Topic: $2.500,000 lost in bitcointalk.org abyss??? (Read 637 times)

This is a nice funny study, thanks for posting it. However, how would you define the concept of "abandoned account" ? Many people might simply read other people's posts without getting involved in the discussions, ie avoiding to post. In fact that's what happened to me - with just a few exceptions I didn't post in the forum from mid 2014 to 2017, yet my account was not abandoned. I was just listening without feeling the need of speaking (which prevented me from becoming legendary BTW). How many forum members are possibly in that same condition?

why created so hype of ranks just because of bounties ? so you can put advertisement in your signature lol we make bitcointalk a joke isn;t

It is not justice that when abandoned accounts has such a big value, so many people who might deserve the upper ranks, is suffering.

I had an account here from 2013.
And was proud about being an early supporter of this forum, and BTC.
Maybe not very active, that is true.
One day I lost my account, it was hacked.
So after some time I followed the procedure that is outlined here in forum, and sent a signed message to cyrus.
Nothing happened, so after 2 months I sent to Theymos the same signed message, as it is instructed here in forum.
After 6 months nothing is coming from the forum admins.
I understand that you can be too busy, that some procedures can take time, that some things have low priority.
But if you post and pin a message with instructions about how to get your account back, then do it.
So I have been without my account for 6 months.
Suppose more ppl are in this situation.
So this is a source of inactive accounts too ......

Most of the accounts from 2010 to 2015 are autolocked. My estimate is at least 90% are autlocked. Any users who don't post bitcoin address have zero recovery rate. Many old accounts has recent login but in reality they can't post because they are autolocked.

It does. Several threads have already shown the correlation between activty of the forum and Cyptocurrency price or better total market cap. This is just rational.
Also have beend noticing that more higher rank accounts are being abonded recently, abonded as in not active in last 2-3 months which ouls be because signature campaigns are getting less and less profitable,

What's the value this analysis really adds to the forum? Also, we should not value an account when we personally discourage that.

Activeness in the bitcointalk forum doesn't depend on the cryptocurrency prices. May be you are here for that reason but i don't expect high ranked accounts are waiting prices to go down so they come back. I would consider all the inactive accounts as "compromised" until ownership verification even by their real owners.

You've got the wrong part of the idea. I don't accuse you of anything. I've read the part that you are not involved in account selling.
What I want to say is that if the account is of no value for the owner, he will not sell it, even if he will never use it anymore. (So the selling value for it remains 0)


I have no idea what the market prices are for the accounts. What I wanted to point out was that it's closer to "luck" to estimate them right, even ignoring the direction that 1 BTC = 1 BTC and 1 dead account = 1 dead account.
However, I expressed my ideas on the subject. They are as hypothetical as yours and probably both of us are wrong


I didn't, but my native language is not English and I don't know how to "soften" my "tone". I just wanted to contribute with some ideas...

I think that some of the abandoned accounts here might become active once again when we see huge increase in price of bitcoins and other alt coins for monetary benefits.

The main difference is the account trading is still legal (in accordance with the rules) as opposed to ID trading.


I wouldn't buy an account for myself, as I wrote "I think it is unfair, everyone should work out his own brand, and this practice should be banned. Nevertheless, trading accounts is a fact even if we do not like it ...". But until there are buyers and sellers and people are trading them each account has also a rational value expressed in money.


As you can see at the table I've attached I've done some research. You've absolutly right there were account with red trust really bad feedback as well as accounts with green feedback and great opinions. That's why I've estimated an average value of each rank for example as you can see at the table offer price of Legendary differs from $150 to $3.000 and taking an average value from 16 different offers I assumed that $460 could be good for this consideration. I you would need a really advanced economic model that will take into account all aspects, analyze individual accounts and calculate more accurately the price, which will probably be average anyway


Thanks ;-)


Once again please don't take my consideration too seriuos... it is very simplified and does not take into account a number of aspects (as some of you mentioned: price fluctuations, flooding the market with accounts, possible drop of crypto and ICO market situation - which will also affect the value of the account, etc.).

I think that you are incorrect. Let me explain.

I'll start with some sort of extreme example:
After a certain age, everybody has an ID. Many people don't care about it, elder people at country side may not use it for extremely long times.
On the black market an ID costs money. So everybody that didn't sell the grandparents' ID on the black market has some value "lost in the abyss"?

What I mean is that the fact one account has a certain value for bounty hunters or scammers, for many people that came here over time only to discuss, it was just a tool to get in and post, no other value.

Also, calculating the value is not really accurate.
- I expect that some account get negative feedback quite early after getting sold (for scam attempts or from vigilant people that'll notice the way of posting has change or from people getting info about the transaction).
- I expect that other accounts (I don't know if too many) would grow right after selling because of increased activity on right hands.
- The value for the seller and the value for the buyer differs. Also if many start to sell, I expect the prices to drop (rules of the free market).
- Then some may earn more money for selling Merit (ruining or not the trust feedback on the account).

All in all, there are a lot of "black market" things that can be done with the account, but many choose to not do that. And it's the best to keep it that way. Because if those accounts you've checked would get sold, the quality of the forum would drop and the current and new accounts will become close to worthless.


So no, there's no 2.5M lost and no potential 2.5M lost. It's only accounts that are deserted. ............At least this is how I'd look at this.

Logically price would vary depending on how many of those accounts were put to sale simultaneously, and just how easy they would be to purchase, but the exercise is still an interesting one.

Jr. Accounts I guess were left out of the calculus since, with the change of criteria, there are barely Jr. Account that have not been active in 2018:  out of the 8.595 Jr. Member accounts, only 130 have not been active during 2018 (115 of which are demoted account due to deleting posts, and the other 15 have received merits for 2017 or prior posts). A drop in the ocean therefore.

Read the thread... If the coins are inaccessible, we can technically say that the money has been "lost".


But that's not what OP is talking about. He's considering the number of accounts that have been banned/locked/lost and that could have been sold for $x. So, it has nothing to do with Bitcoin or the blockchain itself.

Yes, maybe it's stupid of me to say so, but I find it hard to understand how money can be lost in a blockchain system. Because the whole point of blockchain is that everything is recorded.

It was also my sugestion few weeks ago:



Firstly I planed to diverse it, but  unfortunetly this database doesn't contain data about bans (honestly I tried to find such data somwhere else but didn't manage to do it), so as I wrote in my post "abandoned" means inactive for any reason (bans, hacked, lost password, true abandon etc.).

That would be a very interesting development. And I see no reason why it should not be implemented.
If a user is ranked to be a Sr member or legendary mamber based in airdropped merits, they should be tasked to defend their position.
And one merit should not be a problem.
Also lower ranks would stop feeling like there's a vendetta against them.

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Interesting statistics from the OP.
Also note that you're considering the actual worth.
The account buyers plan to earn more than they paid for it. Through the combination of effort put into it.

Just imagine if theymos will introduce a 1 earned merit requirement to display signature for all accounts no matter the rank 
I bet in a month you will see those numbers triple, especially since most merit sellers have probably depleted their stash.

Anyhow when you talk about "abandoned" are those both inactive and banned account or just inactive.
Would be some nice stats to see plagiarism quantified in $

BCT accounts was considered as an asset already as what OP stated that the there were many users abandoned the Bitcointalk.org. This probably those are alternative accounts, being hack and for sale, or the user has forgotten the password of the account. This the usual and common problem may arise and the admin are still processing and developing a new way to retrieve hack accounts. Correct me if I am wrong.

According to your chart the three top ranks make up more than 50% of the total.  Regardless of the projections of price and value, the folks who would buy these accounts would be attempting to gain an ROI by constantly attempting to monetize their account.  I think those who would buy an account are not interested in contributing to the forum in a constructive way, and would only contribute the spam, and possibly scams.

The value of those abandoned accounts is one thing, and value of the forum is another.