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Topic: A simple definition of "lost" coins (Read 3609 times)

hero member
Activity: 1792
Merit: 536
Leading Crypto Sports Betting & Casino Platform
May 18, 2020, 01:01:36 AM
#30
I was reading the whole thread and was fascinated with the concept of lost coins. Like a treasure chest in the Digitalandia, ready to be seen and found when the time comes like many, many years from now. The holder of these coins will simply just give their passwords to their descendants and will distribute the money to be used by the masses. Maybe hundreds of years later when Bitcoin would be the sole winner of the "Crypto" wars, will emerge as the leader of all currencies.
newbie
Activity: 13
Merit: 1
May 17, 2020, 09:44:40 AM
#29
Now, I do agree that most of the points made so far do apply to smaller holdings, but seriously, do you really believe anyone with USD 200,000+ invested in such a volatile thing as bitcoin will let it lose 90% of its peak value and not use any kind of stoploss rule? After all, isn't this one of the basic rules of investing?


This is precisely the flaw in your reasoning.  The people with large 10k+ btc holdings mined them back in 2010 and early 2011 and are NOT investors per se.  Would any professional investor allow the loss in USD value that occurred from $32 down to $2?  no - because it doesn't make any financial sense to do so - sell at $20 and rebuy at $5 even if you're a true believer etc.  But what you're failing to realize is that the ones that did just hold their coins through all that really aren't even interested in financial theory or trading btc - they are trying to change the world.  I can understand that being difficult to believe, but I'm 99.9% sure it's the truth.

"...they are trying to change the world." --> Finally some people understand it and no, many of those are not lost for ever, believe me. They are preserved for the future Bitcoin economy where trading in and out in fiat will make no sense at all. Satoshi wanted them well distributed and that day will come when most of those coins will be payments for citizens so they can continue trading value without getting out of the system, by then we will trade in "satoshis" mostly.
jr. member
Activity: 252
Merit: 1
November 05, 2018, 05:12:26 AM
#28
Now, I do agree that most of the points made so far do apply to smaller holdings, but seriously, do you really believe anyone with USD 200,000+ invested in such a volatile thing as bitcoin will let it lose 90% of its peak value and not use any kind of stoploss rule? After all, isn't this one of the basic rules of investing?


This is precisely the flaw in your reasoning.  The people with large 10k+ btc holdings mined them back in 2010 and early 2011 and are NOT investors per se.  Would any professional investor allow the loss in USD value that occurred from $32 down to $2?  no - because it doesn't make any financial sense to do so - sell at $20 and rebuy at $5 even if you're a true believer etc.  But what you're failing to realize is that the ones that did just hold their coins through all that really aren't even interested in financial theory or trading btc - they are trying to change the world.  I can understand that being difficult to believe, but I'm 99.9% sure it's the truth.

they considered pioneers  and early investor. tough on lower amount but they start the trend. 1 small steps of a time.
full member
Activity: 1022
Merit: 100
November 05, 2018, 02:58:34 AM
#27
Disagreed, this is not "lost" bitcoins.
If we check first address 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF balance 79,957.19651843 BTC and every day address get BTC from "Bitcoin buy or sell JUBTC.COM" and 1BestMixVhna91MkP7pKRtjej3bFq6Ze46.
May be this address of exchange?
newbie
Activity: 1
Merit: 0
November 04, 2018, 11:58:43 PM
#26
A few of those addresses got wiped recently
I wonder what happened
Did they find their paper wallets or got hacked?
Kinda fishy that someone is sending them tiny amounts of btc daily, why is that?
full member
Activity: 352
Merit: 100
January 18, 2018, 12:11:35 PM
#25
The fact that someone did not use his Bitcoins for many years is still not a proof that he may not use them in the future. Owners of those addresses may not be just individuals, but also organizations, which have different plans and behaviors than individuals.
legendary
Activity: 2156
Merit: 1393
You lead and I'll watch you walk away.
January 18, 2018, 11:43:15 AM
#24
newbie
Activity: 25
Merit: 0
February 05, 2013, 02:34:09 PM
#23
Some thoughts:

- De Beers and its secret diamond reserves. Keeping large amount of something considered "valuable" to yourself and out of the free market to make it look scarce, tends to raise the value of the valuables. Why not do the same with bitcoins? The owner(/s) can always have other wallets.
- Someone used Bitcoin and didn't make a backup of his/her wallet and lost everything because of a hardware failure
- Owner of the wallets are dead
- A large pool owner or someone who wanted to make Bitcoin valuable to make business (FPGA or ASIC vendor, etc.)
- Someone wanted to make Bitcoin more scarce to make it more valuable, so that he/she can exchange bitcoins to fiat money and get rich
- Some ppl bored using Bitcoin, deleted their wallets and now regret it
- Some ppl made their own "Bitcoin Reserve" for whatever purposes

sr. member
Activity: 476
Merit: 250
Bytecoin: 8VofSsbQvTd8YwAcxiCcxrqZ9MnGPjaAQm
February 05, 2013, 02:08:40 PM
#22
Why do you we need a definition of lost coins?
legendary
Activity: 2940
Merit: 1090
February 05, 2013, 01:59:20 PM
#21
It is only stop loss if there is a loss.

As someone already pointed out they went from $1 each up to $2 each, with a bubble inbetween. Any point inbetween where it was momentarily going down was a risky point where if you sold you might not manage to buy back in before it skyrocketed to $50 or $100 or more leaving you no opportunity to buy back in. Also, if one is buying with hash power rather than buying with fiat then you are basically buying 24/7 using hash/difficulty averaging so if difficulty goes down you buy faster if it goes up you buy slower.

Hmm, send money to some random scammer on the internet or buy more GPUs, let me think about that...

Plus we already proved it can go to over $30, even before it has hardly even started to catch on and develop infrastructure. Any moment people will come back to their senses and it will scoot up to $1000 or so, want to be the guy who just sold for less than $100 when that happens?

-MarkM-
full member
Activity: 215
Merit: 105
Poorer than I ought to be
February 05, 2013, 01:11:29 PM
#20
Now, I do agree that most of the points made so far do apply to smaller holdings, but seriously, do you really believe anyone with USD 200,000+ invested in such a volatile thing as bitcoin will let it lose 90% of its peak value and not use any kind of stoploss rule? After all, isn't this one of the basic rules of investing?


This is precisely the flaw in your reasoning.  The people with large 10k+ btc holdings mined them back in 2010 and early 2011 and are NOT investors per se.  Would any professional investor allow the loss in USD value that occurred from $32 down to $2?  no - because it doesn't make any financial sense to do so - sell at $20 and rebuy at $5 even if you're a true believer etc.  But what you're failing to realize is that the ones that did just hold their coins through all that really aren't even interested in financial theory or trading btc - they are trying to change the world.  I can understand that being difficult to believe, but I'm 99.9% sure it's the truth.
legendary
Activity: 1806
Merit: 1003
February 05, 2013, 12:17:51 PM
#19
Hmm... I am not willing to modify my list and criteria just yet - at least for LARGE (10,000btc +) holdings! 

Now, I do agree that most of the points made so far do apply to smaller holdings, but seriously, do you really believe anyone with USD 200,000+ invested in such a volatile thing as bitcoin will let it lose 90% of its peak value and not use any kind of stoploss rule? After all, isn't this one of the basic rules of investing?

Anyway, let's try a different, slightly more aggressive approach: I will tag all of the above coins as LOST 4EVER and will only untag an address if its owner ever spends a coin from it OR just simply ADDS 50btc or more to it (which might be preferable from a security point of view as it does not require any cold storage private key to be used.)

I know this is a controversial statement (and please keep bringing good arguments), but until I see hard evidence, I still strongly believe that my list is 95%+ correct.

Problem with your theory is, those people that got in that early to obtain that much coins, are most likely not a short term speculator, but a true believer, and won't let go of the coins easily. Many of them are probably not doing any speculative trading at all.
legendary
Activity: 1400
Merit: 1005
February 05, 2013, 12:14:46 PM
#18
Hmm... I am not willing to modify my list and criteria just yet - at least for LARGE (10,000btc +) holdings! 

Now, I do agree that most of the points made so far do apply to smaller holdings, but seriously, do you really believe anyone with USD 200,000+ invested in such a volatile thing as bitcoin will let it lose 90% of its peak value and not use any kind of stoploss rule? After all, isn't this one of the basic rules of investing?

Anyway, let's try a different, slightly more aggressive approach: I will tag all of the above coins as LOST 4EVER and will only untag an address if its owner ever spends a coin from it OR just simply ADDS 50btc or more to it (which might be preferable from a security point of view as it does not require any cold storage private key to be used.)

I know this is a controversial statement (and please keep bringing good arguments), but until I see hard evidence, I still strongly believe that my list is 95%+ correct.
Tag and untag your list however you like.  It's your list.  That doesn't mean anyone else will take it seriously though...

This is like saying anyone who didn't sell their Apple holdings when it was up to $10/share was completely out of their mind.  Obviously, some people sold, and some people held, all depending on what they believed the future would hold.
legendary
Activity: 3416
Merit: 4658
February 05, 2013, 04:16:11 AM
#17
. . . I still strongly believe that my list is 95%+ correct.
You are welcome to believe anything you like.  It doesn't make you right, but you don't seem to care about that.
legendary
Activity: 1064
Merit: 1011
760930
February 05, 2013, 03:28:42 AM
#16
Hmm... I am not willing to modify my list and criteria just yet - at least for LARGE (10,000btc +) holdings! 

Now, I do agree that most of the points made so far do apply to smaller holdings, but seriously, do you really believe anyone with USD 200,000+ invested in such a volatile thing as bitcoin will let it lose 90% of its peak value and not use any kind of stoploss rule? After all, isn't this one of the basic rules of investing?

Anyway, let's try a different, slightly more aggressive approach: I will tag all of the above coins as LOST 4EVER and will only untag an address if its owner ever spends a coin from it OR just simply ADDS 50btc or more to it (which might be preferable from a security point of view as it does not require any cold storage private key to be used.)

I know this is a controversial statement (and please keep bringing good arguments), but until I see hard evidence, I still strongly believe that my list is 95%+ correct.
legendary
Activity: 960
Merit: 1028
Spurn wild goose chases. Seek that which endures.
February 04, 2013, 08:05:37 PM
#15
That'll be completely off, I guarantee it.

What I'm more curious about is why many of those have a balance with .041 attached to the end.  Why?
Tips.

Somewhere around here is a thread of the addresses with the biggest balances on the network. A while ago, someone sent a small tip (0.031337 BTC) to each of them.

If you look at the history for those addresses, you'll see that the .041 comes from that tip, plus another tip a few months later.
hero member
Activity: 728
Merit: 500
February 04, 2013, 06:42:26 PM
#14
Maybe they're all owned by the same person?
legendary
Activity: 1400
Merit: 1005
February 04, 2013, 06:37:20 PM
#13
I may be wrong, but I believe the following rule allows identification of lost coins with pretty high confidence.

Any address that was existing before July 2011, has had zero outgoing transactions since then, and has received less than 5 coins since then.

Q: Why does this formula manage to distinguish lost coins from coins in cold storage?  And why July 2011?

A: That's the time of the great market crash and start of the plunge to near zero. Any large holders would have surely sold at that time or in the following weeks.


Applying this rule, we find that a LOT of the richest addresses are actually lost forever (hopefully this list doesn't have any mistakes):

  79957.042  1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF
  50000.041  1P3S1grZYmcqYDuaEDVDYobJ5Fx85E9fE9
  50000.041  1DEpjpftLbsGiCJvJDp2F2quVRnymV8U5Q
  40000.041  1cXNTyXj4xPGopfYZNY5xfSM1EPJJvBZV
  40000.041  12HddUDLhRP2F8JjpKYeKaDxxt5wUvx5nq
  40000.041  16Ls6azc76ixc9Ny7AB5ZPPq6oiEL9XwXy
  38058.041  1FngtAcZsLfK89MNe7TqzyqVtSype8TiVD
  38000.041  18Hsgq92AUB1PYLU6MUMQXiwdebaDRo9oQ
  35254.503  19Gt9VKmmyMpMHEv6dkf8ddwmwddoSoJ8w
  31000.041  12ib7dApVFvg82TXKycWBNpN8kFyiAN1dr
  28150.041  12tkqA9xSoowkzoERHMWNKsTey55YEBqkv
  23249.041  12fZ2HxkLjG9zn1u44XYsFFYKHM4A2zCea
  19400.041  1PeizMg76Cf96nUQrYg8xuoZWLQozU5zGW
  13050.000  1KX8EPDcziwbGaC7oDHDuKE9SfLWMmmbZy
  12950.000  1MHdm5XZMrfoZFoUktEaGhYevmdiXoc4x4
  12800.000  1B1wPLyrJ831sg1D8hnZLBG7SejXbqMMrH
  11867.800  19n1JqKDnoqcc34HA3fdgzNxczic6Hu5Pi
  10770.515  1F34duy2eeMz5mSrvFepVzy7Y1rBsnAyWC
  10689.034  1FpqQnKQCgDkJFMC94JL8FpRyHTZ3uRVZ1
  10009.251  1f1miYFQWTzdLiCBxtHHnNiW7WAWPUccr
  10000.000  18k9tin39LKegFzHe8rxSgvJXDpuMriGJq
  10000.000  1JtpgqCf3SSeCeYWEDJjkfYFH7Ruhy4Vp1
  10000.000  1DJSiWg6Ci6DLmxZFjVNBKn9CcahLFx5gS
  10000.000  1Du2jAQsBQnkkVZkN4oqC46tS78k7WMkVq
  10000.000  1CPaziTqeEixPoSFtJxu74uDGbpEAotZom
  10000.000  1ucXXZQSEf4zny2HRwAQKtVpkLPTUKRtt
  10000.000  1BAFWQhH9pNkz3mZDQ1tWrtKkSHVCkc3fV
  10000.000  12dUggmXPYsPVHaHr1DoW5J6bb6gvh4yZq
  10000.000  1EyArywoLEhFto6uKWMxA9QKXJWLTNghsz
  10000.000  14YK4mzJGo5NKkNnmVJeuEAQftLt795Gec
  10000.000  1Le6MkiTvkorvC1JwYXzQUSfqA3ebzGW7N
  10000.000  1P1iThxBH542Gmk1kZNXyji4E4iwpvSbrt
  10000.000  1KbrSKrT3GeEruTuuYYUSQ35JwKbrAWJYm
  10000.000  16TPVCpvtJ6FkV5xNKBp35aMo4BWFGxiEY
  10000.000  145YHsQU7HMzkRnD5SBSuFAzQgCYnAnLkN
  10000.000  12tLs9c9RsALt4ockxa1hB4iTCTSmxj2me

  Total: 755,205 BTC


Do you agree with this reasoning? I'm not saying it's a perfect definition, but it should be reasonably accurate and with very little risk of overestimating lost coins. It is also easy to prove me wrong. If you control any of the above addresses, just spend a satoshi from them. That will be more convincing than any argument, plus you will remain anonymous!
That'll be completely off, I guarantee it.

What I'm more curious about is why many of those have a balance with .041 attached to the end.  Why?
sr. member
Activity: 266
Merit: 250
February 04, 2013, 06:33:08 PM
#12
Do you agree with this reasoning?

At best, you can put an upper limit on the number of lost coins.


21 Million.
legendary
Activity: 1064
Merit: 1001
January 31, 2013, 07:57:51 PM
#11
Do you agree with this reasoning?

FALSE.

There are people like me who would accumulate coins and not sell them at any cost.

At best, you can put an upper limit on the number of lost coins.
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