Let's add up the KNOWN lost bitcoins

[bg002h]

Has anyone searched old forum posts for lost coins from old members who may not have visited in a long time?

[1713952609]

1713952609

[1713952609]

1713952609

[1713952609]

1713952609

[1713952609]

1713952609

[mb300sd]

I may or may not have lost ~1300 because of a lost encryption key... Heres to hoping the data recovery company can get my bitlocker key off a dead flash drive.

[opticbit]

2btc was on my phone, Put cyanogen mod 9 on, i Thought I backed up the wallet file, but I can't remember where I put it.

[arklan]

when i first got into bitcoin, i mined for a while on my nvidia geforce 260... got up to about 2.25 btc. backed up the wallet along the way of course, and password encrypted the rar file using part of the "ring script" aka, that phrase inscribed on the "one ring" from lord of the rings. after reinstalling windows, the encrypted copy was the only backup i had. go to retrive it and... wrong password? what? oh god! hours pass, trying every concievable capitaliziation and spelling variation i could think of, searching the forum for ways to recover the unecrypted wallet or such... to no avail, of course.

then a year later or so i tried it again just for the heck of it and opened the file on the first try, of course. loss SAVED!

so, no losses here! but still, very interestign thread. makes me cringe at the thought of what the total losses are worth at current spot price...

[Dansker]

Interesting thread, and the numbers in here needs to be taken into account when trying to guesstimate what " BTC will be worth if X happens.

[tacotime]

3btc to bitscalper

at the time it was only worth $6

not technically lost, but gone forever.

[misterbigg]

Actually, it might be possible to figure out the total number of lost Bitcoins using a mathematical approximation.

I believe it is safe to say that the probability of a wallet's private key being lost is inversely proportional to the balance. We can model the expected loss over time as a Poisson process (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_process), using the known data on lost Bitcoins to minimize the error.

I'm no math expert however.

[unclemantis]

What about the early blocks that still have untouched 50btc in them and no other transactions?

[SgtSpike]

What about the early blocks that still have untouched 50btc in them and no other transactions?

If we don't know they are lost, they cannot be added to this list.

[cypherdoc]

What about the early blocks that still have untouched 50btc in them and no other transactions?

If we don't know they are lost, they cannot be added to this list.

have you kept up with the tally?

[unclemantis]

What about the early blocks that still have untouched 50btc in them and no other transactions?

If we don't know they are lost, they cannot be added to this list.

have you kept up with the tally?

If that was aimed at me, don't mind me, just trolling!

[softwareseller]

9000 +
50
____
9050 BTC

There, fixed it.

You lost 9K BTC??? WTF are you thinking?  You should've ordered the  10K pizza.

[caveden]

Not me, no. This guy: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=782.0

[softwareseller]

Not me, no. This guy: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=782.0

Wow just reading the thread. It's actually 8999 not 9k. He still had 1 BTC.. Wow, just wow

[dree12]

38669.33589602

Hello!

I noticed that this thread is lacking Stefan Thomas's great loss of 7000 BTC. With this included, the new total is:

45669.33589602

[SgtSpike]

38669.33589602

Hello!

I noticed that this thread is lacking Stefan Thomas's great loss of 7000 BTC. With this included, the new total is:

45669.33589602

Can you link to the details of said loss?  I'd like to have things as well-documented as possible.  Thanks!

[dree12]

Both the code and the idea of bitcoin may hav ebeen impregnable, but bitcoins themselves -- unique strings of numbers that constitute units of the currency -- are discrete pieces of information that have to be sorted somewhere. By default bitcoin kept users' currency in a digital "wallet" on their desktop, and when bitcoins were worth very little, easy to mine and possessed only by techies, that was sufficient. But once they became valuable, a PC felt inadequate. Some users protected bitcoins by creating multiple backups, encrypting and storing them on thumb drives, on forensically scrubbed virgin computers without internet connections, in the cloud, and on printouts stored in safe deposit boxes. But even some sophisticated early adopters had trouble keeping their bitcoins safe. Stefan Thomas had three copies of his wallet yet inadvertently managed to erase two of them and lose his password for the third. In a stroke, he lost about 7,000 bitcoins, at the time worth about $140,000. "I spent a week trying to recover it," he says. "It was pretty painful."

From: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/01/features/the-rise-and-fall-of-bitcoin?page=all

[BrannigansLaw]

I accodently sent 0.25 to an inactive address. No idea how I did it but I did.

[unclemantis]

You know. I was talking to a friend of mine and we came up with an agreement.

There is no such thing as LOST bitcoins. They are simply misplaced or UNSPENT.

So unless you have the private key to SPEND them then they stay where they are. This is a security measure of course too.

[Dalkore]

38669.33589602

Hello!

I noticed that this thread is lacking Stefan Thomas's great loss of 7000 BTC. With this included, the new total is:

45669.33589602

I'll come clean too, I got into this when CPU mining was the way (0.2 client).   I don't want to go into details be here is the damage:

27,000 BTC


New Total:  BTC72,669.33589602