Let's add up the KNOWN lost bitcoins

[Otoh]

yep & he decides to send a few of those to all the kind ppl who sent him tips

[1714508865]

1714508865

[1714508865]

1714508865

[1714508865]

1714508865

[1714508865]

1714508865

[wachtwoord]

yep & he decides to send a few of those to all the kind ppl who sent him tips

Well at least you're a nice generous drunk (better than the kind of people that get aggressive)

[Robin]

I got 0.05BTC from the first public faucet in 2011, and then deleted my wallet by lack of interest.

+0.05

[asc366]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=349082

7500 BTC gone.

[solex]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=349082

7500 BTC gone.

Possibly. Assume Bitcoin gets to $3000. Would they leave $22 million unsearched for?
Fence off the whole area, shift by hand the top 2 meters of rubbish (portable conveyor to pile it aside?) The disk could be found and the coins recovered.

[BitcoinBug]

Is landfill owned by a private company? When bitcoin rises high enough, somebody can buy the whole company for a fraction of 7500 BTC

[atlosas]

+0.3

[bryant.coleman]

I had around 0.01 BTC in 8 instawallets. Lost them when Instawallet went offline. At that time, I think the exchange rate was somewhere around $20. So made no effort to recover them. And it is not possible to recover them now.

[dserrano5]

I had around 0.01 BTC in 8 instawallets. Lost them when Instawallet went offline. At that time, I think the exchange rate was somewhere around $20. So made no effort to recover them. And it is not possible to recover them now.

That's not lost bitcoins, someone has access to them.

[Anillos2]

https://blockchain.info/address/1C6YCVUxhsvYbrcGN3h5xvar7JKhM5BizJ

It's a Instawallet address, I don't know if someone have the private key.

[bryant.coleman]

Check this wallet:

https://blockchain.info/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5qkfy4g3Hi

This one contains 8,000 BTCs and is not active ever since 2009 April.

I think someone started mining Bitcoins in February 2009, but either lost interest in BTCs or lost the password two months later.

[wachtwoord]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=349082

7500 BTC gone.

Possibly. Assume Bitcoin gets to $3000. Would they leave $22 million unsearched for?
Fence off the whole area, shift by hand the top 2 meters of rubbish (portable conveyor to pile it aside?) The disk could be found and the coins recovered.

Imagine finding the drive after investing so much time and resources and it being corrupted

[sssubito]

I enjoyed reading this thread. It's interesting and a bit scary how not only computer noobs loose substantial amounts of Bitcoins. But it's only really scary because of current value of Bitcoins...

Nevertheless: theft, loss or corruption of the wallet is an apparent problem which Bitcoin has to deal with in a better way. Especially when Bitcoin is growing and is becoming more and more common, which I expect everyone who likes it is looking for.

An immediate idea I had is some kind of possibility to save a distributed encrypted version of your wallet in some kind of Bitcoin network cloud. Extend the Bitcoin protocol in a suitable way so that nodes can provide some amount of cloud storage. A wallet that goes into this distributed cloud storage is spread to a certain number of nodes and the Bitcoin network protocol has to take care that there are always enough "copies" available, so that restauration of a particular wallet is always possible. Only securely encrypted wallets are distributed to this Bitcoin wallet cloud storage. The wallet's owner only has to take care that he or she doesn't forget the encryption key/passphrase/whatever. The Bitcoin client should provide necessary assistance for this, like printout of keys or QR codes.

I have not elaborated this idea any more, but I'm confident it could make wallet.dat wipes, harddisk failures/sudden deaths much less of a threat to your beloved Bitcoins. It's a pity and shame to permanently make them unspendable...

[SgtSpike]

I enjoyed reading this thread. It's interesting and a bit scary how not only computer noobs loose substantial amounts of Bitcoins. But it's only really scary because of current value of Bitcoins...

Nevertheless: theft, loss or corruption of the wallet is an apparent problem which Bitcoin has to deal with in a better way. Especially when Bitcoin is growing and is becoming more and more common, which I expect everyone who likes it is looking for.

An immediate idea I had is some kind of possibility to save a distributed encrypted version of your wallet in some kind of Bitcoin network cloud. Extend the Bitcoin protocol in a suitable way so that nodes can provide some amount of cloud storage. A wallet that goes into this distributed cloud storage is spread to a certain number of nodes and the Bitcoin network protocol has to take care that there are always enough "copies" available, so that restauration of a particular wallet is always possible. Only securely encrypted wallets are distributed to this Bitcoin wallet cloud storage. The wallet's owner only has to take care that he or she doesn't forget the encryption key/passphrase/whatever. The Bitcoin client should provide necessary assistance for this, like printout of keys or QR codes.

I have not elaborated this idea any more, but I'm confident it could make wallet.dat wipes, harddisk failures/sudden deaths much less of a threat to your beloved Bitcoins. It's a pity and shame to permanently make them unspendable...

I think a torrent project along these lines could work well.  Have a website where a user can upload an ENCRYPTED wallet file in any format (i.e., a user could encrypt it multiple times with multiple methods if they wanted), and the website would publish monthly torrents with a collection of all wallets uploaded to date.  As long as at least a handful of people download and seed the collection, people would have a permanent distributed backup of their Bitcoin wallet.

Of course, the downside is, once the encryption method that is used is broken or bruteforceable, people would have to abandon use of those particular Bitcoin addresses.

[sssubito]

I won't be happy with a solution based on some other and independent torrent client. What should bind those torrent clients to maintain the storage, except for Bitcoin idealism?

My full Bitcoin-qt client has to deal with the whoppy blockchain worth more than a dozen GB of storage (actually this sucks a bit). I wouldn't care if it asked me to use another 100 or 200 MB of storage space for the distributed wallet cloud storage. This could save quite a bunch of wallets.

The majority of Bitcoin addicts needs some kind of Bitcoin client, thus he's connected to the Bitcoin network, connected to the fictitious distributed wallet cloud storage which every full client would support. Lots of wallets saved, no bits and bytes were harmed... 

[Rassah]

The idea of storing wallets in some sort of a distributed online fashion, where all you (or anyone else) need to remember is a password to access those coins, is really no different from just keeping your coins in a brainwallet with the private key derived from that password. The proble is that if anyone else guesses that password, they will have access to all your money as well.

[dowsey14]

https://blockchain.info/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5qkfy4g3Hi

This one contains 8,000 BTCs and is not active ever since 2009 April.

Imagine...just imagine finding a wallet file somewhere that points to that address and has the coins intact?

Just think of all the potential suicides that would have resulted from these now catastrophic losses. Wow

The poor guys who lost 7000+ and 27000 bitcoins...I wonder what they would be feeling right now if they haven't already killed themselves?

If it were me, I'd still be around. I'm a tough guy. I've been through a LOT of hard shit - parents divorced when I was 9, I was sexually assaulted that same year, lost my mother to suicide 3 years later, endured years of school bullying, lost half of my sexual function from a bike riding accident, and when I was 23 my girlfriend who I was planning to marry had an abortion because her mother didn't want her to have the baby out of wedlock.

So, at the end of the day - it's only money. If I had $8M or even $30M today I doubt I would ever recover the emotional losses that I have incurred. Remember, Kurt Cobain had millions and guess what he did in spite of his immense material wealth? He blew his brains out...

But damned if there wouldn't be some guys who would decide to enter the eternal void due to insurmountable grief. Ouch. What did I say? Ouch! Let me say that or more time...OUCH!!!!!!!

[Imahara]

Have you guys included Countrparty?

They bootstrapped their system by sending bitcoin to an unrecoverable address, some 2000 bitcoin in total:
These bitcoins are lost forever because the chance of making up an address like that and then finding the private key for it is pretty much 0.

https://blockchain.info/address/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr

Consider it a gift to the bitcoin community. Unless of course their system works and starts gaining crypto purchasing power at the expense of Bitcoin.

[davidpbrown]

Would it not be possible to take a sum of stale coins - for example all those not moved since end 2010 and then over time learn what fraction of those came alive later. Doing that over a period might suggest what is lost and what fraction is normally forced back into the open after such a long time.

[anonuser777]

I got 0.05BTC from the first public faucet in 2011, and then deleted my wallet by lack of interest.

+0.05

I did the same. It seemed like there was nothing you could do with bitcoins back then.