How many Bitcoins are lost forever?

[ThEmporium]

A lot of these are lost wallets. Tons of early miners/adopters lost their computers/HDD with their wallets on them.

Not in tons, may be hundreds could be left their computers and Hard disk drives due to the wear and tear, Bitcoin came into the productions since 2009 and during those period very few hardly knew about this Bitcoin digital currency technology.

[knowhow]

yes but some stories about some hard disk that went trash and those bitcoins should be lost forever since no one would go into trash trrying to find those

[gentlemand]

yes but some stories about some hard disk that went trash and those bitcoins should be lost forever since no one would go into trash trrying to find those

You wouldn't dig around in some rubbish for a few million? People murder each other for less. The guy did look into a proper excavation but the site was too vast for it to be practical.

[SmartIphone]

People that use cold wallet and forgot the key.. these bitcoins are lost forever isnt it?

[gentlemand]

People that use cold wallet and forgot the key.. these bitcoins are lost forever isnt it?

If you've lost the private key then it's game over.

If your coins are stuck in a wallet with a password your odds are much higher of being able to remember it or getting someone to crack it for you if you can give them a few clues.

[Amph]

People that use cold wallet and forgot the key.. these bitcoins are lost forever isnt it?

not rally, there is always a chance of a collision, especially in the future with quantum computer, so you can't really say that they are 100% lost, it isn't impossible to retrieve them in some way in the future

[SebastianJu]

yes but some stories about some hard disk that went trash and those bitcoins should be lost forever since no one would go into trash trrying to find those

You wouldn't dig around in some rubbish for a few million? People murder each other for less. The guy did look into a proper excavation but the site was too vast for it to be practical.

I already see the future business of wallet discovering. Buying used harddiscs on ebay, recovering the deleted data and searching for all kind of wallets.

I guess people that trade harddiscs anyway, might find once in a while something. The chance is low now but maybe in the future?

[knowhow]

well those should happening already buying old disk and searching all info inside it ,always a way to recover the information ,and well im pretty sure the people would go into it but who knows which is the disk with bitcoins,and well maybe there isnt any information on it besides the ammount holded there

[gentlemand]

well those should happening already buying old disk and searching all info inside it ,always a way to recover the information ,and well im pretty sure the people would go into it but who knows which is the disk with bitcoins,and well maybe there isnt any information on it besides the ammount holded there

As it rolls forwards, the number of people with 'proper' wallets will probably shrink. I've never used one myself. You might have the occasional score with an old disk but it would barely make up for the countless hours of trawling on useless ones.

[Scamalert]

Just want to say that I personally lost 0.001... playing around with BIP32 encryption and f**** up a bit and cannot decrypt, still have the encrypted private key somewhere, thinking about posting it so someone can claim it, if they can brute force it, the password is pretty simple (I belive).

[lorylore]

People that use cold wallet and forgot the key.. these bitcoins are lost forever isnt it?

not rally, there is always a chance of a collision, especially in the future with quantum computer, so you can't really say that they are 100% lost, it isn't impossible to retrieve them in some way in the future

Quantum computers can break also security all over the world so these is always a chance not 100%

[b-trading]

I know it is a tricky question. What do you think, how many Bitcoins are lost forever and are 'out of the network' by lost private keys?

if i have to answer about the amount of bitcoin that lost i never can give the answer...but i think there will be amount of the 10 to 20 % will be lost of the total of bitcoin supply

[knowhow]

no im pretty sure that is something around 5% already that may be lost for a while or stored at some disk that gone

[ransomer]

no have idea, i really don't know
we can find out who the owner of the largest bitcoin?

Largest bitcoin? You mean the address with the most coins? According to BitInfoCharts, this is currently the address with the most coins:

http://blockchain.info/address/39coweGgC8CPZ6hYL1BBEfc1zqbSfHsprW

How can bitcoin be lost? i cant understand this? maybe the fees that are taken from each transaction ?

A private key is like a "key" that unlocks an address and allows anyone to spend the funds contained within that address. There are some addresses out there where no known private key exists. For example:

http://blockchain.info/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE

Any coins sent to the above address will be lost forever. Same with this unspendable address:

http://blockchain.info/address/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr

That one was used for Counterparty's proof-of-burn. People sent bitcoins to that address to prove that they were "burned" (i.e. destroyed) so that they could be rewarded with the equivalent amount of XCP coins.

It's also possible for coins in an address to be lost forever by simply deleting the private key that corresponds to the address. Your wallet.dat file contains private keys corresponding to addresses in your wallet. Permanently deleting this file from your computer would make any bitcoins stored in that wallet to become permanently inaccessible. While technically speaking, it may be possible to guess the private key and regain access to these coins, private keys are long and random enough that it would take billions upon billions of years to find a successful match.

As for transaction fees, they aren't lost. They go to the miner that solves the next block. Usually this is a pool and miners who mine in that pool get the fees in addition to the block reward.

Could that 215.000 be the Winkelvos?

[GenTarkin]

Well since satoshi is dead.... a heck of a lot of coins are useless..

[timtowner]

I bet there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of early Bitcoins that were forgotten but early adopters.  I read a story of some guy buying some years ago and just happened to read a story about Bitcoins.  He couldn't even remember where he had some but found the site and had over $200,000 in Bitcoins.  I bet there are a lot of people like this that forgot they had Bitcoins from the beginning.

[SebastianJu]

Well since satoshi is dead.... a heck of a lot of coins are useless..

I bet Satoshi was smart enough to prevent his coins being lost. I believe he holds the coins because he has more ideas as to how the world should change. In order to do that he waits until bitcoin is a world currency and then he has the power to really push things.

In case he dies im sure that a lot of donations will be received by certain organisations. Though he might spread them wisely in order to not crash the bitcoin price.

Im very sure he is smart enough and willing to not lose his coins.

[ShamrockHannah]

If you knew how many Bitcoin went missing everyday you could easy work it out. I would imagine if you was to make a graph to display the statistics there would be exponential amounts getting lost, due to the growing number of BTC users.

It's gotta be some kind of inconceivable number.

[prodigy8]

I think the number of lost or forgotten coins is much higher than current estimates. many coins were minted in 2009 and 2010 and have never been touched

[nextgencoin]

The fact is this Bitcoin ultimately has a finite shelf life. there is no way that people won't for a myriad of reasons lose small amounts of Bitcoin until eventually we are all using a fraction of a Bitcoin and eventually we won't want to divide down anymore.

Death particularly will wipe out a large percentage of coins. I doubt very few people on here have told someone else their coin addresses, and guess what, many won't know their last day on earth was the day they got into their car to go shopping etc.