Topic: historical blk00000 coinbase analysis: is ~1.7 M bitcoins likely lost? - page 2. (Read 526 times)

each block is in a chain (hence the blockchain name) so each has a number associated with them starting from 0 (genesis block) to 1 (first block) and so on. each block itself has a header that contains a timestamp, all you have to do is check that variable to know the approximate time that block was mined (approximate because the miner's clock might not have been accurate or they may not have updated the time field correctly).

considering this part:

block #52200 was mined on 2010-04-20 23:35 according to blockchair which means the difference between your totals might have been because @TheArchaeologist is not counting 67,803 blocks (until block height 120003).
although that height is based on timestamps. if you are using the blk00000.dat file you might want to check what the last block inside that file is to get the more accurate number.

First, thanks for reoply and for double checking my counts with what you have!


Good point!  However, I was targeting only coinbase transactions with a single output address then zero activity to be ultra conservative with my estimates.  During these early days (i.e., within blk00000.dat) I found some output address that had two coinbase transactions, but only a tiny percent and almost all were ultimately 'spent'.  Therefore, I was specifically hunting for the '50 mined coins going to a single account never to be heard from again' scenario that appeared to be fairly. My theory is these would be the most likely addresses where the private keys are lost forever.


Now that is very interesting.  My poor man's approach, (since I don't have the entire blockchain downloaded) involved checking the current balance for the 119,965 coinbase transactions I found in blk0000.dat using chain.api.btc.com. Maybe the balances I got via their API for these early addresses wasn't accurate?  I get a sum of ~171,601,616,424,739 sats or ~1,716,016 bit coins (1:100000000 right?)

Sorry, I am still learning about heights....would that covers all of the coinbase transactions from blk0000.dat from 2009-01-03 to 2011-04-24 time period that I was targeting? Another check is to compare how many coinbase transactions in your calculations....is it around 200,000 too? If so, I am leaning toward fault balances with the API unless you can think of something else that might explain our 400,000+ delta?  Is it easy to determine how much of your 1.4 total includes accounts with total received > ~51 to see how much larger our delta is?

Thanks again for sharing your insights!

There are even a few addresses from that period with a lot more than 50BTC incoming and nothing ever spent.

When summing all balances from addresses funded in blocks below a height of 52200 and no outgoing transactions whatsoever I get a number quite a bit lower than your 1.7 million, about 1,398,416 BTC untouched.

There is no way of telling how much of these coins were mined by Satoshi and/or which coins have their associated private keys lost forever.

Some are certainly lost, but there is no particular reason to think that all or even most of them are lost.

Wallets try to minimize change, generally, and a big 50 BTC output is going to result in a lot of change unless you're moving nearly 50 BTC... so some of these coins could even be in actively used wallets and still sit unmoved.

Recently someone posted a signmessage from 145 of the keys that would have been in your list.

I don't agree that it is, many were clearly not.  Bitcoin was public from the first mined block and we do know that quite a few other named people participated from pretty much the beginning.

Please excuse another newbie question...I did search first, but I didn't find a close enough thread to satisfy my curiosity.
In 2018 this article calculated a much larger number but it wasn't as conservative and it used later transactions https://www.leaprate.com/cryptocurrency/bitcoin/lost-bitcoins-satoshi-coins/

I am continuing to explore the early bitcoin blockchain using blk00000.dat covering 2009-01-03 to 2011-04-24 time period.

Out of the ~6M bitcoins mined in these early days, I calculate ~1.716M bitcoins sent to 34,327 output addresses remain untouched today (~28.6%!). 
By 'untouched' I mean that the address' total received matches the final balance meaning that the address was used once for mining then completely dormant for the last decade.   

Questions: Are these generally considered 'lost'?
Is it reasonable to assume most were mined by 'satoshi'? I know 'satoshi' might suddenly become active and dump his 1M+ any day... 
I assume there would be similar dormant accounts if I looked after 2011-04-24, but I figured those dormant accounts during these early days are more likely to remain dormant i.e. lost.

here is my simplistic methodology in a nutshell:

• 1) extracted 119,965 coinbase transactions from blk00000.dat each mining 50 bitcoins using a single output address (only 73 had multiple so I ignored them for these calculations) using pyblockchain's BlockchainFileReader
• 2) looked up current balances for each of the 34,327 output addresses using chain.api.btc.com
• 3) summed up bitcoins for any of these output address where the total_received matched the final balance (i.e., none were ever sent)

Thanks again for your insight!