Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys,

As you may already be aware that there are people who simply lose bitcoins, and there is quite a lof of them!

For example: This guy lost his hard drive with 100k btc on it, another guy lost paper wallet with 30k btc on it and so on...

Now the question that i'm asking myself? Do they stay stuck in blockchain? Because if yes, than i see only about 8million bitcoins in circulation by the time they are mined..

So what ?

Yes they are in "limbo". Unable to be spent because the private keys have been lost.
Of course, this does not change the bitcoin protocol. It would work the same even if there were only one bitcoin.

And makes the remaining coins worth that much more, as there are fewer to vie for.

-B-

I think the total Bitcoins that never going to be used due to lost wallet files, lost passwords, etc will be around 1,000,000BTC MAX

How many Bitcoins exist that have been involved in a transaction in the last two or three years?

How much they pay for 100k and 30k? You know that? It's very intresting.

wtf r ya on bout dawg

The supply of BTC decreases due to BTC loss but at present it is an unknown value of BTC lost. Only when adoption and supply management for BTC happens we will understand how much is lost and not in circulation.

 I think some mechanism should be created to counter this losing bitcoin problem. In my mind, the stuck bitcoins in specific block take a specific period of time to release that coins to miners. Or binding your email address with private key, after specific period, the owner can validate your bitcoin in the blockchain using email.

This same idea.  Again and again and again and again and again and again.

The answer is no, you cannot tell the difference between coins that are not moving due to a lost private key and coins that are not moving simply because someone is saving them for a rainy day.

The ideas you suggest will never happen because they go against everything Bitcoin is.

There is no real way to know for sure if the bitcon are truly "lost" or if the owner is simply choosing to not spend certain inputs for an extended period of time. This would make it so bitcoin is not fungible which is not something we need to do. Also this is not how addresses are generated. The "network" has no way of knowing if a private key has ever been generated for a corresponding public key when bitcoin is sent to a public address

those proposing to redistribute coins that are not spent, are the same people that probably dont have $100 spare and are looking for ways to get free coins..

they have no understanding of economics and would prefer ruining the security of bitcoin for a one time money grab of $100 if any coin was evenly distributed to all bitcoin active users.

i truly hate the greedy people that care more about free hand outs rather than security for the long term.. i truly hope they go back to their fiat lives and steal their grandma's pensions as they should atleast learn the lessons of life ripping off people they do know and care about.. maybe then they will learn to not rip off others, once seeing the pain of wanting free handouts by taking from other people.

Yes,they are stuck on the blockachain but you can't know if they are lost or just cold wallets
there will be unrecovered bitcoins but you will never know it

But if time we are talking about would be set to some really big number? I mean if lost bitcoin would 'return' to ecosystem after, say, 100 years? What then?

The loss rate of "early" Bitcoins was probably greater than the current loss rate. 

People are more cautious about their wallet password. That should decrease the rate.

This isn't logical. People may just be keeping it there for a very long period of time and pass it on to their offsprings. The price would drop a lot since a lot of miners forgot about their bitcoins. We could just shift to a smaller denomination if the total bitcoin in circulation is too low.

Oh, im sure a lot of coins are lost forever, especially those that mined at the very beginning and didn't keep track of bitcoin. I would bet that up to 10 percent of all bitcoins are perma lost... Thats actually good for the the rest of us. Sucks for the guys that lost them, but the fewer the coins, the better off we are..

At least a meager 0.01% increments added each year to counter the permanent loss. Come on 0.01% wouldn't dilute bitcoin value so drastically. And this would eventually ensure bitcoin continuity in supply. Plus some incentive to ensure there will always be miners after the 21 mil

Bitcoin isn't fiat, you cannot predict when will the generation and total estimated supply will be. Miners would mine for transaction fees after 2140 definitely. Bitcoin is meant to have a total coin cap so that one bitcoin wouldn't lose value. If the generation increases, people can just hold the bitcoin and the total circulation would be much higher.

why did the developers set amount of BTC to 21million they could have incresed it to like...100million

nice round number of 0.003btc per person (based on 7bil people) without it having lots or random dust amounts thatneed to be rounded off
and the agreement of 50 coins to start that halve and halve again every 4 years equals this nice rounded number after doing all the maths

for instance if it was 100mill coins
first 4 years of blocks would be 238.0952381 bitcoins per block
first 4 years of blocks would be 119.04761905 bitcoins per block

both of which i had to round off (cut away) less that satoshi amounts making the totals not accurate.
and ofcourse giving each person (of 7billion population 0.01428571btc) again having to cut away extra decomals to bring it to rounded 8th decimal
ugly numbers that need rounding.....


so the 50coin a block which then halve to 25, then to 12.5 (nice easy to manage numbers while the reward is meaningful), totalling 21mill coin and as i said a nice round number per human (out of 7billion)

It probably was. But we are not gonna find for sure what that was the amount of lost bitcoin. Also I think it is really useless to think about it, because there is nothing really we can do. Less bitcoin = more value.

Yes, these wallets are unable to be recovered as nobody has access to the wallet but this is just a drop in the ocean.
It will not affect the price a lot

makes no sense.

Of course they stay on blackchain. And with time when computers will get stronger, they will be companies, that will search for this long lost wallets.  Same as are now companies, that search fro sunken ships from oceans. Pulling them out and sell their Gold or other things to pay costs and divide profit. So some coins on today lost wallets are not lost forever.

Wrong, it is natures law that number eventually will be 21,000,000.
It only takes time and you and I are going to be dead for sure when that happens.

I think it would be disastrous if it ever happens, it would simply mean that wallet are not secure enough and people confidence in bitcoin would drop. If a vulnerability is found, we can just hardfork and go on a new algorithm and the old wallets would not be cracked.

Yes it's just a matter of time. How long we will never know. Imagine this generation of bitcoin adopters, if half of those people never tell anybody or pass along their private key before they die...

Eventually number of available bitcoin in circulation will be too low causing price to increase insanely just for a few fraction of  sats. This will turn off mass adoption.

If you mean searching cryptographically for the private key then for sure, no.

If you mean trying to track down who owned it, finding them, going through their old computers, and trying to find the private key, then probably no.

Finding hard drives in the junk yard, searching them for lost private keys, then also probably no.

Quit trying to "fix" Bitcoin before you understand what it is, how it works and why it is the way it is.

Side note FYI:  if any attempt is made to implement a change like this it will not change or "fix" Bitcoin in any way.  By design it is almost impossible to change or "fix" Bitcoin.  Generally, by design, actually implementing a change of this nature would simply cause the creation of a new alternative coin to branch off of Bitcoin, eventually wither, and die - Bitcoin would be unaffected.

You are wrong.  Everyone I personally know that has a large amount of BTC has made provisions to transfer them to their heirs.  Bitcoin can operate just fine if we lose all but one BTC.

In theory, yes. In reality, no.

While people can and have lost their private keys, there is no way for the rest of us to truly verify that. We can look at the block chain and look for coins that haven't moved in some time, but is that because the coins are lost, or are they in cold storage, or just in someone's wallet who hasn't had the need to move them? Without true verification that the private keys are lost, you can't just use someone else's word as basis for assuming the rest of the coins are worth more. 

I think some time ago, BTC-e was assumed of being bribed to list a coin on its exchange. When news came out, BTC-e opted to destroy those coins in order to assure the community that they weren't being bribed - they destroyed those coins by sending them to an address which couldn't possibly have a private key.

Coins destroyed in that fashion can safely subtracted foe the total current and maximum numbers of coins in circulation, but that should be the only reason for doing so.

Someone has a thread that tries to track the known lost bitcoins: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7253.0

I know their are other ones also I have seen overtime

Gone Baby Gone.

I read about a guy who lost a hard drive with 7500 BTC on it. I don't think anyone ever lost 100,000 or even 30,000.

Yes they are stuck in the blockchain as no one have the private key to spend the funds. There is no real way to know how much bitcoin has been lost.

I'd say less then that. 60-70-80pct unaccessible would not surprise me.

I think maximum 10% of all coins are in circulation, most of them are saved for long term, that is why banks prefer to use a 10% reserve ratio, this is the general behavior of majority of human

Bitcoin can operate just fine if we lose all but one BTC

can you enlighten how that is possible?  ::)
i pay tom 0.00000001 btc which is worth 40 bucks (assuming predicted price at year 2050) for the sandwich which is only 12 bucks and try to give a change????

And have ever heard of sudden death? I assume all the so called guys u personally know will construct a will at 40 years of age?

Age has nothing to do with it because some of them are fairly young, but wealth may have something to do with it.  Someone who owns more than 100 BTC will probably think more about how to deal with the transfer of their wealth in the event of death than someone who has less than 1 BTC.  Oh, and for tax and other reasons almost nobody I know mentions their BTC in a will, they have just made "provisions".

If we were to lose a vast majority of the BTC and the price were to go up to the levels you are talking about then the protocol can be modified to simply add more decimal places.  Currently the protocol operates on (up to) 2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshis.  In the unlikely scenario that all but one BTC are lost we would only be left with 100,000,000 satoshis.  Add a few more decimal places like this:  100,000,000.000000000 and wala! you now have 100,000,000,000,000,000 "Q7s"

A situation like this would be one where a developer was paid in 7000 bitcoins and forgot about and during the $1000 hype he realised he then threw out 7000 bitcoins.
What a loss.

Which fiat are you referring to?  ;D
To summarize it, Loss is inevitable...

I don't see how bitcoin will exist once 21 mil is mined because the percent on transactions wouldn't be enough for miners.

We should get everyone to send 1/3 of the Bitcoins they own to the Bitcoin Eater address to increase the rarity. Then the price will go TO THE MOON!

Lost bitcoins=rarer=higher value at least in theory.

Don't sweat it. Febo hasn't done the necessary calculations to determine how profitable such an endeavor might be.

Protip: barring some breakthrough in cryptography, our computers will never be powerful nor plentiful enough to make such an endeavor profitable.

I say, that would be the only use of a mining pool to be over the 50 percent mark.... so they could conduct a couple unauthorized transactions to recover those lost bitcoins.... sadly something like that would never go over well.

Transaction fees will go up to compensate.

And technology will go up, so less electricity will be needed to make one transaction.

Generally the power consumption of the Bitcoin network follows (Bitcoin price) x (the number of Bitcoins the miners get from the subsidy + fees)

Basically the miners will burn up as much energy as they can afford to.  See:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=694401.msg7841420#msg7841420

That is exactly what I was thinking....

There are probably billions and billions of currency around the world "lost" or "destroyed" and never to be used again; maybe we should just reprint the notes with serial numbers we have not seen in a few years.....

Hashing power does not give you the ability to spend coins without the private key.