Bitcoin Forum

Unless a Jedi can brute-force or guess the keys ;D.

no one knows. You can figure out how many BTC are lying dormant, but you have no idea if their owners still control their keys or not!

When bitcoin first started I had quite a few and felt they were going nowhere so I deleted the wallet and everything along with it.  :'(

How many BTC in that wallet?  :)

My guess: I assume most users dont have backups so probably at least 1% already lost or 100.000 BTC

What would be the best place to determine where the dormant coins are lying about?

For me alone I guess 10 - 20 BTC, in the early days when Bitcoin wasn't worth much.  Too troublesome to backup when changing computers, just delete :(

Why do you ask?

There are other options.

Deleted wallets on old computers might one day be salvaged by "bitcoin treasure hunters." Heirs might eventually have the tools to extrapolate enough information from an old hard drive to recover a deleted wallet.dat.

Bitcoins sent to black hole addresses are probably gone for good, however.

Once I read that due to the fact that some bitcoins are lost they will gain more value, as less coins are available. I don't see how if it's not possible to know how many are lost...

Id say a good million are lost forever.

i believe that something must be done immediately to deny addresses that havent been seen on the network payments over a very small amount. i think some groups are probably buying bitcoin and sending them to nonexistant addresses to devalue and kill the coin.

Divisible down to 8 decimal places. They can destroy all they want, it won't accomplish anything.

Prices are going to go up for every bitcoin lost.

ive hears stories about people losing thousands in the early days so I bet theres quite a fair amount gone forever.

I'm sure a similar thing was said about IPv4..

So that means that each Bitcoin must weigh (2,000 pounds lost) / (2,000,000 BTC lost) = 0.001 pounds / BTC

There should be a recovery system in place that they go to

A recovery system might be a way to recover what is not yours.  Every exception they add to the rules makes for easier corruption.

Is say 500,000 - 1 million

its easy to lose em. 3 million

42

Check out the following report and plots about "What happened to early bitcoins?" https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=215946.0
It shows whether early coins are being traded in exchanges (hint: very few).

Someone estimated there are at least 1 million lost coins.

Can't find secret notepad with all passwords...FML!

This is not good for bitcoin... increases price yes? Long term bitcoin is affected by available number tho.

Exactly. Way too many people hyping this as some infallible system at the moment.

There is so many lost forever..

a buddy of mine lost his password and username to a wallet with like 55 btc in it

1 mil is a lot. I feel sorry for people who lost bitcoins in early days and thinking what the heck its just few pennies, only now realizing how big loss it was

The 21 million limit imposed by Satoshi was just an arbitrary number.

Let's say one million coins have been "lost forever." If Satoshi had made the limit 20 million and no one lost any, the network would be in exactly the same place it is now.

Even if we take into consideration the fact that more coins may be lost, as the value increases (for whatever reason), the precautions users take to avoid losing them will increase accordingly.

I'm almost sure (well, not really) Satoshi went crazy not having access to millions of early btc and simply quit.

Satoshi is one wealthy hobo ::)

Well I lost my very first ever bitcoin when I formatted my pc :(

I'm sure Bitcoin is infinitely divisible, the more destroyed the higher the value of the remaining coins.

However transactions of BTC0.000000000000000000001 would become somewhat annoying for day to day use.

I guess several 100k BTC are lost forever.

I remember this story:
"In July 2011, the operator of Bitomat, the third largest bitcoin exchange, announced that he lost access to his wallet.dat file with about 17,000 bitcoins (roughly equivalent to 220,000 USD at that time). He announced that he would sell the service for the missing amount, aiming to use funds from the sale to refund his customers."

Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin