Is it possible to find lost bitcoins?

[tairus91]

Millions of bitcoins are considered lost. Who will find them?

[stompix]

Nobody.

Because they are not hidden in sand on some island or in some garbage bin.
They are hidden by math.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104461.0
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/22/is-it-possible-to-brute-force-bitcoin-address-creation-in-order-to-steal-money

Haven't double checked the numbers but those might be close, basically you will need 2^45 years.

[senin]

If the bitcoins were lost for some reason, no one will find them. They completely disappear from circulation. This is the essence of the digital currency. Therefore, it is necessary to reconcile that many bitcoins will disappear forever, if someone has forgotten the password from his mobile wallet or for other reasons has ceased to have access to it.

[hosseinimr93]

The only way to have access to that bitcoins is importing them into a new wallet; and it's impossible without the private key. That bitcoins are out of circulation forever and nobody can use them.

[ebliever]

Millions of bitcoins are considered lost. Who will find them?

Brute forcing private keys is hopeless. What might be possible is recovering bitcoin from wallets whose passwords have been lost if the wallet file is retained, if the passwords are not too difficult to crack. And there might be bitcoins considered "lost" because the original owner has died, and whomever inherited their equipment has not noticed/found/deciphered their bitcoin wallet setup (or paper wallet tucked away somewhere). There are varying degrees of "lostness" to bitcoins that are considered lost.

[Soros Shorts]

Millions of bitcoins are considered lost. Who will find them?

What is your criteria that you used to get the "millions"? Coins that have not moved in the last 5 years? Just because they didn't move doesn't mean that those coins are lost. They could very well be in cold storage.

[biocoin_lavkalavka]

A digital currency that has been lost due to the forgetfulness or death of a user, a broken technique or intentional destruction can never be restored.
In addition, several thousand bitcoins were deliberately destroyed. For example, the start-up Counterparty "burned" 2130 bitcoins in the process of distributing its own digital currency called XCP and it was not a single case.

[aardvark15]

If the bitcoins were lost for some reason, no one will find them. They completely disappear from circulation. This is the essence of the digital currency. Therefore, it is necessary to reconcile that many bitcoins will disappear forever, if someone has forgotten the password from his mobile wallet or for other reasons has ceased to have access to it.

I agree that these are permanently lost coins. I think what will happen is that there will constantly be Bitcoins lost every year because of lost private keys, forgotten wallets, or just someone dies and no one knows they had Bitcoins. Or someone does and family members don't know how to access the Bitcoins.

What will happen is that at some point, there will be more Bitcoins lost every year than Bitcoins mined every year. This is because the number of Bitcoins mined will constantly be dropping while the number lost will increase.

[NorrisK]

The only way to "find" them would be to stumble upon the private key that holds them.

The odds of this happening are so small that it is basically impossible to find them.

[klarki]

The probability of this is very small.

[deisik]

Millions of bitcoins are considered lost. Who will find them?

What's lost is lost

But there can still be a workaround, though. Let's assume that Bitcoin doesn't die in a few hundred years from now on, and our descendants (or even us ourselves if we manage to live that long) could reclaim these coins (coins that didn't move all that time) as public property for the common good (after some grace period expires within which you could claim the legitimate ownership of them, of course). It would require some modification to the Bitcoin protocol, but other than that (and consensus required for that), there are no particular hurdles or issues to do exactly that, i.e. find them back

[pressureonme]

Nobody.

Because they are not hidden in sand on some island or in some garbage bin.
They are hidden by math.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104461.0
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/22/is-it-possible-to-brute-force-bitcoin-address-creation-in-order-to-steal-money

Haven't double checked the numbers but those might be close, basically you will need 2^45 years.

Somebody says brute force method would work to encrypt some wallets, well we see it's in terms of thousands years to encrypt them. No method would work to obtain lost wallets then.

[BitcoinUKmedia]

Could a bitcoin mining rig be put to use try to hash the right private key - or is that a stupid answer?

[flippener]

Let's assume that Bitcoin doesn't die in a few hundred years from now on, and our descendants (or even us ourselves if we manage to live that long) could reclaim these coins (coins that didn't move all that time) as public property for the common good

If you're looking that far into the future presumably brute force hacking could have improved so much that the missing bitcoins could be recovered.

[batang_bitcoin]

Millions of bitcoins are considered lost. Who will find them?

They are burned bitcoins and there's no way for anybody to recover them even Satoshi himself, unless he'll do something with the codings and will recover the private keys and the seeds of this wallets. But if bitcoins are gone now, they are totally lost forever. And that's making the supply lesser in the market others are burning bitcoins.

[dothebeats]

Could a bitcoin mining rig be put to use try to hash the right private key - or is that a stupid answer?

You guess it right. It's a stupid answer. Bitcoins that are lost together with the private key of the address they are in are lost in limbo and would be very hard to recover. Theoretically, it would require millions of quantum computer to start brute-forcing just a single address since there are 2^96 private keys that is a "possible" pair to the public address.

[galeriademodacom]

"Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone" - Satoshi Nakamoto

[J Gambler]

Millions of bitcoins are considered lost. Who will find them?

i think it is impossible to find it. Due to the anonymously of bitcoin there will be no traces of lost bitcoins. We all know that bitcoin is anonymous so if there will be lost i think it can never be found  because it has no traces. That will be our disadvantage and an advantage also for us. Just earn it again.

[CARrency]

Millions of bitcoins are considered lost. Who will find them?

i think it is impossible to find it. Due to the anonymously of bitcoin there will be no traces of lost bitcoins. We all know that bitcoin is anonymous so if there will be lost i think it can never be found  because it has no traces. That will be our disadvantage and an advantage also for us. Just earn it again.

As I've been saying to my other posts, bitcoin is not really anonymous, there is been a proof about that. The reason that lost bitcoin can't be found is because paper wallets need your passcode, but if you save it to your computer and deleted it, you're done. Also, if you send them to a wrong address which is not really a bitcoin address, that will be void.

[babar123]

those bitcoin are like gift for everyone, they decrease the inflation and permits bitcoin to worth more, it is rather a good new that many bitcoin got burnt for the bitocin holders, would be nice to know how many but we will never know, its certainly much more than we all believe