Bitcoin Forum

Say someone lost their private key containing 10000+ BTC... How long would it take for that to affect the market price of bitcoins since there will be less of a supply of bitcoin and more demand?

Because such a small amount of the bitcoin supply is on all the exchanges combined there would be no effect on the market.

I think less than 1% of the supply of Bitcoin is on every exchange in the world.

You could loss 100,000 and it wouldn't even get priced in.

The total combined trading volume for the three biggest BTC exchanges amount to almost BTC60,000 per day. Add in the smaller exchanges (+ localbitcoins) and the daily trade volume crosses BTC200,000. 10K BTC will be something like a needle in the haystack.  ;D

This does not help my mourning of the 6 bitcoins I threw away several years ago because they weren't worth my time to back-up when I reformatted my hard drive.  ;D

Wow, there have to be a way to recover them.

In the short term, there is no difference between bitcoins sitting dormant at an address and bitcoins that are lost.

Over the long term, the value of the remaining bitcoins will tend to rise according to the number of bitcoins lost. 10,000 BTC is about 0.5% of the total supply, so the price would go up by that amount.

If the person that lost the 40k BTC will buy 40k new ones to replenish, the price will go up instead of staying stable.
If the person that lost the 40k BTC would have sold them, but now can't, the price will stay stable instead of going down.

If the person doesn't do anything, whether they have 40k BTC or not, the loss of the coins will not affect the price.

People have already lost their private keys containing thousands of BTC, but it wont effect the market in any ways, 10000 is just too small.

I wish there were, but successive installs of Ubuntu on this hard drive have destroyed any remnant of them.

I know I burned them to CD one time.  I keep hoping I find that CD in a dusty box of junk somewhere, but I never do.  I suspect I threw the CD away during a bout of spring cleaning years ago.

I will whine and cry about this even more in the coming years when 1 BTC = $1,000,000 USD. :)

When bitcoin was worth $0.02 some people already mined It and mined thousands of It but they probably did It for curiosity only and had no idea that It will go so big, so It's just a gamble, someone lost private keys or dropped their hard drives into bin having no idea that It will be worth so much and other lucky people saved It till now. This Is past and I doubt anyone would make mistakes Like that now days.  So there are lucky and unlucky people  :)

think it won't, because if he has private keys it is not on exchanges, so the influence in price has already priced(pun intended)

I don't think it would even affect the market at all. Over here, https://blockchain.info/address/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr

2k bitcoin destroyied for counterparty's IPO. Did it make the market's movement to go up? I don't think so.

It would only mean that the effect of that Bitcoin being sold at some point in the future would not occur, but the market at this time would not be affected.

Or tossing a hard drive with 7500 BTC into the dumpster:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site

(still my fav. story)

It could cause the owner of those BTC to become a buyer.

That's very true, or it could cause them to stop buying more Bitcoins out of frustration, but there wouldn't be any direct effect.

The direct effect is the change of his marginal utility of bitcoin. If you have less of an asset then your marginal utility of that asset increases. Someone with 1 BTC is more likely to buy more BTC than someone with 10.000 BTC, all else equal.

It is rational to want bitcoin more when you have less. This effect is different from random emotional reactions towards the loss.

I see your point. I would still consider that an indirect effect, however, since he may or may not choose to change his purchasing behavior, and he could do so at any point (now, 5 years from now, etc). There is no effect that can be directly attributed to those Bitcoins no longer existing.

It wouldn't affect it at all right now unless they were actively selling their coins. It's supply and demand; if they weren't supplying, the loss doesn't affect supply.

There is 5000 btc sitting on some junked laptop in a landfill somewhere that I threw out. I dont even give it a second thought.

One day people will mine old landfills for hard drives like they mine gold   (just kidding :D)


This could relate to the float of a stock.   They only count the shares often traded, the fact that bill gates has 10% held of microsoft for years is not counted in the worth of the share so far as I know.   If he sold them then its included in the market capitalisation

I think the marketcap site started doing this partly, excluding premine and other coins that have not yet released the coins properly

Market prices mainly manipulated by few big capital. 10k btc is not enough to make a big impact.

There is no sure way of confirming the Bitcoin are really lost forever. Coins which are sitting in an address for a long period, could be a cold wallet, not lost. Besides, the amount is so low, it will not affect the market at all.

Don't laugh.  I can envision people in the future actually forming ventures to do exactly what you describe.

The team would go into old landfills and look for hard drives from the period 2005 - 2012 and scan them for Bitcoins.

People form ventures today to find old pirate gold hoards in the Caribbean and around the Gulf of Mexico.

It would not have any effect.

The only way this would change the price of BTC is if this person were to buy more BTC to replace his/her holdings.

That said if it was on an exchange like Mtgox again and the private key and Bitcoin supply were claimed loss it would have an immediate chilling effect on the marketplace.

However to my knowledge there are no Bitcoin exchanges that have that much volume left and only Dooglus has a significant stash of reserves.

I do feel for people who lose this much.

It would not affect the market price. It would be impossible for anyone to know for sure that you had truly lost your private keys as it is impossible to prove a negative like that. It would also be very difficult to prove that you even ever held the private keys to that BTC address. Although someone considered trustworthy could potentially sign a message saying that the address does in fact belong to you.

I might start scouring ebay and craigslist for old hard drives.  ;D

I wonder if any companies who recycle computer parts check the hard drives for old BTC wallets? (especially the ones from ~2010)
The odds of finding a good one would be low, but the "hidden treasure" could be worth millions.

Probably more coins were destroyed during reformats, reinstalls, and wallet corruptions than HDs tossed into landfills.  How many of us nerds actually toss HDs.  I end up pulling them apart and my job has nothing to do with PCs :P

Well since that 10,000 btc wasn't on the market anyway and was stored away "safely" in your wallet no one would be the wiser except yourself.

Long-term there will be a severe shortage of BTC*
*Bitcoin will be able to function as a currency (i.e. "Here is your payment for 0.0000123 BTC"), but people who want to own at least 1 whole Bitcoin will find there are not many for sale.  :)

Since the 10,000 BTC would eventually have been spent, it's loss will have an effect.

That is something that will have to be addressed at some point. The fact that it is divisible helps, but maybe a POS system in the future can help keep us around 21 million coins in existence.

Is there a list anywhere of Bitcoins that are known to be "lost"?

There is a thread somewhere on this site about the biggest bit coin losses. It includes fraud losses as well. It is an interesting read if you have the time to search for it.

Not if you are speaking to as being "lost" as in someone lost the private keys.

Most of the time "lost" private keys are not publicly reported and is often not discovered for a significant time after they are "lost"

It depends on if it is made public or not, take Mtgox those bitcoins were lost and then refound and the price reacted with downward pressure since it was the largest exchange.
Then there are Satoshi's coins which are not used but do exist and the market accepts those ones are around as well but it doesn't affect the price
So it depends

Did you ever recover your bitcoin private key (http://www.bitcoinvalues.net/bitcoin-private-key-safe-how-use.html)? If so, how did you do it?

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Well in the case of losing 5000 bitcoins (current worth of 3.3Million) when bitcoin price rises enough....people may very well go digging for old hard drives in landfields....

I don't think it would have the greatest effect due to the fact that the market is big.

I would if I had a reasonable idea of where it might be.

Say someone lost their private key containing 10000+ BTC... How long would it take for that to affect the market price of bitcoins since there will be less of a supply of bitcoin and more demand?

A friend of a friend of mine has lost more then 10000 in his old computer. He forgot about those coins and now he dont have his PC anymore ( He was mining on it back in 2009) so now he does not have 6 milions in his pocket, but not sure how this is going to affect the network and also are these BTC lost forever? Is there a way to resurect them?
BR

Well , if someone realy looses 10 000 btc, that would make some change to price, but not as much as one would think.
On the other hand , if someone would have their key/wallet leaked, and attacker liquidated that btc, impact would be much bigger

Is that your laptop you are talking about?

It would not affect the price of BTC unless that person decides to use fiat to purchase other BTC to replace his "lost" coins.

They always say there is 21m btc  well not really and this is why.   Maybe there is only 20m because so many got lost like this.   Same thing happens with copper coins except decades later you can still find those.
No is the answer to your question, Ive never heard anyone reverse engineering the bitcoin out of a lost address.  If that were possible it would make reverse charges and all sorts of things possible so I think its fairly simple to say once its gone then you would literally have to physically dig up the old hard disk.

   Only other thing is if Jonny mnemonic had memorised the exact unique code for that btc address in his head, how long is that someone want to say?  Then you can reconstruct.

I guess the other idea might be what if they forked and changed the rules somehow so coins can be recovered


The effect on the network is natural deflation.  There is a tale of a popstar burning 2 million cash, same thing.  The value isnt lost really, it was just paper.  In effect value of these lost coins is now placed with those in distribution.   Obviously hash codes by themselves might be unique but they are not of inate use so the value is transient.  If your friend lost 1000 coins, he made a donation to every other btc holder.
 The creator of btc was a smart guy and allegedly he has alot in a wallet? my guess is they'll never be used for this reason, maybe he removed all temptation or  not; there was the case of an ancient Indian temple where they discovered hundreds of gold bars kept over centuries and amazingly never used by the temple priests

The majority of coins from 2009 are probably already gone or inaccessible.

10k coins from a wallet that was just sitting there anyway isn't going to have any effect on the market in the short term because the coins were not in circulation anyway.

In the long term all these losses add up to reduced supply of bitcoins.