Rate of bitcoins being lost vs. rate of bitcoins being mined

[remotemass]

Hello,

I am interested in estimates of the rate of bitcoins being lost vs. the rate of bitcoins being mined.
Ideally, I would like to see a chart with that relationship with estimates in the past, present and future.

Any hints or help on doing this research?

[ranochigo]

Simply impossible to truly determine the non-provably burned Bitcoins to any degree of accuracy. Coins are lost through several methods, be it intentional burning or accidental. The latter is far harder to identify as there might just be dormant addresses which could become active in the future. Of course, certain accidental burning is identifiable.

Chainanalysis did a report on this before, might be slightly outdated: https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/money-supply.

[Upgrade00]

You'll have to define what 'lost' means to you, some consider it to be Bitcoin's that have not moved for xxx number of years or addresses whose private keys have been lost.
The latter is very difficult to prove as not all users announce publicly that they lost assess to their balance, if you chose to go with addresses that have been dormant;

• Narrow it down to only addresses that has a balance in it,
• Here's a thread from LoyceV on List of all Bitcoin address with a balance. Data on much older addresses may be harder to find,
• Check when those addresses where last involved in a transaction and determine which time frame indicates they are lost.
Not sure if this would work, but it's worth a try.

Data on rate of Bitcoin's mines is fairly easy to get.

[LoyceV]

Check when those addresses where last involved in a transaction and determine which time frame indicates they are lost.

There's no fixed time frame for this, a HODLer (such as Satoshi Nakamoto) could keep them from the very first blocks mined. There's no way to know if they kept the keys.

[o_e_l_e_o]

The only coins which are provably lost are coins which are sent to OP_RETURN outputs, coins which miners failed to properly claim when mining each individual block, or the original 50 coins from the genesis block. These coins can never be spent or recovered. Coins which are almost certainly lost are coins which have been sent to burn addresses, such as a 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE. The chances of anyone ever stumbling across a private key to such an address is incredibly small.

Beyond that, it is complete guesswork. Lots of people say they have lost coins, but many of these coins have been lost in custodial services, exchanges, web wallets, etc., and so the service in question can still move these coins. Lots of people say they have lost coins, but could well be saying that for any number of reasons when it is not true. Lots of people assume that Satoshi's coins are lost, but he could come back tomorrow and move them all. Any coins "lost" in addresses which have been reused or in old P2PK address could potentially be recovered by a quantum computer in the future.

I've seen lots of estimates of between 2 and 4 millions coins that have been lost, but there is no proof that that is the case.

[Upgrade00]

<snip>

I'm aware of this and I personally would not put a timeframe within which I would consider dormant coins to be lost, I was just throwing in an idea should the OP have a different view than mine; they can draw their own estimates.

[pooya87]

I am interested in estimates of the rate of bitcoins being lost vs. the rate of bitcoins being mined.

Rate of bitcoin creation is obvious (it is currently 6.25 per block).
Rate of bitcoin being lost is not possible to measure or even estimate. The ONLY thing we have is the provably unspendable outputs that are mostly OP_RETURN outputs. Coins send to these scripts are lost forever.
Even though blockchair explorer has become very terrible after the recent change but you still can find them here.
You may need to change the value and set it to at least 1 satoshi yourself, the link doesn't seem to be recognized

You can see that there are coins that are being burnt but the amount per month is usually less than a 1000 satoshi. For example blockchain doesn't seem to even find any for May and June.

[Kong Hey Pakboy]

I think that overtime as the blocks get more harder to be completed in mining, lost coins rate will probably catch up or not because as people is learning more about bitcoin and it's value, I think that they will be more careful because they don't want to lose something valuable like bitcoin.

[mk4]

This is one of those things that while we can create estimates based on some data(probably bitcoin addresses that are dormant for 5+ years or something), it's going to be heavily heavily inaccurate that I wouldn't even call it an "estimate". The data is simply going to be so inaccurate that it's just as bad as trying to think if Bitcoin would still exist in a thousand years.

[o_e_l_e_o]

This is one of those things that while we can create estimates based on some data(probably bitcoin addresses that are dormant for 5+ years or something), it's going to be heavily heavily inaccurate that I wouldn't even call it an "estimate".

Consider the individual who signed a message from 100 addresses calling CSW a fraud. Each of those addresses contains bitcoin which has not moved in 10+ years, and yet we obviously know that they are not lost despite this since the individual has demonstrate they still possess the relevant private keys. Assuming that any specific length of time equates to coins being lost is simply incorrect.

Even though blockchair explorer has become very terrible after the recent change

Oh my god, yes. It is absolutely awful, and things which took me seconds to do before I have either spent 15+ minutes trying to do or seem to be impossible to do at all now. And what happened to dark mode? The search and filter functions are horrible, the transaction screen is horrible, the layout is horrible. I've started using mempool.space to look up individual transactions, but are there any other block explorers which had the same functionality as the old Blockchair? I will happily switch instead of using this new site.

[hatshepsut93]

The only thing we can assume is that much more coins were lost in the past than now. Things like mnemonic seeds or hardware wallets didn't exist in early days, and people didn't value Bitcoin much, so it was pretty common to forget about your wallet files. But today almost every newbie has wallet backups, and people pay much more attention to storing their coins, because now they view it as a strong investment. Also, coins were much more concentrated in the past. People had hundreds or thousands of Bitcoin and were losing them, today if BTC is lost, it's probably less than 1 coin.

[pooya87]

are there any other block explorers which had the same functionality as the old Blockchair?

Sadly I haven't seen any explorer that gives the option to "sort" the results (transactions, blocks, outputs,...) based on a lot of different factors which was THE feature I loved about blockchair explorer and it is not unusable anymore.

There is smartbit with very limited capabilities but I mostly like their Api Playground https://www.smartbit.com.au/api since you can run all API calls in your browser without having to write a code. There is also https://www.smartbit.com.au/op-returns which can categorize them based on "type" of the OP_RETURN "content".