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=198.0Lost 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
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