost, we don't print more to have a constant supply, and nobody but the free market cares if some coins are truly lost or are just asleep in someone's wallet.


Apart from number 3 which is clearly a yes since, well, that's how things work, for all the rest nobody would know the answer, maybe Satoshi himself on the second but for anyone else is just crystal globe territory.
But most important, lost coins don't pose a problem, will not pose a problem in the future and if someone thinks oh no we will only have 1 million Bitcoins in 2100, it's not like,  that we will still have 100 trillion satoshis. ;)

The genesis address holds 50 bitcoins less than that, because the genesis block reward is unspendable. 


Satoshi definitely mined lots of the first blocks, and since these coins remain untouched, if he is alive and possesses the keys, it's plausible that he could own thousands, or even millions, of coins. 


There are a few thousand provably lost coins, but beyond that, our knowledge is limited.  Speculating about lost coins doesn't seem valuable given the high level of uncertainty surrounding our conclusions.  I hope this addresses all of your concerns.  There isn't anything more to say. 

Answers to discussion questions.

• I do not really know whether it is lost forever because it is still possible that the owner of the wallet who is inactive due to the death of the owner has submitted or inherited a private key or seed phrase to other parties who are trusted.
• I don't feel disturbed.
• Can be a cause of scarcity based on the amount of Bitcoin 21 million BTC.
• No.

In the precautionary measures of the loss of Bitcoin, all of these points I agree and I think whoever the owner of Bitcoin is currently stored in a special wallet, it is necessary to pass on people who can believe like wives/husbands to be used properly as assets. The act of passing down needs to be done on an ongoing basis until the child for his future.

I never knew how other people did it, but in my opinion bequeathed Bitcoin the actions that I would take if I had large amounts of bitcoin.

Since these questions were already asked before, I'll just say most of the common answers other members have given over time.

The number of bitcoins in dormant addresses are considered as dormant because we don't have a way to know for certain if the keys are lost or not. Even today, most of the figures you might read on the internet regarding these 'lost coins' are guesstimates wherein they get the number of bitcoins sitting on wallets for a certain period of time.

Even if you come up with a sensible equation or analysis to get an exact number of coins that would no longer be in circulation ever, it will never be correct as there had been some cases wherein dormant coins were transferred to another wallet after 10 years or more.

Of course not. There have been wallets that's been around for a decade then suddenly became active.

No. Because it's his money. He should do whatever he wants with it.

Even dormant wallets already sort of provide some 'scarcity' due to the fact that they're off the markets.

Around 500k lost probably. Just a random guess.

A Bitcoin wallet usually contains a lot of private keys, from which associated public keys and public addresses are derived by known cryptographic recipies. But yes, normally you need to have the private key to move coins in the blockchain. The blockchain itself doesn't know or use public addresses, those are only recipies for how to construct so-called unlock scripts for coins.



By design there can be only 20,999,999.9769BTC, of which some are provably lost or unspendable (as already said e.g. the Genesis block coinbase subsidy of 50BTC is unspendable, even if you had the private key; there are few examples of miners who didn't claim the total allowed block subsidy and transaction fees, those unclaimed coins are forever lost, too; any coins sent to OP_RETURN outputs are burned and lost; ...).



Why those should be considered lost coins? Elaborate, please!

There might be a likelyhood that early coins are lost coins because wallets were deleted when Bitcoin didn't yet had a accepted value. But we can't know if those are really lost.



With 100% certainty blocks 0 (Genesis) and block 9 can be attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto (Satoshi sent some coins from coinbase of block 9 to Hal Finney and this is well documented).

See http://satoshiblocks.info/ (http://satoshiblocks.info/), there's some scientific evidence that Satoshi mined around 21954ish blocks (this yields ~1.1million BTC). Every of those coinbase outputs were mined to a public key, never to a public address!

This bitcoinexplorer.org (https://bitcoinexplorer.org/blocks?limit=25&offset=0&sort=asc) lists blocks with a miner attribution.



Why are you so concerned about dormant wallets exactly? We can't really calculate them all together, except maybe that you could put them into buckets of unspent age. But that doesn't give you any certainty if those are only dormant or provably lost. What's the fuss about them anyway?


I added my answers in color.

According to speculation, we are made to believe that Satoshi owns over 1 million Bitcoin, whereas according to the real time value of the total circulating supply of BTC at the time of writing this post is said to be 19,696,950 BTC,  which means if we are to subtract Satoshi's acclaimed 1 million BTC, what will be left for both lost+unlost BTC currently in circulation will be 18,696,950 BTC.

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/05/11/1AN0z.jpeg  https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/05/11/1AR9g.jpeg
Credit:www.visualcapitalist.com

However, according to data about the top holders of Bitcoin, I'm made to understand that;
1. Microstrategy  174,530 Btc
2. Galaxy                17,518  Btc
3. Marathon            13,716 Btc
4. Tesla                    10,500 Btc
5. HUT8                     9,366 Btc
6. Coinbase               9,181 Btc
7. BLOCK                   8,027 Btc
8. RIOT                       7,327 Btc
9. HIVE                       2,596 Btc
10. Clean Spark        2,575 Btc
11. NEXON                1,717 Btc
12. EXODUS              1,651 Btc

Of which if you are to sum up all the Bitcoins been held by worlds top corporate holders, it gives us only 258,704 BTC. Whereas, If you are to subtract both Satoshi's acclaimed amount of 1million and the one been held by these top corporate holders, you will be left with  18,438,246 BTC (i.e both lost and unlost).

The question or challenges here is on how to identify the difference between a lost wallet and the one which is inactive, the issue is on how to know or differentiate between the two of them, how can we know if someone holding for a long time is still in charge of his wallet or not.


How does the two correlate, we don't care about Satoshi nor his wallet, if at all he has been dead, then he's very smart enough to leave the access to those coins with his family or children, but we are not having a clear evidence on his whereabouts.[/list]

It is likely that if upon the death of the owner, there was no hand over of seed phrase, then it is lost forever. I remember the guy who lost his drive where he had his bitcoin wallet in a dump. He's been looking for it for years and cannot find it. It could also be considered lost forever.

We shouldn't major in minor things so it is said. I know Satoshi's dormant wallet entering into the market will be a major thing but for now I cannot be bothered about his dormant account.[/list]

Of course not. It would be foolish to think that way.


I see no reason why.


Thats kind of obvious.  If there is less of something, of course that means it is scarcer.


You mean in 100 or so years? Well, thats a long way off.  Human civilization itself might be a whole different story by then.  Predicting something so specific is impossible.

People die and bitcoin gets scarcer.

There is an influence but not a cause that makes us afraid of the development of bitcoin, because in the journey of bitcoin's development to the present, there are sometimes stories of early wallets going back to the past- there are many reasons for that.

And we should also consider the fact that the number of active bitcoins accounts for the majority, so there is no need to panic/panic is what people choose. I also find this as humorous as the way we talk about the tragedy of WW3+, solar storms, quantum computers,... and there are tons of reasons why others question it, but back to the reality is that we need to own bitcoin before a bad situation arises to feel how it affects us.

I wanted to answer some of your questions briefly - but I'm sure you probably already know what the answers to your questions are.

• As long as you still hold the key, seed or whatever allows you to access your wallet at any time - then your bitcoin will not be lost.
• It's normal to fear a big drop due to a massive sale of from address containing thousands of bitcoins - but you should already have a plan for when to cash out your investment in bitcoin.
• Yes - that's clear.
• I don't know - if you have a crystal ball, try to predict it yourself.  :P

No, there are instances that wallets that were inactive for more than 10 years suddenly become active just like what is written on this link: https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/7744610888034.

Another thing, just like earlier stated, we have no way of determining whether an idle wallet is just dormant or it was already a lost wallet


I don't since I respect the right of a person over his property, I do not know about you though...


Obviously, simply by knowing the law of supply and demand, once the supply is cut there is always a scarcity in the market especially when the demand keeps on pouring in.



It is easy to predict, let alone attempt since we can just utter some random numbers and the prediction is done.  Take note, predictions do not need to be precise and correct so anyone can predict any numbers and not have to worry if they will realize or not.  But if you are talking about precisely predict or estimate the number then by all means it is a no.

No I don't think that all inactive coins are lost, from time to time an address that wasn't used 10+ years suddenl activates. This doesn't even mean that someone is not selling coins for 10+ years - a user can have many addresses and they might have done a lot of sales in the past too.

If by scarcity you mean shortage then no, it won't cause such problems because there's enough units of account on the network.

What do you mean by "active wallets"? Coins that are moved frequently? Or coins that the owner has access too?

The halving and loss of bitcoins are almost similar.

Just the halving tends to increase the value of bitcoins by reducing the number, scarcity due to loss of bitcoins also reduces  the number of bitcoins available too, and as usual, a reduction in the available bitcoins will greatly affect positively the value of bitcoins available

It depends let me use volcanoes as an analogy. Some volcanoes can be inactive for a while but then show signs of acitivity later on. With wallets, we do not know what the owner is doing or whether they are even alive so it’s difficult to say
Why? I don’t think it’ll be a problem.
Yes and that will drive up the price even more.
No as a lot of factors would play in the adoption of bitcoin. Many will hold many will forget their wallets and so on and so forth.
[/quote]

There's no certain way to determine if those lost bitcoins are lost or not because the logical way to look at things with this one is that we should know that or that there's a confirmation that it's really lost, the only certain amount of bitcoin that we've lost right now are those bitcoins that went to the burn addresses, those are for sure not going to be back in the circulation anytime soon. In regards to scarcity, probably the only thing that we can do about it is if we just don't think about it and just accumulate and hodl as much bitcoin as we can afford to do, we would eventually not worry about scarcity because when that happens and the prices goes up in an exponential amount, you would get the most benefit out of it. And if you did bought a huge amount of bitcoin through the consistent DCA through the years, you would be fine that you don't mind not getting back into bitcoin because of the profit.

How many bitcoins are lost? (https://bitbo.io/how-many-bitcoin/)
Lost Bitcoin: 3.7 million Bitcoin are probably gone forever (https://decrypt.co/37171/lost-bitcoin-3-7-million-bitcoin-are-probably-gone-forever)
What happens to lost bitcoins? (https://cointelegraph.com/explained/what-happens-to-lost-bitcoin)

People have estimations on lost bitcoins that is about 3 - 4 million bitcoins but let's see
Old Bitcoin wallets keep waking up: How many of the 1.8 million ‘lost’ coins are really gone? (https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/04/24/bitcoin-wallets-waking-up-lost-coins-satoshi/)

I don't mind how many bitcoins lost in accurate number because I know we never knows that number, but I know I received donation from people lost their bitcoins.

Halving is not primarily done to increase the price of bitcoin but it is only a consequence of such. Halving is done to counterattack inflation and in the process of it the bitcoin price hiked up.

This is due to the common and very well-known economic concept that less suppy = more demand. The rarer it is, the more expensive it is. On the other hand some bitcoin who are lost well they were just lost unless some people actually burn some coins to hike the price up.

Halving does not make Bitcoin deflationary in its circulation curve that is still inflationary.

How is the 21 Million Bitcoin Cap Defined and Enforced? (https://blog.lopp.net/how-is-the-21-million-bitcoin-cap-defined-and-enforced/)


Halvings are like events to shock Bitcoin miners, weak hands will be shaken out; and to advertise Bitcoin on media with noise from halvings. It helps to bring Bitcoin to more people and convert some of them to Bitcoin investors. With more new investors, new capital, higher demand, price will increase.

The math is demand usually increases more than x2 and this helps price to rise more than x2 with each bull run after one halving.

You can't send Bitcoin to invalid address because Bitcoin address has a checksum. (https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/keys/checksum/) By the architecture, Bitcoin already help the users to not send to wrong address since you can only send your coins to valid address (although it could be an address that you can't access.

In addition to your list, I will add "centralized exchange" as one of the reason why people lost their coins, when CEX bankrupt, people can't access their coins anymore.

Remember, ink can fade over time https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/which-inks-fade-fastest/96814

Op is correct that it's hard to evaluate the number of lost coins, since we don't know why some wallets are inactive. I think of them as just inactive, and I don't view them as lost forever.
As for Satoshi's coins, we shouldn't focus on someone else's money.
Bitcoin is scarce by design, which will drive its price up if more and more people want to get some of it. But, thankfully, each Bitcoin is divisible into 100 million satoshis, so we can actually just refer to satoshis rather than bitcoins in the future if the price becomes that high and satoshis become a more relevant indicator of prices. So the issue is not as serious as it might seem at first glance, even if a significant part of coins is lost.

1. Not all but majority of those long inactive wallets are gone forever for some reason.
2. Nah, if ever those dormant wallets will remain untouched or even moved then it is considered as burned Bitcoins that might help the scarcity of it.
3. Yes of course no doubt about that.
4. I personally have no idea on this but maybe it's more or less 15M Bitcoins.

I actually came across this speculation and wanted to use it in the post, but I thought it would be too contradicting as I don't have enough evidence to back it up. It's really good that you pointed this out.

You are totally right from your calculations. Assuming we are to subtract the speculated 1 million Bitcoin owned by Satoshi, then that's literally a significant amount of subtraction.


I agree with the 15M value as I perceive that Bitcoin loss would keep happening even after halving. But that would be a reckless action from anyone who does that in the future when Bitcoin price is already above $200K.


Very correct. Evaluating the number of lost coins can be very difficult, and it would be also wrong to think that all inactive wallets that holds Bitcoin are long lost. Recently, a long inactive wallet just made a transaction, which means it is certain that others might still safe.


The two of them just finds a way to trigger scarcity

And this is why you make multiple copies and store them somewhere safe, create new ones after a certain amount of time and repeat the process until you die or probably be unable to do it. It's a pretty straightforward approach to keep your funds safe, and even if inks fade, it will take a long ass time for it to do so, and you will always have time to replace those writings and create new copies of your seed/passphrase.

No, there are two possibilities. It might be that the owner has lost the private keys to the wallet or he's not yet ready to sell the Bitcoin.

Satoshi is not coming back to take ownership of Bitcoin, and I don't know why he hasn't move his Bitcoin all this years but I'm not really bothered about it. I believe there's a reason he left it there, he could have just use a mixer and send it to a new address.

Yes, lost Bitcoins are lost forever and will help to increase scarcity just the same way altcoins are burnt to reduce supply and increase scarcity of the token.

What do you mean by "even after halving"?  You know that this is neither the first nor the last halving?


Wait, a minute ago you were cool with a value of a 15 million Bitcoins? Whats that based on? You literally just admitted it is hard to estimate this thing!

That is true, you can always find a way how to create copies of your seed phrases and secure it. In this forum, there are even threads how to safely and securely store your keys, your options on how to implement it. Below are just few of the threads that you can read related to this topic. But for sure, it is hard to memorize your keys and expect that you won't forget those keys.

How best to secure your Private Keys and/or Seed phrase (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5211880.0)
HOW DO I SECURELY STORE MY BITCOIN AS A BEGINNER? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5452750.0)
Crypto Security - Additional Protection For Your Seed/Private Keys. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5230920.0)
 How do i make sure my Bitcoin Private Key is Random and secure? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5421415.0)

If the owner does not have time to submit or leave it to the person he trusts, then it can be justified disappearing forever. If the owner before dying could store well the private key or seed phrase in a special storage, it is likely that one day someone will meet him.

To avoid losing access forever, I chose to save it somewhere if I did not have time to pass down to the parties that I believe.
Bitcoin is a very important inheritance to be inherited.


The story of a person who lost Bitcoin due to being thrown into trash and a search for years after I read.