Total BTC 7,796,150 in the wild currently ?

[bbit]

Ummm that is a lot of bitcoins assuming a lot got lost / hacked / erased   but assuming there is still a lot of BTC out there where the hell do all these coins reside ? I saw some number like there are only 100,000 or less Bitcoin users total out there  so like 100,000 / 7,796,150 BTC means a lot of people have bitcoins?

what am I missing here ?

[Eveofwar]

Ummm that is a lot of bitcoins assuming a lot got lost / hacked / erased   but assuming there is still a lot of BTC out there where the hell do all these coins reside ? I saw some number like there are only 100,000 or less Bitcoin users total out there  so like 100,000 / 7,796,150 BTC means a lot of people have bitcoins?

what am I missing here ?

Coins don't get "erased".

[bbit]

Ummm that is a lot of bitcoins assuming a lot got lost / hacked / erased   but assuming there is still a lot of BTC out there where the hell do all these coins reside ? I saw some number like there are only 100,000 or less Bitcoin users total out there  so like 100,000 / 7,796,150 BTC means a lot of people have bitcoins?

what am I missing here ?

Coins don't get "erased".

hmmm good point ...Ok, I concede that point I meant "erased" as in " lost wallet dat. on people's computers say if the hard drive was erased.

[cbeast]

So that means the "Early Adopters" are hoarding an average of 78 BTC. Dang those rich people!

[bbit]

So that means the "Early Adopters" are hoarding an average of 78 BTC. Dang those rich people!

Didn't have an opinion one way or the other just didn't know where all the coins could be but 78 btc each person not bad! 

[Phinnaeus Gage]

So that means the "Early Adopters" are hoarding an average of 78 BTC. Dang those rich people!

Didn't have an opinion one way or the other just didn't know where all the coins could be but 78 btc each person not bad! 

This is great news! Now that we've done the math, I'm sure Jimmy Buffet with Berkshire Hathaway will soon be adding Bitcoin to their portfolio. Pass me that tequila. Not that one! The one with the worm in it.

[bbit]

So that means the "Early Adopters" are hoarding an average of 78 BTC. Dang those rich people!

Didn't have an opinion one way or the other just didn't know where all the coins could be but 78 btc each person not bad! 

This is great news! Now that we've done the math, I'm sure Jimmy Buffet with Berkshire Hathaway will soon be adding Bitcoin to their portfolio. Pass me that tequila. Not that one! The one with the worm in it.

Didn't you hear! Warren Buffet the other Buffet  is "the manipulator"  that everyone talks about! pass me the corona with lime in it! 

[BurtW]

I don't know if you have see this but check out http://ecdsa.org/stats.html

If you take your cursor and run it across the graph from left to right is animates BTC movemment.

If you take your cursor all the way to the right and then pick a point in time, let say one year ago, and then calculate the blue area from day one through the day one year ago this blue area would represent all BTC that have not moved in over one year (lost, destroyed, saved/hoarded).

Notice the large number of BTC that were created in the first year that have never moved.  I believe that in that time when BTC was just a "toy" some (many?) people ran their CPU miners, got bored with it and then deleted the program (lost forever), others collected a bunch when they were basically free and are sitting on them = the "early adopters"

[phatsphere]

hacked

"hacked" coins aren't lost, for instance. they just belong to someone else now.

[MysteryMiner]

hacked

"hacked" coins aren't lost, for instance. they just belong to someone else now.

Exactly!  

Unfortuneatly there is no way to tell how many coins are lost forever due to lost wallet.dat files or other malfunctions. Maybe they are hoarded and sitting in a flash drive in unabomber's cabin.

[BurtW]

I think it may be possible to figure out some of the coins that have been destroyed on purpose.  But it is probably not worth the effort because my method would only account for a small part of the BTC that have been lost or destroyed.

My idea would be to search for and find all addresses like the following addresses by searching for longer strings of words and phrases (in any language):

Code:

1But1DontWantToGoAmongMadxxxzDmyW6
1Peop1eA1iceRemarkedxxxxxxxxxuLyKu
12ohYouCantHe1pThatxxxxxxxxxzCjyMs
19SaidTheCatWereA11MadHerexxyTvEir
191mMadYoureMadxxxxxxxxxxxxxvwA4Up
1HowDoYouKnow1mMadSaidA1icexxZA4Nr
12YouMustBeSaidTheCatxxxxxxxz2tFa2
12orYouWou1dntHaveComeHerexxvtHbqq
1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE
1BitTaLkTVChristmasSpeciaLXXRix9Ea

and add up all the BTC sent to these and other addresses like them.  All of these BTC have been destroyed on purpose.

[MysteryMiner]

Or probably someone have run Vanity Gen for long time or are simply lucky to have such adreses.

[lonelyminer (Peter Šurda)]

My idea would be to search for and find all addresses like the following addresses by searching for longer strings of words and phrases (in any language):

Code:

1But1DontWantToGoAmongMadxxxzDmyW6
1Peop1eA1iceRemarkedxxxxxxxxxuLyKu
12ohYouCantHe1pThatxxxxxxxxxzCjyMs
19SaidTheCatWereA11MadHerexxyTvEir
191mMadYoureMadxxxxxxxxxxxxxvwA4Up
1HowDoYouKnow1mMadSaidA1icexxZA4Nr
12YouMustBeSaidTheCatxxxxxxxz2tFa2
12orYouWou1dntHaveComeHerexxvtHbqq
1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE
1BitTaLkTVChristmasSpeciaLXXRix9Ea

and add up all the BTC sent to these and other addresses like them.  All of these BTC have been destroyed on purpose.

I respectfully disagree that this is a correct conclusion. If these addresses were made up, why would they contain random characters? The address can be any base58-encoded string. The public key of the recipient is unknown, it's not a part of the blockchain. Why not then just make up any address that does not contain random chars?

At the Prague bitcoin conference, I was at one of the Prague hackspaces and bought a beer with Bitcoins. The payment address they have in their "store" is 1BRMLAB7nryYgFGrG8x9SYaokb8r2ZwAsX (brmlab -> name of the hackspace). Why would they put a fake address for payments up on the wall?

[BurtW]

First a public address does not contain just random characters.  It is a structure that is calculated from the public key which itself is a structure being a point in the eliptical curve group.  You realize they all start with the number 1, right?  Well the entire structure is defined as:

address = base58(versionbyte + ripemd160(sha256(pubkey)) + hashCheck)

where hashCheck = first4bytesof(sha256(sha256(versionbyte + ripemd160(sha256(pubkey)))))

and versionbyte is 0 in the real network and 111 in the test network.

Second, these addresses could not be made by vanitygen - it would take too long.  And by too long I mean the following:

Here are some estimates for generating some addresses using just my laptop.  You can extrapolate to a faster system, even a GPU system or even 100,000 GPUs and see that it is “impossible”:

Code:

Exact pattern     Time
1	          found 1HszrwReND62cBZUBZhqLTPKxAoSsANuxK instantly
12                found 12UpCienamnaM8Vw8pdTEFJ39Mth23CK3N instantly
123               found 123r9SzaKwgZF6xjit3Svs1jTU8TWitrcn instantly
1234              found 1234Ru7M2a6HHXpr5sE31n7TdgSTXcREen  instantly
12345             found 12345RDRciJmSBywxSGTJSHYrvAr4xBVUH  in about 30 seconds
123456            about 30 minutes
1234567           about 1.2 days
12345678          about 70 days
123456789         about 11 years
123456789a        about 640 years
123456789ab       over 36,000 years
123456789abc      over 2 million years
123456789abcd     over 100 million years
123456789abcde    over 7 billion years
123456789abcdef   over 400 billion years
123456789abcdefg  over 20 trillion years
123456789abcdefgh over 1 quadrillion years

So if you are going to go to all this trouble why not try to guess the richest public address instead of some small number of lost BTC?  For example:

1LJY4ey9FVKKuodaDr84sdZDXLy5o8nFDY which as of the end of October contained 105,000 BTC, or about $250,000.00

From above you can kind see that it would take a “long” time to find the key pair that generated any one public address like the one above.

In fact the vanitygen program will not calculate how long it would take (too large) but to just get most of it (which does not get you the coins) here is the output from the program showing that you have a 50% chance of finding only most of it in 6e32 years:

C:\downloads\www.bitcoin.org>vanitygen 1LJY4ey9FVKKuodaDr84sdZDXLy
Difficulty: 2794725737275825531787289201741966674434639341
[102.98 Kkey/s][total 1497088][Prob 0.0%][50% in 5.965101e+032y]

[BurtW]

Here is how an address like 1BRMLAB7nryYgFGrG8x9SYaokb8r2ZwAsX is found:

Code:

Generate a random private key - this is any random number in the finite field used by Bitcoin.
Calculate the corresponding public key (a point in the elliptical group generated from the finite field)
Calculate the corresponding public key address (using the formula from my previous post)
Check the first part of this calculated public key address and see if it matches 1BRMLAB.
If it does then quit, if not go back and try again.

After running this algorithm for a reasonable amount of time the key pair that generated 1BRMLAB7nryYgFGrG8x9SYaokb8r2ZwAsX was found.

If you run the program again to find another vanity address that starts with 1BRMLAB you will find a totally different key pair and a totally different public address.  It will be just another one of the very large number of public key addresses that just happen to start with 1BRMLAB.

[bbit]

Here is how an address like 1BRMLAB7nryYgFGrG8x9SYaokb8r2ZwAsX is found:

Code:

Generate a random private key - this is any random number in the finite field used by Bitcoin.
Calculate the corresponding public key (a point in the elliptical group generated from the finite field)
Calculate the corresponding public key address (using the formula from my previous post)
Check the first part of this calculated public key address and see if it matches 1BRMLAB.
If it does then quit, if not go back and try again.

After running this algorithm for a reasonable amount of time the key pair that generated 1BRMLAB7nryYgFGrG8x9SYaokb8r2ZwAsX was found.

If you run the program again to find another vanity address that starts with 1BRMLAB you will find a totally different key pair and a totally different public address.  It will be just another one of the very large number of public key addresses that just happen to start with 1BRMLAB.

Sounds like you've discovered a way to 'treasure hunt' ?  Not a bad idea.

[BurtW]

Not me.  The vanitygen program!

[lonelyminer (Peter Šurda)]

address = base58(versionbyte + ripemd160(sha256(pubkey)) + hashCheck)

Aaah ok, I did not realise the address contains a checksum. That clarifies it. Cheers.