I’m sure that everyone of you have read that 3 – 4 millions of bitcoins lost in the blockchain (in case of loosing passwords, loosing harddrives/pendrives, hardware destruction etc.).
Yesterday, thanks to Piggy and his last thread -
Open scraped data of all the users - SQL Lite DB - 2.437.064 users I downloaded userdatabase he prepared and did some of my own research. I was checking many parameters but when I was looking at last activity parameter of ranked users I found many of them are not active for years and then I’ve started to think about these abondon accounts like the digital assets lost in bitcointalk.org abyss (just like those bitcoins in its blockchain).
Of course there are some important differences, not all of them are really lost for good, some of them were banned by admins and what is most important there’s always a guy (admin) who has a key to unlock them even if he almost never do it. But let’s leave this small detail and think about them like they are really lost.
Ok they are lost, but can we tread them like a real digital assets? Of course we can. Especially thanks to the signature campaigns high ranked accounts have real worth. All of us know that today’s signature campaigns profitable like year or two ago but there is still possibility to earn some money with high good ranked account (in best case even a few hundreds bucks/month from only one account). There are probably many others way to monetize bitcointalk account but what is their real worth?
Account trading isn’t against this forum rules so many users trades them “legally” both on this forum and other social media. I did some research to know the real value of each account. It was not easy task: although there are plenty of advertisements but the prices offered are very diverse. I’ve checked 40 threads from last 3 week and based on these result estimated average value of each rank (due to great fluctuations, I rejected the highest and lowest offers I found).
Ok, we have average prices of each account so how many of them “lost in the bitcointalk.org abyss”? To make this task easier I accepted the assumption that account which wasn’t active this year at all were abandoned for good. Table below shows number of accounts abonded in years 2011-2017.
What we could expect the level of “abandonment” decreases with the rise of the rank, but what is interesting with accounts ranked from Member to Hero Member is quite similar (30% - 22%), only Legendary accounts seems to be much less often left (less than 10%).
Now the easiest part – lets check how much money circulates in the depths of our forum:
Honestly I am very surprised with this results. I suspected that many accounts have been lost/banned/abandon but never thought that they could make so much value together. It made me aware how valuable can be this forum. For the first time I looked at bitcointalk.org not only as a treasury of knowledge and a place of spending free time (and sometimes making a few bucks) but as a really huge business.
EDIT:
One important thing:
I do not support account trading, 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 ...
Do not treat this post as a professional business analysis, it is based on simplified assumptions and is only a theoretical consideration of the fact that our accounts are digital resources with real value.
