Approximately, how many bitcoin are lost FOREVER!!!

[renkcub]

its easy to lose em. 3 million

[JimCGSavings]

42

[instoftech]

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.

[coingun]

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

[Eva Braun]

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

[CKJ411]

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.

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

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

[Eva Braun]

There is so many lost forever..

[Peacefrog]

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

[sealberrder]

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

[edd]

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.

[Artofficial]

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

[ArcticWolf]

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

[cryptocyprus]

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.

[tlo]

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