Topic: 21 million not never !!! (Read 3868 times)

You can say it, for example you could trace the transaction of similar addresses or from where he got inputs/ outputs, and correlate with those.

If he has a deterministic wallet of course.

Exact. Many people might consider them "savings" wallets, and as such it's reasonable that they don't have any TXs.

Why would they do this if it's even possible? It doesn't even matter whether the coins or lost or not but who is to say which coins are lost or just being saved? You can't or shouldn't be able to change something to get those coins back. It's theft and unnecessary. Besides, the less coins the more valuable they should become theoretically.

I really hope that never happens. There's no way of telling whether coins are just parked. I wouldn't be best pleased if my coins suddenly disappeared from my grasp because a bunch of strangers decided they might be 'lost'.

not necessarily, in the future we could fork bitcoin and adding something to restore those coins, i'm thinking what would happen in this case, the price will decrease because more coins will be accessible or it will remain the same/increase? and who will be the owner of those coins?(i'm theorizing that the original owner has no track anymore of his lost coins)

I think most of the early mined bitcoin might be lost as they have never been moved

Well that would be just tyrrany. They are already putting their hands on the internet with all this net neutrality bullshit, so their powerhungy grap is now getting crazy.

Besides if people tolerate tyrrany then they deserve it, a government will do whatever they want if nobody will stand up agains them.

So it's up to the people to decide how much is enough. This is more than just bitcoin, this is about freedom in general.

i'm not talking about crypto in general, but about bitcoin(the rest are just clone), you can't say for sure that in 10-20-30 years bitcoin will be still alive no matter what

there is a chance even if it remotely(actually it isn't, at this point it's already at 25% dies, 75% survive or worse...)that bitcoin will not survive

and you are wrong about shutting down many of those scam coins, even one miner with a good hash can shut down many of them, because they have so low diff that they can be 51%'d so easily it's not even funny

government would not even bother to shut down those coin

Thats simply not true. If the crypto currencies will survive, and they have no reason not to, govenrments cant shut down every one of them without exposing themselves and creating big controversy.

Otherwise there is demand for it, global banking system sucks, so here is a healthy alternative.

And until 1 crypto grows, it grows all cryptos, 1 shill-coin can advertise the whole industry by itself, and people will diversify, and since bitcoin is the 1st one it has a pretty good change of succeeding even if a better one comes along, unless some security flaws will be found , no reason why bitcoin would die.

There have been discusions about Blackholes.

• https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-bitcoin-black-hole-21552
• https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/possible-solution-for-recovering-lost-bitcoin-to-the-blackhole-58206

There maybe more than these but I couldn't find any more.

Edit: Other(s).

• https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/blackhole-address-generator-online-webapp-457338

Edit-2: • https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/how-to-make-custom-address-without-private-key-973998

Edit-3: • https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-vanity-burner-custom-vanity-address-without-private-key-generator-1007269

He should have learned more about it. There blackholes are interesting. How did you find about them?
We definitely can't reach 21 million. Even fiat gets destroyed. Bitcoin can be easily sent to the wrong address, wallets lost, passwords forgotten and such.

He used it maybe because of the big amount of Bitcoins stored in it. He may have thought private keys of such address are kept safe.

Bitcoin blackholes:

• https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE
• https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/address/1111111111111111111114oLvT2
• https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/address/11111111111111111111BZbvjr

P.S. There maybe more blackholes, these are what I was able to find.

Is hard to say how much is lost due to people mining in early days and never spending and then throwing their wallets away as maybe thought mehh worthless coins. Is like  plenty of stories  I have come across with lost wallets or hard drives some recovered but others lots out on.  Id say mabe 10 to 15% or more is lost due to wallets being lost or never given thoguht when getting a holed of them when first started out.

well yes but this is just a possibility, there is no guarantee that the interest for bitcoin will grow with time, because there are chances that bitcoin will die before reaching that status, or the interest of people shift to another better currency, while bitcoin even with its 21M mined, will remain at $200 dollars price

the interest of people is unstable as bitcoin, you know...


there is nothing to be educate by reading that link, it's a simple fact, you can't take into account only the supply, there are many other variables that influence the price

I'm actually not surprised that you think that you know what you're talking about without any visible knowledge. Sure, don't educate yourself. You don't need to read, learn, stay ignorant. How about we start pulling more facts and bold statements out of magical hats?
Yes, this seems to be the case. Your posts are often rather very contributing.

I don't think that the current generation should worry about the supply after 2100. We will most likely not live to see the day. Besides, we have more important things to work on right now.

Yes but we are not talking about ordinary things. Yes some things fade away as the trend falls but bitcoin is in its genesis right now, this technology is so new, and bitcoin itself as a payment system, that people will want it.

Of course not now, but once they awaken that card dealers are thieves charge 4% comission, and bank transfer 10% comission really? As of bitcoin is only 0.0001 BTC (<1 cent)

So eventually the more time will pass the more interested people will be. And many card dealers will go bankrupt soon.

i don't need to read that link, the price speak for itself, the interest(average people interest, not rich guy, talking about the majority of people in the world) is important at least like the supply, supply isn't everything, just because a things is scarse doesn't mean it will be worth more in the future

p.s. i'm making tons of posts a day, because i have all the day free

You have no idea what you're talking about. Read Economics 101 for newbies: http://www.whatiseconomics.org/economics-101
I'm not even gonna bother to tell you and provide links to why you're wrong on so many levels. You should rather do it yourself this time instead of making a crazy amount of posts a day.

I'm actually hoping that he used the wrong word in this case. Because definitely does not fit into that sentence at all. We can't know if the coins are or aren't lost. We can know if someone publicly says that they've lost access to address X or their HDD died with address Y etc. Bitcoin is divisible, so even if we lost 80% of the supply it still could be used.

It's impossible to know with certainty the number of lost coins... but assuming tons of coins were lost specially at the beginning when it was worthless and wallets with thousands of coins got lost... well a lot of it. Who knows, maybe by 2140 when everything is mined, 50% of coins already got lost forever.

Definitely? What if the private key was lost? What if the owner is no more? What if owner can not access it anymore? Many Bitcoins have lost especially the ones in Bitcoin blackhole.*

* Bitcoin blackhole are addresses which don't have private key. "Blockhole" obviously is named by us.

If there is no PoS for Bitcoin, why should people at all have an incentive to open their wallets?
These coins are probably safely stored, but definitely not lost.

if the 30% of bitcoin lost is true then the price, should not go even below 1k, but we are at 200, the price is more related to interest(you can call this adoption) of people in bitcoin than its supply

Unless people realize that he's not a hodler but a I-lost-my-keys-er.  One person can't define a market.  If it comes down to only Satoshi holding bitcoins, then the price will certainly be 0 (by definition: no one wants bitcoins but Satoshi, and he has them).  So, I think markets can't really be reduced to such a simple example.  But I guess it has some value as a thought experiment.

What if Satoshi threw away his private keys where he held that many bitcoins, so that even if they get to him they cant steal his bitcoins?

Because if this is true, then the bitcoin price cant really go below 100$ cant it?

I would guess 5-10% is a realistic number, but next to impossible to verify.

It is unlikely, but not impossible. In 2009 and 2010, more than 5 million coins were mined. No one realized the real value of Bitcoin back then, and a lot of coins were lost as a result of negligence.

30% seems a big number if it is based on the max supply, because it mean that 50% of current total coins in circulation is lost forever, personally i don't think so, it's an amount too big to be true

Why 30% lost forever ? Give out a reason to convince me !

That is quite possible. Some of the earliest miners just threw away their coins, or lost them because of negligence. However it is almost impossible to confirm this amount. Here is a thread which will help you with this:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/lets-add-up-the-known-lost-bitcoins-7253

exactly, that is the point. All these 'analysis' are forgetting to easily about this fact.

I never mined bitcoins, come to think of it,it  really feels strange , have known BTC from quite some time now but still , well i wasn't into bitcoins much before

Another thing which often gets brought up in this context is that while currently bitcoins are only divided to 8 decimal places.  In principle we can continue to subdivide existing bitcoins if for some reason, so  many bitcoins get lost that 1 Satoshi is extremely valuable.

I would guess 4-8%

Probably more than we think.  makes you wonder though why didnt satoshi create bitcoin for it was mined forever hmmm.

Those 30% are not lost coins, but 'zombie' coins.

NVIDIA engineer John Ratcliff calculated in June 2014 that “zombie coins”, defined as those which have lay dormant for at least a year and a half, accounted for 30 per cent of all Bitcoins.
Those coins were bought for just a few cents, so the lack of profit-taking despite a return of 4,000 per cent seems to rule out the possibility that they're simply long-term savings.

For more detailed analysis of 'disappeared' Bitcoins (lost coins, zombie coins, satoshi's coins, burnt coins etc.), read the full article here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11362827/The-625m-lost-forever-the-phenomenon-of-disappearing-Bitcoins.html

Well you know if normal currencies are lost, the CB will just print more, thus decreasing the value of lost coins to replace them with fresh circulating ones.

In BTC all supply is fixed, or atleast ithas a hard cap. I would be interesting that after 1 million years only 1 bitcoin would be in circulation, because everyone else would have lost their private keys.

And that 1 Bitcoin would be worth the entire Planet's money/wealth

I don't have a problem with some bitcoins being destroyed/lost because it makes mine more valuable in the long run.

You're talking nonsense. Stop spreading false information. Even if we find a way to easily crack SHA-256 in 1000 years, do you think that by then we would still be using SHA-256? It would be easily increased by tenfold or replaced by something else entirely.
Good luck trying to get a hold of someones private key. If this event occurs Bitcoin would quickly die, as all trust would be lost and the price would plummet.

As for lost Bitcoins, we can't really say. The same thing happens with every currency. How do you know that the address that you're sending to isn't still owned by someone?
There was a thread in which they've tried to estimate the loss by summing up known losses.

there is a post on the italian section of the forum in which all the movements of all the wallets since 2009, we have considered that the wallets with no input or out for more than 2 years are to be considered  dead https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=353156.120

In bitcoin nothing is lost "forever", given enough time its possible for one person to own every single bitcoin private key. The time it would take this with our current computing power is incomprehensible, but in maybe 1000 years we will have a computer being able to do this. In our lifetime the technology will definitely not be created but all bitcoins are not "lost forever".

It's a very interesting question, unfortunately it seems to be a very difficult thing to verify/determine with certainty. Because Bitcoin is divisible into much smaller units, I don't think that "lost Bitcoin" will really be at the forefront of Bitcoin-related issues any time soon.

This is what I mentioned earlier.  It is just hard to tell the difference between the two as they appear the same.

I do think there i a high chance lots of CPU coins did get "lost" in one way or another.  But it will always be a estimate no way you can tell for sure.

That no transactions are made not mean who are lost or "abandoned". Some people do not open their wallets for years, and do not think they will be open until the last Bitcoin be mined.

Is there concrete proof that nobody can access those coins?

Not all inactive addresses doesn't mean that the coins on those are lost forever. Yes--it is true that some addresses have lost privkeys by their owners and won't be recovered (unless someone or something discovered a way to brute-force) anytime sooner. There are far more different scenarios that could have happened, though, but all the 21m coins in circulation probably wouldn't happen if--as you said it--addresses have lost their privkeys and the users don't have the control over them.

30% seems to be too much.

That means on average everyone who owns 1 BTC would likely to lose 0.3 BTC lol.  

Just because coins haven't moved for long time means nothing. If you have thousands then there's no need to dip into old reserves.

Quite a few have admitted to early mining then deleting wallets when they felt it was going nowhere. Considering how big the block reward was it's likely a lot are never to be seen again.

Then you have hardware failures too like this https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/dont-feel-bad-newbies-early-adopter-without-many-bitcoins-388169  1000 BTC up in smoke just for this guy. There were no paper or hardware wallets back then.

Anyone can claim any amount of coins have been lost; absent coins being burned to a verifiable burn address, there's no way to prove any loss.

Yes, if someone comes along saying they lost 5 BTC, I will fee horrible for them, but even if the sum of coins reported lost by people to things like crashed hard drives, etc was 2 million, in my mind, I wouldn't think that the remaining coins should be any more valuable, because there is no way to prove those coins lost, rather than people trying to manipulate perceived prices.

People come up with all sorts of theories about when to say that coins have been lost; if they haven't moved for X amount of time, presumed lost, etc... That doesn't make sense.

First off, early miners could have simply backed up their wallets and haven't felt the need to combine all of their coins at a new address, and a lot of people claim to have created paper wallets and done things like burying them somewhere. Those coins won't move either. Really, just because a coin hasn't moved from its address for a while, that's no reason to assume its lost. Or, at the least, it would be very unwise for people to try to adjust value of the remaining coins, as those coins "lost" could move at any time. There's no proof the private keys for older coins have been lost, in many cases, no ones even claiming the key has beeen lost, it's just that someone is speculating that the key is lost due to the lack of movement.

There are at least 2130 BTC which have been lost forever because they have been sent to an address to which nobody has the private key.

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

it would make sense for people who bought btc in 2011 and 2012 to at least sell a few coins at $1100 peak.
maybe they just can't access their wallet or they will leave them untouched for like another 10 more years.

That's a really helpful post, thanks.  His spreadsheet is very handy and shows 3,380,582 bitcoins total in these quiet addresses.  Note that he only considered addresses with 25 or more bitcoins so who knows how much is lost in other addresses.

3,380,582 is about 25% of all existing bitcoins, so that 30% estimate seems legit for today, but not sure going forward, since presumably people will be much more careful of their bitcoin now that it is worth so much more.

Nothing. It would just make the remaining coins even more valuable. More decimal places could be added too if coins were so scarce so smaller denominations weren't worth ridiculous amounts.

huge amount of coins are gone, what will happen if lets say 95% of bitcoin are lost?

Well I think that is logical, but it doesn't mean they're all lost. My first coins haven't moved in years since I bought them and likely won't for a very long time and if you see the potential in bitcoin I think others will feel the same. If satoshi is alive I can't see him just abandoning his coins forever either or would like to think he still has access to them at least.

This study finds that older addresses are more likely to become inactive.

http://www.coinbuzz.com/2015/03/05/paper-suggests-bitcoin-miners-lose-money/

It cites one reason being that bitcoin was worth much less back then as it is today. Therefore, there was less motivation for a person to hold onto his/her coins and take the proper measures to preserve them.

There's no way to tell but it doesn't really matter how many are in circulation but 21 mill is the number that will be mined. I don't think just because they haven't moved means they are lost though as some people will just keep them safe and hold for the long run (though also some coins will naturally be lost or forgotten about too).

This person compiled a list of all "dormant" bitcoin addresses, those that have not been used to send any transactions "since the price of bitcoin was less than $10 apiece; so around January 31, 2013".

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2twrs7/all_42400_dormant_bitcoin_addresses_with_a/

There's an address holding over 79,000 coins here: https://blockchain.info/address/1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF

And one with 28,150 here: https://blockchain.info/address/12tkqA9xSoowkzoERHMWNKsTey55YEBqkv

It makes you wonder what the stories behind the addresses are. Do the creators of these inactive addresses still have the private keys? Or did they lose them through some stroke of bad luck?

I think it would be hard to find amount.   You might be able to find BTC adress with no activity, but part I don't see is how you could tell cold storage holding (with no one depositing more) compared to a lost account.

I do think it is not something that will repeat its self.   I would guess most lost were CPU and GPU days.  But that is just my feeling as price was lot lower then.

I wouldn't go that much or believe that article like most of them, but there is definitely quite a lot of coins missing/lost would you count satoshi's million+ as lost as they have never been touched for years? I am guessing anywhere from 10-15% but who knows and in the future there will obviously be a hole lot more being lost which is good for everyone else who doesn't lose them i guess them, smaller supply higher value.  

Read an article once, author claimed up to 30% coins are lost forever.

how many of currently mined bitcoins are lost forever?