Real total supply

[joniboini]

I think the amount of accessible bitcoin is far less than 16 million. I would go as far as to say the amount is probably half of that. You cannot imagine how many coins have been lost over the years.

It would be great if you can present some data instead of some inaccurate guess. There's a post up there that you can use to filter transaction data, so you can research on your own. Without something like that, your argument that only half of the supply is left can be easily rebuked by saying something along the line of "you cannot imagine how many coins are not lost over the years even if people believe they are".

[dzonikg28]

I think the amount of accessible bitcoin is far less than 16 million. I would go as far as to say the amount is probably half of that. You cannot imagine how many coins have been lost over the years.

It would be great if you can present some data instead of some inaccurate guess. There's a post up there that you can use to filter transaction data, so you can research on your own. Without something like that, your argument that only half of the supply is left can be easily rebuked by saying something along the line of "you cannot imagine how many coins are not lost over the years even if people believe they are".

As this guy makes such substantial claims it would definitely be necessary to see some evidence backing his claims up. I don't think half is lost. From the reports I read the number four million seems to be about right although it is very hard to estimate even for companies with the tools to investigate that question technically.

One big fraction of that amount might be Satoshis coins alone and nobody knows where he or she or they is or are and whether those people are still alive. SCW did file another lawsuit I think but by now nobody believes him anymore.

Anyway, the number is hard to estimate, but more Bitcoins are most likely going to be lost in the future (death, etc), making Bitcoin truly deflationary.

[thecodebear]

If we subtract Satoshi’s 1 million BTC (as Plan B does in his STF2X model), should we also subtract the ~4 million BTC estimated to have been lost?

So that would make total supply around 16 million BTC. Some of these have a private key that is encrypted and the password forgotten, whereas others have lost the private key entirely, like the hard drive lost at the rubbish tip in Manchester in 2013 with a key for 800BTC on it. So the former will eventually be able to be brute-forced in coming decades when quantum computers can be accessed. But the lost keys are lost forever.

i'd be careful not to overestimate the number of lost bitcoin. Seems like people like to just assume any coins that haven't been moved since like 2012 or 2013 are lost, when that is clearly not the case. Proven by the fact that someone has for the past couple years been occasionally moving large amounts of bitcoin that haven't moved since 2010/2011. I forget the details but it has happened several times the past couple years. I generally assume maybe at 1.5-2 million, plus Satoshi's presumed 1 million, have been lost. This number of lost bitcoin will always increase by small amounts though because people will always unexpectedly die without having made arrangements for bitcoin they had in cold storage and no one will ever get access to them. Bitcoin is deflationary forever.

[hazenyc]

How do they actually calculate the number of lost coins? Are they just looking at what tx outputs seem to be idle for a very long time or do they have a rationale that they base their argument on?

Pretty much as you said - just coins which haven't been moved in a long time. To say that all coins which haven't been moved in >5 years are lost is wildly inaccurate at best. We see coins which haven't moved in over 5 years being transacted all the time, and we've seen messages being signed from address holding coins which haven't moved in over a decade, proving that they are not lost either.

The only coins which are provably lost and can be subtracted from the maximum supply are those which miners failed to claim in the first place, the 50 coins from the genesis block which cannot be spent, and those sent to OP_RETURN outputs. I am aware of about 130 BTC lost in the first of those categories, and about 27 BTC currently sent to OP_RETURN outputs, meaning the total amount of provably burned bitcoin is only around 200 BTC.

You could relatively safely include all bitcoin sent to obvious burner addresses, but once you start including coins which are inactive or you think belong to Satoshi, then your estimates become increasingly inaccurate.

That is exactly what I thought. Just from the stories that you hear here and there, the probability that the lost coins are in the very low millions is relatively high. I remember a story of a guy who lost 70,000 on a hard drive I think, and another with 30,000. So even while this is wild speculation, it is likely that people did indeed throw away hard drives with Bitcoin on them. Then again you can't even verify if these guys just wanted a nice article in the newspaper about them.

But if you think about those losing Bitcoin, it is hard to conceive of the circumstances how that could have happened. If someone is literate enough to set up mining operations during Bitcoin's early days, those people probably knew relatively early on that there was a market for Bitcoin. Why would someone just throw a hard drive out the window with Bitcoin on there? I don't know.

But I fully agree with what you said in regards to coins not being moved >5 years are most likely lost. That is certainly nonsense.