Bitcoin Forum

Sucked you in,  ;D Its a serious question though.

How much Bitcoin is likely to become stranded in accounts because of users deaths? I imagine a lot, more than people have given it worthy of discussion. I bet a lot of holders if they got hit by a car and died would have no one to find their coins online...including their wives. Plus you got a lot of single guys using Bitcoin who aren't going to have a spouse to trust with their passwords etc even if they thought about it.

I would also add coins simply lost by people or forgotten. I personally have a bunch of tiny amounts of Sats in temporary addresses I made for different purposes, only worth a dollar or two but they must add up.  Add to that on purpose burning of coins and I wonder if we will even have any Bitcoin in 30 years.  :D

the decimal point can be moved at any stage long before there are a shortage of coins
just because we divide a coin in 1.0000000 now doesnt mean it has to stay that way
could easily divide it into smaller units again

A lot of millionaires, politicians and mafia die with a lot of their money in their backyard. Probably the same for bitcoin..
I would consider loss of bitcoins in the early stages more, as people might never have thought of price going so high before, and might have lost it in HD crashes etc.

how about satoshi and the first million coins ever mined  ? if hes already dead or didnt bother to save the private keys those coins are lost forever
potentially billions of dollars worth :(

I've thought of that before. Don't see how it can be helped. Anyone know how? ???

I started that discussion a while ago:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=894229.0

Well, as long as bitcoins don't go mainstream, and those coins don't come back in, its only a matter of having 20 million coins existing then.
The price would just be affected with the supply and demand and not with those 1 million coins.

in a few years spending  whole bitcoins will be unheard of anyway ,
people will use mbits or satoshis to buy stuff or maybe even smaller units than satoshis if btc is very sucessful and needs to be divided even smaller than 1 million sats per btc

it's actually 100 million sats/BTC

even better :)
it will have to be incredibly sucessful beyond our wildest dreams  if it needs to be divided into even smaller units than that to purchase stuff .........

If you remember a brain wallet well enough, maybe you can take your bitcoins with you :-p

Stating the obvious but it's not that BItcon can't be divided up, what I'm saying is overall supply will decline due to deaths and loss, more significantly than we think. I wouldn't think its crazy to say we might lose 1-3% in this way annually, that figure is plucked from my butt but still I'm betting it's significant.

My point is this gives Bitcoin a natural price increase all other factors equal.

The real problem with the coins burnt/lost is the uncertainty of whether the coins lost are really lost or just temporarily inactive.

Imagine what happens when 10,50,100 years from now there are only ~BTC100k bitcoins in circulation (not a problem as it can be infinitely divided), and then you manage to recover the priv key to the wallet (say your deceased grandpa's) containing BTC50k, which everyone considered "lost coins".

The very first moment you would make any withdrawal from that wallet, you will cause a massive panic and crash the market.

I'm not that much worried about the lost coins (due to death etc), I'm sure there will be a lot of solutions in the near future. But I'm slightly concerned about ideas such as Proof-of-Burn used in OpenBazaar:

https://blog.openbazaar.org/proof-of-burn-and-reputation-pledges/ (https://blog.openbazaar.org/proof-of-burn-and-reputation-pledges/)

There's still 7 million coins to mine - no shortage soon. Loose all you want ...

I don't think there is much influence to the price of bitcoin. The block reward is 25 btc and new generated bitcoin is injected into its ecosystem. The adoption rate is not high as we expected!

I don't think that is going to be any issue for many more years to come. Don't forget we still have about 7 millions coins yet to be mined and by then people would be super cautious on their holdings because it's getting rare and rare as more coins get lost.

What if when whales die, they decide to not give their sons and families their Bitcoin wallets? these would be lost forever in time. Sometimes it happens now that parents are mad with sons and do not give them inheritance, except the money doesnt get lost forever lol.

Many are still missing my point. It's a good thing. I mean there is no way coins won't be lost over time so it's hardwired in that Bitcoins overall supply will decrease. It's accepted with fiat that a lot of coins and notes are lost, destroyed etc but are replaced even if the money supply is not increased, but Bitcoin is a one way street, it will be interesting if Bitcoin did get a much more global acceptance what would happen. It doesn't matter if we end up with one Bitcoin and its divided up into billions the point is you can't slice a pizza more times and get more pizza which is what is being expressed by some here (face palm). Like I said  using compound interest as a model even a few percent lost or destroyed each year is very significant to the supply. And it will grow even more significant as mining becomes harder and less fruitful.


Looking at a cliqued idea that an ounce of Gold or whatever it is would buy a decent suit 100 years ago and today an ounce would buy the same today. With Bitcoin 1 BTC even if the 'value' didnt increase would buy 100 suits Just for example in theory when before it bought 1. In that sense Bitcoin is super fuel injected Gold, the perfect store of capital.

I forsee a lot of deathbed begging for passwords.

Haha indeed, and it makes it hard when you're begging to someone with Alzheimer's...

more like it would be a minor news blurb, "oldest wallet in use is no longer xxxx it is now yyyy". Kind of like when a 120 year old person celebrates a birthday these days.  You click on the article, say, "hmm." and then make a stupid tweet.

Nothing is immortal.  Especially life after BTCitcoin