How many coins are really lost forever?

[adaseb]

Basically everybody is happy with the $23.5 Billion USD market cap of Bitcoin. However this really isn't accurate.

Currently there are 16,307,800 BTC in circulation however since BTC had no value for the first 2 years. Many of the CPU mined coins back in those days are most likely gone when the user just formatted their drive or threw their computer away.

There is also this BTC account here: 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF

Currently it has 80K BTC coins worth over $115 million however the first deposit was on March 2011, and never any withdraws. My guess is their computer crashed or something because who wouldn't withdraw a little from a 10000% gain.

There are articles like this
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=994852.0
and
https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/rise-of-the-zombie-bitcoins

Which states that massive amounts of coins from 2009+2010 were never spent (up till block 348050).

So there are at least 2,000,000 BTC which are lost forever so the market cap really should be  ~$20 Billion USD OR if you assume that the lost BTC is better because there is less supply then BTC real value should be ~12.2% higher so marketcap of $26.3 Billion USD with a price of $1626 USD per coin.

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[talkbitcoin]

since this topic is posted in an speculation board then i am going to give an speculative (price-related) answer.

at this point, it doesn't mater how much coins are lost as far as price is concerned. there are more coins than there is demand and new coins (12.5BTC) are being created every 10 minutes on average.

as for marketcap goes, again it doesn't matter if it is 20 billion dollar or 20 trillion dollar or whatever. that number has no effect on bitcoin apart from getting it in the news as it grows and also being used as a comparison when altcoin pumpers what to force fed everyone their altcoin is good because it has x% of the total bitcoin market cap.

and finally you can never say anything more than a "guess" about all those coins you mentioned. it may very well be someone who doesn't need fiat at the moment so why should he sell coins from 2009 when selling 1BTC means losing $100000 in a couple of years?

[187undercover]

Basically everybody is happy with the $23.5 Billion USD market cap of Bitcoin. However this really isn't accurate.

Currently there are 16,307,800 BTC in circulation however since BTC had no value for the first 2 years. Many of the CPU mined coins back in those days are most likely gone when the user just formatted their drive or threw their computer away.

There is also this BTC account here: 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF

Currently it has 80K BTC coins worth over $115 million however the first deposit was on March 2011, and never any withdraws. My guess is their computer crashed or something because who wouldn't withdraw a little from a 10000% gain.

There are articles like this
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=994852.0
and
https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/rise-of-the-zombie-bitcoins

Which states that massive amounts of coins from 2009+2010 were never spent (up till block 348050).

So there are at least 2,000,000 BTC which are lost forever so the market cap really should be  ~$20 Billion USD OR if you assume that the lost BTC is better because there is less supply then BTC real value should be ~12.2% higher so marketcap of $26.3 Billion USD with a price of $1626 USD per coin.

Unless some of those coins get recovered, which there are some projects to find lost wallet's keys.

[Seansky]

Basically everybody is happy with the $23.5 Billion USD market cap of Bitcoin. However this really isn't accurate.

Currently there are 16,307,800 BTC in circulation however since BTC had no value for the first 2 years. Many of the CPU mined coins back in those days are most likely gone when the user just formatted their drive or threw their computer away.

There is also this BTC account here: 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF

Currently it has 80K BTC coins worth over $115 million however the first deposit was on March 2011, and never any withdraws. My guess is their computer crashed or something because who wouldn't withdraw a little from a 10000% gain.

There are articles like this
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=994852.0
and
https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/rise-of-the-zombie-bitcoins

Which states that massive amounts of coins from 2009+2010 were never spent (up till block 348050).

So there are at least 2,000,000 BTC which are lost forever so the market cap really should be  ~$20 Billion USD OR if you assume that the lost BTC is better because there is less supply then BTC real value should be ~12.2% higher so marketcap of $26.3 Billion USD with a price of $1626 USD per coin.

Thats a real waste because there will be lesser supply in the market maybe the owners of those bitcoin regret that they didn't tried to recover it or maybe they are all trying to recover it, so I wouldn't say that those bitcoins are lost forever in the circulation maybe someday, the real owners would recover them specially now that there are some who offers bitcoin wallet recovery service.

[Maheshkumar_Hrangkhawl]

Whatever Satoshi has mined is lost for ever. These coins have never been moved, and I think that Satoshi has lost the private keys of all these wallets. So the real number may be somewhere around BTC2,000,000.

[Paya]

I suspect that there are a lot more coins lost forever than we might even imagine. Only I knew two guys (personally) who had more than 30k btcs combined, all lost. First one had hdd failure but as bitcoins didn't have any value worth mentioning back in the (very!) early days, he didn't bother with data recovery and simply threw away the disk. Other one died unfortunately, and later I've heard from his family that his PC has been wiped out, reinstalled, and given to someone as a gift. 

[BTCLovingDude]

Unless some of those coins get recovered, which there are some projects to find lost wallet's keys.

they can try till the end of the universe to find a lost private key and still not succeed. and unless some day someone finds an impossible weakness in ECDSA or there was a gigantic revolution in computing power this won't change!

[isov]

Whatever Satoshi has mined is lost for ever. These coins have never been moved, and I think that Satoshi has lost the private keys of all these wallets. So the real number may be somewhere around BTC2,000,000.

I don't know why you think Satoshi has lost his keys. He has been very systematic with everything else so I'd guess he still has his keys too.

[thejaytiesto]

All of the coins attached to satoshi are pretty much lost for life, so you can count at least 1 million out of the supply. Then you can add at least another million coins lost in a series of disasters, including loss of passwords, loss of hard disks, of pen drives, of trezors, any devices that could store bitcoins.
A good 1 million at least for sure.

So 2 millions out and increasing. There's no way to know for sure tho.

[luca1073]

Whatever Satoshi has mined is lost for ever. These coins have never been moved, and I think that Satoshi has lost the private keys of all these wallets. So the real number may be somewhere around BTC2,000,000.

it blows my mind how satoshi may have lost the private keys to 20.000 addresses?? thats what i heard he had : 20.000 with 50 coins each. did his house catch on fire? did he really lose ALL of his private keys? Did he die? or he is not moving the coins for a reason (or many)? a big mistery

being the founder of bitcointalk (so it seems) he could come back here once and shed a light LOL

Satoshi wherever you are show that you will withdraw from at least 1 address

[Panda Trump]

Whatever Satoshi has mined is lost for ever. These coins have never been moved, and I think that Satoshi has lost the private keys of all these wallets. So the real number may be somewhere around BTC2,000,000.

it blows my mind how satoshi may have lost the private keys to 20.000 addresses?? thats what i heard he had : 20.000 with 50 coins each. did his house catch on fire? did he really lose ALL of his private keys? Did he die? or he is not moving the coins for a reason (or many)? a big mistery

being the founder of bitcointalk (so it seems) he could come back here once and shed a light LOL

Satoshi wherever you are show that you will withdraw from at least 1 address

And you do realize that this topic is 10 months old? I don't even get how you got here...

Feel free to farm your posts, but please do it in Spam Mega-Threads, not here... It's annoying to see these topics at the top, though they've been dead for almost a year.

[luca1073]

Whatever Satoshi has mined is lost for ever. These coins have never been moved, and I think that Satoshi has lost the private keys of all these wallets. So the real number may be somewhere around BTC2,000,000.

it blows my mind how satoshi may have lost the private keys to 20.000 addresses?? thats what i heard he had : 20.000 with 50 coins each. did his house catch on fire? did he really lose ALL of his private keys? Did he die? or he is not moving the coins for a reason (or many)? a big mistery

being the founder of bitcointalk (so it seems) he could come back here once and shed a light LOL

Satoshi wherever you are show that you will withdraw from at least 1 address

And you do realize that this topic is 10 months old? I don't even get how you got here...

Feel free to farm your posts, but please do it in Spam Mega-Threads, not here... It's annoying to see these topics at the top, though they've been dead for almost a year.

 Is this a locked topic? does it really matter that this thread is 10 months old? isn't this issue /subject still valid? even more now, due to the interest in BTC widespreading worldwide..... now do you want to know how i stumbled upon this post? by making a google search on lost(or unspent) coins. being a member of this forum i felt like leaving a reply...

[Za1n]

Agreed that the age of a post shouldn't matter if the topic is still relevant, which I think in this case it is very relevant. There are 100's of fresh topics daily that are pure garbage, like; "Is Bitcoin Cabbage?" That's probably not a real topic, but it very well could be.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I do think that the circulating supply should be used when establishing a Market Cap as that is truly what matters. If somehow some of those estimated 2 million Bitcoins assumed lost were suddenly dumped on the market, the price would crash like nothing we have seen so far. Just look at all the hype and blame for the Mt Gox bankruptcy trustee dumping a few of the 200,000 coins onto the market, so image the impact of 10x that.

Another negative to the whole basic "marktetcap is based on the total supply" argument is that every time the market does go up or down, headlines scream "Bitcoin Loses 10 Billion in One Day" due to a $500 price decline, when in actuality the relatively small number of coins traded make the impact far less than that. Most coins are locked up in one form or another, whether that be they are lost, or just being held in storage for the long game, and the few that are traded day-to-day probably only represent a very small percentage of the total supply.

[grimesrhymes]

Agreed that the age of a post shouldn't matter if the topic is still relevant, which I think in this case it is very relevant. There are 100's of fresh topics daily that are pure garbage, like; "Is Bitcoin Cabbage?" That's probably not a real topic, but it very well could be.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I do think that the circulating supply should be used when establishing a Market Cap as that is truly what matters. If somehow some of those estimated 2 million Bitcoins assumed lost were suddenly dumped on the market, the price would crash like nothing we have seen so far. Just look at all the hype and blame for the Mt Gox bankruptcy trustee dumping a few of the 200,000 coins onto the market, so image the impact of 10x that.

Another negative to the whole basic "marktetcap is based on the total supply" argument is that every time the market does go up or down, headlines scream "Bitcoin Loses 10 Billion in One Day" due to a $500 price decline, when in actuality the relatively small number of coins traded make the impact far less than that. Most coins are locked up in one form or another, whether that be they are lost, or just being held in storage for the long game, and the few that are traded day-to-day probably only represent a very small percentage of the total supply.

These are some good points. Circulating supply is just all of the coins that could possibly be sold at any time, as there is no way of knowing for certain if coins are actually lost or irretrievable then they should be included in to circulating supply. I think that the market price is already somewhat reflective of the fact many of these coins are lost as it's a fairly common exception for example that Satoshi's wallets will never be touched.