Bitcoin Forum

One thing that probably has not been thought of, during the creation of BTC, is that the number of Bitcoins will be slowly reducing to zero. There will be, in some time, 21KK BTC, but what about bitcoin that get lost? I mean hardware malfunctions. Wrong address transfers. Lost passwords. Forgotten wallets etc.

Do we know, how many of all Bitcoins is in circulations at this moment? I mean we can count the number that indicates how many it should be. We however do not know how many of them is inaccessible.

One day it might be a problem, but probably not the problem of our generation. Still statistically that says bitcoin cannot survive.

Here we go again. I don't understand why people worry about potential problems that won't happen in their lifetime. Bitcoin has many other problems that need addressing right now and in the foreseeable future. This is not something that we should be worried about right now, especially not when the reward per block is still high. Technically even if only 1 Bitcoin existed it could be users by millions of people due to it being very divisible.

Well that's the point of a limited supply currency, there is a limited supply and it will keep being used/spent/lost until people give up on it or nothing is left.

This goes for gold and silver too, they keep wearing about and they slowly decrease, but there is a large enough supply that the impact is negligible. This is equally represented in Bitcoin. With the potential for 21m coins, at a predictable and limited rate, any losses that don't take out >50% of the current supply likely do not mean much.

Losing coins shouldn't be an issue if people use their brains honestly , the only situation where it's not the holder fault is probably when he gets hacked .
Mt-gox , Cryptsy , other exchanges = Users fault because they should never store their coins in an online exchange , you trade ,then you withdraw , It's that simple .
Computer failure , Lost passwords , forgetting wallets and all that stuff = You always recover your wallet if you are using Electrum or Multibit HD for example . (even if you don't you could take other precaution so none of that happens to you) .

After saying that , I should remind you of what Satoshi said : "Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone." .
People will learn the lesson with time , and people will be losing coins less then they did on the past .

Even if 10% of all usable bitcoins were lost every year, the number of usable bitcoins would never reach 0.

Or, if 100% of all bitcoins were lost every day for the next 100 years, the number of bitcoins would still remain above 0.

And yes, it's been discussed many times.

The real question is, how do you prove that their bitcoins were in fact lost?

How do they prove beyond all contestation that they haven't lied about it and still secretly control the wallet addresses the allegedly "lost" bitcoins are stored in?

After all, the best of people will lie, cheat, and steal every moment of every day if they can gain from it.

That said, in the short term any "lost" bitcoins will simply make the rest of the bitcoins in circulation more valuable, and in the long term the precision can be lengthened to add more spendable units to the current supply.

21 million bitcoins equals 2,100,000,000,000,000 (21 quadrillion) spendable units of value.

Increasing the amount that can be mined higher than 21 quadrillion units of value should never be necessary, unless it's better than changing the precision... and even that should never be needed, but it's possible.

lets assume that all bitcoin minus 0.21 are lost, now you will simply have that 1 satoshi = to one bitcoin

create another 100M divisors of one satoshi with an hard fork and you're good to go again

Quoting Satoshi on this one:

I think in this worst case scenario, even that one last Bitcoin could be hard-forked to make more than 8 places after decimal right? If I remember correct what I read about the early days of Bitcoin there were not even 8 decimal places?


Edit:

I dug this up from old post. It seems that it was always 8 decimal places, but the client only showed/registered 2.

Next generation miners will be treasure hunters. They will recover the lost coins. :)

Quoting Satoshi again:

Correct. There is a maximum of ~2.1 quadrillion unique transaction units right now. This could be increased if necessary, but I doubt that it will ever be needed.

I'm not sure about that.

I haven't really thought of that but it is a possibility that can happen in the future.
It'd be nice to exactly know how much bitcoin is in circulation right now, but I believe that at this moment we don't have much many lost bitcoins.

But the next generation has to be smart to handle this.

If this is a problem for the next generations then let them sort it out. BTW if they really want, I'm pretty sure they can hard fork BTC for replacing lost coins or adding more coins to the network. Or they can just replace the whole thing with something new in CLAM style.

How do you tell the difference between a lost coin and a coin held for investment?

two things are impossible in Bitcoin (in my opinion) , I mean you could try but It will be always estimated and nothing exact :

• Having the number of users (wallets != users)
• know how much coins are lost

Well reworking the divisible units might solve it, but I am not entirely sure about it.


Look at this example:

Imagine that 100 satoshi actually means something. You can buy thing A for 100 satoshi. Now you would renumber so 100 satoshi would be actually 10 000 satoshi.

That would either mean that thing A that costed 100 still costs 100 satoshi and then everybody got suddenly super rich or what costed 100 satoshi now costs 10 000 satoshi and nothing has changed. And therefore the rework of divisible units failed.

And the quote from Satoshi is correct but not indefinitely. I know its not our problem, but it is a question to ask.

/edit typo

Okay lets assume we have lost most of the bitcoins. Once a threshold reaches people will stop using them all together.. but u are forgetting this is an 'Idea' there are lot many potential coins.. just ready to take its place. And people like us are so used to with it, there will always be a virtual currency. Bitcoin is the current face.. later i can be anything..

It has just began my friend

Bitcoin is highly divisible, so if there is demand for Bitcoin, the price will just keep growing. Even if 20,999,999 BTC were lost forever, that remaining BTC will be enough, just make it more divisible (extend amount of divisibility more than 8 decimal places). Price would be insane for 1 BTC but the system would still work.

It's very unprovable that so many coins get lost but you are right, if time is infinite and supply is limited, at some point supply will be 0 theoretically.
It will probably take 1000 years for this being a problem so this is something future generations must have to deal with.

That's not how divisibility works. You start using/create a unit that is smaller Satoshi. For example 100 satoshi = 100 000 laudas.

It only makes sense increase decimal places if there are things that cost way less than 1 satoshi.

Imagine that in the far future 1 satoshi is worth $100, that means you cannot use bitcoin to pay less than that, so, more decimal places.

although bitcoin can still be valuable when it gets lesser. I have to agree there are lots of altcoins that will replace once btc is proved to be really not going to work in the future. there are altcoins seem to have a sophisticated system and can adapt to changes.

This is not possible. I didn't notice presence of black hole on blockchain, don't worry!

Many of us don't count on our memory(heads) for storing passwords for wallets.
Few people have lost their coins but this is their funeral!

Nope.  Try the math.

Lets assume that 10% of all the remaining bitcoins are lost every year.  That's a ridiculous amount.  At today's exchange rate that's a permanent loss from circulation of $882 million dollars worth of bitcoins. I think most people would occur that losses will be much less than that.  But, for the sake of argument, how long will it take until there is nothing left?

10 years?  Nope.  After 10 years there will still be 7322247.24210000 BTC remaining.

50 years? Nope.  After 50 years there will still be 108229.27935400000 BTC remaining.

150 years?  Nope. After 150 years there will still be 2.874721060000 BTC remaining.

500 years?  Nope. After 250 years there will still be 7635.6610000000 satoshis remaining.

1000 years?  Nope.  After 1000 years there will still be 0.00000000000000036705296286175683 yoctoBTC

Keep adding decimal places (and shifting over the decimal point), and you can keep losing a percentage of what's left and still have more than trillions of spendable units.


If it's a simple case of lost private key, you can't.  Why does that matter?

There are cases of outputs scripts that are provably unspendable.  In those cases you can count those bitcoins that are permanently unspendable.


This is only possible if mathematical weaknesses are discovered in the cryptographic functions that bitcoin currently uses.  I suppose that could happen, but there is no way right now to be certain that such a thing will ever happen.


There was an analysis done in July 2014 that found (at that time) there were a total of 2,745.22283996 BTC that were provably permanently lost:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=675321.0

But then more would be generated in the next block.

Ah, I see what you are saying.  New bitcoins will continue to be generated for more than the next 100 years...

Ok, I'll go back and edit my post.  I was thinking that you meant after all new bitcoins were mined.

It matters because people lie, cheat and steal and should not be rewarded for it.

If the alleged loss can be absolutely proven to be unspendable, then I have no issues.

Yes people are already started to make better projects even now.. more secure.. private.. etc etc features... but bitcoins has gained repo over a long period hence still the top one. But when the 1st place is out of the league the 2nd takes its place.

What are we talking here? What math?
Many coins are lost due to beginners faults, especially in early days when btc was almost worthless. As we approaching 1k$ i think this percentage will be only less and less until become negligible values.
You'll never know for sure if some coins are actually lost except if those coins are not yours.

I think this is a little too bit of a grim prediction. Bitcoin will be here in 50 years.

We'll always have enough coins in circulation. Bitcoin is consisted from smaller units.
Only price can go up , with those lost coins. But globally bitcoin is safe.

I think if you couple the divisible nature with the extended rate of the generation of new coins, you might find that you will not have to ever worry about this until the last coin is mined. This will not be

in our lifetime, and even if this happens, people might then decide to adjust the cap or do something drastic, to generate some more coins. How can they fight over the total cap, if there are zero coins

in circulation? {This part, will be the difficult one to prove} In any way, I do not think Bitcoin will still be used by then, and even if it was still available, it would be worth very little. {supply & demand}

yes,just little of use relize this fact,that bitcoin create just like other altcoin with limited amount,and at the end will cannot mine again,just bitcoin on our wallet,but this one makes difference between bitcoin and other that bitcoin still loving by so many people,and i'm sure that people will not let bitcoin finished.

What you are concerned about it will not be anyone of us problem in our journey of life. Maybe after we have died (no one knows when this happen) that problem may arose , so I think we are safe for the near to long term future as only 15 mln bitcoins approximately are mined so far. Personally I am not concerned at all about this, we should focus more to make bitcoin more usable and raising its value. Thats what I am concerned about bitcoin.

Just dividing down in an endless deflation is also quite dangerous.
What if someone in the year 3000 finds a USB stick with 50 bitcoins on it and that is equivilant to $100billion now?

Ok it is an extreme example, but could happen in a constantly deflating world.

I think it bitcoin will exist in future. Because, if some bitcoins were send to a wrong address that was never used may be randomly generated by someone in the future and he/she got that lost bitcoin we cannot say its impossible but its a rare case.

Dude just calm down and enjoy the pleasures of BTC at the moment. For BTC to die there is a log way to go. It would probably be aftaer all other cyrptos die out and it will not happen for our genereation like you said. So take my advice and reap the profits of BTC at the moment. Just think positively of the future.

i would think you could estimate the amount of coins lost
or estimate a rough maximum that might be lost

If you only look at data prior to April 2011
when 1 BTC = $1

from that point on i would assume people would have started to take more steps to secure their coins and make sure passwords were stored safe, as that would be when a lot would start seeing the potential, so i dont think many coins would be lost after that time, or nothing considerable that would not be normal such as user error is, like typos and forgeting password, but these would most likely be small amounts that would not add up to anything significant

so i would say if you calculated how many coins were mined up until April 2011
Then it would be a safe bet i think to say that the amount up until then would be like a maximum that could be missing, but more likely about 20-50% of those early mined coins mined prior to Arpil 2011

EDIT: roughly 6 million in circulation April 2011,

i would estimate about 1-2million bitcoins may be lost

dont forget SN has 1 million

All Bitcoins never will be lost..
Even if all except 1 bitcoin are inaccessable..
this just makes the 1 btc worth 21 million x old value

If they will keep their coins no matter what then they are lost in practice, because no one that will spend them will have their private keys.

Of course one day most Bitcoins will be unacessible, but it would take centuries for such situation to happens, the coin more than likely will be dead long ago way before that.

Bitcoin was not made to last forever

This is a pretty easy calculation (Since you only specified a month, I'll use the middle of the month, April 15):

• There are 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 365.25 days in a year
• Multiply those together and you find there are about 525960 minutes in a year, and 1440 minutes in a day
• A new block is generated on average every 10 minutes.
• Divide the minutes per year (and per day) by 10 minutes per block to find out on average how many blocks are generated in that time
• So, we get about 52596 blocks per year and 144 blocks per day
• Satoshi started bitcoin on 2009 January 3
• There are 2 years between 2009 January 3 and 2011 January 3
• There are 28+28+31+15= 102 days between 2011 January 3 and 2011 April 15
• 2 years * 52596 blocks per year = 105192 blocks
• 102 days * 144 blocks per day = 14688 blocks
• So, by mid-April 2011 there were approximately 105192 + 14688 = 119880 blocks
• The block subsidy back then was 50 BTC per block.
• 50 BTC per block * 119880 blocks = approximately 5994000 bitcoins mined

If you look at blockchain.info you'll see that my calculated "estimate" of 119880 blocks (https://blockchain.info/block-height/119880) on April 15 is close, but not exact:
https://blockchain.info/block-height/119880

The 119880'th block was actually generated on April 24.  If we click on the "Previous Block" hash over and over, eventually we get back to the 118412'th block which was the first block generated on April 15.

So if you multiply 118412 blocks * 50 BTC per block, you find that by exactly mid April there should have been exactly 5920600 bitcoins mined.

Looks like my "estimate" was pretty close.  It's the difference between saying "5.99 million BTC" and "5.92 million BTC".


20% * 5920600 BTC = 1184120 BTC

50% * 5920600 BTC = 2960300 BTC

at the end there you forgot to factor in satoshi has 1 million out of the first 6

also to work out how many bitcoins were in circulation, i just done the quick method and used this link:
http://www.coindesk.com/data/bitcoin-total-circulation/ (http://www.coindesk.com/data/bitcoin-total-circulation/)
i had already edited my post before you could post your calculations

What does that have to do with anything?
Satoshi could be dead (and his bitcoins lost).
Satoshi could have lost his private keys (and his bitcoins lost).

Nearly all of the bitcoins that people assume Satoshi has have never been spent. Is this because he has chosen not to spend them or is it because they are lost?  How would you know?

Op's argument isn't entirely wrong though. We've only considered the present times which is that the number of bitcoins lost is dust compared to what is mined everyday. If, I say again, if there comes a point when there are no minable bitcoins left, the number of bitcoins will start reducing everyday. Those that hold onto bitcoins with paper wallet can, theoretically, be 'lost' because they are not in transaction anymore.
I stand to be corrected as this is only an opinion.

I do nit see any reason why in the future there would be no Bitcoins. I do not know why people say this and I would like to see a explanation on why Bitcoin is not going to be there in the future.

If small part from all BTC are lost, it is nothing. It is very small part - in lost wallets, computer viruses etc. The whole BTC system is covering whole world with thousands of daily users.  ;)

Yep, some day probably all bitcoin will be lost, but bitcoin will die way sooner... and another crypto will take it place.
still, not this generation problem.

Of course there are going to be Bitcoins in the future, there is no guaranteed that you know what is going to happen with Bitcoin but I do not see why Bitcoins are going to disappear in the future.

The more bitcoins that are lost, the more people will take care with their own holdings since their value will increase.