About 20% of all Bitcoin (BTC) in circulation was lost – Study shows

[bryant.coleman]

The figure of 3.6 million BTC sounds right for me. Even my initial days I was careless with some of my wallets. I believe that I would have lost at least BTC0.10 due to carelessness in backing up the wallets. Back then, it was not a big amount. Bit now the same amount of coins are worth $3,500. I lost most of these coins, when I failed to backup Instawallet addresses. I had the option of contacting Instawallet admin, but I was too lazy to do that in 2013.

^ also saddened with your loss, friend. before Bitcoin make a record ATH of up to $ 20k the first time, many Bitcoin holders did not care and were serious about storing their passwords and private keys as a result many lost their Bitcoin because it was locked in their private wallets. 0.1 BTC right now is really very valuable.

Well.. this is what Satoshi said about the lost coins:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=198.0

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

I wonder though, is there a point where the difficulty of generating a new coinbase is so high that it would make more sense to try to recover keys for lost coins or steal other people's coins instead?  The difficulty of that is really high so for now it makes a lot more sense to generate but I just wonder what the real figures are.. would that ever become more productive?  Maybe Satoshi can address this..

Computers have to get about 2^200 times faster before that starts to be a problem.  Someone with lots of compute power could make more money by generating than by trying to steal.

So I would assume that I made a donation to everyone else, for the greater good. See, I made my contribution to popularize the idea of cryptocurrency. So probably it's not all bad, and I need to stop regretting about it  .

[Beparanf]

20%? It seemed to me that this figure is much less. What is the reason for this?

I believe they exclude Satoshi Nakamoto holdings. The 20% is based on the wallet address that holding Bitcoin that do not move for a long period of time which you can verify via Blockchain. The exact figure is not important, Rough estimate on the total can already express what the author of the article really mean.

[acener]

I don't think we would really know the percentage of lost Bitcoin,
Because some might just be asleep but the owner still have their private key or some are just a long term holder that might be waiting for something.
But I also think that there would be many BTC that has been lost forever because the early user forgot their wallet or something.

[Expecto]

The New York Times, referring to a study by Chainalysis, writes that about 20% of the mined 18.6 million BTC worth approximately $ 140 billion are lost or are in wallets to which investors have lost access (forgot passwords, etc.)  Read the full Article here: https://worldpublicityblog.com/index.php/2021/01/17/about-20-of-all-bitcoin-btc-in-circulation-was-lost-study-shows/

It is really a huge rate I think. But there are really so many people who have forgot about their password, private key etc. or can't find where they store the information. The system of cryptocurrencies doesn't give a second chance for these kind of people as there is no way to recover the info.

[(o)(o)ilikeboobs(o)(o)]

Those are addresses that own bitcoins at a very early time. They are careless and lose their money in their wallet without a password or secret phrase to recover their Bitcoins. This is a pity for those who already own them. I even asked my friend in 2017 to buy 16 Bitcoins and he rushed to put Bitcoin in his wallet but forgot to write down the recovery characters. Now he looks at his bitcoins every day and can't do anything about it. He has repeatedly contacted Blockchain.info but is still unable to recover his Bitcoins.

[Vishnu.Reang]

In 2015, I lost exactly 0.08 btc to my disbelief. I never believed in backups and did not think that my bitcoins would be lost with the slightest mistake.
My Windows was removed from the system that year and my wallet was completely destroyed. I even called support and ... but it was useless.
But the figures shown on these sites are not accurate and they are all approximate i believe that this number is less than what actually happened.

Don't worry.. it happens to everyone.. at least you were holding coins from 2015, when the prices were really low. The exchange rate was around $250 per coin back then. I purchased my first BTC in 2017, and by then the price had increased to $900. And a few months later, it had further increased by 22x. I won't be much surprised if the proportion of lost coins is much higher. Because people lose small amounts every now and then, and they hardly mention about it. Adding all together, we may get a figure that is much higher than 20%.

[pawanjain]

As many have said earlier, the data for lost bitcoins can never be accurate as there is no sure way of determining that.
There might be people holding bitcoins since 2011 but have never accessed it and that cannot be counted in lost bitcoins.
So I believe that the % would be less than what it is shown in the chainanalysis reports.