[Question] Amount of Bitcoin Lost/Not Accessible

[ImThour]

Hey,

On a search on google, I found these two blogs for amount of bitcoin that are lost forever and are not accessible anymore.

1. https://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/ - 2017
2. https://www.investopedia.com/news/20-all-btc-lost-unrecoverable-study-shows/ - 2019

Is there any latest data to with some sort of proof with the No. of Bitcoin which are lost forever?
Would love to know as according to the 2nd URL, almost 20% of the overall supply is not accessible which raises the scarcity of bitcoin even more.

While the loss of 20% of all bitcoin is likely to not have a significant impact on the crypto market itself, it could surely affect individual investors.

Aren't they underestimating the 20% of all bitcoin supply in total? geez.

[Bttzed03]

It's 34% from this 2021 article but this includes dormant wallets. It could be obsolete by now because there have been some wallets that were activated/woke up recently. The data came from a Glassnode study. If you want to vew their analysis, you need an account there (I don't have one).

[hd49728]

You can visit the website LookintoBitcoin and check the HODL waves chart.

It is on-chain data but we only can base on it and use it to make estimation on lost Bitcoin. The actual lost Bitcoin might be smaller than estimation or bigger than that. We can not have an exact estimation on it.

Fortunately, lost Bitcoin (whatever amount it is) is a gift for everyone who own Bitcoin with whatever amount.

[hugeblack]

In my view, lost coins are those that have been proven to be sent to burn addresses^[1] (an address from which they cannot ever be retrieved) and therefore no one can say they will "find" the key to those addresses.
Thus, the bitcoins sent to those addresses^[2][3] are lost forever^*, otherwise they are "possibly lost" coins.

I don't know if there is a service that counts this bitcoins but it will be less than 100K

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn
[2] https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr
[3] https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1111111111111111111114olvt2

* ~2⁹⁶ different private keys for those address  (792281625 1426433759 3543950336)

[GreatArkansas]

(......)

While the loss of 20% of all bitcoin is likely to not have a significant impact on the crypto market itself, it could surely affect individual investors.

Aren't they underestimating the 20% of all bitcoin supply in total? geez.

If ever they are totally true and really proven that they are totally lost/not accessible anymore it is always good news for everyone because it will help to reduce the circulating supply of Bitcoin and really high chance that it will help to increase the price of Bitcoin.

But for me, we are not yet sure if those Bitcoins are totally lost especially when it was sent to another person's wallet. It is like burning a coin if ever they are already lost/not accessible.

[NeuroticFish]

In my view, lost coins are those that have been proven to be sent to burn addresses^[1] (an address from which they cannot ever be retrieved) and therefore no one can say they will "find" the key to those addresses.
Thus, the bitcoins sent to those addresses^[2][3] are lost forever^*, otherwise they are "possibly lost" coins.

I don't know if there is a service that counts this bitcoins but it will be less than 100K

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn
[2] https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr
[3] https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1111111111111111111114olvt2

* ~2⁹⁶ different private keys for those address  (792281625 1426433759 3543950336)

* I will add the well-known 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE (~13.29 BTC)
* I will add the ~196 BTC lost people tend to keep forgetting about at every nice milestone

Still the confirmed-for-real numbers don't look so good to make news about, hence many prefer to guess based on dormant addresses...

[noorman0]

What can prove is a collection of owners' public reports/statements that they lost access to the wallet.
Even I'm not sure if the number of 20% is the whole unrecoverable bitcoin, we still have 2 million unmined bitcoins. While lately a lot of bitcoins from (allegedly) unused addresses waked up and move large amounts of balance to new addresses.

[o_e_l_e_o]

On a search on google, I found these two blogs for amount of bitcoin that are lost forever and are not accessible anymore.

They are both wrong.

There are a small number of bitcoin which are provably lost, which means they are definitely lost forever and can never be recovered. This includes the original 50 BTC from the genesis block which cannot be spent, 100 BTC accidentally overwritten by a duplicate transaction bug, a few hundred BTC failed to be claimed by miners over hundreds of different blocks, and a few thousand BTC sent to provably unspent outputs (including, but not exclusively, OP_RETURN outputs). The total of all these provably lost coins is a few thousand bitcoin.

Anything beyond that is complete speculation. There is absolutely no proof that anywhere near 4 million are irretrievably lost. We see coins which haven't moved in >10 years suddenly "wake up" with some frequency. We have seen messages be signed from addresses holding long dormant coins, proving these coins are not lost at all. And even if millions of early coins in P2PK addresses are lost, then quantum computing will likely make them accessible at some time in the future and they will return to supply.

[pooya87]

One of the characteristics of a decentralized money is that you will never be able to say who owns how much money and as a result you won't also be able to tell who has lost how much money even if they declare it themselves like that topic on bitcointalk. Unfortunately despite a lot of different articles on this matter, they are all suffering from the same mistake. They are all either directly or indirectly assuming that any coin that hasn't moved for an arbitrary amount of time (which is different in each study) should be considered lost.
Most of them are also writing an emotional article trying to say that because this many million coins are lost, the price has to rise up to the moon more...
This makes all of them wrong.

[DapanasFruit]

Looking at how many Bitcoin could have been lost already...meaning they are not anymore recoverable and lost in the digital space...I feel that they are a huge waste of something that is already valuable. And for now, there is nothing we can do about it. On my own experience, I have a minute amount of Bitcoin somewhere in an exchange - I think it is Bitmart - and I was then so naïve that I lost my Google Authenticator and then I never safeguarded the special code and then when I contacted the exchange about it, they send me so many things that I must submit even including the very date and the source of the assets I have in their exchange...and since I could not comply I just considered my BTC to be lost forever.

[hd49728]

In my view, lost coins are those that have been proven to be sent to burn addresses^[1] (an address from which they cannot ever be retrieved) and therefore no one can say they will "find" the key to those addresses.
Thus, the bitcoins sent to those addresses^[2][3] are lost forever^*, otherwise they are "possibly lost" coins.

You are correct. From estimation on possibly lost Bitcoin, we have really lost Bitcoin and false estimated lost Bitcoin. We can not identify the exact numbers for both of them. All numbers we have are only estimation but in my opinion it is enough for us to have an overview on the gift we possibly have from possibly lost Bitcoin. I don't think we need to know the exact numbers.

Bitcoin market is volatile and speculative so estimation is enough.

I don't know if there is a service that counts this bitcoins but it will be less than 100K

I think it is much larger than 100k Bitcoin that is a too small number. The inactive Bitcoin with ages from 5years and above is bigger than 100k certainly. It's clear that it is just possibly lost Bitcoin!

Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more.  Think of it as a donation to everyone.

[o_e_l_e_o]

you won't also be able to tell who has lost how much money even if they declare it themselves like that topic on bitcointalk.

Funny you should mention that, because just yesterday I lost all my coins in a yet another tragic boating accident. Fourth time this year!

On my own experience, I have a minute amount of Bitcoin somewhere in an exchange - I think it is Bitmart - and I was then so naïve that I lost my Google Authenticator and then I never safeguarded the special code and then when I contacted the exchange about it, they send me so many things that I must submit even including the very date and the source of the assets I have in their exchange...and since I could not comply I just considered my BTC to be lost forever.

In that kind of situation, the coins in question may be lost to you, but they are not lost to the network. The centralized exchange still has control over them, and the coins have almost certainly been swept in to their central wallet a long time ago and continued to circulate. After your account is inactive for a period of time, or you don't respond to their latest request for more invasive KYC, then your account will be closed and any balance on it at the time simply wiped, meaning the exchange would no longer pay you back an equivalent amount of bitcoin, but the coins themselves have already moved and are not "lost".

[Bitcoin.PN]

Hey,

On a search on google, I found these two blogs for amount of bitcoin that are lost forever and are not accessible anymore.

1. https://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/ - 2017
2. https://www.investopedia.com/news/20-all-btc-lost-unrecoverable-study-shows/ - 2019

Is there any latest data to with some sort of proof with the No. of Bitcoin which are lost forever?
Would love to know as according to the 2nd URL, almost 20% of the overall supply is not accessible which raises the scarcity of bitcoin even more.

While the loss of 20% of all bitcoin is likely to not have a significant impact on the crypto market itself, it could surely affect individual investors.

Aren't they underestimating the 20% of all bitcoin supply in total? geez.

By "being lost forever", it just means that to get their private keys in order to spend those coins will take YEARS, DECADES or maybe even A LOT more due to quantum computers